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[ih] Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet -- Some Questions
- Subject: [ih] Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet -- Some Questions
- From: eric.gade at gmail.com (Eric Gade)
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2018 17:47:03 -0400
Hello list members,
Please excuse the length of this email.
I am in the process of writing a review of Yasha Levine's new history of
the Internet, "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the
Internet." His overall thesis is that the development of the Internet has,
from the beginning, grown from "counterinsurgency" and surveillance
operations, and that these aspects have not been adequately chronicled in
other histories. Many of his claims about the early ARPA work I have not
encountered before, and I imagine that some would find them provocative.
I'm hoping there are members of this list with knowledge about these claims
who can help me clarify a few points:
1. Levine asserts that there was some overlap or relationship between
William Godel's Project Agile and work conducted by the ARPA Command and
Control division under Licklider. He pulls a lot from Sharon Weinberger's
recent book ("The Imagineers of War") in discussing both Godel and the
potential connection. He writes, "[Licklider's] work at ARPA was part of
the military's larger counterinsurgency efforts and directly overlapped
with William Godel's Project Agile." (52). In making this statement he
actually cites Weinberger's prologue, in which she says "Godel personally
signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his
Vietnam budget." It appears Weinberger is herself citing this document: (
https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/arpa-order-internet.pdf).
It is a part of a series that may still be classified (I have the NDC
looking into it). My question about this is: was there really any kind of
working relationship? What does this transfer of funds represent? And
perhaps more broadly: to what extent was ARPA C&C/IPTO involved in
counterinsurgency data collection and processing?
2. A large section of the early history in this book deals with the
Cambridge Project (aka Project CAM) at MIT and controversy surrounding it
at the time. I am awaiting a copy of the original proposal from MIT (it
might not come in before deadline; should anyone on this list have a copy
I'd really appreciate it). Levine asserts that the project "would directly
aid the agency's counterinsurgency mission." He claims that the work of the
project "could be accessed from any computer with an ARPANET connection"
(68) and that "It was a kind of stripped down 1960s version of Palantir,
the powerful data mining, surveillance, and prediction software the
military and intelligence planners use today." He goes on: "the project was
customized to the military's needs, with particular focus on fighting
insurgencies and rolling back communism [...] It was clear that the
Cambridge Project wasn't just a tool for research, it was a
counterinsurgency technology." (68-69)
Is that not an accurate description of the proposal? Were any members on
this list involved in this research? If so, are these characterizations
accurate to your mind?
3. There is yet another section where Levine finds some reporting from
the early 70s, where NBC News' Rowan Ford conducted a 4 month investigation
and found evidence that intelligence files about American anti-war
protestors and others had been transferred, perhaps stored, and perhaps
processed somehow, over the ARPANET and linked host machines. His report
was entered into the Congressional Record as a part of Tunney's hearings in
1975:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078638619;view=1up;seq=7
The claim is that these files might have been a part of previous CONUS
intel that, in 1972, the Army was ordered to delete. One of the claims in
the report is that such files were transferred via the ARPANET to MIT for
some reason. Ford had 4 sources for this story who had knowledge of the
incident; only one, Richard Ferguson (who apparently was fired from MIT for
this disclosure), gave information publicly.
Does anyone on this list have knowledge of this incident, and/or whether
or not the ARPANET/ARPA IPTO was used to move around, eventually store, or
otherwise process these kinds of dossiers?
These are all the questions I have for now. Thanks for taking the time to
read.
--
Eric
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