Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet”

You go into a library, a big public building, around you are tables and desks where other patrons similarly drawn to the offerings of the library read and turn pages.  Venturing into the stacks, you see the shoulders and bent necks of other people pulling books off the shelf, reading an index or table of contents, or perhaps their fingers running over the back of book spines naming authors, stating titles and showing the Dewey Decimal numbers that group books of similar content and concerns together. Somewhere, not far out of eyesight, is a desk with one or more librarians who can help and answer questions if you ask. Maybe one trundles through to squeeze past you to replace some of the books to the stacks.  The environment may be hushed and quiet, but it doesn’t seem entirely private.  It might even seem that there is a social aspect to this commons you are occupying.  There is the possibility that, seeing the title you might ask your neighbor, “Good book?”, and in return get an entirely unexpected answer teaching you are amazed to have learned.

By contrast, finding yourself at home reading an article on the Internet in that corner where sun doesn’t come in to glare on your computer screen may seem like a far more private experience. . . .  But is it?

Yasha Levine's book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet,” which came out in February is a stern reminder of a fact that gets regularly overlooked and/or forgotten: Reading on the Internet is a very unprivate experience.  In other words, as he explains, the history of the Internet, from its very inception, is intimately intertwined with surveillance and the military. .

Fire up your browser to interface with the Internet and it can track you (your browser probably recently offered to have all your devices share the information it can collect about your browsing habits).  Tell your search engine like Google what you want to look at and it will collect that data from you along with what you actually wanted to click to open from amongst the links its presented.  Along the way, some advertisers will be clued in about what ways you may be a good target for various things.  The websites you land on will also likely try to advertise to you and may know a lot about you even before you get there.   If you are reading an ebook, the publisher may be paying attention to whether you are reading certain parts of it fast or slow, what you want to bookmark and what statements in the book you are researching as you go along.  They may be paying attention to where you are, what your reading habits are time-of-daywise.  Send your friend a few thoughts about what you just read via Gmail and Google will read that email.  And that phone in your pocket that is a powerful little computer? It knows your voice, by default might be listening for it now, recognizes your face; keeps track of where you are reporting that information to the provdiers of various apps. . . .What about your Internet provider or providers?: What are they keeping track of with respect to you?  Who sold you your computer?; What are they keeping track of in terms of your use of it?. . . . And we haven’t even brought up what is formally called “spyware” or deemed “malicious.”

In other words, even if curling up in an easy chair with your laptop in an empty apartment seems like a solitary experience in which you alone are participating, it is really quite the opposite.
Here, via our YouTube channel, is a quick overview about what Yasha Levine's book is about, delivered in the creepiest possible way by Amazon’s Alexa.  

   

    Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa) (click through to YouTube for best viewing)

    Amazon's Alexa is happy to describe "Surveillance Valley," Yasha Levine's new book about how surveillance and the military history are baked into the DNA of the Internet including the partnerships between big Internet companies (like Amazon, Google and Facebook) and the military.  Siri also has some things to say about Alexa.

Your first instinct might be to console yourself by telling yourself that all the many companies tracking you as you read are private companies, not the government, and that no matter how much of a nuisance it is that you are being followed by advertisements omniscient about what you last shopped for, their only goal is to help and make life more convenient by anticipating your every next thought before it even pops into your head. . .

. . . But that would be to ignore the Edward Snowden revelations that the flow of information through all the major Internet companies has been tapped into by the U.S. Government.  Further, as Yasha Levine documents extensively in his book, these big Internet companies with surveillance and data collection at the core of so much of their basic purpose, are integrally connected with the government including through all sorts of partnerships.  Mr. Levine also has some scary observations about why hopes for privacy seemingly offered by Edward Snowden are likely just pitfalls instead.

Although those doing this vast amount of surveillance would like to hope that the public makes a distinction between government surveillance and the surveillance done by private corporations and thus consider the situation somehow more benign, Levine makes clear that it is increasingly a distinction with no real difference flowing from the implications attached.  (One thing that Levine’s book does not mention is that the law does make some technical distinctions in this regard, the result of which is that the government can probably more easily do surveillance if it is the outcome of partnerships with the private sector.  One reason partnerships are often in play is because the Internet, something the government created, was privatized through actions undertaken without fanfare in the mid 1980's a convoluted chapter of the overall story Levine tells.)  Levine does not write about whether the intelligence agencies have actually involved themselves in picking the winners and losers in the silicone valley races, which firms will step up to become the Internet giants, but with firms like In-Q-Tel scouting for Internet firms and investing in them since before 9/11 that is not a far-fetched proposition.      

This is from Mr. Levine's prologue to his book:

Google is one of the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world, yet it presents itself as one of the good guys: a company on a mission to make the world a better place and a bulwark against corrupt and intrusive government‘s power around the globe. And yet, as I traced the story and dug into the details of Google's government contracting business, I discovered that the company was already a full-fledged military contractor, selling versions of its consumer data mining and analysis technology to police departments, city governments and just about every other US intelligence and military agency.  Over the years it had supplied mapping technology used by the US Army in Iraq, hosted data for the Central intelligence agency, indexed the National Security Agency's vast intelligence databases, built a military robots, colauched a spy satellite with the Pentagon, and leased its cloud computing platform to help police departments predict crime. And Google is not alone. From Amazon to eBay to Facebook – – –

Levine over and over again makes clear how little the difference is between the surveillance tactics of the private Internet firms the government.  At page 164 he writes about Google’s content extraction and collection of data culled from the emails of those using its “free” gmail service (introduced in 2004) and concerns of UC Berkley law professor Chris Hoffnagle who noted its similarity to the “Total Information Awareness” program of President Reagan’s national security advisor John Poindexter. 

Concerns about Google‘s business model would continue to haunt the company. Time proved Hoffnagle right. There wasn’t very much difference between Google‘s approach and the surveillance technology deployed by the NSA, CIA, and Pentagon. Indeed, sometimes they were identical.

Levine notes how the military surveillance programs hailed back to the Vietnam War and efforts then to anticipate and thereby control the direction the populace of the country would go in.  Not to split any hairs, the goal was that the country should not head off in any communist directions.  When transplanted back and used with respect to the populace of the United States such programs also had incorporated built-in notions of the political directions in which the citizens of this country should not be allowed to head.  Levine writes that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering a speech after the Detroit riots of 1967 was viewed in military terms as a “counterinsurgency.”  Levine notes that the secret CONUS Intel program, exposed in early 1970 that involved thousands of undercover agents spying on United States Citizens, seemed to focus primarily on the Left, “anyone perceived to be sympathetic to the cause of economic and social justice.”  This is not to say that the program didn’t have or utilize its capacity to spy on the John Birch Society (now essentially morphed into the Koch network) at the other end of the polical spectrum.

Levine writes (at Page 76) about the CONUS program:

They infiltrated domestic antiwar political groups movements, spied on left-wing activists, and filed reports in a centralized intelligence database on millions of Americans. “When this program began in the summer of 1965, its purpose was to provide early warning of civil disorders which the army might be called upon to quell in the summer of 1967,” reported [Christopher] Pyle [in his exposé in the Washington Monthly]. “Today, the army maintenance files on the membership, ideology, programs, and practices of virtually every political group in the country.”

On page 85 Levine writes about the investigation of CONUS Intel led by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina in a series of 1971 hearings:

    . . . His committee established that the US Army had amassed a powerful domestic intelligence presence and had “developed a massive system for monitoring virtually all political protest in the United States.” There were over 300 regional “record centers” nationwide, with many containing more than 100,000 cards on “personalities of interest”

    * * *

    . . . the army referred to activists and protesters as if they were organized enemy combatants embedded with the indigenous population.

    * * *

    “The hypothesis the revolutionary groups might be behind the civil rights and antiwar movement became a presumption which affected the entire operation,” explained senator Irving and a final report…

What happened then, as reported by Levine is even more of a revelation.  In light of the public outrage resulting from Ervin’s hearings:

The arm promised to destroy the surveillance files, but the Senate could not obtain definitive proof that the files were ever fully expunged.  On the contrary, evidence mounted that the Army had deliberately hidden and continued to use the surveillance data it collected.

Those files were, as Levine recounts, fed into database that was that was at the core of the early Internet.

Levine has something in common with some others who have worked to lift the veil about the unrecognized level of surveillance and inelegance gathering by the United States: At one point, like some others, Levine's book takes on a personally harrowing caste as Levine receives death threats and worries about his safety and that of his family.  Those threats, as we will get to in a moment, came after he started to promulgate information about how perhaps everything people thought they knew about obtainable level of privacy after the Snowden revelations were not what most people informing themselves about these subjects thought they knew.

At the very beginning of his book talking about the military efforts to control the population of Vietnam, Levine mentions the fairly notorious Pheonix program giving an estimate that under that program some forty thousand to eighty thousand Vietnamese were assassinated to neutralize their potential or suspected influence in their society. Acknowledged by the CIA, the CIA officially puts the number of such assassinations at just twenty thousand.

It is one thing that Levine could have gone into in greater depth, but in the age of Internet surveillance and control, such "wet" assassinations become far less necessary.  Like in "The Matrix" it is enough to neutralize a person's cyber identity.  As our venturing forth to interact in public spheres is increasingly in the form of our digital cyber selves, whether we disclose our real identities as we do so, or cloak ourselves theorizing that pseudonyms can be effective, and as we increasingly see others through the digital goggles of services like Google, it is enough that our digital world avatars are neutralized when they threaten the powers that be.  

Laura K. Donohue is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, Director of Georgetown's Center on National Security and the Law, and Director of the Center on Privacy and Technology who writes on constitutional law, legal history, emerging technologies, and national security law has spoken about how in the cyberworld of social networks where everything is virtual, individuals whose growing influence is threatening to the security state can readily be readily identified (all the social network programs these days automatically count followers these days, what could be easier- plus they have other tools).  Then their virtual cyberworld existences can neutralized by various means such as isolating them or interfering with or interrupting their communication network to suppress their message.  See: Meta-Irony Of Trying To Mount A Social Network Campaign To Get People To See Oliver Stone’s Movie “Snowden” and To Pardon Snowden- How Efforts To Help Snowden Could Be Impeded, Monday, October 31, 2016.

In other words, who actually saw the Facebook post of this individual?  Are their Twitter posts escaping attention?  Do their Internet posts disappear into the rarely explored nether regions on page 5 or 10 of Google searches?  If the monitored tribe of followers of such individuals is very small, perhaps they are not even a threat, but possible a help as they draw off and help further fractionalize the communication and coordination of an opposition that might otherwise congeal into something fiercer and of more concern.

Maybe these individuals of influence don't need to be neutralized at all.  And maybe with the kind of Internet monitoring being done today, the anticipating and steering of society doesn't have to be thought of any longer as individuals at all: Such individuals can be thought of as just as components of overall trends that can be countered by launching countervailing counter-narratives, or distractions that will sidetrack the potentially influenced segments of society.  Perhaps it is enough that the political candidates supported by such individuals never win (or are consistently co-opted after election) so that their energy deflates with a Sisyphean string of constant defeats.  On the other hand, to say that more and more frequent monitoring may be used to control the flocking behavior our populace in terms of what may be trending, is not to say that nano-targeting of voters on an individual basis won't be a tactic to control the outcome of elections and engineer those defeats.

Something to think about: If the most important thing is for the surveillance state to be monitoring the flocking trends of followers, not leaders, then, although you may not consider yourself a leader with dangerous ideas that they may care about ( nothing that you need care about keeping private), they have as much interest or more in getting an accurate garage of what you as  a follower may be thinking as any leader.  That way they can work to swing trends the other way when they need to.  Which is to say that ideas are not, in and of themselves dangerous: Ideas are only a threat if they take hold.  And in terms of the main centers of power, the mainstream media of this country is pretty innocuous in terms of the ideas it passes along that might threaten those centers.

In Ms. Donohue's estimation, monitoring Internet social network activity is not the best tool for dealing with small secretive terrorist cells, but effective to stymie trends in political opposition:

If you are looking at a social network, the denser that network is the more you can tell about it, but in a cell structure where they are communicating very rarely and you are dealing with peripheries it's very hard to tell where those important nodes are in a sparsely populated communication network.

So, ironically, it turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool to head off potential social, economic, political opposition and not as an effective way to head off concerted terrorist cell structure activity.

The concerns for Levine's life and the safety of his family due to what was angrily posted openly on the Internet was in response to what Levine was researching revealing about the Tor service, and how Tor likely did not provide the secure unsurveilled channels for communication and accessing information through the Internet that it was supposed to.  Why?: Because Tor had deep ongoing ties, including financing to the U.S. government.  (Tor was nominally nonprofit and independent of the government.) And yet it was being embraced as a privacy app by privacy community advocates.  A Tor logo sticker was prominently visible on Edward Snowden's laptop in photographs of him meeting with reporters to leak information about the almost incomprehensible extent of the surveillance by the United States government, including its own citizens, including surveillance that was illegal, and inclining  surveillance that Congress had been told was not going on.

Levine concluded that the personal attacks and threats against him were to fend off his message about Tor, that expressions of personal animosity against him were just a distraction from the main issue.  While Levine analyzed that Tor could perhaps provide some privacy, to use it effectively would require great technical acumen and assiduous care to avoid all the other ways that a communication could be intercepted in various steps along the way.  Even then, the U.S. government would likely have a back door to it.  This is not to say that Tor would not have uses.  It would be useful to U.S. intelligence agency spies themselves, but only if they could disappear into a cloud of other users.  It would also be useful to activists in other countries battling to change or overthrow their governments so long as  the U.S. government did not share its own intelligence with those other governments unable to crack through Tor.  Levine also posits Tor as a "honeypot" to attract and concentrate more accessibly for evaluation all the communicators who really do want hide significant things from the U.S. government.

Levine never uses the term "limited hangout" anywhere in his book. A "limited hangout" is where the intelligence community releases true but partial (or potentially distorted) information intending it to be misleading or relied upon by its recipients in a way that manipulates them into wrong conclusions or actions that are not in their interest.  Levine does write about an  interesting, flamboyant young man who was one of Tor's principal promoters at hacking and privacy conferences around the globe, an encryption and security software developer, by the name of Jacob Appelbaum.

Appelbuam made appearances in two of reporter Laura Poitras' documentaries, her Oscar winning "Citizen Four" about Edward Snowden coming forward with his leaks through the journalists he met with in Hong Kong, including Poitras, and her later released documentary, "Risk" about time Poitras spent with Julliane Assange.  Poitras' documentaries make clear how Appelbuam gained the trust of both Snowden and Assange.  As you can learn from "Risk" and as Levine writes about, Poitras, a journalist trusted by the privacy community also became close enough to Appelbuam to have an affair with him.

Appelbaum in "Citizen Four" about Edward Snowden

Based on the portrait and information about Appelbaum in Levine's book there is an obvious question as to whether Appelbaum was working for the intelligence agencies as part of a limited hangout when he was promoting Tor.  Being careful, questions must also be asked about the ties he was able to make with Snowden and Poitras and his befriending of Assange.

Another possible limited hangout?: On page 222 of Levine's book he describes how one day he arrived home to find a heavy brown box sitting on his doorstep.  It was an answer to a freedom of information act request he had filed and it documented with further information and details much of what he'd been saying about the connections between Tor and the federal government. Should it have been that easy for him to get the information he was requesting, and, if not, why was the information, now public through his book, furnished to him as it was?

Near its end, Levine concludes his book with the following finishing his observations (at page 269):

Now Internet billionaires like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg slam government surveillance, talk up freedom, and embrace Snowden and crypto privacy culture, their companies still cut deals with the Pentagon, work with the NSA and CIA, you continue to track and profile people for profit. It is the same old split screen marketing trick: the public branding in the behind the scenes reality

Internet Freedom is a win-win for everyone involved – everyone except regular users, who trust their privacy to double-dealing military contractors, while powerful Surveillance Valley corporations continue to build out the old military cybernetic dream of a world where everyone else watched, predicted, and controlled.

Now think back about that depiction of a visit to the traditional library set forth at the beginning of this discussion-  Reading in the traditional library was a comparative private experience with no such tracking.  You could have access to all sorts of books, books you never thought about or even knew existed before you got to the library and no one would be taking note of any trends that you and the other library users were setting in terms of the books you were plucking from the shelves.

These days, traditional libraries are under siege: Citizens Defending Libraries was formed in response to the across-the-board plans New York City is implementing to sell and shrink libraries, eliminate books and libraries, typically with real estate schemes helping fuel their fast pace.  Meanwhile, the library space that remains in the city system or which is being substituted for what is sold off is becoming, akin to Internet reading, more susceptible to surveillance with books being  kept off the library premises and needing to be requested by computer Internet request, probably searched for and asked for in advance.  The library systems are also seeking to induce patrons to increasingly use digital books that are more expensive for the library.  Or the net result may simply be that library patrons are simply encouraged to do more of their reading on the Internet, perhaps even while at the library.  More about the difference between digital books and physical books, and more about surveillance in the libraries here: Physical Books vs. Digital Books, Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries, and It's Not Just The Real Estate Industry Threatening Libraries: Examining The Panoply of Other Threats. 

If you watched our video of Alexa explaining what the book "Surveillance Valley" is about then you learned at the end that Alexa is named after the Library of Alexandria, by reputation the greatest library of all time, a repository of the world's knowledge in an ancient time.  Alexa may also store a vast amount of information, but Alexa was not set up to collect the world's information in books, Alexa was a company that was set up by Amazon to collect information about us, information that in previous times, before the Internet, was largely private.