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The primary goals of the internet have always been surveillance and control. Today, it is merely following its original design.
Internet (originally ARPANET) was born out of a Pentagon surveillance and counterinsurgency project. It was implemented by ARPA, a US Department of Defence research agency that we know as DARPA.
The effort to change the public perception of the internet from a military surveillance project to a promised utopian land of opportunity took about twenty years and a lot of work – and it worked like a charm – but surveillance has always remained at the centre of what the internet is about.
World Wide Web: Whom Was It Designed to Catch?
By Tessa Lena republished from Mercola.com
The Birth of the Internet
Personally, I am a big fan of Yasha Levine’s book, “Surveillance Valley,” even though later on, our views on covid did not coincide. Yasha’s book describes the counterinsurgency and surveillance underbelly of the internet really well.
The Internet came out of a 1960s Pentagon project called ARPANET. ARPANET was a counterinsurgency, communications, and surveillance project developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (“ARPA”) and based on the idea of “Great Intergalactic Network,” a futuristic-sounding term coined by J. C. R. Licklider, nicknamed “Lick.” Lick was an American psychologist and computer scientist and one of the “founding fathers” of interactive computing.
How It All Started
We all know ARPA as DARPA, the creepy Department of Defence (“DoD”) agency behind the Operation Warp Speed. ARPA was originally formed in response to the shock of being “beaten” by the USSR in space after the USSR launched its Sputnik in 1957.
The agency was intended to protect the United States from the Soviet nuclear threat from space. It was designed as a lean Pentagon agency that would be almost like a management company, overseeing advanced military research projects but contracting a lot of their work out to private companies.
In the words of Ray Alderman:
In February 1958, reacting to the Russian lead in space technology, Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) inside the Department of Defence (DoD). The original mission was to stay ahead of our enemies and prevent future technological surprises like Sputnik.
ARPA’s initial focus was on missiles. Later in 1958, the money for missiles and space programs was transferred to another new agency, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). ARPA then changed their mission to long-range advanced military problems like the Defender missile defence programme, early warning radar, and satellite detection of nuclear tests by the Russians.”
ARPA was part of the Pentagon, a bureaucratic rats nest of inter-service rivalries and politics. The Air Force was broken-off from the Army and the CIA were created in September 1947, NSA was created in November 1952, and NASA was created in 1958. ARPA worked on projects for all these groups but was stuck inside the Pentagon.
In 1972, it was renamed DARPA, changed back to ARPA in 1993, and then back to DARPA again in 1996 … The director of DARPA reports to the Secretary of Defense just like the military services.
Some Trivia
ARPA was formed under Defence Secretary Neil McElroy, who was thrust into his important government role straight out of his prior role of the President of Proctor & Gamble, a role in which he pioneered the format of “soap operas,” melodramatic television series designed with the primary goal of selling household products to housewives.
Here are two Time Magazine covers: One is of Neil McElroy of Proctor & Gamble, and the other one is of Neil McElroy, the Defence Secretary.
A philosophical question: is the internet none the less useful to us? Of course it is. I am typing this on the computer, after all. But the devil is always in the detail, isn’t it?
The Privatisation of the Internet
The man who was responsible for the privatisation of the internet was Stephen Wolff, a military man who worked on ARPANET. The privatisation was done through the National Science Foundation (“NSF”), a federal agency created by Congress in 1950.
In early 1980s, NSF ran a small network connecting computers at a few research universities to ARPANET. NSF wanted to connect a broader pool of universities to the network and to expand it beyond the military and computer science research use. Wolff’s task was to oversee the building and management of the new educational network, NSFNET. The first reiteration of NSFNET was launched in 1986. Yasha writes:
In early 1987, he and his team … hashed out a design for an improved and upgraded NFSNET. This new network, a government project created with public money [emphasis mine], would connect universities and be designed to eventually function as a privatised telecommunications system. That was the implicit understanding everyone at NSF agreed on.
The NSFNET was supposed become a two-tier network. The top layer was going to be a national network, a high-speed “backbone” that spanned the entire country. The second layer was going to be made up of smaller “regional networks” that would connect universities to the backbone. Instead of building and managing the network itself, the NSF decided to outsource the network to private companies.
The plan was to fund and nurture these network providers until they could become self-sufficient, at which point they would be cut loose and allowed to privatise the network infrastructure they built for the NSFNET.
The most important part of the system, the backbone, was run by a new non-profit corporation, a consortium including IBM, MCI, and the state of Michigan. The second-tier regional networks were farmed out to a dozen other newly created private consortiums. With names like BARRNET, MIDNET, NYSERNET, WESTNET, and CERFNET, they were run by a mix of universities, research institutions, and military contractors.
In July 1988, the NSFNET backbone went online, connecting thirteen regional networks and over 170 different campuses across the country …
The network stretched from San Diego to Princeton – snaking through regional network exchange points in Salt Lake City, Houston, Boulder, Lincoln, Champaign, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Ithaca and throwing out an international transatlantic line to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva. The network was a huge success in the academic community.
The privatisation of the Internet – its transformation from a military network to the privatised telecommunications system we use today – is a convoluted story. Wade in deep enough and you find yourself in a swamp of three-letter federal agencies, network protocol acronyms, government initiatives, and congressional hearings filled with technical jargon and mind-numbing details.
But on a fundamental level, it was all very simple: after two decades of lavish funding and research and development inside the Pentagon system, the Internet was transformed into a consumer profit centre.
Businesses wanted a cut, and a small crew of government managers were all too happy to oblige.
To do that, with public funds the federal government created a dozen network providers out of thin air and then spun them off to the private sector, building companies that in the space of a decade would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today – Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast.
According to Yasha, the privatisation was done in a dubious if not fraudulent manner. The consortium that managed the “backbone” network – that was legally limited to educational institutions – split into two legal entities, and then the for profit legal entity started selling “internet” services to commercial entities – even though the underlying physical “internet” infrastructure was the same one used by the non-profit educational network.
(So it’s kind of like Comirnaty, in a way, a magical potion that was authorized by the FDA but was nowhere to be found.)
In short, the NSF directly subsidised the MCI-IBM consortium’s national business expansion. The company used its privileged position to attract commercial clients, telling them that its service was better and faster because it had direct access to the national high-speed backbone.
NSFNET contractors began fighting for control of this untapped and growing market as soon as Stephen Wolff gave them the green light to privatise their operations – that’s what the fight between providers like PSINET and ANS was all about. They were licking their chops, happy that the government bankrolled the network and even happier that it was about to get out of the business. There was a lot of money to be made.
Aside from interindustry wrangling, there was no real opposition to Stephen Wolff’s plan to privatise the Internet – not from NFSNET insiders, not from Congress, and certainly not from the private sector. Cable and phone companies pushed for privatisation, as did Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
In 1995, the National Science Foundation officially retired the NSFNET, handing control of the Internet to a handful of private network providers that it had created less than a decade earlier. There was no vote in Congress on the issue. There was no public referendum or discussion. It happened by bureaucratic decree.
A year later, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a law that deregulated the telecommunications industry, allowing for the first time since the New Deal nearly unlimited corporate cross-ownership of the media: cable companies, radio stations, film studios, newspapers, phone companies, television broadcasters, and, of course, Internet service providers.
A handful of powerful telecommunications companies absorbed most of the privatised NSFNET providers that had been set up with funds from the National Science Foundation a decade earlier.
San Francisco Bay Area’s regional provider became part of Verizon. Southern California’s, which was part-owned by the military contractor General Atomics, was absorbed by AT&T. New York’s became part of Cogent Communications, one of the largest backbone companies in the world.
The backbone went to Time-Warner. And MCI, which had run the backbone along with IBM, merged with WorldCom, combining two of the biggest Internet service providers in the world.
All these mergers represented the corporate centralisation of a powerful new telecommunications system that had been created by the military and ushered into commercial life by the National Science Foundation. To put it another way, the Internet was born.
Did the Alphabet Soup Ever Leave the Room?
While the Internet was formally privatised, the surveillance aspect hung around. It hung around – through funding, through personal connections, through mentorship, through nudging, through providing a guiding hand toward the “desired” direction of research, through pressure, and of course through secret programs, some of which were later exposed. I think “some” is a key word.
For instance, Google’s Larry Page’s graduate advisor at Stanford (a school that was “awash in military cash”) was Terry Winograd, “apioneer in linguistic artificial intelligence who had done work in the 1970s at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, a part of the bigger ARPANET project.
“In the 1990s, Winograd was in charge of the Stanford Digital Libraries project, one component of the multi-million-dollar Digital Library Initiative sponsored by seven civilian, military, and law enforcement federal agencies, including NASA, DARPA, the FBI, and the National Science Foundation.”
Unsurprisingly, Larry Page’s PhD first research paper published in 1998 “bore the familiar disclosure: funded by DARPA.” “And just like old times,” Yasha writes. “DARPA played a role. Indeed, in 1994, just one year before Page had arrived at Stanford, DARPA’s funding of the Digital Library Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University produced a notable success: Lycos, a search engine named after Lycosidae, the scientific name for the wolf spider family.”
And when Google itself became huge, capitalising on their secretive practice of all-pervasive data collection that allowed them to compete successfully in the “search” field – they shamelessly waved in our faces their carefully crafted image of benevolent nerds saving the world. “Don’t be evil,” they said. And many believed.
I remember that time well. Just some ten years ago, as a musician, I was involved in “anti-Big Tech activism” – complaining about Google’s predatory ways and transhumanism, and writing stories trying to draw attention to what was going on – and no one cared. People just liked Google. It was convenient to like Google. The media kissed up to them like they were kings, and regular citizens didn’t mind being surveilled as long as the services were convenient to use.
It’s very understandable. We are all focused on the everyday. And this is how long-term military planning work. Today, we can look around and say that they’ve done a pretty damn good job. Everything is online, the dependence is huge – and it is much harder to live the digital prison today than it was to never enter it decades ago. Can we learn from that?
And then there is PRISM – a program, revealed by Snowden, that gave the NSA, and the FBI, a back door to the servers of all major tech companies. Yasha’s “Surveillance Valley” touched upon PRISM as well:
PRISM resembles traditional taps that the FBI maintained throughout the domestic telecommunications system. It works like this: using a specialised interface, an NSA analyst creates a data request, request, called a “tasking,” for a specific user of a partnering company.
A tasking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other providers is routed to equipment [‘interception units’] installed at each company. This equipment, maintained by the FBI, passes the NSA request to a private company’s system. The tasking creates a digital wiretap that then forwards intelligence to the NSA in real time, all without any input from the company itself.
Analysts could even opt-in for alerts for when a particular target logs in to an account. Depending on the company, a tasking may return e-mails, attachments, address books, calendars, files stored in the cloud, text or audio or video chats and “metadata” that identify the locations, devices used and other information about a target.
The programme, which began in 2007 under President George W. Bush and which was expanded under President Barack Obama, became a gold mine for American spies.
Liberating Ourselves from Mob Control
There we have it. Privacy was never meant to be. The current development with censorship and surveillance is a feature, not a bug. And the internet – as fun as it is – is a continuation of Steven Newcomb’s “System of Domination,” and the System of Domination is real.
It turns out – again – that the world is run by a bunch of bold mobsters playing military games with our lives. In the post-2001 world, their games, previously happening on the background, became more visible to a regular citizen in the West.
And then in 2020, those games came straight to our backyard in the form of dictatorial covid measures, paternalistic surveillance and moralising, unhinged censorship, and so on. They came to our backyard in 2020 with a full boot, but the seed was planted long ago, when many were asleep.
All this is obnoxious, and tragic, and painful – but there is always a silver lining in everything that life brings. We are not helpless bystanders. Like Jeff Childers said in his interview, realistically, we may not be able to directly counter Klaus Schwab or the WEF – I believe that the higher powers will take care of them in due time. But even though there is little we can do about the World Economic Forum or the central bankers’ central bank digital currency (“CBDC”), we are not helpless. There are things we can do.
We can refuse to be afraid. We can use these times to try to understand the world. We can refuse to betray our brothers and sisters. We can focus on our immediate surroundings, on the things that we have the power to change, and we can change the world together, little by little, over time, with courage and passion, from the ground up. “Local, local, local” is something that speaks to me a lot.
After all, the villains, in their military planning, plan far ahead – sometimes, hundreds of years ahead (like Google saying that they hope to have their really perfect AI in 300 years – that’s long-term planning, I would say).
This really is an existential battle – yes, a challenge, but also chance of remembering who we are, an opportunity to part with our past delusions and to grow our souls for real, with spiritual dignity and without fear.
The above is extracted from an article titled ‘World Wide Web: Whom Was It Designed to Catch?’ by Tessa Lena. You can read the full article in the file attached below
Go to link:
https://expose-news.com/2023/03/10/internet-surveillance-and-censorship-from-outset/