Surveillance Valley

The Secret Military History of the Internet

Yasha Levine

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785785054
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sorveglianza politica e privacy

** Featured as a Guardian Long Read ** '[A] fast-paced, myth busting exposé' Max Blumenthal, author of The Management of Savagery 'Contentious... forceful... salutary' The New Yorker EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF THE INTERNET IS A MARKETING PLOY. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown, private corporations consider it their right to use our data (and by extension, us) which ever way they see fit. Tempted by their appealing organisational and diagnostic tools, we have allowed private internet corporations access to the most intimate corners of our lives. But the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon. Looking at the hidden origins of many internet corporations and platforms, Levine shows that this is a function, not a bug of the online experience. Conceived as a surveillance tool by ARPA to control insurgents in the Vietnam War, the internet is now essential to our lives. This book investigates the troubling and unavoidable truth of its history and the unfathomable power of the corporations who now more or less own it.Without this book, your picture of contemporary society will be missing an essential piece of the puzzle. 'A masterful job of research and reporting about the military origins of the 'world wide web' and how its essential nature has not changed in the years since its creation during the Cold War.' - Tim Shorrock, author of Spies For Hire

Part I

Lost History

Chapter 1

A New Kind of War

Our hatred for the Americans is as high as the sky.

—North Vietnamese song

On June 8, 1961, a military intelligence officer named William Godel arrived in Saigon from Washington, DC. It was a hot summer’s day when he landed in the South Vietnamese capital, and Godel, jetlagged and dripping with sweat, visited several low-slung barracks-style buildings not far from the Saigon River. He walked unevenly, hobbled by the limp he carried from his days fighting Japanese forces in the South Pacific. On the surface, there was nothing special about this excursion. There was little to indicate that these nondescript structures, with their bland white walls and sloping roofs, sat at the center of Project Agile, a top-secret counterinsurgency program that would play a major role in the history of the Vietnam War and the rise of modern computer technology.

From his base in the Pentagon, Godel had been pushing for an initiative like Agile for over a decade. Now, this project had the personal backing of President John F. Kennedy.1

The first results were seen on August 10, 1961, when a Sikorsky H-34 helicopter, shaped like a giant guppy, lazily rose above Saigon and made its way toward the impenetrable jungles of Kon Tum, which borders Laos and Cambodia.2 Once the pilot acquired his target, he signaled, and the crew switched on a special crop duster grafted onto the bottom of the craft. In a slow sweeping motion, they sprayed the jungle below with an experimental mixture of highly toxic defoliation chemicals. Among them was the infamous Agent Orange. Those who smelled it said it resembled perfume.

America was not yet officially at war in Vietnam. Yet for years, the United States had been funneling money and weapons into the region to help the French wage a war against North Vietnam, the communist revolutionary state led by Ho Chi Minh that was fighting to reunify the country and kick out its colonial rulers.3 Now, as Godel’s crew sprayed the jungles below, America was increasing its support in money and weapons. Thousands of military “advisers” were being dispatched to South Vietnam to prop up the puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the hopes of stemming what Americans viewed as a surging global tide of communism.4

In the sweltering jungles of Indochina, it was not an easy fight. Dense vegetation cover was a persistent problem. It was one of the rebels’ greatest tactical advantages, allowing them to move people and supplies through neighboring Laos and Cambodia undetected and launch deadly raids deep in South Vietnamese territory. With Project Agile, Godel was determined to take that advantage away.

The British Empire had pioneered the use of defoliants as a form of chemical warfare, using them against local movements that opposed colonial rule. In the fight against communist rebels in Malaya, Britain ruthlessly deployed them to destroy food supplies and jungle cover.5 British military planners described defoliants as “a form of sanction against a recalcitrant nation which would be more speedy than blockade and less repugnant than the atomic bomb.”

Godel followed Britain’s lead. Under Project Agile, chemists at a secret US Army lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had tested and isolated potential defoliant chemicals that could eat away at the dense jungle cover. These were flown to Saigon and tested in the field. They worked with brutal efficiency. Leaves fell several weeks after being sprayed, stripping the canopy bare. A second application increased effectiveness and permanently killed many trees. Bombing the area or lighting it up with napalm also made the defoliation more or less permanent.6 With the tests a success, Godel drew up ambitious plans to cover half of South Vietnam with chemical defoliants.7 The idea was not just to destroy tree cover but also to destroy food crops to starve the North Vietnamese into submission.8

South Vietnam’s President Diem backed the plan. On November 30, 1961, President Kennedy had signed off on it. Thanks to Godel and Project Agile, Operation Ranch Hand was launched.

Ranch Hand got going in 1962 and lasted until the war ended more than a decade later. In that time, American C-123 transport planes doused an area equal in size to half of South Vietnam with twenty million gallons of toxic chemical defoliants. Agent Orange was fortified with other colors of the rainbow: Agent White, Agent Pink, Agent Purple, Agent Blue. The chemicals, produced by American companies like Dow and Monsanto, turned whole swaths of lush jungle into barren moonscapes, causing death and horrible suffering for hundreds of thousands.9

Operation Ranch Hand was merciless, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. It remains one of the most shameful episodes of the Vietnam War. Yet the defoliation project is notable for more than just its unimaginable cruelty. The government body at its lead was a Department of Defense outfit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)—better known today by the slightly retooled name of Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Born in 1958 as a crash program to protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear threat from space, it launched several groundbreaking initiatives tasked with developing advanced weapons and military technologies. Among them were Project Agile and Command and Control Research, two overlapping ARPA initiatives that created the Internet.

America Goes Ballistic

In late 1957, Americans watched as the Soviet Union launched the first manmade satellite, Sputnik 1. The satellite was tiny, about the size of a volleyball, but it was thrust into orbit by hitching a ride atop the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. This was both a demonstration and a threat. If the Soviet Union could put a satellite into space, it could also deliver a nuclear warhead to just about any spot in the United States.

Sputnik crashed into America’s paranoid politics like a giant meteor. Politicians seized on the event as a sign of US military and technological weakness, and news reports focused on the Soviet victory of being the first in space. How could America fall behind the communists in something so vital? It was an affront to people’s sense of exceptionalism.10

President Dwight Eisenhower was attacked for being asleep at the wheel. Generals and politicians spun horrific tales of impending Soviet conquest of earth and space and pushed for more defense spending.11 Even Vice President Richard Nixon criticized Eisenhower in public, telling business leaders that the technology gap between America and the Soviet Union was too great for them to expect a tax cut. The country needed their money to catch up.12

As the public reeled from this major defeat in the so-called Space Race, President Eisenhower knew he had to do something big and very public to save face and ease people’s fears. Neil McElroy, his newly appointed secretary of defense, had a plan.

Immaculately groomed and with perfectly coiffed hair parted down the middle, McElroy had the looks and manners of a high-flying advertising executive. Which is, in fact, what he was before Eisenhower tapped him to run the Department of Defense. In his previous role as president of Procter and Gamble, McElroy’s signature innovation was bankrolling “soap operas”—cheesy daytime dramas tailored to housewives—as pure marketing vehicles for his company’s selection of soaps and household detergents. As Time magazine, which put McElroy on the cover of its October 1953 issue, put it: “Soap operas get more advertising messages across to the consumer—and sell more soap—simply because the housewife can absorb the messages for hours on end while she goes about her household chores.”13

In the weeks after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, McElroy cooked up the perfect public relations project to save the day. He called for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—ARPA—a new, independent military body whose purpose was to bridge the space gap and to ensure that embarrassing technological defeat like Sputnik would never happen again.14 McElroy was a businessman who believed in the power of business to save the day.15 In November 1957, he pitched ARPA to Congress as an organization that would cut through government red tape and create a public-private vehicle of pure military science to push the frontiers of military technology and develop “vast weapon systems of the future.”16

The idea behind ARPA was simple. It would be a civilian-led outfit housed within the Pentagon. It would be lean, with a tiny staff and a big budget. Though it wouldn’t build or run its own laboratories and research facilities, it would function like an executive management hub that figured out what needed to be done and then farmed out the actual work to universities, private research institutes, and military contractors.17

The plan appealed to President Eisenhower, who distrusted the cynical jockeying for funding and power of various arms of the military—which he believed bloated the budget and burned money on useless projects. The idea of outsourcing research and development to the private sector appealed to the business community as well.18 The military brass, on the other hand, weren’t so pleased. The air force, navy, army, and Joint Chiefs of Staff all balked at the idea of civilians sitting above them and telling them what to do. They feared losing control over technology procurement, a lucrative center of profit and power.

The military pushed back against McElroy’s plan. The conflict with the military loomed so large that it made a cameo in Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union address: “I am not attempting today to pass judgment on the charge of harmful service rivalries. But one thing is sure. Whatever they are, America wants them stopped.”19 He got his way. On February 11, 1958, a month after the State of the Union and just five months after the Sputnik launch, Congress wrote ARPA into a US Air Force appropriations bill, giving it $520 million in initial funding and a plan for a gigantic $2 billion budget.20

McElroy chose Roy Johnson, an executive at General Electric, to head the new agency. An internal Pentagon repo...