Surveillance Valley

December 1, 2017
A sometimes-overwrought but provocative history of the internet-equipped security state, implicating key players in the digital economy in the game of espionage.Even paranoiacs have enemies, as some wag once observed. Levine (The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell, 2012, etc.), a tech-savvy investigative journalist who was born in Russia, documents an army of them in his wide-ranging look at the way governments and companies alike spy on ordinary citizens. That the internet grew from the defense industry and its dream of all-knowing supercomputers is old news; Levine looks at the malevolence behind it, writing about "America's belligerent nuclear policy." (It surely would have been belligerent had Curtis LeMay been successful in his drive to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi, but he wasn't; the point is eminently debatable.) From defense-related research came the spread of cybernetics and cybernetic metaphors in all sorts of sciences, from economics to biology, and the idea that information could be linked to power to "create a controlled utopian society, where computers and people were integrated into a cohesive whole." That age may well have come, though whether it has reached the stage of "big data totalitarianism," as Levine puts it, is again debatable. Where the book reaches its pinnacle of interest is also where it threatens to become unhinged. Here, the snake begins eating its own tail and encryption technologies such as Tor and Signal are linked not just to WikiLeaks, but also the National Security Agency as honeypots that "provide a false solution to the privacy problem, focusing people's attention on government surveillance and distracting them from the private spying carried out by the Internet companies they use every day."Levine's arguments aren't entirely persuasive, but readers will be forgiven for hereafter not wanting to entrust too much information to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to say nothing of the feds.

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December 11, 2017
The internet is a cesspool of military-industrial villainy according to this vehement but muddled jeremiad. Journalist Levine argues that since its creation in the 1960s by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the internet has been an instrument of surveillance and control. But aside from a few familiar points—the NSA’s monitoring of internet traffic to catch terrorists; Google and other search engines’ use of their services to sell targeted ads back to their users—most of the “secret history” he pinpoints, such as the government’s sending of files over the internet in the 1970s, seems innocuous. The tangible harms Levine identifies aren’t that convincing: he attacks the encrypted browser Tor, which gets U.S. government funding, as a sinister American infringement of foreign nations’ “sovereign control” because it helps people evade government internet censorship. Levine’s suspicion of both the state and capitalism tangles him in contradictions as he castigates the government for ceding the internet to private companies and internet companies for working with the government. Meanwhile, his glib, omnidirectional paranoia—“The Internet is like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world. There is no escape”—tags even whistle-blower Edward Snowden as an unwitting tentacle of the surveillance octopus. The result reads as an incoherent, aimless indictment of every aspect of the internet.

February 1, 2018

Journalist Levine traces the Internet's history from its inception as a military tool for surveillance during the Vietnam War to its current role as an electronic global network for individuals, corporations, governments, and the armed forces. The author unravels the often-unseemly relationship between government surveillance and software corporations supposedly offering protection from privacy invasion, notably Tor, a cloaking system relied on by users to preserve their anonymity. Despite Tor's promise of protection, it enjoys a lucrative relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense, to which Tor makes its data available in return for annual funding. In reality, Tor offers no protection at all, and Levine describes the death threats he and his family received from Tor hackers for revealing this secret. Also included are fascinating stories of the engineers and scientists who created and expanded the Internet's surveillance capacity, especially Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, the Stanford graduate students who went on to create Google. VERDICT At times, excessive detail detracts from the intriguing narrative, but this engrossing investigation will find a large audience among those interested in the uses and abuses of technology. Fans of Jaron Lanier's Dawn of the New Everything will be drawn in.--Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

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