Mitch Jeserich talks to Yasha Levine about the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project.
Yasha Levine is an investigative journalist for Pando Daily, a San Francisco-based news magazine focused on covering the politics and power of big tech. He is the author of the book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.
About Surveillance Valley:
The idea of using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad drove the government to develop the internet in the 1960s and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even co-opting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.