Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  74. Here’s a roundup of what happened to the NSFNET providers in greater detail: America Online bought up the NFSNET backbone built by the IBM-MCI consortium. Using access to this high-speed national network to outpace competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe, AOL would later end up merging with Time-Warner. The San Francisco Bay Area’s BARNET became part of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, J. C. R. Licklider’s old firm and an original ARPANET contractor, which itself grew into one of the largest Internet providers in the country and eventually had its networking division absorbed by Verizon (while the rest of the company went to Raytheon) (Nathan Newman, Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002]). CERFNET was first bought by Teleport, a large phone company, which was itself bought by AT&T in 1998 (Seth Schiesel, “AT&T to Pay $11.3 Billion for Teleport,” New York Times, January 9, 1998). PSI went public on the NASDAQ in 1995 with an initial valuation of $1 billion, collapsed in the wake of the dot-com bubble, and was snapped up in 2002 by Cogent Communications (Keith Epstein, “The Fall of the House of Schrader,” Washington Post, April 7, 2001).

  75. Timothy B. Lee, “40 Maps That Explain the Internet,” Vox, June 2, 2014, https://www.vox.com/a/internet-maps.

  76. Neil Weinberg, “Backbone Bullies,” Forbes, June 12, 2000. The industry would continue to consolidate over the next decade, not just domestically but also internationally. As I write this in 2017, two decades after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, the US media and telecommunications markets are concentrated in a way that has not been seen for a century: a handful of global, vertically integrated media companies—Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications, Time Warner—own most of the domestic media today, including television and radio networks, film studios, newspapers, and, of course, commercial Internet service providers.

  77. “Louis Rossetto Sr., 78, Typesetting Executive,” New York Times, July 31, 1991.

  78. Frank da Cruz, “Columbia University 1968,” Columbia University 1968, April 1998, updated May 26, 2016, accessed March 15, 2016, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/.

  79. George Keller, “Six Weeks that Shook Morningside,” Columbia College Today, Spring 1968.

  80. Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto Jr., “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism,” New York Times, January 10, 1971.

  81. Sam Tanenhaus and Jim Rutenberg, “Rand Paul’s Mixed Inheritance,” New York Times, January 25, 2014; Tames Boyd, “From Far Right to Far Left,” New York Times, December 6, 1970.

  82. Louis Rossetto Jr., “Afghan Guerrilla Wants Soviets Out, but Has No Illusions of Victory,” Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1985.

  83. Gary Wolf, Wired: A Romance (New York: Random House, 2003).

  84. Ibid.

  85. Michael Dobbs, “Negroponte’s Time in Honduras at Issue,” Washington Post, March 21, 2005; Carla Anne Robbins, “Negroponte Has Tricky Mission,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2004; Scott Shane, “Cables Show Central Negroponte Role in 80’s Covert War Against Nicaragua,” New York Times, April 13, 2005.

  86. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking Adult, 1987).

  87. “It was our bread and butter for a decade, and I wish it would become again,” Nicholas Negroponte said. Brand, Media Lab, 163; Edward Fredkin, ed., Project MAC Progress Report IX, July 1971 to July 1972, AD-756689 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 1973), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext /u2/756689.pdf; Project MAC Progress Report III, July 1965 to July 1966, AD-648346 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 17, 1967), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/648346.pdf.

  88. “We came up with the idea of projecting onto video screens sculpted like people’s faces and also having the screens swivel a bit—so they could nod, shake their head, turn to each other,” Negroponte explained to Stewart Brand in The Media Lab. “At my site I’m real and you’re plastic and on my right, and at your site you’re real and I’m plastic and on your left. If we’re talking and looking at each other, and one of the faces across the table interrupts, we would stop and turn toward him” (92).

  89. “It was a byproduct of Pentagon interest in the Entebbe hostage-freeing raid of 1973, where the Israeli commandos made a mockup of the airport in the desert and practiced there before trying the real thing” (Brand, Media Lab, 141). It was sophisticated for its time, complete with a “season knob” that toggled between different times of the year to show what streets and buildings looked like. It also allowed viewers to walk into buildings and check out what was inside, and even read the menu of a restaurant. “It was the whole town. It let you drive through the place yourself, having a conversation with the chauffeur,” explained one the developers of the project (141).

  90. Brand, Media Lab, 137. “A block slightly askew would be realigned. One substantially dislocated would be placed (straight, of course) in the new position, on the assumption that the gerbils wanted it there. The outcome was a constantly changing architecture that reflected the way the little animals used the place,” Negroponte explained.

  91. Clients included, according to Brand’s Media Lab, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, HBO, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount. IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sony, NEC, Mitsubishi, and General Motors were also members, as were major newspapers and news publishing businesses: Time Inc., the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

  92. Among other things, DARPA funded lab research on speech recognition technology that promised to identify people by their voices or to visually read their lips from a distance.

  93. Todd Hertz, “How Computer Nerds Describe God,” Christianity Today, November 20, 2002.

  94. “Wired was meant to be a lifestyle magazine as well as a technology guide,” writes John Cassidy in Dot.Con, a book about the dot-com bubble. “Sections like ‘Fetish’ and ‘Street Cred’ told readers which new gadgets to buy, while ‘Idees Forte’ and ‘Jargon Watch’ told them what to think and say.” Cassidy, Dot.Con (New York: PerfectBound/HarperCollins, 2009), 44.

  95. Louis Rossetto, Wired, January 1, 1993.

  96. Fred Turner writes: “As he told a reporter for Upside magazine in 1997, ‘The mainstream media is not allowing us to understand what’s really happening today because it’s obsessed with telling you, “Well, on the one hand” and “on the other hand”; under conditions of digital revolution, Rossetto believed that a magazine could tell the truth—and achieve distinction—only by ‘not being objective.’” Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2016.

  97. The inaugural issue of Wired featured a cover story by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, who was dispatched to profile DARPA’s virtual tank battlefield simulator project: a multiplayer online tank game run on a powerful new military ARPANET-like network built just for battle simulations called SIMNET. “The seams between reality and virtuality will be repeatedly and deliberately blurred. Ontology be damned—this is war!” Bruce Sterling, “War Is Virtual Hell,” Wired, January 1, 1993.

  98. Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020,” Wired, July 1, 1997.

  99. For more on Wired’s embrace of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Right, see Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Here is how he describes the magazine’s profile of Gingrich: “In her introduction to the [Wired interview with Newt Gingrich], Esther Dyson expressed reservations about Gingrich’s social politics, explaining, ‘I like his ideals—but not necessarily the people who espouse them. Or the society that will result from them.’ But by the end of her interview, the doubts seemed to have washed away. Dyson and Gingrich clearly spoke the same language.… Moreover, for regular readers of Wired, their encounter came at the end of a long series of articles in which the cybernetic, countercultural, and deregulationist strains of their rhetoric had already been legitimated… the notion of business as a source of social change, of digital technology as the tool and symb
ol of business, and of decentralization as a social ideal were well established in the pages of Wired,” he writes. “From here, it took little imagination to guess that perhaps the Republican ‘revolution’ of 1994 might itself be riding the same ‘Third Wave’” (232).

  100. David Kline, “Infobahn Warrior,” Wired, July 1994. “I’ll make a commitment to Al Gore, OK? Listen, Al, I know you haven’t asked for it, but we’ll make a commitment to complete the job by the end of ’96. All we need is a little help… you know, shoot [FCC Commissioner] Hundt! Don’t let him do any more damage, know what I’m saying?” he declared in the interview.

  101. “Wired—the monthly bible of the ‘virtual class’—has uncritically reproduced the views of Newt Gingrich, the extreme-right Republican leader of the House of Representatives, and the Tofflers, who are his close advisors. Ignoring their policies for welfare cutbacks, the magazine is instead mesmerized by their enthusiasm for the libertarian possibilities offered by new information technologies,” wrote Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in their influential 1995 essay, “The Californian Ideology.” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Magazine, September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology.

  102. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Lotus Notes creator Mitch Kapor, cattle rancher and Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, and early Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore. It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs. It did not take long for EFF to find its calling: lobbying Congress on behalf of the budding Internet service providers that came out of the NSFNET network and pushing for a privatized Internet system, where the government stayed pretty much out of the way—“Designing the Future Net” is how EFF’s Barlow described it.

  103. Mitch Kapor, “Where Is the Digital Highway Really Heading?” Wired, March 1, 1993.

  104. Joshua Quittner, “The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington,” Wired, June 1, 1994.

  105. “Thanks in part to a confluence of extraordinary economic, technological, and political currents, its technocentric optimism became a central feature of the biggest stock market bubble in American history. Its faith that the Internet constituted a revolution in human affairs legitimated calls for telecommunications deregulation and the dismantling of government entitlement programs elsewhere as well,” remarks Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture while examining Wired’s place in the deregulatory and privatization frenzy of the 1990s.

  106. John Perry Barlow, “Jack In, Young Pioneer!” (keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition, August 11, 1994), https://w2.eff.org/Misc /Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html.

  107. “Louis Rossetto,” Charlie Rose, season 1996, episode 01.24.96 (Arlington, VA: PBS, January 24, 1996).

  108. Brand, “SPACEWAR.”

  Chapter 5

  1. The story of Sergey Brin’s search for terrorists in Google’s logs comes from I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, an amazing insider account by former Google employee Douglas Edwards. All direct quotes of Edwards in this chapter come from his book.

  2. Vivian Marino, “Searching the Web, Searching the Mind,” New York Times, December 23, 2001.

  3. Google engineer Amit Patel, quoted in Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 46.

  4. Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), chap. 16.

  5. President George W. Bush, “Remarks on Improving Counterterrorism Intelligence,” the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, February 14, 2003, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62559.

  6. “Guantanamo: Facts and Figures,” Human Rights Watch, March 30, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2017/03/30/guantanamo-facts-and-figures.

  7. Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky, chaps. 16, 24.

  8. Quoted in John Cassidy, Dot.Con (New York: PerfectBound/HarperCollins, 2009), 44.

  9. Sean Hollister, “Welcome to Googletown,” The Verge, February 26, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/26/5444030/company-town-how-google-is-taking-over-mountain-view.

  10. Richard L. Brand, The Google Guys: Inside the Brilliant Minds of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (New York: Portfolio, 2011).

  11. Marc Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla (New York: Citadel, 1996).

  12. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).

  13. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) went through several minor name changes over the years. The last one took place in 1996, when it gained a D and became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

  14. Aside from founding the university, Stanford’s biggest mark on history was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific, a lawsuit that his railroad took to the Supreme Court and that yielded the infamous decision endowing corporations—legal fictions granted by the state—with all the Constitutional rights of actual people.

  15. Michael S. Malone, The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (New York: Doubleday, 1985).

  16. Frederick Terman, the influential head of Stanford’s engineering department, was the driving force behind the university’s engineering might. He had led MIT’s Radio Research Laboratory during World War II and stewed in the same rarified corporate-military-academic brew that schooled and brought up many of the personalities who would later head over to ARPA and create the Internet and the modern computer industry. At Stanford, Terman worked hard to re-create that world. Thanks to him, the university carved out the Stanford Industrial Park from hundreds of adjacent acres and invited computer companies to set up shop.

  17. Wolfgang Saxon, “William B. Shockley, 79, Creator of Transistor and Theory on Race,” New York Times, August 14, 1989.

  18. The first ARPANET segment that went online in 1969 connected Stanford University to UCLA.

  19. Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

  20. Scott J. Simon, “Information Architecture for Digital Libraries,” First Monday 13, no. 12 (December 2008); Digital Libraries Initiative, homepage, National Science Foundation, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/20000815090028/http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/; Terry Winograd’s Stanford homepage, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19981206032336/http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/~winograd/.

  21. Stanford University Digital Libraries Project, homepage, Stanford University, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980124140522/http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/; Human Computer Interaction Group, homepage, Stanford University, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980126230453/http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/html/diglibbodyresearch.html.

  22. Other universities that took part in the Digital Libraries Initiative include UCLA, University of California at Santa Barbara, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and University of Michigan. At Berkeley, researchers searched and analyzed photographs. Carnegie Mellon University set up the Informedia Project, where researchers focused on getting computers to automatically understand and transcribe video content, with the goal of analyzing video broadcasts on the fly—all of which had uses in education and health care but also “defense intelligence,” according to Carnegie Mellon (Informedia Project homepage, Carnegie Mellon University, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040602113005/http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu:80/). One such digital library project, which was funded in part by the navy’s Spa
ce and Naval Warfare Systems, sought to create searchable databases of foreign media sources (Multilingual Informedia, Carnegie Mellon University, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040603071038/http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu:80/mli/index.html).

  23. “Lycos was created in May 1994 by CMU’s Dr. Michael Mauldin, working under a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Like its predecessors, Lycos deployed a spiderlike crawler to index the Web, but it used more sophisticated mathematical algorithms to determine the meaning of a page and answer user queries.” Battelle, The Search, 53.

  24. David Hart, “On the Origins of Google,” National Science Foundation, August 17, 2004, https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660.

  25. “Page was not a social animal—those who interacted with him often wondered if there were a dash of Asperger’s in the mix—and he could unnerve people by simply not talking,” writes Google biographer Steve Levy in In the Plex, 11.

  26. Interestingly, multiuser dungeon games, or MUDs, emerged, somewhat unintentionally, from the ARPANET when an ARPA contractor named Will Crowther developed them in his off time while going through a divorce. Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2007).

  27. Quoted in Isaacson, The Innovators, 452.