Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  No IBM machines are displayed at Mauthausen today. And, sadly, the memorial makes no mention of them. But the camp had several IBM machines working overtime to handle the big churn of inmates and to make sure there were always enough bodies to perform the necessary work.1 These machines didn’t operate in isolation but were part of a larger slave labor control-and-accounting system that stretched across Nazi-occupied Europe, connecting Berlin to every major concentration and labor camp by punch card, telegraph, telephone, and human courier. This wasn’t the automated type of computer network system that the Pentagon would begin to build in the United States just a decade later, but it was an information network nonetheless: an electromechanical web that fueled and sustained Nazi Germany’s war machine with blazing efficiency.2 It extended beyond the labor camps and reached into cities and towns, crunching mountains of genealogical data to track down people with even the barest whiff of Jewish blood or perceived racial impurity in a mad rush to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s drive to purify the German people.3 The IBM machines themselves did not kill people, but they made the Nazi death machine run faster and more efficiently, scouring the population and tracking down victims in ways that would never have been possible without them.

  Of course, IBM tabulators didn’t start out in this capacity. They were invented in 1890 by a young engineer named Herman Hollerith to help the US Census Bureau count America’s growing immigrant population. Fifty years later, Nazi Germany employed the same technology to systematically carry out the Holocaust.

  This is, perhaps, a grim note on which to end a book about the Internet. But for me, the story of Mauthausen and IBM carries an important lesson about computer technology. Today, a lot of people still see the Internet as something uniquely special, something uncorrupted by earthly human flaws and sins. To many, progress and goodness are built in to the Internet’s genetic code: if left alone to evolve, the network will automatically lead to a better, more progressive world. This belief is embedded deep in our culture, resistant to facts and evidence. To me, Mauthausen is a powerful reminder of how computer technology can’t be separated from the culture in which it is developed and used.

  As I stood there surveying the idyllic pastoral scene in that horrible place, I thought about my conversation with Stephen Wolff, the National Science Foundation manager who helped privatize the Internet. “There are certainly values built in,” he told me. “Whether they’re exclusively Western values or not, I couldn’t say. There is no culture that I know of that has refused to use the Internet. So, there must be something universal about it. But is it a supra-national entity? No. The Internet is a piece of the world. It’s a mirror of the world, but it’s a piece of the world at the same time. It’s subject to all the ills that the rest of the world is subject to, and participates in the good things as well as the bad, and the bad things as well as the good.”4

  Wolff captures it beautifully. The Internet, and the networked microprocessor technology on which it runs, does not transcend the human world. For good or ill, it is an expression of this world and was invented and is used in ways that reflect the political, economic, and cultural forces and values that dominate society. Today, we live in a troubled world, a world of political disenfranchisement, rampant poverty and inequality, unchecked corporate power, wars that seem to have no end and no purpose, and a runaway privatized military and intelligence complex—and hanging over it all are the prospects of global warming and environmental collapse. We live in bleak times, and the Internet is a reflection of them: run by spies and powerful corporations just as our society is run by them. But it isn’t all hopeless.

  It’s true that the development of computer technology has always been driven by a need to analyze huge amounts of complex data, monitor people, build predictive models of the future, and fight wars. In that sense, surveillance and control are embedded in the DNA of this technology. But not all control is equal. Not all surveillance is bad. Without them, there can be no democratic oversight of society. Ensuring oil refineries comply with pollution regulations, preventing Wall Street fraud, forcing wealthy citizens to pay their fair share of taxes, and monitoring the quality of food, air, and water—none of these would be possible. In that sense, surveillance and control are not problems in and of themselves. How they are used depends on our politics and political culture.

  Whatever shape the Internet and computer networks take in the future, it is safe to say that we will be living with this technology for a long time to come. By pretending that the Internet transcends politics and culture, we leave the most malevolent and powerful forces in charge of its built-in potential for surveillance and control. The more we understand and democratize the Internet, the more we can deploy its power in the service of democratic and humanistic values, making it work for the many, not the few.

  Acknowledgments

  A lot of people helped make this book possible. First is my brother, Eli, who flew out to Los Angeles to push me to first seriously consider putting this project together back in 2014. My beautiful wife, Evgenia, was an incredible help all throughout the process, reading drafts and using her grasp of storytelling and characters to focus the narrative and keep the pages turning. My friends, family, and colleagues have taken time out of their busy schedules to provide support, both intellectual and spiritual: Alexander Zaitchik, Mark Ames, John Dolan, Tim Shorrock, Joe Costello, Boris Levine, and David Golumbia have all helped make me sound smarter and more eloquent than I really am. Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr were key to the whole project. The reporting that first put me on the scent of the Internet’s dark history took place while I was a staffer at Pando covering Silicon Valley’s for-profit surveillance industry. I miss my time there. I do not think it is possible for a reporter to have better, more supportive editors. Sarah in particular knows all too well the importance of shining a light on Silicon Valley and the lengths to which the tech industry will go to protect its power.

  A big thanks to Maria Goldverg (now at Knopf/Vintage) and Benjamin Adams for bringing Surveillance Valley to PublicAffairs, as well as Matt Wise (now at Adaptive Studios) and Peter McGuigan at Foundry Media for giving wise counsel every step of the way.

  Also key were the good people of the New York Public Library, who gave me a quiet spot in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room in the middle of Manhattan to finish my research and writing.

  Last but not least, I want to make a big bow to all the people who supported this book on Kickstarter when it was still just an idea back in the winter of 2014. Surveillance Valley would not have happened without their support and trust. Special thanks goes out to Kickstarter backers Carlo Trevisan, Ivor Crotty, Benjamin O’Connor, Michael Oneill of Baycloud Systems, and John Heisel.

  Yasha Levine is a Russian-born American investigative journalist and a founding editor of The eXiled. His work has been published in The Baffler, Pando Daily, Wired, The Nation, Penthouse, and many others. He and his wife, Evgenia, split their time between New York and St. Petersburg, Russia.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Ali Winston, “Oakland Surveillance Center Progresses Amid Debate on Privacy, Data Collection,” Center for Investigative Reporting, July 18, 2013.

  2. Darwin Bond Graham and Ali Winston, “The Real Purpose of Oakland’s Surveillance Center,” East Bay Express, December 18, 2013.

  3. Buried among thousands of pages of official Oakland correspondence obtained by an activist through a public records request was a short email thread from October 2013 between Scott Ciabattari, a Google strategic partnership manager, and Renee Domingo, an Oakland official spearheading the DAC project. The emails were short on details but referenced a meeting that had taken place between Ciabattari and Domingo and discussed scheduling a follow-up meeting to find out what kind of Google products could be beneficial to the DAC as well as to Oakland’s Emergency Operations Center, an emergency police hub that would be tied to the DAC. “I spoke with our Intern Director of Information Technology, Ahsan Baig, last night
and he will provide some potential dates for us to meet with you week after next, to begin the dialogue,” Domingo wrote to Ciabattari, cc’ing the Oakland mayor Jean Quan. “He is very interested in seeing some of the demos and products Google has available for our EOC/DAC as well as how the City might partner with Google.” She signed off: “I look forward on behalf of the City of Oakland, of working with you and Google.” Ciabattari replied, “We are excited to help and I look forward to speaking with you again.… Please feel free to contact me anytime.” Renee Domingo, email message sent to Scott Ciabattari, “Re: Thank you,” October 3, 2013, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-thread-between-google-s-scott-ciabattari-and-oakland-officials-about-the-dac-october-2013.jpg.

  Chapter 1

  1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961, Document 96, “From June 8 through 25, 1961, a Research and Development Team Headed by William H. Godel…” (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Office of the Historian, 1988).

  2. Vegetational Spray Tests in South Vietnam (US Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories, April 1962), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/476961.pdf.

  3. Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, United States Army, 1985).

  4. “Vietnam ‘Program of Action’ by Kennedy Task Force,” New York Times, July 1, 1971; Mai Elliot, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), 33.

  5. Judith Perera and Andy Thomas, “This Horrible Natural Experiment,” New Scientist, April 18, 1985.

  6. H. Lindsey Arison III, “Executive Summary: The Herbicidal Warfare Program in Vietnam, 1961–1971,” published July 12, 1995, last modified May 1, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/20061025232940/http://members.cox.net/linarison /orange.html.

  7. Donald J. Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1989).

  8. “Its goals were to strip the border areas along Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam to ‘remove protective cover’ from Vietcong reinforcements, to defoliate Zone D in the Mekong Delta where the Vietcong had numerous bases, to destroy the manioc groves that the Vietcong used for food, and to destroy the mangrove swamps where the Vietcong hid. Taken together, the two phases of the program would have defoliated 31,250 square miles of jungle—about half the land area of South Vietnam—as well as 1,125 square miles of mangrove swamps and 312 square miles of manioc groves.” Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War, 134.

  9. Even today, the dioxins that seeped into the soil almost a half century ago continue to cause horrific birth defects. Thousands of Vietnamese infants are born every year with grotesque deformities. Orphanages are full of children suffering from exotic genetic mutations that cause painful conditions such as hydrocephalus, in which the brain fills with fluid and deforms and enlarges a child’s head and causes severe brain damage. Ash Anand, “Vietnam’s Horrific Legacy: The Children of Agent Orange,” News.com.au, May 25, 2015, http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/vietnams-horrific-legacy-the-children-of-agent-orange/news-story /c008ff36ee3e840b005405a55e21a3e1.

  10. Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

  11. Werner von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who got a new lease on life working for the US Army, went on television to warn America that Sputnik was a clear sign of impending total domination by the Soviet Union—not only of earth, but of heaven itself. “I’m convinced that the Russian concept is very clear. They consider the control of space around the Earth very much like, shall we say, the great maritime powers considered the control of the seas in the 16th through the 18th centuries,” he said, confident that the Sputnik would provide a nice bump to his missile research efforts. Sputnik Declassified: Top-Secret Documents Rewrite the History of the Famous Satellite and the Early Space Race (Arlington, VA: PBS, 2007).

  12. Ed Creagh, “Nixon Seemed More Concerned over Sputnik Than President,” Rome News-Tribune (Associated Press), October 17, 1957, https://surveillance valley.com/content/citations/ed-creagh-nixon-seemed-more-concerned-over-sputnik-than-president-associated-press-17-october-1957.pdf.

  13. “The Cleanup Man,” Time, October 5, 1953.

  14. Much of the fine-grained detail about the history of ARPA comes from a previously classified 1975 report that was commissioned by the agency and carried out by Richard J. Barber Associates, The Advanced Research Projects Agency 1958–1974 (Washington, DC: National Technical Information Service, 1975).

  15. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, II-7.

  16. McElroy developed the idea for ARPA in consultation with James R. Killian Jr., the influential president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Eisenhower’s presidential assistant for science.

  17. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

  18. Ibid. The US Chamber of Commerce had proposed something similar to ARPA: “the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had floated the notion of creating a single research-and-development agency for the federal government during congressional hearings months before Sputnik. Such talk was in the air.” Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 18.

  19. President Dwight Eisenhower, State of the Union Address, 1958.

  20. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, I-7.

  21. Initially, Roy Johnson wanted to hire Dr. von Braun to be ARPA’s first chief scientist. But that would have required relocating his entire team of ex-Nazi rocket scientists to the inner sanctum of the Pentagon. The idea was killed. Instead, Johnson chose Herb York, a respected nuclear scientist who set up an ambitious missiles and nuclear research program for the agency. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 21.

  22. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, I-8, III-8.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Parts of this chapter that deal with William Godel’s vision of counterinsurgency are largely informed by Annie Jacobsen’s The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (New York: Back Bay Books, 2016). Other parts come from archival research, memoirs, and declassified ARPA and CIA records. Sharon Weinberger’s The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) was also very helpful in filling in some of the finer details about Godel’s life. Both The Pentagon’s Brain and The Imagineers of War are highly recommended as deep histories of ARPA.

  25. In State Department documents, William Godel is described as “an expert from the Department of Defense on the techniques and practices of psychological warfare.” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume I, Vietnam, 1961, Document 96 (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Office of the Historian, 1988).

  26. William Godel’s negotiations with North Korea was a delicate issue. Some of the American prisoners had confessed on television to taking part in illegal chemical weapons attacks against North Korea. Godel’s job was to cover up the allegations by blaming the whole thing on advanced communist brainwashing techniques, which could reprogram people’s minds and make people believe or do anything their captors wanted. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6, “At the Pentagon, the man tasked with handling the situation was William Godel …”

  27. The former Nazi asset Ernst Brückner (codename CARPETMAKER) occupied a high office in Germany’s Ministry of the Interior. Declassified CIA documents show Godel taking part in an effort to weed out Soviet agents embedded among the mass of German prisoners of war returning from the Soviet Union as well as counseling his CIA asset on how to evade Soviet electronic surveillance inside West Germany. Central Intelligence Agency, FIOA# 51966ec2993294098d509809, Memorandum for the Record: Subject: Meeting with CARPETMAKER, Jun
e 27, 1956, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/brueckner-ernst-vol.2-0010-document-number-foia-esdn-crest-51966ec2993294098d50980a.pdf

  28. Secretary of Defense Roger M. Kyes, “Memorandum for the Secretaries of the Military Departments, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Assistant Secretaries of Defense, Chairmen of Boards, Committees and Councils, OSD, Assistants to the Secretary of Defense, and Directors of Offices, OSD: Subject: Reorganization—Office of Special Operations, Office of the Secretary of Defense,” July 15, 1953, https:// surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/subject-reorganization-office-of-special-operations-office-of-the-secretary-of-defense-the-secretary-of-defense-15-july-1953.pdf.

  29. Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960 (New York: Free Press, 1985).

  30. Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 6.

  31. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency, 286.

  32. Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 1947–75, a Studies in Intelligence anthology (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, August 2016), http://web.archive.org/web/20170523094620/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/Anthology-CIA-and-the-Wars-in-Southeast-Asia/pdfs-1/vietnam-anthology-print-version.pdf.