Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  99. Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Twitter posts, December 9-11, 2009, https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/6502200803, https://twitter.com/ioerror/status /6572987080; Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Twitter post, 8:18am, December 9, 2009, https://twitter.com/ioerror/status/6500619633.

  100. David Kushner, “The Darknet: Is the Government Destroying ‘the Wild West of the Internet’?” Rolling Stone, October 22, 2015.

  101. Some inside critics involved with the Broadcasting Board of Governors admitted that promotion of Internet Freedom technologies was part of a much bigger US government project to leverage the Internet as a foreign policy weapon. Jillian York, an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who worked as an adviser to the BBG, minced no words: “I do fundamentally believe that the State Department’s ‘Internet freedom agenda’ is at heart an agenda of regime change, and have made no secret of that opinion,” she wrote on her blog in 2015. Jillian C. York, “There Are Other Funding Options Than the USG,” February 6, 2015, http://jilliancyork.com/2015/02/06/there-are-other-funding-options-than-the-usg/.

  102. Mary Beth Sheridan, “U.S. Warns against Blocking Social Media, Elevates Internet Freedom Policies,” Washington Post, January 28, 2011.

  103. James Glanz and John Markoff, “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors,” New York Times, June 12, 2011.

  104. Tor also began funding multiple high-bandwidth nodes across Europe, Canada, and the United States to speed up the network and keep up with increasing user numbers. Tor even specifically hired a person to expand the so-called independent Tor node network, with funds provided by Tor: “We’ve hired a dedicated relay community manager. Moritz Bartl of Torservers.net is now responsible for maintaining relationships with relay operators, finding new ISPs for hosting exit relays, and growing the Tor network.… We’re working on finding partners in Africa and Asia for diversity,” wrote Dingledine in a December 2012 report. “We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Wau Holland Stiftung organization in Germany to reimburse exit relays located in the European Union,” he wrote in a February 2013 update (Dingledine, “April 18–May 17 2013 Progress Report for BBG Contract 50-D-11–0061,” Tor Project [blog], 2013, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/bbg-tor-contract-stack-6.pdf). Interesting to note that Dingledine worried that funding Tor nodes could classify Tor as an Internet service provider, which would force it to install a legally mandated FBI surveillance tap. “We are in final discussions about the Tor network and legal aspects of running a funded relay under US laws,” he wrote his handlers at the BBG in 2012. “The main concern here is not falling under the definition of Internet Service Provider or telecommunications carrier which would subject Tor to CALEA compliance regulations.” CALEA was the legally mandated FBI surveillance tap that every network provider had to install. Ibid.

  105. Burma was a curious place for American antisurveillance activists funded by a CIA spinoff to travel to, considering that it has long been a target of US regime change campaigns. In fact, the guru of pro-Western “color revolutions” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution,” New York Times, February 16, 2011), Gene Sharp, wrote his famous guide to nonviolent revolutions, From Dictatorship to Democracy, initially as an insurgency guide for Burma’s opposition movement to help the US overthrow the military junta in the late 1980s. Sharp had crossed into Burma illegally to train opposition activists there—all under the protection and sponsorship of the US government and one Colonel. Robert Helvey, a military intelligence officer (Ruaridh Arrow, How to Start a Revolution, documentary film, September 18, 2011). Helvey later played a central role in training Otpor student activists in Serbia, who helped overthrow Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (“Interview: Col. Robert Helvey,” A Force More Powerful, January 29, 2001, http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/films/bdd /story/otpor/robert-helvey.php).

  106. Internet Access and Openness: Myanmar 2012 (Washington, DC: Open Technology Fund and Radio Free Asia, February 2013), https://www.opentech.fund /files/reports/otf_myanmar_access_openness_public.pdf.

  107. Laura Poitras, Risk, documentary film, May 2016.

  108. “The NSA and Its Willing Helpers,” Spiegel Online, July 8, 2013, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edward-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html.

  109. Patrick Howell O’Neill, “Tor Now Reaches 200,000 Users in Russia,” Daily Dot, June 18, 2014, https://www.dailydot.com/news/russia-tor-users-censorship/.

  110. mikeperry, “This Is What a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Edward Snowden,” Tor Project (blog), December 30, 2015, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/what-tor-supporter-looks-edward-snowden.

  111. While Edward Snowden stayed quiet regarding US government backing of Tor, the government continued funding it. In 2014, Tor financial disclosures revealed that government contracts added up to $2.3 million, or roughly 90 percent of its discosed budget for that year. The Pentagon, State Department, and Broadcasting Board of Governors each contributed roughly a third of that sum. “2014 IRS Form 990, State of MA Form PC, and Independent Audit Results,” Tor Project Inc., 2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20170508113258/https://www.torproject.org/about/findoc/2014-TorProject-combined-Form990_PC_Audit_Results.pdf.

  112. Joe Mullin, “Trump’s Pick for CIA Director Has Called for Snowden’s Execution,” Ars Technica, November 18, 2016, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11 /trumps-pick-for-cia-director-has-called-for-snowdens-execution/.

  113. Dan “Blah” Meredith, “Update from Congress: More Funds for Internet Freedom Than Ever Before,” Open Technology Fund, January 19, 2014, https://www.opentech.fund/article/update-congress-more-funds-internet-freedom-ever.

  114. The law stipulated that the money be used to maintain “the United States Government’s technological advantage” in the censorship arms race that had been brewing ever since the Broadcasting Board of Governors began pushing its China broadcasts through the Internet, specifying that the funds be prioritized for countries considered to be “important to the national interests of the United States.” The law also was very clear that these tools were meant to subvert the sovereign control of the Internet in targeted countries—what it described as countering “the development of repressive Internet-related laws and regulations.” In Washington-speak, that meant that authoritarian allies that heavily censored their Internet such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were off-limits for Internet Freedom. Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014, Pub. L. No. 113-76, Global Internet Freedom, Sec. 7080, January 15, 2014.

  115. Adam Lynn, “OTF Sees Significant Increase in Budget for 2014,” Open Technology Fund, April 17, 2014, https://www.opentech.fund/article/otf-sees-significant-increase-budget-2014; Internet Anti-Censorship Fact Sheet (Washington, DC: Broadcasting Board of Governors, May 2013), https://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2013/05/Anti-Censorship-Fact-Sheet-May-2013.pdf.

  116. The Open Technology fund, which was launched after the Arab Spring in 2012, was initially called Freedom2Connect. “Radio Free Asia’s next generation freedom2connect program is designed to ensure secure communication tools exist for millions of individuals whose online interactions are being monitored or obstructed by repressive governments. Through support of research, development, and implementation of globally-accessible secure communications…” (Freedom2Connect, Radio Free Asia, accessed June 20, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20120620231727/http://f2c.rfa.org:80/index.html). The State Department also set up a “venture-capital-style” unit in Washington, DC, that paired career foreign policy operatives with young, hip techies and put them to work cooking up all sorts of gadgets that leveraged the power of social networks. One initiative, which the New York Times described as an “operation out of a spy novel” staffed with “young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band,” involved the creation of something called “Internet in a suitcase”—a device that could be smuggled into a country and unpacked to provide an instant wireless Internet network t
hat would be shared by any device with a WiFi connection and then linked to the rest of the world. The point was to undercut the ability of foreign governments to stop opposition movements by turning off the Internet. Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made projects like this the central plank of her Internet Freedom policy. To her, this was not about regime change but about helping people around the world talk to one another. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” she told the New York Times. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.” Glanz and Markoff, “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour.”

  117. The first version of Radio Free Asia shuttered in 1955, after the agency realized that the Chinese were too poor to own radios and that no one was listening to its broadcasts (“Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,” New York Times, December 26, 1977). A second-generation Radio Free Asia appeared a decade later, this time funded through even murkier organizations with ties to the government of South Korea, the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and the Central Intelligence Agency (SAC, San Francisco, “Memorandum to Director, FBI, Subject: Moon Sun-Myung, IS—Korea,” October 6, 1975, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/moon-sun-myung-fbi-6-october-1975.pdf). Through the 1960s, Radio Free Asia served as a psychological operations component of the Vietnam War. According to the FBI, it “produced anti-communist programs in Washington and beamed them into China, North Korea and North Vietnam” (Scott Armstrong and Charles R. Babcock, “Ex-Director Informs on KCIA Action,” Washington Post, May 6, 1977). It enjoyed high-level support from within the first Nixon administration and even featured Congressman Gerald Ford on its board (Robert Parry, “Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Truth, Legend & Lies,” Consortium, 1997, https://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon4.html). But this version of Radio Free Asia also shut down after being investigated by the Justice Department as part of a larger probe into South Korean government attempts to influence American public opinion to keep the US military engaged against North Korea (Investigation of Korean-American Relations: Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Comm. on International Relations,’ H.R. Rep. [October 31, 1978], https://archive.org/stream/InvestigationOfKorean AmericanRelations/Investigation%20of%20Korean-American%20Relations#page /n0/mode/2up).

  118. Radio Free Asia was created by Congress and managed and funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, but it was also organized as a private nonprofit. This curious structure shielded Radio Free Asia from public accountability, allowing it to claim exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. The private, opaque structure reminded me that during the Cold War, the CIA funneled money to its global propaganda radio station network through private foundations, cutouts designed to hide the agency’s involvement. Radio Free Asia seemed to be involved in a similar tradition. I found this out the hard way when I tried to request records from Radio Free Asia and was told that it was exempt from this federal law.

  119. “Just as the enormously successful Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty have retired from the Cold War business, Radio Free Asia has picked up the fight halfway around the world,” declared syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, calling the radio station an “enemy of tyranny.” Georgie Anne Geyer, “Enemy of Tyranny,” Universal Press Syndicate, January 17, 1997, https://surveillance valley.com/content/citations/georgie-anne-geyer-enemy-of-tyranny-universal-press-syndicate-17-january-1997.png.

  120. “FY 2013 Budget Request,” Broadcasting Board of Governors, 2012, https://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2012/02/FY-2013-BBG-Congressional-Budget-Request-FINAL-2-9-12-Small.pdf; James Brooke, “Threats and Responses: Airwaves; Infiltrators of North Korea: Tiny Radios,” New York Times, March 3, 2003; Glanz and Markoff, “U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour.”

  121. Dan “Blah” Meredith, “Something About Me,” accessed May 2, 2017, https://danblah.com/.

  122. “This Is Open Technology Fund—Advisory Council,” Open Technology Fund, accessed May 2, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/about/people/advisory-council.html.

  123. OTF programs attracted participants from all over the world: North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa. They called themselves various names: technologists, researchers, cryptographers, political scientists, and activists. Many of them looked hip and edgy, wore piercings, had funky hairdos and dreads, and swore online like sailors. OTF-sponsored activists talked the language of social justice—of fighting for freedom and defending the powerless—but their projects lined up with US foreign policy objectives. China, Iran, Russia, and Belarus would pop up in these projects, whereas authoritarian allies of the United States such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates were conspicuously absent. “Fellows,” Open Technology Fund, accessed May 7, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/about/people/fellows.html.

  124. The Tor Project received over $1 million from OTF to pay for security audits and traffic analysis tools and to set up fast Tor exit nodes in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Yasha Levine, email message sent to Dan Meredith, “Media Request: OTF & Tor,” February 9, 2015, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/email-from-yasha-levine-to-dan-meredith-media-request-otf-tor-9-february-2015.png.

  125. Among the tools funded by OTF: a radical anarchist collective called RiseUp used a special secure email and VPN system designed for activists that received over $1 million from the OTF (“LEAP Encryption Access Project,” Open Technology Fund, accessed May 22, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/project /leap-encryption-access-project); a WikiLeaks whistleblowing alternative called GlobaLeaks, endorsed by Tor’s Jacob Appelbaum, received nearly $350,000. The platform was used by a variety of organizations in line with the State Department’s regime-change operations around the world: from right-wing portals that asked for the evidence of Hugo Chavez’s corruption in Venezuela to the leaks submission systems of a Tunisian group set up to help Internet organizing during the Arab Spring (“GlobaLeaks,” Open Technology Fund, accessed May 22, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/project/globaleaks). Qubes OS, a secure operating system, received $570,000 (“Qubes OS,” Open Technology Fund, accessed May 22, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/project/qubes-os). There are several dozen other projects and fellowships. For more information, see OTF’s website: https://www.opentech.fund.

  126. “We really quickly found out that a lot of developers that were trying to access places close to censorship, if they wanted really good service, they needed to go through Amazon—which has servers in the United States, couple of places in Europe and Japan and Hong Kong. We pushed a cloud close to these areas in places… we can put nodes and servers in places say like Turkey and know that it’s probably not going to get raided if people are doing things that are in trouble in other places,” Dan Meredith explained during in a 2014 BBG board meeting. “We give our tools in-kind access to this so they can get really really close so that they don’t have to send a proposal to us every time with system administration or engineering costs. We save money paying thirty different projects for exactly the same thing, we invest in it one time and they get access to it. We contract it with these good folks to keep it maintained and updated and it saves everybody money” (“BBG Board Meeting, Part 4,” April 11, 2014, https://archive.org/details /BBGBoardMeeting04112014). Countries where OTF funds were deployed for “digital emergencies” included Iran, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Tibet (“Results,” Open Technology Fund, accessed May 7, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/results).

  127. Danny Yadron, “Moxie Marlinspike: The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2015. “Open Whisper Systems,” Open Technology Fund, accessed September 26, 2017, https://www.opentech.fund/project/open-whisper-systems.

  128. “Every time someone downloads Signal and makes their first encrypted call, FBI Director Jim Comey cries. True fact
.” Chris Soghoian (@csoghoian), Twitter post, November 2, 2015, 3;14 p.m., https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status /661320586115858432.

  129. Edward Snowden (@Snowden), Twitter post, September 21, 2016, 6:50 a.m., https://twitter.com/snowden/status/778592275144314884; Edward Snowden (@Snowden), Twitter post, November 2, 2015, 2:46 p.m., https://twitter.com/snowden/status/661313394906161152.

  130. Edward Snowden (@Snowden), Twitter post, October 12, 2015, 5:05 p.m., https://twitter.com/snowden/status/653723172953583617?lang=en.

  131. moxie, “Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-to-End Encryption for Allo,” Open Whisper Systems (blog), May 18, 2016, https://whisper systems.org/blog/allo/. Google also entered into a partnership with the Open Technology Fund on a privacy project called Simply Secure, which promised to make privacy and encryption easy to use for even the most technically incompetent user.

  132. 2014 Annual Report (Washington, DC: Open Technology Fund, 2014), https://www.opentech.fund/sites/default/files/attachments/otf_fy2014_annualreport.pdf. Also: “With increasingly restrictive regulations in a growing number of nation-states, and a sharp rise in sophisticated attacks against the people and organizations who support a more civil and democratic society, the need for OTF support is greater than ever. That same year saw a tightening of censorship in Russia, Southern Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and China.”