Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex in War Nerd Reading List

Jun 09, 2017 Adam McPhee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, journalism, the-exile, politics, science

computer technology can’t be separated from the culture in which it is developed and used.

The first part is a history of the Internet. It reminded me of reading Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal in high school: on the one hand, constantly dismayed by the appalling practices used to create and sustain an industry, but on the other hand, I was also left with the feeling of wanting a burger (or in this case to reminisce about my early experiences with the Internet and to to computer technology can’t be separated from the culture in which it is developed and used.

The first part is a history of the Internet. It reminded me of reading Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal in high school: on the one hand, constantly dismayed by the appalling practices used to create and sustain an industry, but on the other hand, I was also left with the feeling of wanting a burger (or in this case to reminisce about my early experiences with the Internet and to to celebrate the technological achievements, even though they're being used to track dissidents and kill public services). Perhaps it's a testament to all of the pro-Internet propaganda I've consumed. Not that the author is anti-Internet, rather, he thinks we're framing the debate wrong. For example, he points out that the surveillance/privacy debate is completely skewed with 'privacy' somehow always being a good thing, except that it's letting corporations and government bodies run wild without oversight.

The second part of the book focuses more narrowly on this surveillance/privacy question, looking at the Tor Project in fine detail. Always found myself reminiscing here, for the heyday of Levine's reporting for the NSFW Corp and Pando websites. And he's completely vindicated. Well, he was right at the time too, but the insane amount of vitriol sent his way made it feel less triumphant. He completely exposes Tor as a honeypot, a cover for spies (something I'd had trouble conceptualizing when I'd read about it earlier, Levine lays out the details more clearly here), and not the mathematically infallible tool it's booster (once?) claimed it was.

The whole book is incredibly well-researched (something I think Levine, and also his sometimes writing partner Mark Ames, don't get enough credit for).

One thing I'm left curious about: is Tor still revered among the Silicon Valley elite the way it was in '13/'14? I suppose it's a moot question though, because after reading Surveillance Valley it's hard to see how anyone could defend it.

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Apr 06, 2018 Ezra rated it really liked it

A book that's come out at the right time. As the revelations about Google, Facebook, and Apple's surveillance practices come to light, this book shows the military and intelligence roots of these companies. Ultimately, the only solution is political but that requires widespread demand from the global public. Yasha Levine's book will help. ...more

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Apr 15, 2023 Rashid Yasin rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, nonfiction

In this book, Yasha's written an important history of a topic that gets somewhat brushed aside. I definitely learned a number of new pieces about the history of the internet, its fundamental ties to the US government and US military, and the ways in which privacy and surveillance are muddled. Whether by the interference of government agencies who wish to use tools of "digital freedom" as ways to disrupt enemy regimes abroad or trap would-be revolutionaries and subversives into a false sense of s In this book, Yasha's written an important history of a topic that gets somewhat brushed aside. I definitely learned a number of new pieces about the history of the internet, its fundamental ties to the US government and US military, and the ways in which privacy and surveillance are muddled. Whether by the interference of government agencies who wish to use tools of "digital freedom" as ways to disrupt enemy regimes abroad or trap would-be revolutionaries and subversives into a false sense of security via honeypot schemes and backdoors into encryption technologies or the diversion from political regulation of intrusive surveillance to "silver bullet" technological solutions that don't harm the pervasive surveillance of platforms like Google and Facebook, Yasha tells a great story about how Tor and Signal and encryption are not necessarily the allies of a free public and how the internet has always been conceived of as a tool for social control by the powerful.

That being said, I will caveat that this is a polemical work. I agree with a lot of Yasha's politics, so I don't think he makes too many fundamentally wrong conclusions, but he starts with the premise of "US Military allegiance is obviously bad" and this can lead to some guilt-by-association and logical leaps where it isn't proved that a particular thing is nefarious, rather that it's affiliated with the government or one of its military funding branches. I am amenable to this perspective, but I also think that the US functions (in a way I don't think is healthy) by using military spending as a form of research keynsianism. And so, while I wouldn't want to take military funding were I to have stayed in academia, I don't think it's always fundamentally nefarious. It's very often just a symptom of a larger disease at the heart of America's industrial policy that replaces funding for fundamental science and engineering research with profligate military spending instead. SRI, for example, certainly does military research, which will affect particular research goals, but it also does other things funded by other arms of the government. I probably wouldn't work there myself, and there are lots of pernicious effects of research funding coming from the military (as we've also seen with tobacco and fossil fuel companies), but Yasha can describe a more hand-in-glove relationship than may be the more complex picture. The same goes with the Electronic Frontier Foundation that Yasha basically describes as Silicon Valley's lobbying arm. Their interests are sometimes aligned, but not always, and sometimes big companies and industries and governments give money to things that are not aligned with other goals of differnt parts of those organizations.

All that being said, the overall thrust is really important and the history is also very useful and illuminating. Because of some of that broad-brush painting, not every chapter fully supports his main thesis, but that's fine because the history itself is still very engaging and useful to understand. And the core message is true - we need politics to solve our problems. The power of governments and corporations is too huge to think that we can finagle our way around them with the right github repositories. ...more

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Apr 10, 2018 Kirill Kovalenko rated it it was amazing

A very important book.

Levine digs deep and uncovers a narrative of the internet which is starkly at odds with the prominent tech utopianism, Silicon Valley suckjobs and cybernetic libertarianism of our age.

Technology is not the answer to power. Supposedly apolitical technocrats are deluded stooges. Intelligence agencies have their fingers in all the pies. This is the world we live in.

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