Upcoming WBAI Town Halls

Library defenders may remember that for much the same reason that Citizens Defending Library co-founders Michael D. D. White and Carolyn McIntyre have been fighting to defend our libraries, they have similarly gotten involved with WBAI radio, 99.5fm, the only truly listener supported radio station in New York City.  (The both went on WBAI's local station broad.)  Free speech radio WBAI can also be called, as it sometimes is, "radio for the 99.5%."

 As part of WBAI's grassroots celebrating governance tradition, WBAI holds Town Halls for public discussion and input.  Library Defenders may want to get involved with these as Michael and Carolyn have.  As you will see from the descriptions below for prospective featured Town Hall topics, the concerns to be grappled with in the WBAI community and the Pacifica free speech radio network of which it is a part, tend to have a lot in common with concerns involved in defending libraries.  This includes concerns like censorship and narrative control, what happens when our traditional analogue has to contend with the arrival sometime dubious benefits of digital revolution, and finally having to fend off skulking would-be privatizers.

Our next Town Hall has been decided upon and will be held by Zoom on Sunday, August 28th at 4:00 PM (see below).  Library Defenders are invited and welcome.

You may also want to give input on what Town Halls you'd like to see prioritized to be held next or may have ideas for additional topics or coverage to what appears below.

To get information about attending email Michael White at MDDWhite [[at]] aol.com. 

UPCOMING WBAI TOWN HALLS

Debating Debates, Particularly On The Most Divisive Issues, Probably Starting With Covid.  (Sunday, August 28th at 4:00 PM-  Listen to or watch the Recording HERE using the Passcode: uq@$8Uam:) Will debates improve and help make the WBAI and Pacifica environment healthier?  Can debates increase audience and bring in revenue?  Can debates create a more unified, free and exploratory thinking free speech radio audience and valuable listener membership?  Perhaps the best and most topical example, which is up for discussion, is the way that Covid questions  divide and fracture the cohesion and unity of political cultures that, once upon a time, self identified regarding themselves as anti-corporate, anti-monopoly, pro-health and anti-big Pharma, and anti-authoritarian (and possibly as Left).  At least two sides in Covid discussions are claiming that they are “following the science,” while others absolutely don’t.  Anthony Fauci has announced that he is “science,” and he along with those of whom are Fauci followers say that to doubt Fauci is an “attack on science,” moreover an attack on “truth.”  If shows on Pacifica showcase Fauci while describing invermectin as a “horse dewormer” that is spuriously “touted in right-wing media” as a beneficial treatment for Covid, if Pacifica stations run government PSAs about Covid safety, should the slant of that `reporting’ and air time use get debated?  If so, by whom? Some serious money has been talked about as flowing in connection with the prospect of Covid issue debates: Multi-millionaire and activist Steve Kirsch has issued multiple million dollar backed challenges for qualified people just to show up and debate the Covid issues, but some people parry that because people like Fauci “are science” it would be undignified for them to debate, or they feel that only those who have credentialed themselves by receiving money from Fauci and the Big-Pharma should be allowed offer opinions as to what may be the facts respecting Covid, vaccines, and best health practices.  NOTE: Attendees of this Town Hall are also invited to play a social justice and debate game of chance– To play this game take any three of the last four digits of your phone number, and arrange them into a number between 23 and 894 and then submit that number together with your name when you attend.  

WBAI and Pacifica Decisions- Competing Successfully With the Internet vs And/or Becoming Internet Successful.  (Sunday, September 18th at 4:00 PM- Zoom information to attend is in the Pacifica/WBAI calendar-click on the date- and the CDL Calendar) Listen to or watch the Recording HERE using the Passcode:!0b0MppY  The Pacifica Network originated as a network of terrestrial radio stations.  It’s no secret that the internet has brought a lot of “creative destruction” to all businesses, but particularly to virtually all forms of media, terrestrial radio included.  Just as the Craig’s list usurpation of classified ads worked to defund and financially starve newspapers, terrestrial radio’s business model has been challenged as audiences are siphoned off by an ever greater multiplicity of internet-based challengers supplying huge varieties of content, listening experiences included, that frequently seem even more convenient to access.  Most people now carry a smart phone in their pocket. Those phones easily access the internet providing podcasts or other forms of available listening streams, but those ubiquitous phones don’t provide terrestrial radio connections (although they easily could have that added feature).   Search engines and algorithms readily (and censoriously) direct people to internet-based content, but not, per se, without added effort, to terrestrial radio.  Terrestrial radio has understandably seen its audiences diminished.  This doesn’t mean that the audience for alternative media is diminishing: Alternative media on the internet is flourishing.  It is flourishing despite Big Tech’s exercise of considerable censorship.  Its audiences are growing to increasingly dwarf the audience of the Big Tech promoted legacy and corporate media.  But the Pacifica network stations, that once were the sine qua non in providing definitive alternative media, have not participated in that audience growth and shift to alternative media.  Is that because of Pacifica’s lack of internet savvy and presence?  Is internet savvy and slickness what’s needed to keep pace and similarly outpace corporate narratives?  Maybe, but as the recent spectacularly ignominious demise of CNN+ demonstrates, internet slickness alone means nothing in terms of capturing audience.  Also, as we reposition ourselves, reinventing ourselves in this internet world, might it not also be important to recognize characteristics of the internet from which audience might want to escape?: the data scraping, and regular surveillance, Big Tech’s curation and constant steering of what you see there along with censorship that includes the evanescence with which what’s on the internet can disappear when censored.  While we probably want to do both, what takes priority: for WBAI and Pacifica to compete with the internet on our own terrestrial radio terms, or to become internet successful with all the tools associated with success in that realm?

Recognizing The Methods By Which Public Assets Are Targeted, Taken Over, or Otherwise Neutralized (And Goals of Those Doing So).  Sunday, October 30, 2022 at 4:00 PM- Listen to or watch the Recording HERE using the Passcode:9?gHZPw4.   WBAI and all its sister stations in the Pacifica Network are part of our public commons.  They are publicly owned and controlled public assets.  Anyone can listen.  There are no bars to access, no user fees are demanded.  It exists through public contributions donated to freely benefit, without restriction, the entire larger community.  It therefore stands in contradistinction to and it competes with privately owned entities, including the corporately owned mainstream and legacy media.  Those other entities exist for different purposes pursuing different goals.

More and more frequently, we see the private sector targeting public assets and the commons for privatization, or sometimes just working toward its destruction, neutralization and/or possible replacement.  An explanation sometimes given is that, as capital continues to build up, it exhausts traditional investment opportunities and is forced to seek new, less traditional assets to acquire and monetize.  Or is it partly just what happens when there’s so much of this money sloshing around?  Quite importantly, it is important to remember that the competition from the Pacifica stations is a threat not only just to the goals and purposes of the corporately owned media, but also to the agenda of all the corporate expires and the rest of the establishment institutions with which corporate owned media is so fearsomely and completely interlocked.  Also efforts are always made to quash, any examples that model alternatives to the profit based capitalism (e.g. how we relentless impose sanctions of socialist countries, then declare the systems don’t work).

There is substantial overlap, but public assets may be privatized, or public entities that own and control such assets may also be taken over accomplishing the same thing. Similarly public purpose organizations may be targeted, or political parties, political movements, or causes may be targeted for takeover, redirection or ineffectualizeation.

In learning to recognize the tactics that used it is probably important to discern the goals of those acting to commandeer public realm assets and enterprises.  Those goals can be multiple: To monetize or privately profit from the changed ownership or control (e.g. privatized road for toll collection, library real estate turned into luxury condos); elimination of alternative models of success; squelching competition; thwarting an anti-corporate mission or promulgation of any anti-corporate narratives; while intending that good work of an entity should cease, it may also be the goal to use the accumulated prior good work and built up good will and trust of a captured entity to send the public off in wrong directions (e.g. captured environmental groups touting fracking as a “clean transitional fuel”); the captured entity can be used as a resource drain or suck (e,g. a captured public purpose entity political faction that continues to seek donations so that donated money is sidelined, not going to productive use; similarly, a takeover may be slow or incomplete, existing for a long time as a battlefield to drain the financial strengths, talent and available man hours of those fighting for pubic goods– much as the U.S. lured the Soviet Union into Afghanistan intending to sap its resources); lastly when privatization shifts functions away from the government (.e. the internet, the Post Office, surveillance agencies) to private entities, those private entities may have a freer hand (decision making included) to do that, which the Constitution (or voter control) might prevent the government from doing.

In this context, can we identify and discuss some of tactics used when targeting the public commons?  They include draining and starving the entity of funding (creating an argument that someone else or alternatives are better), creating crises, undervaluing the assets, working in stealth to formulate top-down takeover plans, infiltrattion of decision-making processes with people who are unsympathetic to the public and to public goals; dismissing, avoiding and interfering with workable alternatives and ways to keep public assets robust and self-sustaining; sending in disrupters who may engage in obvious power plays (“steering committee” grabs) and divide and conquer techniques (they may also use the CIA/FBI COINTELPRO tactics of promoting unworkable bureaucracy), and, for the longer term, sending in “pivot people” (and information collectors) who will be regarded as helping until their numbers build sufficiently for a flip in tactics/board control/etc; buy influence and position within the entity with appreciable donations, co-opting the goal-and-purpose language of the entity, which can also include redefining that language into less meaningful watered down expressions of purpose; set up astro-turf alternatives and competition.  We leave this list open for more thought and additions.

Effective Directing of Resources For Good Influence.  (Part 1- Saturday, February 25th at 4:00 PM-  Listen to or watch the Recording HERE using the Passcode:*+G&6Z8* Part 2- Will be Sunday March 26th at 4:00 PM,  see the CDL Calendar for March 26 for Zoom meeting sign on information.)
You are paying at your pharmacy’s cash register, and the screen to confirm your payment asks whether you want to ‘round up’ your payment to make a donation their charity. Answer: No!- Why would you want a pharmacy chain with probably too many connections to Big Pharma, corporations and the medical establishment to be directing your money to where they want it to go?  A candidate is running for office: Do you donate to their campaign?  Maybe, if it qualifies them to get into debates where they are going to force discussion of certain issues.  In a flood of emails you are asked to donate again to a political party: Do you do it?  And have your money be the tail on a dog funded by lots of mega-corporations? Don’t think so!  Similarly, stopped on the street, you are asked to donate to save animals, protect the environment, or children via a charity that’s backed by big business conglomerates while parking political operatives at high-profile salaries.  Where do you put your money to influence the world for the better? Jane Mayer reported that the Koch brother’s decided to put their money into causes first, rather than politicians who could flip on them. What about sending some of your money and resources to WBAI and Pacifica for the influence it can have on the world?  Next question, when resources come into WBAI and Pacifica, how can they best be directed within the Pacifica environment?; to improve programming attracting a bigger audience, or to promote the good shows already here?. . Maybe paying for social media promotion that might be quashed by Big tech algorithms?  There is a lot up for discussion in a two-part WBAI Town Hall.

Music Programming on WBAI and Pacifica Stations.  Sometimes some of our biggest radio listening audiences, often along with reliably sizable donations come in from music programs.  But music comes in such variety. .   what music should best make its way onto our airwaves and how much should be played of all varieties to make way for all the richness that is available?  Furthermore, isn’t music deeply imbued with cultural message?  In this regard, should we now ask: Where have all the anti-war songs gone?  The protest songs?  Are they still being written?  Or should music perhaps be a justifiable and carefree respite and refuge from the blocks of talk radio Pacifica programs where we assiduously exercise our consciences searching for solutions for the world’s societal problems and what own role should be in pursuing such solutions?  Other questions: Should we strive to feature, perhaps prioritize: local talent?; live performances?; new current era music vs. music that, like the oft revered American Song Book or the nostalgic oldies you hear played in supermarkets, have withstood the test of time becoming familiar airs?  
              
Improving WBAI and Pacifica Reputation and Brand. Do WBAI and Pacifica suffer from “reputational handicap.”  Do our stations have a reputation for lack of professionalism?  Does our democratic, grass roots governance structure mean we have reputations for destructive infighting, and if so, is this inevitable or available?   Do we undermine the free speech radio brand we seek to promote with signals that we only tolerate a narrow range of discourse?  Are we viewed as a welcoming home to, and reliable platform for, new, different and a wide range of voices that can provide alternatives to the corporate media?  Or are we hobbled by uncertainties about that?  If our reputation handicaps us, it can dissuade people, potential show hosts and producers, from bringing programs, messages and content to WBAI’s air.  Similarly, it can limit our pool of applicants for those who might work at the station or network.  It can drive away potential LSB board members or others who might be willing to contribute constructively in different ways to WBAI’s and Pacifica’s governance.  It can intimidate people who might step up to provide special fundraising premiums based on their work.  It can scare away potential contributors who could be making donations. Listeners may not then have a positive and clear perception of the WBAI brand, plus it may interfere with a full spectrum of good feelings about the station as a welcoming community. It can foster the idea that WBAI and Pacifica have no future.  Robust disagreement and debates between friends and allies is valuable.  It can even be friendly.  Alternative media can be a very big tent without ever retreading any of the corporate media narratives. But are we instead suffering from the effects of divide and conquer?  If so, what do we do to improve our brand and reputation.

WBAI and Pacifica Stepping Into The Breach As We Increasingly See More Internet Censorship.  If we are free speech radio, do we find that our most valuable content for the airwaves will be in inverse proportion to that which is censored?  Maybe that’s always been the case, but is it possible that the increasingly blatant censorship of the internet coming from Big Tech as an arm of government gives WBAI and Pacifica a perfect opportunity to strengthen, burnish and promote our brand?  And doesn’t it mean that the areas where there has been the most intense censorship is exactly where we should step in with flourish.  With the RT takedown much valuable alternative media programming was banished and disappeared, including our own “Chris Hedges On Contact” program.  Chris Hedges is one area where we stepped into the breach to broadcast a new resurrected version of Hedges’ weekly broadcast.  That’s something we can toot our horn about! It’s an age-old story with us that anti-war content, and content about promoting peace, have been intensely censored and squelched in our mainstream corporate media.  Likewise, criticism of capitalism and information about systematic racism, particularly the forms it takes with our police and in our prisons.  What else is high on the censorship list these days? It would seem at least the following: The conduct of the Israeli state in occupied Palestine, the topic of Big Pharma’s influence and the reliability of related Covid issue narratives, certainly now discussion about Ukraine and NATO, the topic of Big tech and authoritarian censorship itself, and now getting onto the list is the question of whether the U.S. is in a “recession.”  Participants in the discussion can probably add to the list.  Participants are also free to argue that they think certain points of view, or people they might identify, should be censored or “curated” off the air.  Most important is whether WBAI and Pacifica are stepping up to meet and take advantage of the challenges and opportunities here.

Privatization of History: Scary Information About What Is Happening At Our National Archives and Records Administration

"Erasing" history or "privatizing" it?  Churchill, a man whose flaws you may be unfamiliar with said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”-- And he did.

This one hits home for us at Citizens Defending Libraries.  At Citizens Defending Libraries we have paid much attention to how the shutting down, selling and deliberate underfunding of libraries relates to information control, information elimination, and censorship.

On February 6th, Democracy Now had a story about how millions of documents are being expunged from the National Archives.  This was right after the National Archives delivered an altered version of history concerning the 2017 Women’s March by doctoring a photograph of the March that the Archives used as a main feature for a new exhibit, The doctoring removed criticisms of President Trump.  See:  Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies.

Our National Archives is a form library intended to be a repository for the protection of our country’s history, as well as a form of watchdog for its protection.  Let’s note again: It’s a form of library.  Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab, interviewed for the Democracy Now story about the expungements said that:

a lot of what’s happening at the National Archives is happening because they are being starved of resources.  They have a smaller budget now than they had back in 2008. That budget has been cut every year for the last three years.

That sounds exactly like our New York City libraries.  And we will remind you that there is no excuse for starving our New York City libraries of resources the way we are being starved, because libraries are an almost infinitesimal portion of our city budget, especially in terms of the benefits they deliver.

Mr. Connelly was on Democracy Now, having written a recent piece for The New York Times on the Archive expungements headlined “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.”

While the hook that was used for both the Democracy Now interview and Mr. Connelly’s New York Times op-ed was the destruction of information about the recent and ongoing atrocities being committed by ICE under Trump, the violations of “immigrant rights” involved, and how ICE may be “destroying records from Trump’s first year, including the detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care,” Mr. Connally ventured further in his concerns.  He expressed his worries about our government’s “long history of destroying records related to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, mind control experiments and torture,” and he noted how our country has “destroyed all of the records of the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [he didn’t get to finish his sentence].”  He noted that the “Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water.”

The Democracy Now headline for its segment with Mr. Connelly refers to “Erasing History,” but is this characterization directly on target?  Isn’t this instead, a likely “privatization” of history?

In his New York Times op-ed Mr. Connelly mentions how now when things go into the National Archives, “Everything must be digital, or the departments and agencies must use their own resources to scan them.”

We are currently in an age when there is unprecedented private storage of data.  Everything is saved.  Data storage is insanely cheap, and keeps getting cheaper.  Much of that data storage is done by companies like Amazon, private companies that have strong ties to the CIA and the military industrial complex.

With private data collection running rampant for every conceivable purpose, is it reasonable to think that any anything that ever exists in digital form, even if that digital existence is brief, is ever truly expunged, that it truly ever vanishes?  Is it reasonable to believe that just because we starve our libraries and public national archive, that the information they made available, however briefly, especially if it was made available digitally, will not continue to exist in private hands?  Probably not.

When information exists digitally, it is easy to suck it out on into private databases a wholesale basis. . .   It is instructive to remember that, before his premature and extremely disheartening death, Aaron Swartz, the young activist  who was, among other things, a fan of libraries and an advocate for democratic empowerment through publicly available information (plus an open internet with net neutrality), was legally persecuted by our government for sucking out digital information on a wholesale basis to do exactly the opposite: He downloaded 4.8 million academic journal articles from a from a private database with the probable intent of making them more publicly accessible.  A number of years before, Swartz downloaded and made more freely available to the public 2.7 million federal court documents (essentially the law) from a federal database, documents which were technically already public, but were somehow not actually readily accessible to the public unless they paid to go through private channels, except through private channels.  Prosecuted for his download of the academic journal articles, Swartz faced a potential 90 years in prison and his father accused the government of hounding him and bringing about his death.
         
It is therefore important to understand that what we are talking about is the privatization of history and information, not its erasure.

The control of history and its narratives has been going on for a long time with those who are powerful thinking a lot about it.  Winston Churchill famously said, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  Our more liberal friends from the United Kingdom, who are better and more knowledgeably acquainted with Churchill, tell us they have very mixed feelings about “Winnie.”  Their feelings toward him are probably less favorable than ours, as we on this side of the pond, have likely been subjected to more unadulterated myth-making propaganda about the man.  There is much that was simply appalling about Churchill, but the fact that Churchill did, indeed, actually write a lot of the history about himself counteracts much of that.

Interviewed on On The Media, journalist Madhusree Mukerjee explained that after World War II, Churchill:

had complete access to all United Kingdom documents and an entire team of researchers and writers who helped him actually write six volumes or so of his World War II memoirs. And these volumes put Churchill at the center of the war, whereas historians have filled out some of the detail, which is that it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.

(See: Churchill's Forgotten, Ruthless Past, March 16, 2018)

Mukerjee also notes that “when his political career was in shards after the First World War, he wrote a history then, as well,” and that he wrote several histories, including “something called The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Putting the resources of the British government at Churchill’s disposal to write is one way of letting history be written by those that command the reins of power. . . But pulling back on our public resources to put all of our history in the hands of private corporate monopolies that do not have the best interests of the public assuredly at heart is probably an even more serious surrender of the custodianship of truth and memory.  Global warming anyone?  How about perpetual wars?

. .  Privatizing history is probably far worse than just trying to erase it.

Our last thought on this: You may have already observed for yourself that, whether its studying to understand history or just trying to follow the news, the most vital key to comprehension is most certainly a careful focus on what the powerful don’t want you to know.

PS: (added February 29, 2020)– On February 21, On The Media caught up to run a segment, “The Vanishing National Archives," about  Matthew Connelly, his  New York Times op-ed and the expungements from the National Archives.

It mostly tracked the story above:

by the end of this year, they're [the archive is] going to be able to start destroying records from the first year of the Trump administration when it first began to crack down on undocumented immigration.

* *

[On the chopping block] . .  everything from aviation safety to the takeover of American firms by foreign nationals. All of those records are slated for destruction in the Department of Interior, records related to protection of drinking water, enforcement of laws on endangered species, the management of the mismanagement of native lands, native assets, all that stuff's gonna get deleted, too.

However, it ends using a nice quote from Churchill’s counterpart in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt:

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people.” So to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Orchestrating Another PR-Grabbing Move to Telegraph Supersedence of The Traditional, Curated Library With Distracting Technological Glitz, The NYPL Starts Posting To Instagram Public Domain Books Already Freely Available on The Internet

The story is available from the Wall Street Journal (NYC Library Takes Novel Approach, Posting Books to Instagram The service, dubbed ‘Insta Novels,’ will be available to users of the photo- and video-sharing platform, by Charles Passy, August 22, 2018), but to read it there on the internet you’ll have to get through the Journal’s paywall if you are not already one of its business news oriented subscribers.  The article is, however, also available through Morningstar/Dow-Jones.    

Swaggering fecklessly into the internet to emphasize yet again its asserted faith that technology, represents the future of libraries, supplanting the age old traditions of curated collections and physical books, the NYPL will put what it calls “Insta Novels” on Instagram, the social service network owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. (That’s the same Facebook now involved in current censorship scandals, the scandal being how Facebook, subject to the wrong sort of influences, is censoring valuable content and free speech that it shouldn’t be censoring).

In a previous and similar highly promoted initiative, library administration officials partnered with Amazon to encourage the reading of digital books, back then it was to be on the subway. 

Previous digital reading campaign promotion (some of it)

The few works the NYPL is putting up on Facebook's Insatgram are public domain, and hence already readily available.

Library officials told the Wall Street Journal’s Charles Passy that the idea was to promote the  “NYPL brand” communicating in connection with that promotion “that libraries are changing with the times and fully adapting to the digital era.”  (“Fully adapting”: That certainly makes it sound like it's imperative that libraries adapt need to a lot.)   Just in case anyone missed the point about the NYPL’s fixations on a digital future for its libraries vs. what libraries have always done so successfully, Christopher Platt, the NYPL’s chief branch library officer, took the opportunity of this Instagram stunt to synchronistically dismiss the tradition of physical libraries.  He grabbed and combined some adjectives and nouns to say in a denigrating way that (aside from Instagram stunts?) the NYPL wants people to understand that libraries are not only “brick-and-mortar places full of dusty books.” — Achoo!  Anyone feel that administrative chill?

The Journal article included this reaction supplied by Citizens Defending Libraries:

Michael D. D. White, co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries, a New York City-based watchdog group, said the emphasis on online reading works against the idea of libraries as physical spaces where books are curated and knowledge is shared. 

It diminishes the sense of place and purpose,” he said.

When does a library stop being a library?  At the last NYPL meeting in September the trustees during a report about the NYPL’s recent forays into private partnerships (another issue to consider) were told of the NYPL’s expectations that it will go into the film business with HBO to make movies!  Hooray for Hollywood?: That is something we will have to delve into at some later time.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion!

Amazon growth charts, one of revenues and one of returns since Amazon went public.  Not the respective flat lines in each and consider what that means.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!

Amazon is now the second U.S. company (following Apple) to top $1 trillion in value.  That makes Jeff Bezos ($167 billion) world's richest man.

As Yasha Levine covered in his book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” Amazon is an internet company engaged in surveillance as a key part of its profit model and it works with the federal government and the federal government’s military and CIA.  As part of the sales blurb (on Amazon) for Mr. Levine’s book states:

Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.

For more on what we have already covered on this see: 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” and for even more that is relevant coming from Mr. Levine’s book; Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government.

Second biggest U.S. Company as of September 2018?  Amazon grew very fast to do that.

Amazon, which began in a converted garage of Bezos’ rented home, launched on the internet in July of 1995.  That’s just 23 years ago.

The story is that Bezos, not particularly a book lover for any reason, coming out of an unusually successful Wall Street hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Co., was not so to speak “following his bliss” when he decided to start his internet sales company with books.  He was instead selecting books from amongst “a list of 20 products” he was considering theoretically as the result of what where essentially mathematical computations:

Bezos eventually decided that his venture would sell books over the Web, due to the large worldwide market for literature, the low price that could be offered for books, and the tremendous selection of titles that were available in print.

The Unites States, in 2013, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis was contracting out “about 70 percent” of its “intelligence budget.”  That figure is probably, for the most part not calculated considering most of the surveillance being done by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook as talked about by Levine in his book.

What is clear, as written about by Mr. Levine in his book and by Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” is how intertwined the intelligence community is with private sector companies with an interdependence that has a lot of implications for who succeeds or fails in the private market place.  If we are talking about small start up companies trying to establish themselves, both these authors write about how the efforts of those companies may be aided and quietly, nay secretly, assisted by the government.  Both authors write about how “In-Q-Tel” was founded in 1999 (an interesting date in terms of ramping up electronic surveillance) as the CIA’s venture capitalist company operating in Silicon Valley “to invest in start-up that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.”  (Yasha Levine p. 174)  And “through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence” that’s “information that it could grab from the public web: Videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram amd Google+.” (Yasha Levine p. 188 -189)

In-Q-Tel “works with the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology” to find companies with products with intelligence application and then “buys equity positions in these firms— many of which are managed by former intelligence officials.”  (Shorrock p.16) Along with technology incubation funding from the CIA and other agencies “high-tech companies would be offered a huge natural market—the Intelligence Community and the federal government, plus assistance in testing and perfecting their products for use by the private sector.”  (Shorrock p.144) The interrelationships between the Intelligence Community and the tech community are very widespread, Stephanie O’Sullivan, the CIA’s director for science and technology said in 2006: “There is no technology out there that is not relevant to our mission.”  (Shorrock p.145)

Citing In-Q-Tel as just one example of “private-partnerships” with the technology industry that serve as a “convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests” Tim Shorrock in his book (p. 365) describes In-Q-Tel’s “partnerships” as “masking the fact that the CIA’s investments amounted to a hefty government subsidy that allowed companies to do things like hire lobbyiests to expand their market share.”  And the companies with those expanded market shares are likely to get a pass for when the private surveillance they engage in may flout  laws—   Citing the defense cavalierly offered by the the Chamber of Commerce for AT&T’s secret spying on U.S. citizens, Shorrock writes that “the ultimate result of the privatization of intelligence activities” is that the Chamber’s an amicus defense brief ventures to describe as a “friendly `partnership’” a “secret alliance between business and government that may be one of the most egregious examples of a corporation skirting U.S. privacy and foreign intelligence laws” (p. 366)

In-Q-Tel, designed with a focus on incubating start-ups, is one end, the small company end, of the spectrum of the government as a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place.  And In-Q-Tel is only one of those government market influences out there; for example, there is also a cousin company of British Intelligence heritage, defense and intelligence research company, QinetiQ Group a privatizing ownership share of which was transferred to the Carlyle Group.  Shorrock writes of George Tenet, former head of the CIA (under whom In-Q-Tel was launched) being on the QinetiQ  board.  The U-less Qs in the names of both these companies are intended to merrily invoke the Q of the James Bond films who equipped 007 with all his disguised tech gadgets.  QinetiQ’s model and influence on the market is different from In-Q-Tel's, buying up other tech companies for Intelligence Community purposes after becoming a privatized part of the Carlyle Group.  (One thing they like is robots.)

The other end of the spectrum of how the government is a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place is the big company end.  And obviously, Amazon is now a really big company.  (For instance, circa 2014 Amazon was reportedly providing the CIA with cloud computing services pursuant to a $600 million contract.)

When the companies that the United States relies on to do its intelligence work are really huge, when those companies have most of the available experts with security clearances working for them (at higher salaries than individuals working for the government), when those companies have most of the collected data and most of the systems that are up and running that the government has grown dependent on them for, plus when those companies have huge government derived income streams that they can recycle into lobbying for the big shares of secret government budgets that they are allowed to know and can talk about, but that the public isn't allowed to find out about, there is a question of who is running the show.  This question about contracting out is one that Tim Shorrock delves into and contemplates at length in his book mulling it over from many different perspectives.  Finally, while government officials may or may not lose the upper hand, government officials can nevertheless direct huge influence about who amongst these big companies will be the winners or losers in the market.

The implications of huge private corporations having so much power in the Intelligence Community are more pronounced given that, when individuals work for such private corporations, unlike the individuals who work directly for government, loyalties run in the direction of making profit.  By corporate law definition, that means profit first, not patriotism.  Furthermore, loyalties can be bought or sold.  And private corporations pursuing private profit are becoming increasingly multi-national in character and thus untethered from the patriotisms of any particular nations, including ours, that may hire them.  Hiring out to other private firms or interests (not nations) as they are allowed to do, they may be acting with no national patriotism at all.

Bezos started with books, but in time expanded Amazon’s offerings beyond books, including, initially, to some of the other products he was supposed to have been considering early on, music, by selling CDs and videos.  . . .  Nowadays if you want to see a video, a movie, particularly anything you might consider vintage or historic, say you want to see something with a political message, like “Seven Days In May” (about a military coup against the U.S. President in the Kennedy era) it’s likely you may find that your best chance, your path of least resistance to easily view the film easily will be to pay for it to stream through Amazon.  This is a far cry from the days when pretty much everyone’s  Friday night film viewing came from their local, often independently owned, video store.  In 1988, the year after the home video market surpassed box office revenues, with the number of stores leveling off, (the Blockbuster chain was simultaneously buying another chain to expand) there were 25,000 video stores nationally (about 45,000 other outlets renting tapes); in 1997 there were 23,036.

Video stores are vanishing practically to the point of non-existence, including in New York City. . .  Amazon, with probably lower overhead and fewer employees involved, will charge you about as much, maybe more, than your local video store once charged.  Did you once have a relationship with your local video store operator who knew your tastes, what to recommend intimately?  Think of what Amazon knows about you, learning more each time you rent a film like “Seven Days In May.”  Once Amazon just knew the books you read, but now as you might browse to look to possibly buy almost everything in your life through Amazon, Amazon now knows so much more.

In 1988, months after starting it's expansion into music, Amazon announced its expansion beyond books.  At the same time it bought a service that would keep track of your friends and their birthdays, so, for example, Amazon could suggest when it was time to order them presents.

In November 2007 Amazon introduced its, three year in development, Kindle (continually connecting you to the Internet) to sell ebooks, staring with 90,000 books (more than four times as many as Sony offered at the time and 90 percent of the current best sellers) and vowing that its “goal” was “to have every printed book on earth available for instant download.”  Of course, whatever their benefits, the ways in which e-books in contradistinction to physical books, are problematic are manifold, especially in terms of issues of surveillance.

By the beginning of 2010, hardly two years later, with the “nascent” ebook market still “only a few years old,” Amazon was clearly dominating it with an estimated “80 percent of e-book purchases” and by the end of 2010 a “full 50% share.”   The difference in those two percentages offered (books vs. market share) may reflect the low price that Amazon was charging for every book.

Offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon left no room for any profit margin as it sought to claim virtually the entire market.  In 2013, author (and lawyer) Scott Turow said that Amazon was using “unfair tactics” trying to “monopolize” the e-book market.  He said:

If you price e-books well below the cost, which is what they did for years, it both destroys physical book stores and drives the reading public into the e-book, which of course Amazon dominates.

As the point is made in Scott Turow's quote above, Amazon's disruption of the market not only drove e-book competitors out of the e-book market, but also drove brick and mortar book stores and stores selling physical books into bankruptcy as well.  Furthermore, publishers haven't liked Amazon very well either because they too have found themselves impoverished by Amazon's model.  Their impoverishment can limit support given to authors.

Should we all just relax and surrender to the fact that Amazon dominates the market while pushing digital books?  Citizens Defending Libraries reported last year how New York City library officials were partnering to further promote digital books in a program that featured prizes from Amazon.  See: NYC Library Officials Partner To Promote Digital Books With Prizes From Amazon.

A New York Times Sunday Review Op-ed this week by sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg reminded us that this summer Forbes Magazine ran published an article arguing that Amazon should replace libraries with its own retail outlets, and claimed that most Americans would prefer a free-market option. But, the public response "was so overwhelmingly negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website." 

Amazon has grown fast because its model is to grow fast.  Although its valuation, its gross revenues and its market share keep growing dramatically, Amazon's net revenues have been nearly flat.  Everything goes into expansion.  There have been times in the past when that strategy was problematic and close to edge, a risk to have no profit going out to shareholders, but whatever threats that lack of net return seemed to pose to company or to Jeff Bezos as its leader financing always came to the rescue, and they both survived. . . . and continued to take over market after market.

Amazon should be a walking poster-child advertisement for antitrust litigation and legislation.  Instead, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, the newspaper for the national capital where such issues should be discussed and where the careers and day to day lives of the all the legislators and government officials responsible for the enforcement such antitrust measures are reported on.

The Washington Post has always had a special role in influencing the nation.  We are pretty sure it was Peter Dale Scott, credited with coining the term the "deep state," who in one of his interviews said that the Washington Post along with the New York Times and the LA Times was a preferred outlet by the CIA when it wanted to get its stories out to the public (often without telltale fingerprints).  Whether that's exactly the case, the Washington Post has certainly played an important role historically for the CIA in this regard.

If it all started with BOOKS, why Amazon?  Why not Barnes and Noble?  Why isn't Barnes and Noble now the second biggest company in the United States?

An interesting comparative analysis points out that as of Spring 2017 Amazon increases would have returned 48,197% since their May 15, 1997 (before their 1988 announced expansion beyond books) debut as a public company.  Barnes & Noble would have only returned 26%. Borders went bankrupt! Some other comparatives: Walmart-  +96%; Best Buy: +38% ;  Macys:+19%: Target: +4%: Staples: -50%. 

And Amazon has become the second trillion dollar company in the U.S. even as sales of the digital books it is pushing are dropping for years in succession.

Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government

Two WNYC On The Media segments, both about surveillance, clash because of what connects them: What you might learn from each of them about the relationship of the Tor Service to our federal government and its surveillance efforts.  For libraries this means. . . keep reading.

We first heard about the Library Freedom Project on what we thought was an excellent WNYC On The Media segment about United States government surveillance of patrons in American libraries aired on June 5, 2015: Librarians Vs. The Patriot Act.  Our library defending interest was already piqued and attuned to the issue.  The On the Media segment aired just a few months after a National Notice article about surveillance in libraries: Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?

In that On The Media segment an interview with Alison Macrina was used to supply and put much of the information in context and it informed us that Ms. Macrina is the founder of the Library Freedom Project, and that with “help from the Knight Foundation, she and an ACLU attorney have created workshops on how to maintain privacy online.” 

The Library Freedom Project Twitter page (with a crossed-out surveillance eye symbol as its logo) promises that “We fight for privacy rights” and that the Library Freedom Project is:

Fighting for intellectual freedom and against authoritarianism. Coming to a library near you.

On the Library Freedom Project website we learn more about Alison Macrina and her connection to the Tor Project (emphasis supplied):

Alison Macrina
Founder & Executive Director

Along with founding the Library Freedom Project, Alison is a librarian, internet activist, and a core contributor to The Tor Project. Passionate about surveillance and it’s connection to global injustice, Alison works to demystify privacy and security topics for ordinary users.

On the Library Freedom Project “Resources” page (which includes a tweeted compliment from Edward Snowden) their website has more about TOR touting it as "beneficial to libraries":

All About Tor

What is Tor, and why is it beneficial to libraries? How does it work? How can it help my library patrons? In this course, we discuss the need for anonymous browsing, give a crash course on using Tor, and walk librarians through the process of adding it to their library labs.

That links to a “Curriculum for teaching all about Tor” page including a link to download Tor.

On another page of the site the Library Freedom Project announces “We are excited to partner with The Tor Project to bring Tor exit relays into libraries!”  What this means is a little complicated, but it means using the libraries to help Tor.  In fact, it's interesting how much of the Library Freedom Project website involves efforts to make Tor available and get it used.

What is all this about “Tor”?  Does Tor provide privacy?. . .

. . . If you listened to another relatively recent On The Media segment (May 25, 2018), this time about Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet,” you learn that Tor does NOT provide privacy as advertised and that it is heavily funded by the United States government, thus raising questions about what the government is accomplishing through that funding.

Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet.”

Here is some of the transcript of Yasha Levine being interviewed by OTM's Bob Garfield:

    YASHA LEVINE: So the Tor browser, it’s a separate browser that you download and that you use, and it promises to protect your anonymity on the internet. So the websites that you go to don't know who you are. . . .

    BOB GARFIELD: So that’s great. These apps have delivered us from the prying eyes of the state, whether it's the Iranian state or the US government. We can navigate around the net without fear because these civilian heroes have given us the tools to do so.

    YASHA LEVINE: Except not. [LAUGHS] And one thing that I outline in my book is just how dependent both Signal and Tor are on government contracts. So Tor, anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of its budget depends on government contracts. . . .. And the origins of Tor are very interesting. The origins of Tor are not to protect human rights, are not to protect dissidents in Iran or China. Tor originated in a US Naval laboratory as a way of protecting spies from surveillance. So imagine if you're conducting an investigation for the FBI and you’re trying to infiltrate, let’s say, an animal rights group on the internet, if you are sitting in an FBI office and you go and register with this forum, the administrator will see your IP address and, if they take the time to trace that, they’ll be like, wait a second, this guy is the Fed. And so, you needed a technology that could hide your information. But the problem was if it's only American agents using this system, it defeats its purpose because it’s like, oh, they’re using Tor, another Fed. So the only way that that system could work was if it's used by as broad a range of people as possible.

    BOB GARFIELD: Aha, make it ubiquitous so that we’re not dimed out by the very fact of being on the platform.

    YASHA LEVINE: Exactly. And that’s what Tor has become. . . .  And to me, what’s interesting about the Tor project is that it shows that the military is so involved in every part of the network that it even controls and develops parts of the network that are supposed to be opposed to it.

    BOB GARFIELD: But that doesn't necessarily mean the government has backdoors to subvert the encryption or the IP address masking, does it?

    YASHA LEVINE: No, not necessarily. . . .

Citizens Defending Libraries just put up an article about Levine’s book: 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.”  There we described how Levine, pointing out the oddity of the connection between Tor and the federal government, went into the likelihood of (not very necessary) government backdoors to allow the Tor service to surveil its users, and how TOR may serve “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.”

On his own website Yasha Levine wrote about his OTM interview

Yasha Levine himself wrote more about his On The Media interview (quoting from it) and specifically about Tor.

        "My problem with tools like Tor and Signal is that they distract from a bigger problem that exists on the Internet. It is in Google's interest. It is in Facebook's interest to promote Tor and to promote Signal. Because these tools do no threaten their business models. When you use Tor and you log into your Google account or if you log into your Facebook account, Tor does not protect you. Google knows who you are. You just logged into their service. Facebook knows who you are. You just logged into their service. Tor does not protect you from surveillance that happens on the Internet as a matter of routine. It does not protect you from Facebook giving away or selling your data like we've seen with Cambridge Analytica. These tools give people a false sense of privacy. And we don't have any privacy."

        "Tor narrowly protects you when you're browsing the internet, and it's sometimes useful. Signal protects a narrow band of communication — your text messages. It does not protect anything else that happens on your Android phone that siphons up everything it can collect and sends it to Google. What can you do if you want to protect yourself from Google? There is nothing you can do."

        "The NSA does not run its own social media platform. That social media platform is run by Facebook. So we have to focus not just on government surveillance, but on the private telecommunication systems and platforms that make that surveillance possible. And so as a privacy movement, we have to move away from simplistic technological solutions and figure out political solutions because that's the only way we are going to guarantee our privacy."

As our previous post about Mr. Levine’s book noted, his book never mentions by name the concept of a “limited hangout” by the intelligence agencies, but he supplies enough information about people involved with promoting Tor to give cause to wonder who those people may actually be working for when they promote Tor or, alternatively, whether they know they are being used by the Big Brother forces they say they are providing protection against.  In this regard, Levine provides intriguing background stories and details about Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (all of whom are also connected one way or another to Julian Assange).

Whether or not some people might be working as agents of the federal government and intelligence community or are simply being used as tools by them while they, duped, in good faith believe in the benefits of Tor, if Yasha Levine’s various suspicions about Tor are valid, as it appears that they almost certainly are, then it is important to bell this cat for the otherwise unwary.

In June of 2015, right after the On The Media segment featuring them, we contacted the Library Freedom Project and wound up exchanging emails with Alison Macrina because we wanted to exchange information and dig deeper into the subject of library surveillance in general.  We didn’t actually talk with Ms. Macrina, because Ms. Macrina wanted communications to be by email.  Although there were over a dozen emails exchanged back and forth between us the information exchanged was mostly an outflow of what we sent the Library Freedom Project.  We also worked to engage with them via Twitter.

When we sent Ms. Macrina the National Notice article (by Michael D. D. White) about the Snowden revelations and surveillance in the libraries saying that we were interested in “what is  happening in New York City libraries, and why it may be happening” and what besides real estate deals may “also factor into driving what is happening as books are disappearing from our libraries” Ms. Macrina responded that she was “in agreement about all this stuff of course.”   Despite all our ensuing emails we really never got deeper into things than that.

Maybe Ms. Macrina didn’t view our Citizens Defending Libraries interests as truly extending to the same concerns about surveillance the Library Freedom Project said it was addressing, instead of expecting that we'd only take issue with library sell-offs, library contractions and the elimination of books.  (As our post about Yasha Levine’s book makes clear, those contractions and elimination of books are definitely interrelated with surveillance concerns.)

Talking about the way Citizens Defending Libraries addressed and wanted to prevent “closures” Ms. Macrina referred us to Urban Librarians Unite as being similarly interested, but while we said that we didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with her, we had to explain that Urban Librarians Unite did not want to ally with us to protect the public and that, running into problems with them from the start, we found them consistently on the other side, testifying in favor of the library sales and shrinkages, and promoting keeping library books off-site (actually a surveillance issue itself).  Ms. Macrina communicated that library “closures” was not an “arena” the Library Freedom Project was working in.

Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

Since our 2015 communications with the Library Freedom Project, however unproductive they may have been, we have not heard from them again although we ourselves have substantially added to the information we have been passing along to the rest of the world about library surveillance, setting up a dedicated page of links about it (Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries), and, among other things, furnishing information from an October 2016 Noticing New York article based on information from the minutes of NYPL trustee meetings:  Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?

We think it suffices to say that there are issues about surveillance in our libraries that need to be pursued much more deeply than they have been and that there are too many unanswered and unpursued questions relating to surveillance in our libraries and why certain things that are happening to our libraries are happening.

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.