The Secret Military History of the Internet (w/ Yasha Levine) | The Chris Hedges Report

Summary

Summary of "The Secret Military History of the Internet (w/ Yasha Levine)" on The Chris Hedges Report

Release Date: April 2, 2025

In this compelling episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges engages in an in-depth conversation with Yasha Levine, investigative journalist and founding editor of Exiled. They explore the intricate and often unsettling origins of the Internet, as detailed in Levine's book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. The discussion delves into how the Internet was fundamentally designed for surveillance and control, tracing its roots back to military endeavors during the Vietnam War, and examines its evolution into the pervasive surveillance apparatus we witness today.

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1. Introduction to Surveillance Valley

Chris Hedges opens the dialogue by introducing Yasha Levine's book, emphasizing the Internet's inception as a tool for mass surveillance and behavior tracking initiated during the Vietnam War era.

"Yasha Levine, in his book Surveillance Valley, the Secret Military History of the Internet, documents how the Internet, from its inception during the Vietnam War... has always been designed for mass surveillance, behavior tracking and profiling."
[00:10]

Hedges highlights Levine's assertion that the intertwining of military intelligence and Silicon Valley has resulted in a society where privacy is virtually nonexistent.

2. Origins of the Internet and Military Surveillance

Yasha Levine provides a historical account, explaining that the Internet's foundational technology was developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) during the Cold War to aid in counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.

"The Internet came out of a very specific program that was initiated by a very new agency called ARPA... to figure out new technologies and new methods of trying to win this war in Vietnam."
[02:37]

Levine discusses how technologies like drones and Agent Orange were developed to surveil and pacify populations, laying the groundwork for data collection and analysis systems that would evolve into the modern Internet.

3. From Military Use to Domestic Surveillance

The conversation shifts to the domestic applications of these surveillance technologies. Levine explains how ARPANET quickly transitioned from a military tool to monitoring anti-war activists within the United States.

"The ARPANET almost immediately began to be used to spy on Americans. I mean, almost immediately."
[17:18]

He reveals that data collected on activists was digitized and shared across various security agencies, defying initial mandates to destroy such information.

4. Early Opposition and Rebranding Efforts

Hedges and Levine explore the early resistance from university students who recognized the Internet's potential for surveillance. Levine notes that sophisticated critiques and pamphlets exposed the dangers of these technologies.

"Students from the Students for Democratic Society at Harvard and MIT had a more complex and sophisticated critique of Internet technology... they're tools of surveillance. They're tools of political control."
[11:38]

Despite this opposition, Levine argues that a conscious effort was made to rebrand the Internet from a surveillance tool to a utopian, democratizing force, especially as commercialization took hold in the 1990s.

5. Commercialization and the Rise of Tech Giants

Levine details how the Internet's commercialization masked its military origins. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple emerged as gatekeepers of vast personal data, collaborating closely with intelligence agencies.

"Nothing is private. Our personal and business correspondence, financial documents... anything sent and received by email."
[00:10]

He underscores that the graphical user interfaces and user-friendly designs were initially developed to make computers accessible to the masses, further embedding surveillance capabilities into everyday technology.

6. The Tor Project: Origins and Realities

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the Tor Project, a tool marketed as a means to achieve anonymity online. Levine uncovers its origins as a tool developed by the U.S. Navy to protect spies operating on the Internet.

"Tor was created to hide spies online... It was developed specifically to hide American spies online."
[40:59]

He critiques the effectiveness of Tor, explaining that while it can obscure basic online activity, sophisticated agencies like the NSA can still trace users through various methods.

"Tor was always a fiction in terms of what it actually was... It was always a fiction."
[35:20]

7. Modern Implications and the Trump Administration

Levine transitions to contemporary issues, discussing how Silicon Valley has entrenched itself within the political landscape, particularly during the Trump administration. He argues that tech giants are no longer merely service providers but are primary actors shaping national policies and surveillance practices.

"These companies are no longer squeamish about these things. They're out front about it."
[47:02]

He highlights the collaboration between tech moguls and governmental agencies, noting initiatives like cryptocurrency strategies and the push for deregulation to expand corporate control.

8. The Techno-Fascist Future

In the concluding segments, Levine and Hedges reflect on the trajectory towards a society where technology firms wield unprecedented power, effectively eroding individual freedoms and privacy.

"It's... the end of freedom."
[57:40]

Levine warns of a future dominated by "techno-fascism," where tech companies act as monopolistic middlemen controlling every aspect of daily life, from financial transactions to personal communications.

9. Closing Remarks

Chris Hedges wraps up the episode by reiterating the grim outlook presented in Levine's book, emphasizing the loss of privacy and autonomy in the digital age.

"It's extinguishing freedom. I mean, let's be clear. That's... the end of freedom."
[57:40]

He thanks the production team and provides his contact information, leaving listeners to contemplate the pervasive influence of surveillance embedded within the very fabric of the Internet.

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Key Takeaways:

• Military Origins: The Internet was fundamentally designed as a tool for surveillance and control during the Vietnam War, with ARPA spearheading these initiatives.

• Domestic Surveillance: Early uses of the Internet included monitoring anti-war activists, setting a precedent for widespread data collection and sharing among security agencies.

• Commercialization and Rebranding: The transition to commercial use obscured the Internet's surveillance roots, promoting a narrative of democratization and utopianism.

• Tor and Anonymity: Tools like Tor were initially developed to safeguard spies but have limitations in protecting against advanced surveillance, questioning their efficacy.

• Tech Giants' Power: Modern tech companies have become pivotal in shaping policies and expanding surveillance capabilities, often in collaboration with governmental bodies.

• Erosion of Privacy: The pervasive integration of surveillance technologies into everyday life poses significant threats to individual freedoms and privacy.

This episode serves as a critical examination of the Internet's true origins and its transformation into a vast surveillance network, urging listeners to reconsider the narratives surrounding digital freedom and privacy.

Transcript

[Chris Hedges]

Yasha Levine, in his book Surveillance Valley, the Secret Military History of the Internet, documents how the Internet, from its inception during the Vietnam War when its early prototypes were designed to spy on guerrilla fighters and anti war protesters, has always been designed for mass surveillance, behavior tracking and profiling. Its evolution spawned the massive private surveillance industry that lies behind tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, which not only mine our private information for profit, but share it with the government. The military, Intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley, he argues, have now become indistinguishable. Everything we do online leaves a trail of data. Google pioneered this collection of our data for profit, but it was soon copied by a host of other digital platforms, including Facebook, Apple, ebay, Netflix, Uber, Tinder, Foursquare, Twitter or X, Instagram, Angry Birds, and Pandora. We are the most watched, photographed, monitored, tracked, profiled and surveilled population in human history. Nothing is private. Our personal and business correspondence, financial documents and bank statements, arrest records, medical history, vacation photos, love letters, sexual habits, marital status, ethnicity, age, gender, incomes, political positions, shopping receipts, locations, text messages, school records, anything sent and received by email. This vast trove of personal data in the hands of corporations and and security agencies such as the FBI and the NSA presages a terrifying dystopia for when the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. Joining me to discuss his book Surveillance Valley, the Secret History of the Internet is the investigative journalist and founding editor of Exiled, Yasha Levine. There were a lot of things I learned in this book that I didn't know. It's a great history. The first thing I didn't know is that this had its origins in the Vietnam War. So I want to talk about where we are now, but maybe you can give us a sense of the evolution of the Internet and how it was always tied to the surveillance state in the military.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I think a lot of people don't really realize that surveillance and influence, these are features that didn't just come to the Internet recently or even 10 years ago or even 20 years ago when this technology first started gaining traction. These functions, these features of technology were built into the technology. I mean, they were the reason why they were created. And to understand that, I mean, we have to go back to the 1960s and to the 1970s and really. Yeah, to a kind of a new post World War II World Order Where America was a global power. It wasn't the only power. It was facing off against the Soviet Union, Communism was a perpetual threat to the foreign policy establishment, to the business establishment of America. I mean, there was like, the obsession, right, of the Cold War obsession. And so. But there was a problem in that a lot of the conflicts that America suddenly faced, especially after the Korean War, were not wars, you know, where big armies were facing off against each other. These weren't like tank battles. It wasn't like troops marching in formation or anything like that. These were smaller wars, basically, wars of liberation, of Third World liberatory wars, where local populations were essentially rising up against their colonial overlords. Right? And the US Was usually aligned with the colonial overlords of these countries or backing them, or they were. These were puppet regimes, in some cases, that were directly backed by either the old European colonial powers, like France in the case of Vietnam, or America itself in South America. And so you have these populations, right? These are distributed populations all around the world. They're fighting wars that are kind of specific to their location. A lot of the fighters aren't in uniform. They're actually part of the civilian population. They are the population. And so what a lot of, you know, there was a new kind of way of thinking about how to fight these wars. And it was essentially a new doctrine, a counterinsurgency doctrine that was emerging in the 1960s. And it was the sense that we really can't fight these wars without understanding the population that we're dealing with. Why are they rebelling? Why are some people rebelling on other people are not. What can we do to convince? Maybe in a soft way, with aid or with other kind of economic programs to tamp down dissent. And if that doesn't work, what kind of more tougher measures can we take in order to put down these uprisings? And so the Internet came out of a very specific program that was initiated by a very new agency called arpa. And the Advanced Research Project Agency, which was actually arpa, started out as NASA as a kind of a pre. NASA agency that was then defunded and then reconfigured into a counterinsurgency agency under John F. Kennedy, under his administration. And it was essentially let loose on the Vietnam conflict to figure out new technologies and new methods of trying to win this war in Vietnam. And so the agency did a lot of different things. It, you know, for instance, developed drone technology to figure out how can we more effectively surveil the jungles. You know, it developed Agent Orange. How can we prevent sort of the guerrillas that are attacking French and then American troops from using the Jungle as cover, Right. For their kind of raids. And part of that was also developing new ways of studying the Vietnamese population. Its habits, its beliefs, its spiritual ideas. To try to figure out how to pacify these people using psychological techniques and things like that. And so it's funded. ARPA funded all these anthropologists essentially, to go out into the field and collect data. And there was so much data coming into to the Pentagon from that. That there really wasn't a way of, you know, keeping it in one place to make. To make it useful. So that was one thing. So there was a need to create data systems that could manage all this. What it was essentially surveillance data of these populations, right? And to process it, to extract something useful out of it. At the same time, ARPA was involved in a kind of a surveillance system in a different way. It was trying to track the movements of Vietnamese fighters on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Again, they were using jungle cover to hide, you know, massive movements of troops of supplies and things like that. So they were trying to develop basically, like, spy devices that could listen. That could be dropped from air. That could listen to what was going on on the ground under the jungle cover. That could even smell. That could even, like, smell human urine. If there were fighters peeing in the jungle, it would detect the urine and then send a signal to base. And then that location would be bombed from air. So there are all these different surveillance things that was involved in. That were very practical to fighting the Vietnam War. But at the same time, there were people in America, back in the United States, that were thinking on a kind of a bigger scale. That were seeing. That saw America as this global power. And you really can't be a global power in the modern age. Overseeing all these different. Vast different conflicts without having some kind of bird's eye view of the entire globe of knowing what's actually happening in the world. What are people talking about? What kind of political movements are. Are sort of brewing in the various different locations in which America has an interest. And so they started kind of thinking about creating a. I don't know, like a. To use today's terms, like an operating system for the American empire. An information system that could collect all this data. And that could provide useful, meaningful information to the managers of the world, right? So it was like a kind of bureaucratic view of the American empire. And so these things essentially kind of merged together. These different streams merged together. And they birthed the ARPANET and various programs that were associated with the arpanet. The ARPANET was this Network technology that could connect different kinds of computers together in one network, which information could be shared amongst them. That was one part of it. The other part of it was to actually create computers that normal people could use. So people don't really know. But the operating system that we use here, you know, I have an Apple Apple MacBook here, the graphical user interface, the mouse, all these things, the menus, the drop down menus, all these things were actually developed by the military as part of the ARPANET program. So part of it was to create this network that could connect computers, but also to create a new type of computer that could be easily used by regular people, not engineers. Because before this kind of graphical user interface that we're all used to, computers were punch cards. You needed these technicians who would punch in data on these punch cards. They'd feed it into these vast computers and then they'd produce some kind of data. So they were more like complex calculators rather than machines that you could interact with, that you could actually interface with in a natural way. And so that's the origin of it. I mean, the origin of the Internet was about fighting insurgencies, about studying foreign populations, but also creating a platform that would allow America to run the world and to see the world. Right. To make it transparent.

[Chris Hedges]

Well, let's talk about its domestic use, because it wasn't just used on fighters in Vietnam, it was used on anti war activists in the United States.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, I mean, look, you know how it is, anything that you deploy for use abroad, it immediately gets imported back into for domestic purposes. Right. So almost immediately this ARPANET technology was used to ingest information about activists against the Vietnam War specifically. And, and you know what's interesting is because a lot of the research that was part of the ARPANET program that created the Internet was done at universities. Students actually knew quite a bit about these things, even in the late 60s.

[Chris Hedges]

Well, you talk in the book about, I think it was students at Harvard, at mit, saw where this was going and publicly protested.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, I mean, look, it was interesting to me writing this book and researching this book, because I went into the archives at MIT at Harvard, and looked at various declassified documents. And what was amazing to me is that students from the Students for Democratic Society at Harvard and MIT had a more complex and sophisticated critique of Internet technology or network technology than people did in the Obama era. Right. Because I was writing this book at the tail end of the Obama era. And so people still viewed Internet technology as a liberatory technology, as a democratic Technology that the Internet would create this global democratic village. I mean, people still believed that back then. People don't believe it so much anymore. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit later, why that is. But back then, you know, not that long ago, people really did believe in the liberatory power of the Internet. Meanwhile, of course, the Internet was, is owned by these massive corporations, some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet. Of course they work with the nsa, with the CIA, with the FBI. I mean, the relationship has been intertwined from the very beginning. But people believed it, right? People believed the kind of the marketing mythology that these Internet companies have pushed as part of their product. But in 1969 and 1968, when the first links were activated of the ARPANET links, the first nodes were starting to work together already. Students at these universities were protesting them. They were producing these very sophisticated pamphlets trying to educate other students and other people about the danger that these technologies pose. And they set it out, right? They said, look, these computer technologies, these network computer technologies that the ARPANET is, that ARPA is trying to create are tools of surveillance. They're tools of political control. They're designed to, to basically pacify political movements abroad and are designed to pacify political movements at home. I mean, there was an incredible pamphlet that I discovered in the archives at mit. And so, because it was clear back then, I think, to people who were watching the emergence of computer technology, that computers were linked with power because computers were controlled by major corporations, they were very expensive to purchase, they were very expensive to run, and government agencies. So back then people understood it wasn't like, it wasn't an epiphany or anything like that. People understood that if you own a giant IBM computer, you're using it to crunch data, you're using it to crunch numbers. You're doing it to kind of extend the power over the organization that's using it, right? It's an extension of their power. And that the only people who could afford to use these things were very powerful entities in American society. And so the linking between power and computers and control and influence was obvious too, I think even in the mainstream, in the American mainstream. I mean, you had like magazines like the Atlantic or something, you know, doing front page stories about how computers are agents of surveillance and control and things like that. So it was understood back then and essentially it has been forgotten. It was repressed, this history or this understanding. And it was, people have been, were propagandized to view computers in a totally different light, in a benign light. In a utopian light, which was not the case in the 1950s. In the 1960s and the 1970s and even up into the 1980s, people still viewed computers with skepticism. I think things started to change in the 1990s when things started to get commercialized.

[Chris Hedges]

Well, you talk about that, and that was a very conscious effort to rebrand the Internet. It wasn't an accident. But before we go on to the commercialization of the Internet, I just want you to talk about what it was, these computer systems. You talked a little bit about that in Vietnam, but let's talk about the anti war activists. When I covered the war in El Salvador, they were using this system. And anecdotally I heard that they knew the names of every fighter in every single tiny guerrilla unit. They had charts and where they were from and this kind of stuff. But talk about the exercise of that knowledge and power.

[Yasha Levine]

I mean, look, you know, there was a series of scandals in America during the sort of Vietnam War era where it was clear, it was, it was found out that the U.S. army had, was essentially running one of the most massive surveillance operations in the history of America. And probably, you know, it's probably been eclipsed now with the Internet, because the Internet just automatically collects so much data. But back then, you know, to collect data, you really needed to put people out in the field, right. And you needed to create files. You know, people had to really. Yeah, you need to have manpower to do this stuff. Right? You had. So they came up with, you probably remember this stuff. You probably, they, you know, posed as fake camera crews that would go and film cover, you know, anti war protests and then they'd actually produce.

[Chris Hedges]

So you write about this in the book.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[Chris Hedges]

But I mean, but you also, you also noted that they were sending all this back to where was it the Pentagon or somewhere or the nsa. But, but, but as you said in the book, the, they could have just watched the evening news.

[Yasha Levine]

Exactly. So I mean, essentially the, the generals in the Pentagon had their own private TV network that was creating newsreels for them. But, but, but what, what? Look, I mean, so surveillance was happening, right? But what. I think there was a major escalation with this technology, with the ARPANET technology and the ability of these new computers to ingest data and to make it accessible. That's, I mean, that's the key, right? Because you can have a lot of data. It's stored somewhere on paper or in these punch cards. And really, if you're trying to get at trying to study, you know, some Kind of political cell, let's say. Yeah. In Nicaragua or in Ecuador, if you're trying to study those things, you really need to make it accessible to regular people who are staffing, you know, the Pentagon or the CIA. And so I think what was the major escalation with this technology is that you could take all that, take all that data that's being collected on, let's say it's anti war protesters or political movements abroad, and you could ingest it and you could put them in essentially like an Excel kind of format. Right. Like a database where things could be collated, things could be related, you could create relational maps between various individuals, all these things. So suddenly that data isn't just sitting somewhere and gathering mold in some basement, but it's actionable. Right. So it's putting them at the fingertips of these bureaucrats, wherever they are, whatever state security agency they're in. And so I think that was the escalation. So. And there were some scandals in, where, yes, it was even covered on, on tv. You know, there was, it was a, it was a major scandal where there was even a whistleblower who notified the press that this new technology, this ARPANET technology, was being used to digitize old surveillance data on anti war protesters and make it accessible not just to the U.S. army, where it was, which created, but share it with the FBI, with the CIA, with the NSA and whoever, and even with the White House. So the ARPANET almost immediately began to be used to spy on Americans. I mean, almost immediately. I mean, there was, if you, I can't remember the exact dates, I think it was 1972 or 1973. Arpanet came online in 1969. So just a few years after this experimental, you know, network came online, it was already being used to spy on Americans. Of course, the Pentagon denied it, said it didn't happen, that it was just an experimental thing and all this stuff. But the fact is that they did digitize surveillance data, illegally collected surveillance data, which the Pentagon was actually legally mandated to destroy. And in fact it didn't destroy to digitize it and use this network to, to share it with all the security state agencies. So from the very beginning, again, I, I think this is what's shocking to a lot of people who read my book, is that this wasn't something that, that happened when Google emerged, right. This wasn't something that happened with Facebook. This wasn't something that happened, you know, with the NSA spying on us. As, you know, Edward Snowden revealed, right. Using, tapping into all these Internet giants. Surveillance was there at the origin of the technology. I mean, surveillance was the reason why it was created. And just to give kind of an example, right, the first surveillance network technology was NORAD essentially, right? So NORAD is this radar system that kind of watches the skies above the Northern hemisphere in North America to watch for enemy bombers, specifically Soviet bombing bombers, and to intercept them if they, if they enter American airspace. That was sort of why it was created initially in response to the Soviet Union also developing the nuclear bomb. And I mean, so that is a kind of a surveillance network. So you're watching the sky, right? You're looking for people who cross the border or who are coming close in the sky or planes that are coming close. And that is what sort of the managers of the American empire were hoping to recreate. But on a societal level, right? It's an early warning system for political threats, essentially. I mean, that's what kind of this ARPANET project came out of. That's the desire, that's the dream, that was the wish, the Christmas wish of theirs, right? To create for societies what NORAD or air defense systems created for airspace. And so if you think of it like that, then kind of the Internet makes a lot more sense because the Internet has created that reality. We're talking right now on these phones, on this computer. I have my phone here, it's always with me, it's tracking me wherever I go. It's a personal radar, right? It could be used to listen in on this conversation if it wasn't public. We're completely bugged, right? Everything like you said in your great introduction, everything that we do is surveilled, nothing is unwatched. And things could be correlated. Even if things that you don't say things could be inferred from your actions. You know, one of the things that even like let's say Google or Apple couldn't even know that you had a one night stand purely by the movement of your, let's say mobile phone. It could infer a lot of things. It can refer who you're friends with, who you meet with. It can map out your social networks very easily. I mean, we are fully transparent in that sense, right? And so, but that idea that Google and Apple and all these tech companies really brought into being with the commercialization of the Internet and the wide adoption of these technologies was there from the inception.

[Chris Hedges]

Let's talk about that, because that's a big moment. So you commercialize the Internet, but you have to shake that perception that it's a tool of Surveillance and that its roots lie in the military intelligence community. And I mean, that was a really fascinating moment in the book where, in essence, they rebrand the Internet as kind of part of the counterculture.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, yeah, they rebrand the Internet as part of the counterculture. And I think that rebranding even began in the 70s, really, because there were actually people who were hippies who had long hair who listened to the Grateful Dead and stuff like that who were working as military contractors in places like UC Berkeley and places like Stanford and places like MIT, who were reading Lord of the Rings or whatever, walking around smoking dope, but yet building the surveillance technology for the military. And even back then, they didn't really see themselves as, you know, people who are doing a bad thing. They were just engineers who were creating a cool new technology, right? So there was that aspect of it even within sort of the military industrial complex, because a lot of the work wasn't being done at the NSA or the US Army. People weren't like, wearing uniforms. The people who were creating this technology, they were engineering, you know, PhDs at universities, right? So there was that aspect. And so that aspect was essentially dialed up and expanded. And it really, I mean, you know, I don't know if, you know, listeners know who Stuart Brand is. I mean, he was a really big figure really in the 70s and 80s and 90s. And he was this pivotal figure who really helped almost like, like, Like a, like, like a doula or something. You know, he helped birth. He helped birth this counterculture image of. Of Internet technology, bringing it, connecting kind of counterculture of the 1960s and the 1970s to the tech culture of the 1990s and beyond. And like, a big sign of that is, let's say, you know, Apple Computer. Apple's computer is big, like, ad campaign that it launched was all about fighting Big Brother. And it's a. It's kind of an iconic ad that people know about. You know, people. Basically the way that Apple Computer was positioned was that you, by using this technology, you could defeat Big Brother, you know, from 1984. And, and, you know, there's another thing that I think helped create this utopian image of the Internet was that right as this technology was commercialized and was becoming cheap enough for people to buy, America won the Cold War, right? And so suddenly America was the global superpower American. This American ideology, American capitalism, this new kind of technocratic capitalism that began. Began to be global in nature, and there was nothing opposing it from any other side. And it was victorious and was dominant. And so and it was. And so the Internet technology was being pushed as this new operating system for a new utopian kind of democratic global system. Right. That if you allow this technology to spread all around the world, it'll create, you know, a global democracy, a global democratic village. I mean, it'll even make governments obsolete. You know, we don't even need governments because people will decide things for themselves in this kind of anarchistic way. Right. We'll just vote directly. We'll talk to each other. I'll talk to someone in Bangladesh, in Russia, in China, and we'll all be these, you know, these, you know, perfect democratic voters. Right. If we use these technologies, if we. If we use these networks, if we use these computers, like Apple Computer or Windows or IBM or all these things, we use these technologies, we will be able to create a global unified society. I mean, it's within reach. You know, it's a really utopian idea. It's a beautiful idea, I guess. But what was unstated, Right. What's unstated was that all these technologies are run by American corporations, huge corporations that are not democratic, that have their own interests in mind, and that these corporations are very much in bed with the American empire. They're completely intertwined with the nsa, with the Pentagon, with the CIA, with the FBI. These relationships with some of these companies go back decades and decades and decades. Like with IBM, for instance. IBM is essentially an extension of, you know, the American security state and had been from almost the very beginning. And so that's IBM.

[Chris Hedges]

My. My uncle worked at Bletchley.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Chris Hedges]

Breaking Enigma. Breaking Enigma. And then, yeah, went straight to IBM because all the military technology. They built the first supercomputer at Bletchley. Yeah, it went. He went straight to IBM and they just commercialized everything the military had done at Bletchley.

[Yasha Levine]

Totally. Yeah. And the computers that they built, let's say, for the first air defense system, were these giant IBM computers for the time there were supercomputers that were housed in these giant, giant concrete bunkers that were nuclear proof. Yes. IBM was very much intertwined with the American security state. So that's you.

[Chris Hedges]

I just want to interject. They were also intertwined with the Nazi death camps, which you talk about at the end of the book.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and also, yes, they were the Nazis.

[Chris Hedges]

They used the punch car. Use them completely.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, yeah. They use the punch card tabulators to essentially find Jews and to more effectively exterminate them. But also, IBM is intertwined with the Social Security Administration. IBM essentially ran the Social Security program. Right. So the welfare program, not the welfare, but the pension program of America. It was all done on IBM computers. And so really, IBM was like a privatized extension of the kind of almost like the New Deal, post World War. Well, New Deal in a post World War II American state. And so I think the utopian rebranding, I think, depended on people being ignorant of actually what underlies the Internet, what underlies this personal computer revolution, and what underlies it is American capitalism. Right.

[Chris Hedges]

I want to talk about before we get into Tor, I definitely want to, because you write a lot about Tor, and I want to get into the fact that these tech billionaires now have, you know, are essentially running rampant within the Trump administration. Yeah, but just talk a little bit about what you call the censorship arms race. This is in the early 2000s, because I thought that was a really important point.

[Yasha Levine]

Well, look, yeah, because while on the one hand, the Internet was being sold to American, but also global consumers as this technology of utopianism and democracy, America saw the Internet as a tool of American foreign policy and American power abroad. Because America developed this technology. And as it was sort of going outside of America and globalizing and being picked up in Europe, in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and in China as well, America, the State Department and CIA saw the Internet as a. As like a crowbar or something, you know, that could essentially, if you could, you could beam propaganda, you could use the Internet to reach foreign populations in a way that you couldn't before. And so with China specifically, there began to be a conflict very, very, very, very early on in the 2000s about who gets to control the. Your domestic Internet space. And so China very quickly understood that the Internet is a threat, that the Internet is a tool of American power, and that if it didn't control its domestic Internet space, it left itself open to foreign influence from America and to a kind of a destabilization, various destabilization programs to propaganda and things like that. And so the China began to essentially control what gets past its national firewall, Right. And to. Began to erect this kind of defense against American, American unfiltered American Internet content that was primarily a lot of these programs that were targeting Chinese. The Chinese population were funded by the CIA or spinoffs from the CIA like Radio Free Asia and things like that. And so what that launched was America could not accept that. Right. It could not accept that another country would say, look, we want to control what happens within our borders. Right. We don't think that Allowing CIA propaganda to just sort of to target our population is good for us or is good for China. So we're going to have a kind of a censorship regime against, you know, the outside. And so America could not abide that. To America that was essentially like someone closing its markets to American corporations. Right. China, you know, would not allow Google or other American companies to operate freely in China. And so the US began funding these kind of anti censorship technologies. In the first iteration, the organization that was making these anti censorship technologies, essentially tools that you could use to that, that people in China could use download to kind of go around the firewall. Right. Initially the main organization that was involved in that was Falun Gong, which is this pretty crazy right wing occult that's backed by the CIA that puts on all these sort of Chinese anti communist ballets that you see posters for all over, all over cities in America. And this, this, this cult was created creating these programs. But very quickly it moved to a different organization. And that organization was the Tor project that became kind of the major anti censorship tool that America was promoting in China, but also in other countries like in Iran and then later in Russia.

[Chris Hedges]

Okay, explain, explain what Tor is. It became the lodestar for WikiLeaks and for, I don't know, do you call them crypto anarchists? You know, these people who felt that they could evade surveillance through the Dark Web. I was, I told you before the show on Tor, when I was communicating after the Snowden documents, which were housed in Berlin, there was communication between myself and them, but they always insisted on doing it through Tor. Explain what Tor is, explain what the Dark Web is. Yeah, but as you also explain in the book, unless you are completely severed from Gmail and everything else, Tor, which I think by the end you make a very convincing case, was always a fiction in terms of what it actually was. But you also can't. Tor becomes useless unless you completely sever yourself from all other normal Internet activity. But just explain all that for people who don't understand what it is and how it works.

[Yasha Levine]

I'll talk about first what the Tor sort of says it's going to do and then I'll talk about the history because I think it's very surprising about where the origins of Tor actually who created it and why it was created. So what Tor promises to do, you download now, it's like a special browser. It's essentially a kind of a different custom version of the Chrome browser. Right. And that Chrome browser has a special program in it. That what it does is it Kind of does the, what do you call it, like the three card Monty. You know, it's where you, you know, con men on the street will try to, like, play with you, and you got to find where the little ball is underneath one of these cards. And so that's what Tor claims it can do with your Internet traffic. It obscures, sort of, it shuffles it around, right? Because. All right, well, if you just to. The Internet is fully transparent in the sense that when I go to, let's say, newyorktimes.com right, I type into my browser newyorktimes.com that tells my Internet service provider, hey, please request information from newyorktimes.com the servers that have that information. So my Internet provider knows where I'm going, what site I'm going to, what I'm requesting, right? And so who is ever watching my Internet service provider, let's say it's the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or all three of them know that, hey, this guy is requesting information from newyorktimes.com all right? Or WikiLeaks.org right? And so, so, so it's transparent to anyone who's watching and to the company that provides the Internet service on the other end. Right. My request is also transparent to the other Internet service provider who is providing this information, right, that hosts New York times servers or WikiLeaks servers, right? So New York Times knows, hey, there's a person from this, from this IP address, they're requesting this particular webpage send it to them, right? So my Internet activity is transparent to anyone who has access to data on the Internet that the Internet service provider has access to. And so what Tor claims it can do, and it does do, it does do it is to obscure kind of the origin and the destination of your Internet requests, right? So what you don't. You request everything through Tor, so you request it through Tor, and then Tor does this kind of shuffle with your traffic that no one really knows who you are. And so it sort of obfuscates your identity.

[Chris Hedges]

And it does talk about how it became a big a tool for drug dealers.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah. And then, and then there's other thing. Tor actually began to. You could host websites in like the Tor cloud, essentially, which was the dark web. So you don't actually ever leave Tor. It never. So Tor is its own internal network, essentially, and you never leave it. Right? So if you request, let's say, newyorktimes.com, it has to leave this Tor cloud because it has to go to the public Internet. Right. But your. Your identity, your, Your entry point and your exit point are essentially broken up. They're no longer connected. That's what Tor does. Or you could stay inside that and host a website inside that. And that was the dark web. And it became, you know, very useful for. Pretty famous. Yeah, the Silk Road, which is this big drug marketplace. The guy was caught, you know, eventually, even though he used all these technologies, and he actually. Trump just pardoned him and released him from prison. He was serving two concurrent life sentences in prison anyway. So that's what it claims to do. And it does do it. On a technical textbook case, yes, it does do it. The problem is that when, if you are using. Look, and if you're using Tor to hide some kind of petty crime, let's say, or you're, you know, hiding from the local police or something like that, yes, it works. But if you're using this technology to hide from the FBI or the nsa, it starts to fall apart. And that was. And it was targeted that it could do that. It could provide protection from the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet. That's sort of. It's stated, you know, Tor itself, you know, did that. And the people who promoted Tor and, and backed it claimed that it could do that. The problem breaks because if you are someone like the nsa, you are observing vast amounts. You're basically observing the entire Internet in real time. And the problem with Tor is that you could actually time things. So if you're using Tor, it could time things like it could. The amount of time it takes to jump through Tor is actually predictable. So you could say, oh, this guy's entering here, now here, and then someone's coming out the other end, you know, a few milliseconds later. Well, we can correlate those together. So that was one way you could track people. Another, another way you could track people is that every. Every computer and every browser has its own unique signature which can also be tracked. And there's. And then there's. Then there's, you know, just bugs in the code that are not known to people that the NSA has discovered and that has kept to itself, essentially allowing it to, you know, unmask people that way. There are all sorts of different ways to circumvent this, but there's even a darker level to it, which I think is. Makes it a lot more interesting. Tor itself, while it build itself as this independent agency that was run by these anarcho kind of crypto guys who hated the government, who had Long hair, who seemed to be against the NSA, who were, you know, helping WikiLeaks and all this stuff.

[Chris Hedges]

We're talking about Jacob Applebaum.

[Yasha Levine]

Jacob Applebaum and Roger Dingledine, who was also the head of Tor Project back then. I don't think he's the head of IT anymore. These guys were on the payroll of the US Government, you know, and specifically nonprofits that were linked to the State Department and a CIA spinoffs like the Broadcasting Board of Governors. It's called a different name now. It's called the U.S. agency for Global Media. I mean, they use these. They pick these names, man, that, like, you can't remember them. They're just gray, generic names, and they keep changing them. But the Broadcasting Board of Governors back then was the umbrella agency that ran America's government propaganda news divisions, everything from Radio Free Europe to Radio Free Asia, and all these different language programs that were targeting the Middle east, that were targeting South America, they were targeting China, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Iran, blah, blah, blah. So just the entire American propaganda division that was sort of the agency that was overseeing it was also funding this, supposedly an anarcho, you know, sort of crypto spunky outfit that was going to protect you from the nsa. And also it had direct contracts with the Pentagon. And the reason why the Pentagon was funding it. So all these different agencies that are funding TOR have different reasons why they were funding it. The reasons that the Pentagon was funding it was because it was. I think it was being used by. By the US Military actively. And the origins of the Tor Project were actually in the US Navy, in the US Naval Laboratory. The US Navy is actually historically linked with surveillance and espionage, because historically, I don't want to get into the details, but historically, the US Navy was actually the driver of surveillance technologies and encryption technologies and interception technologies, basically to intercept signals intelligence that was coming from ships out in the ocean, right. And hiding its own signals intelligence from other countries. And so the US Naval Intelligence Laboratory developed the Tor Project, or the technology that underpinned the Tor Project, to hide spies as they used the Internet. So the problem with the Internet is that it doesn't matter if. If I'm using the Internet, right? Or if a CIA agent is using the Internet or an FBI agent is using the Internet, we're all transparent to the ISPs that provide the service. So if I'm a. Let's say a CIA agent and I want to infiltrate an animal rights forum or something like that, right? Or I'm an FBI agent and I want to infiltrate an Animal rights forum. I don't want the administrator of the forum to see that the ip, my IP use address, you know, the IP address of the user that I created on that forum to be linked with Langley or to be linked with an FBI office somewhere. Right. I want to be able to hide that. So for an FBI agent to kind of use the Internet, but to hide themselves in plain sight, they have to use Tor or they have to use something like Tor. And so it was developed specifically to hide spies online, American spies online. That was the purpose of the Tor project. And the problem with this kind of technology is that you can also see that if someone uses Tor, because if you actually start tracing the IP information, you see that this user popped out of a Tor node or Tor cloud. And so in order for this American spies to use torture, they have to open to as wide an audience as possible, to a wide as. Not an audience, but as wider user base as possible. So everyone from criminals to drug dealers to drug users to, you know, let's say political activists like Julian Assange to, I don't know, soccer moms who are just paranoid about the government, you know, watching them or whatever, like you want everyone to use it in that, that way the spies can hide in the crowd. It's like, it's like in the old Cold War movies or something. You know, you do the handoff in a, in a crowded train station or whatever. You know, you go to a crowded, a crowded square to do the handoff where things can't be traced as easily. And so Torah was created to hide spies, and then it was essentially handed off to this strange nonprofit that was essentially run by these nobodies, you know, that people who were involved with helping kind of code peripherally this technology, but there were nobodies. And suddenly it became this. It rebranded itself from a tool to hide spies into a tool that will help you, will help hide you from spies. So it did almost like a 180, right? It was. It's a very interesting story. I don't know if where else we can go from that or if this is enough, because I don't want to get too much into the details.

[Chris Hedges]

Well, just quickly, because I want to talk about what's happening right now in the Trump administration. But you argue in the book that Tor just ultimately doesn't work. I mean, I mean, I'd say it can. It can work.

[Yasha Levine]

I'd say it can, yes. It depends. It works on very low level cases. Yes. If you're hiding from just local cops or something like that, you know, like petty crime.

[Chris Hedges]

Yeah, let's talk about what's happening now, because the Silicon Valley is now essentially come to power with the Trump administration. Let's not forget they were all good liberals and Democrats until they weren't. What are they doing? And talk a little bit about the AI projects. But, but I think people don't quite understand what's happening before our eyes.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting for me to watch this because, you know, when I was reading, writing this book, in essence, all the tech companies that were active at the time, you know, Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, they really did not want to admit that they are part of the American empire, that they are completely embedded with the American state and especially with its foreign policy apparatus. They really wanted to maintain that fiction that. No, no, no, no, no, we're just companies and we are operating on a global scale. And all right, yes, there's these contracts, but they really would not answer questions about these things. They would not answer about the relationships or the active contracts they had with the Department of State. I'm speaking specifically.

[Chris Hedges]

And Israel, let's not forget.

[Yasha Levine]

And Israel. Yes, and Israel is like the. Yes, Israel was the kind of the, the really. The quiet demon in the corner of the room. But America is an extension. I mean, Israel is an extension of the American empire. So it made sense that these tech companies and Israel are entwined. In fact, Israel is such a big hub for computer technology that Google and all these different companies would actually buy startups that were created by people who came out of Israeli intelligence and all this stuff. So there was the squeamishness about admitting that Facebook was essentially an extension of American power, that Google was a privatized extension of American power. Things have changed now quite dramatically, I'd say. I'd say these companies are no longer squeamish about these things. They're out front about it. I mean, they're very much more willing to talk openly about their patriotism, about how much they want America to succeed. And they are American companies and they're willing to take America's security seriously and all these things. And I think it's had to do with, first of all, the maturation of these companies. And these are pretty young companies, you know, they only, they. This, this whole, like, sector really became big. You know, I mean, look, it's, it's no more than 20 years old, really, economic power that these companies have and the change in American politics and the collapse of this utopian technological mythology, because I think it started to really Turn during the first Trump administration, and even in the run up to the Trump administration, when I first saw sort of liberals really in the Democratic Party start talking negatively about the Internet is when they, when they started pushing this idea that the Internet is responsible for Trump's victory, right? For why Trump is so popular. And not just the Internet, but the fact that Russia and foreign powers are manipulating the American people into voting for Trump. And so suddenly, you know, it really turned on a dime. Like Hillary Clinton, as the head of Department of State under Obama, spearheaded like her whole main policy, as the person in charge of this Department of State was the policy of Internet freedom. So she said that no, no countries cannot control their domestic Internet space. They have to let America in, they have to let American companies in. And if they don't let American companies in, they're totalitarian, they're anti democratic, they're thugs, they're. They're against freedom, they're against liberty, they're against everything that's holy to us as Democratic people. Right? That was her whole thing that she was pushing in that position. And then, of course, when she lost, she began to demonize the Internet as this agent of chaos, as a dangerous technology, because suddenly, whether it was real or not, she believed that the Internet was used to subvert American democracy. I mean, I don't subscribe to that theory, but that's what you believe in. So the Internet started to be this agent of danger suddenly. And so American society itself began to view, or American elites really began to view the Internet in a negative light. They no longer believed in their own mythology. Right. And so I think it started to really turn then. And because the foreign policy establishment just the elites began to turn inward much more and to begin to be, I don't know, the kind of the idea that America would fully control the world in this kind of global neoliberal American utopia began to crumble and collapse. Right. And so the mythology started to change, and so the American company started talking a different way. Now, that's a little bit different from part of your question about what these tech guys are doing with Trump and with AI And I mean, I don't know, it's kind of a complicated question, I guess, because I think, I don't know how you would look at it, but my sense of it is that it's a full maturation of this industry. It's kind of coming to its own in a way that it hadn't really than before, that it's now taking a kind of a leading role in shaping policies at the highest levels of American. American power. They are not. These companies are not ashamed to be public about, you know, their intentions and that they have so much. So it's. It's a maturation, I think, you know, because they're so intertwined with, but specifically the Trump administration, they really think that they have the money and they can influence the government to do things how they want them to be done, to instill policies that they want. So they're not like secondary actors anymore. They're primary actors. And you can see it with the crypto stuff now, where Trump has announced that there's going to be a strategic reserve of bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies. I mean, these are the expressed demands of the people who in large part funded his campaign. And so they are in power now, and so they are kind of bringing their ideology in a much more direct way to. To. To Washington.

[Chris Hedges]

Just in the last two minutes. What is it they want? What do they want to create that they don't have?

[Yasha Levine]

Oh, that's a good question. You know, I mean, I think they have everything they want. I mean, I think they want. I'll tell you what they want. They. They want. The crypto guys just want crypto to be fully, fully, basically deregulated and to. To. To. To not to just derail it, to be mainstreamed and to be made an official part of the American state, almost like a secondary currency or something. And they also, they all. They. They want access to government contracts. They want to be fully embraced by the American state. I mean, you know, they already have been, but they are much more open about. I mean, I think. Look, I think they want power and they want to see to the table, and they are just. They. They don't want to be regulated. I mean, there's a. I think there are different factions in it, you know, I mean, if we're talking about Elon Musk, I think he wants. He wants government contracts. He doesn't want to be investigated for potential, you know, Wall street fraud and all these things. But they just want a seat at the table like every other major industry, like Wall street or things.

[Chris Hedges]

But they. But Elon Musk is talking about the Everything app. I mean, they want to cut out banks. They want. They want direct. I don't want to use the word relationships, but they want. They want to directly control everything that you do.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah, they want to be the main monopolists. They want to be the middleman that. That funnel, you know, your life, the middlemen for your entire Life.

[Chris Hedges]

Yeah.

[Yasha Levine]

I mean, and they already, they are already that. I mean, this is what I mean is like they already have pretty much everything they want. I mean they're, they're integrated. I mean, if you take Elon Musk, you know, he's a military contractor. He runs like one of the most. One of the most important propaganda or like one of the most media platforms controls it and you know, can silence whoever he wants or boost whoever he wants on his media platform. He's part of the surveillance state in a massive way. I mean, he's fully integrated with both the kind of the media ecosystem of the American state, but also the security state apparatus. I mean, he's like, has runs a privatized NASA. He puts up spy satellites in the air. He provides spy satellite technology to the entire military establishment. So he's already fully integrated. I guess they just want more power and I think they want control. I mean like to take a really, like to have a. The table in a way that I think, you know, Wall street used to have. Right to be the drivers of policy rather than people who kind of lobby at the edges of things, you know, or. Yeah, that.

[Chris Hedges]

That's what Janus Fair Flock is calls techno fascism.

[Yasha Levine]

Yeah. Yeah. They want to be the guys in charge and they. But they already are in charge. I mean that's, that's kind of thing to me. I mean, there's just hubris, I guess, in a way, because they are in charge, but they just want more. And you can just see it, you know. I mean, I think Elon Musk is such a distillation of their kind of insanity. It's like you have everything you, you could possibly want, but you actually just want more. You want more attention, you want more money, you want more control and you want to be like. I don't know. Yeah, the, the. You want to be the, the. The king of America. And he can't be directly, I guess, because he can't be elected, but he's. He's got the second best position now. So it is. We live in their world. I mean, this is to close. I, I think it is important to think about the origins of Internet technology because if you do look at the dreams that some of the people had that were involved with this stuff, it. We do live in, in their world now because the world that they envisioned was a world of technocrats managing the planet right and having. And overseeing a world where people's desires are transparent, political movements are transparent, people's obviously buying habits are transparent. Basically that the soul of like human society writ large is sort of turned inside out and can be looked at. And we exist in that.

[Chris Hedges]

It's existing, it's extinguishing freedom. I mean, let's be clear. That's, it's the, you know, it's the end of freedom. That was Yasha Levine on his book Surveillance Valley, the Secret Military History of the Internet. I want to thank Thomas, Diego, Max and Sophia, who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com thanks.

[Yasha Levine]

For having me, Sarah.