Dit boek is een geschiedenis van Sillicon Valley en legt daarbij de relaties bloot die SV heeft met het veiligheidsapparaat en de geheime diensten van de Verenigde Staten. Uit het boek blijkt dat vrijwel geen enkel sociaal netwerk volledig te vertrouwen is, maar we lopen vooruit op het verhaal...

• Zoals bekend is het internet een product van DARPA. De ontstaansgeschiedenis van Darpa, dat intussen bekend staat als het "brein van het Pentagon",  vant aan onder Eisenhower, onder impuls van Neil McElroy, gewezen voorzitter van Procter and Gamble, en uitvinder van de "soap opera" (P&G is bekend als producent van zeep, vandaar...):
  As the public reeled from this major defeat in the so-called Space Race, President Eisenhower knew he had to do something big and very public to save face and ease people’s fears. Neil McElroy, his newly appointed secretary of defense, had a plan. Immaculately groomed and with perfectly coiffed hair parted down the middle, McElroy had the looks and manners of a high-flying advertising executive. Which is, in fact, what he was before Eisenhower tapped him to run the Department of Defense. In his previous role as president of Procter and Gamble, McElroy’s signature innovation was bankrolling “soap operas”—cheesy daytime dramas tailored to housewives—as pure marketing vehicles for his company’s selection of soaps and household detergents. As Time magazine, which put McElroy on the cover of its October 1953 issue, put it: “Soap operas get more advertising messages across to the consumer—and sell more soap—simply because the housewife can absorb the messages for hours on end while she goes about her household chores.”
  In the weeks after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, McElroy cooked up the perfect public relations project to save the day. He called for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—ARPA—a new, independent military body whose purpose was to bridge the space gap and to ensure that embarrassing technological defeat like Sputnik would never happen again.14 McElroy was a businessman who believed in the power of business to save the day.15 In November 1957, he pitched ARPA to Congress as an organization that would cut through government red tape and create a public-private vehicle of pure military science to push the frontiers of military technology and develop “vast weapon systems of the future.”
  The plan appealed to President Eisenhower, who distrusted the cynical jockeying for funding and power of various arms of the military—which he believed bloated the budget and burned money on useless projects. The idea of outsourcing research and development to the private sector appealed to the business community as well.18 The military brass, on the other hand, weren’t so pleased. The air force, navy, army, and Joint Chiefs of Staff all balked at the idea of civilians sitting above them and telling them what to do. They feared losing control over technology procurement, a lucrative center of profit and power.
  The military pushed back against McElroy’s plan. The conflict with the military loomed so large that it made a cameo in Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union address: “I am not attempting today to pass judgment on the charge of harmful service rivalries. But one thing is sure. Whatever they are, America wants them stopped.”19 He got his way. On February 11, 1958, a month after the State of the Union and just five months after the Sputnik launch, Congress wrote ARPA into a US Air Force appropriations bill, giving it $520 million in initial funding and a plan for a gigantic $2 billion budget.
• DARPA is dus begonnen als een "publiek-privaat-partnerschap" avant la lettre. Het werd al snel betrokken bij "counterinsurgency"-activiteiten in Vietnam en elders:
  Counterinsurgency theory wasn’t particularly new. Earlier in the twentieth century, the United States had conducted brutal counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines and South America. And the CIA was in the midst of running a brutal covert counterinsurgency campaign in North Vietnam and Laos—headed by Godel’s future boss, Air Force Col. Edward Lansdale—that included targeted raids, death squads, propaganda, and torture.32 What made Godel’s counterinsurgency vision different was its laser beam focus on the use of technology to bolster effectiveness. Sure, counterinsurgency involved terror and intimidation. It involved coercion and propaganda. But what was equally important was training and equipping fighters—no matter if they were US special operations teams or local forces—with the most cutting-edge military tech available: better weapons, better uniforms, better transportation, better intelligence, and a better understanding of what made the locals tick. “The way Godel saw it, the Pentagon needed to develop advanced weaponry, based on technology that was not just nuclear technology, but that could deal with this coming threat,” writes Jacobsen.
  The agency tested light combat arms for the South Vietnamese military, which led to the adoption of the AR-15 and M-16 as standard-issue rifles. It helped develop a light surveillance aircraft that glided silently above the jungle canopy. It formulated field rations and food suited to the hot, wet climate. It bankrolled the creation of sophisticated electronic surveillance systems and funded elaborate efforts to collect all manner of conflict-related intelligence. It worked on improving military communication technology to make it function in dense forest. It developed portable radar installations that could be floated up on a balloon, a technology that was quickly deployed commercially back in the United States to monitor the borders for illegal crossings.46 It also designed vehicles that could better traverse the boggy landscape, a prototype “mechanical elephant” similar to the four-legged robots that DARPA and Google developed a half-century later.47 ARPA frequently pushed way past the boundaries of what was considered technologically possible and pioneered electronic surveillance systems that were decades ahead of their time. It played a big role in some of the most ambitious initiatives. That included Project Igloo White, a multi-billion-dollar computerized surveillance barrier.48 Operated out of a secret air force base in Thailand, Igloo White involved depositing thousands of radio-controlled seismic sensors, microphones, and heat and urine detectors in the jungle. These eavesdropping devices, shaped like sticks or plants and usually dropped from airplanes, transmitted signals to a centralized computer control center to alert technicians of any movement in the bush.49 If anything moved, an air strike was called in and the area was blanketed with bombs and napalm. Igloo White was like a giant wireless alarm system that spanned hundreds of miles of jungle. As the US Air Force explained: “We are, in effect, bugging the battlefield.”
  Some began to doubt America’s mission in Vietnam and questioned the purpose of ARPA’s scientific approach to counterinsurgency. Anthony Russo, a RAND contractor who worked on ARPA projects and who would later help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers, discovered that when results of ARPA studies contradicted military wishes, his bosses simply suppressed and discarded them.77 “The more I grew to admire Asian culture—especially Vietnamese,” Russo wrote in 1972, “the more I was outraged at the Orwellian horror of the U.S. military machine grinding through Vietnam and destroying everything in its path. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls were turned into prostitutes; streets that had been lined with beautiful trees were denuded to make room for the big military trucks. I was fed up with the horror and disgusted by the petulance and pettiness with which the RAND Corporation conducted its business.”78 He believed that ARPA’s entire Project Agile apparatus was a giant racket used by military planners to give scientific cover to whichever existing war policies they were intent on pursuing. This wasn’t cutting-edge military science, but a boondoggle and a fraud. The only people benefiting from Project Agile were the private military contracting firms hired to do the work. Even William Godel, the counterinsurgency star who started the program, got caught up in a petty embezzlement scheme that involved the misappropriation of part of the $18,000 in cash that he had carried to Saigon in 1961 to set up Project Agile.79 It was a bizarre case that involved an almost insignificant sum of money. Some of his colleagues hinted that it was politically motivated, but it didn’t matter. Godel was ultimately convicted of conspiracy to commit embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison.80 Other ARPA contractors had reservations about their work in Vietnam as well, but the mission rolled on. Fraudulent or not, Project Agile turned Southeast Asia, from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam, into a giant laboratory. Every tribe, every jungle path, every captured guerrilla was to be studied and analyzed and monitored and understood. While assassination teams terrorized the rural population of Vietnam, ARPA scientists were there to log and measure program effectiveness. Incentive programs were designed and then monitored, analyzed, tweaked, and monitored again. ARPA didn’t just bug the battlefield; it tried to bug entire societies. Interviews, polls, population counts, detailed anthropological studies of various tribes, maps, available weapons, migration studies, social networks, agricultural practices, dossiers—all this information poured out of ARPA’s centers in Vietnam and Thailand. But there was a problem. The agency was drowning in data: typewritten paper reports, punch cards, giant tape reels, index cards, and tons of crude computer printouts. There was so much information coming in that it was effectively useless. What good was all this intel if no one could find what they needed? Something had to be done.
• Ze moesten dus iets doen. Dus keken ze richting "cybernetics" en de wetenschappers erachter, ook al waren die "links" en anti-oorlog:
  After popularizing cybernetics, Wiener became a kind of labor and antiwar activist. He reached out to unions to warn them of the danger of automation and the need to take the threat seriously. He turned down offers from giant corporations that wanted help automating their assembly lines according to his cybernetic principles, and refused to work on military research projects. He was against the massive peacetime arms buildup taking place after World War II and publicly lashed out at colleagues for working to help the military build bigger, more efficient tools of destruction. He increasingly hinted at his insider knowledge that a “colossal state machine” was being constructed by government agencies “for the purposes of combat and domination,” a computerized information system that was “sufficiently extensive to include all civilian activities during war, before war and possibly even between wars,” as he described it in The Human Use of Human Beings. Wiener’s vocal support of labor and his public opposition to corporate and military work made him a pariah among his military contractor–engineer colleagues.25 It also earned him a spot on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI subversive surveillance list. For years, he was suspected of having communist sympathies, his life documented in a thick FBI file that was closed upon his death in 1964.
  Lick worked hard and fast, and his efforts at ARPA were remarkable. Companies like General Electric and IBM did not initially accept his ideas about interactive computing. But with his tenacity and ARPA’s funding, his vision gained traction and popularity and ultimately changed the direction of the computer industry. His tenure at ARPA achieved something else as well: computer science became more than just a subdivision of electrical engineering; it developed into a proper field of study of its own.38 The long-term research contracts the ARPA Command and Control Research division handed out to research teams helped seed the creation of independent computer science departments in universities across the country and tied them closely, through funding and personnel, to the US military establishment.
  Perhaps most infamously, IBM’s tabulator machines were employed by Nazi Germany to run death labor camps and to institute a system of racial surveillance by enabling the regime to comb genealogical data to root out people with traces of Jewish blood.50 Willy Heidinger, head of IBM operations in Germany and a devout member of the Nazi Party, knew the part he played, with the help of IBM tabulators, in studying a sick German people and helping Adolf Hitler provide the cure: “We are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual characteristic … on a little card,” he said in a fiery speech dedicating a new IBM factory in Berlin. “We are proud that we may assist in such a task, a task that provides our nation’s Physician with the material he needs for his examinations. Our Physician can then determine whether the calculated values are in harmony with the health of our people. It also means that if such is not the case, our Physician can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances…. Hail to our German people and der Fuhrer!”
  Roberts’s task was daunting: connect all of ARPA’s far-flung interactive computer projects—with computers made by a half dozen different companies, including a one-of-a-kind ILLIAC supercomputer—into one network. “Almost every conceivable item of computer hardware and software will be in the network. This is the greatest challenge of the system, as well as its greatest ultimate value,” said Roberts.
  Not long after arriving at ARPA, he convened a series of meetings with a core group of contractors and several outside advisers to hash out the design.
• En zo ontstond dus het ARPANET, de voorloper van het internet:
  The sessions brought together a mix of ideas and people. One of the most important was Paul Baran, who had worked at RAND designing communication systems for the air force that could survive a nuclear attack.60 Over time, the group came up with a design: key to the network would be what Roberts called interface message processors, or IMPs. These were dedicated computers that would form the connective tissue of the distributed network. Connected by telephone lines leased from AT&T, they would send and receive data, check for errors, and ensure that data successfully reached the destination. If part of the network went down, the IMPs would attempt to retransmit the information using a different pathway. IMPs were the generic gateways to ARPA’s network, functioning independently of the computers that used them. Different makes and models of computers did not need to be designed to understand each other—all they needed to do was communicate with the IMPs. In a way, IMPs were the first Internet routers.
  The very first ARPANET node, powered by the IMPs, went live on October 29, 1969, linking Stanford to UCLA.62 The first attempt to connect barely worked and dropped after a few seconds, but by the next month, connections to UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah were also made. Six months later, seven more nodes became operational. By the end of 1971, more than fifteen nodes existed. And the network kept growing.
  In October 1972, a full demonstration of the ARPANET was carried out at the first International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington, DC. It astounded people. ARPA contractors fit out a hall with dozens of computer terminals that could access computers across the country and even a link in Paris. Software available for demonstration included an air traffic simulation program, weather and meteorological models, chess programs, database systems, and even a robotic psychiatrist program called Eliza that provided mock counseling. Engineers ran around like children at an amusement park, overwhelmed by how all the different parts flawlessly fit together and worked as one interactive machine.
• Maar ook anti-communisten speelden hun rol natuurlijk:
  Pool, a descendant of a prominent rabbinical family that traced its roots to medieval Spain, was an MIT professor and renowned expert in communications and propaganda theory. Starting in the late 1950s, he ran MIT’s Center for International Studies, a prestigious department for communication studies that was funded by the CIA, and helped set up MIT’s Department of Political Science. He was a hardcore anticommunist and a pioneer in the use of opinion polling and computer modeling for political campaigns. With his expertise, he was tapped to guide the messaging for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential bid, crunching poll numbers and running simulations on issues and voter groups. Pool’s data-driven approach to political campaigning was on the cutting edge of a new wave of electoral technologies that sought to win by pretesting people’s preferences and biases and then calibrating a candidate’s message to fit them. These new targeted messaging tactics, enabled by rudimentary computers, had a lot of fans in Washington and over the next several decades would come to dominate the way politics were done.72 They also inspired fear that America’s political system was being taken over by manipulative technocrats who cared more about the marketing and selling of ideas than they did about what those ideas actually meant.
  Pool saw computers as more than just apparatuses that could speed up social research. His work was infused with a utopian belief in the power of cybernetic systems to manage societies. He was among a group of Cold War technocrats who envisioned computer technology and networked systems deployed in a way that directly intervened in people’s lives, creating a kind of safety net that spanned the world and helped run societies in a harmonious manner, managing strife and conflict out of existence. This system wouldn’t be messy or wishy-washy or open to interpretation; nor would it involve socialist economic theories.
  In fact, it wouldn’t involve politics at all but would be an applied science based on math, “a kind of engineering.”
  In 1964, at the same time his company was doing counterinsurgency work for ARPA in Vietnam, Pool became a vocal supporter of Project Camelot, a different counterinsurgency effort funded by the US Army and backed in part by ARPA.79 “Camelot” was just a code name. The project’s full official title was “Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential.” Its ultimate goal: to build a radar system for left-wing revolutions—a computerized early warning system that could predict and prevent political movements before they ever got off the ground.80 “One of the project’s anticipated end products was an automated ‘information collection and handling system’ into which social researchers could feed facts for quick analysis. Essentially, the computer system would check up-to-date intelligence information against a list of precipitants and preconditions,” writes historian Joy Rohde. “Revolution could be stopped before its initiators even knew they were headed down the path to political violence.”81 Project Camelot was a big undertaking that involved dozens of leading American academics. It was very dear to Pool personally, but it never got very far.82 Chilean academics who were invited to participate in Project Camelot blew the whistle on its military intelligence ties and accused the United States of trying to build a computer-assisted coup machine. The affair blew up into a huge scandal. A special session of the Chilean Senate was convened to investigate the allegations, and politicians denounced the initiative as “a plan of Yankee espionage.”83 With all this international attention and negative publicity, Project Camelot was shut down in 1965.
• Eindelijk was het misschien wel de start van de "technocractie". Dat was wat allen bond. Gebruik van computers, data en technologie voor het controleren en veranderen van de maatschappij (en van mensen). Maar er was ook protest met name tegen Stanford Research Institute
  At the University of Michigan, students attempted to block campus recruitment by Dow Chemical, which produced the napalm that rained down on Vietnam.86 Someone blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin.87 The Weather Underground set off a bomb inside Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.88 They wanted to stop the Vietnam War. They also wanted to halt the cooptation of academic research by the military-industrial complex. ARPA programs were a constant target. Students protested against the ILLIAC-IV, the massive ARPA supercomputer housed at the University of Illinois.89 They targeted the Stanford Research Institute, an important ARPA contractor involved in everything from chemical weapons research to counterinsurgency work and development of the ARPANET. Students occupied the building, shouting, “Get SRI out!” and “Down with SRI!” A few brave contractors stayed behind to protect ARPA’s computers from the angry mob,90 telling protesters that computers were “politically neutral.”91 But are they?
  The demonstrations against the Cambridge Project involved hundreds of people. They were ultimately a part of the larger antiwar movement at MIT and Harvard that attracted the leading lights of the antiwar movement, including Howard Zinn. Noam Chomsky showed up to lambast academics, accusing them of running cover for violent imperialism by “investing it with the aura of science.”96 But in the end, the protests didn’t have much of an effect. The Cambridge Project proceeded as planned.
  The only change: further proposals and internal discussions for funding omitted overt references to military applications and the study of communism and third world societies, and project contractors simply referred to what they were doing as “behavioral science.”
• Van Arpanet naar internet: proces verliep niet over rozen. Maar dat het ook voor controle diende stond als een paal boven water:
  Rowan’s exposé was phenomenal. It was based on solid sources from the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Secret Service, as well as key ARPANET insiders, some of whom were concerned about the creation of a network that could so seamlessly link multiple government surveillance systems. In the 1970s, the historical significance of the ARPANET was not yet apparent; what Rowan uncovered has become only more relevant in hindsight. It would take more than twenty years for the Internet to spread into most American homes, and four decades would pass before Edward Snowden’s leaks made the world aware of the massive amount of government surveillance happening over the Internet.
  Today, people still think that surveillance is something foreign to the Internet—something imposed on it from the outside by paranoid government agencies. Rowan’s reporting from forty years ago tells a different story. It shows how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet. Surveillance was baked in from the very beginning. This is an important fact in the history of the Internet. Yet it has vanished down the collective memory hole. Crack any popular history of the Internet and there is no mention of it. Even today’s foremost historians do not seem to know it occurred.
• De digtalisering was begonnen, met alle voor- en nadelen van dien (één van de voorlopers was de FBI):
  The late 1960s was the beginning of America’s computerization gold rush, a time when police departments, federal government agencies, military and intelligence services, and large corporations began to digitize their operations. They bought and installed computers, ran databases, crunched numbers, automated services, and linked computers via communication networks. Everyone was in a hurry to digitize, link up, and join the glorious computer revolution.23 Digital government databases popped up across the country.24 Naturally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation led the pack. It began building out a centralized digital database in 1967, by order of J. Edgar Hoover. Called the National Crime Information Center, it spanned all fifty states and was available to state and local law enforcement agencies. It contained information on arrest warrants, stolen vehicles and property, and gun registrations and was accessible via a dispatcher service. By the mid-1970s, the system was expanded to support keyboard terminals mounted in police cruisers for immediate data search and retrieval.
  The first ARPANET node between UCLA and Stanford went online in 1969 and the network expanded nationally that same year. Now, with Rowan’s exposé six years later, this groundbreaking military network had its first big moment in the public spotlight.
  His ARPANET investigation took months to complete. Most sources would not go on the record, but one of them did.50 He was an MIT computer technician named Richard Ferguson, who was there in 1972 when the Pentagon transferred the surveillance data to his lab. He decided to come forward with the information and personally appeared on NBC to make the accusation. He explained that the files were in fact dossiers containing personal information as well as political beliefs. “I’ve seen the data structure that they’ve used and it concerns a person’s occupation, their politics, their name,” he told NBC. He explained that he got fired from his job for objecting to the program. Multiple intelligence sources and people involved with the spy file transfer corroborated Ferguson’s claims, but not on the record. In time, other journalists verified Rowan’s reporting.51 There was no doubt: the ARPANET was being used to monitor domestic political activity. “They stressed that the system did not perform any actual surveillance, but rather was designed to use data which had been collected in ‘the real world’ to help build predictive models which might warn when civil disturbances were imminent,” he later wrote in Technospies, a little-known book that expanded on his investigation into the network surveillance technology built by ARPA.52 At least part of the work of writing the database “maintenance program” for the army’s illegal surveillance files appeared to have been carried out at MIT through the Cambridge Project, J. C. R. Licklider’s grand initiative to build computer counterinsurgency data tools.53 They were possibly transferred to other ARPANET sites. Harvard and MIT students who protested ARPA’s Cambridge Project back in 1969 saw the ARPANET as a surveillance weapon and a tool of social and political control. They were right. Just a few years after their protests failed to stop the project, this new technology was turned against them and the American people.
• Arpanet en dus het internet was dus wel degelijk bedoeld als een wapen voor toezicht en sociale en politieke controle. Dit was zo vanaf het begin. Maar verder met het verhaal van de ontwikkeling van TCP/IP (volledig ontwikkeld om te voldoen aan de behoeften van het Pentagon):
  Kahn took over and scribbled away, jotting out thirty pages of diagrams and theoretical network designs. Both Cerf and Kahn had been involved in building the ARPANET: Cerf had been part of a UCLA team responsible for writing the operating system for the routers that formed ARPANET’s backbone, while Kahn had worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman helping to design the network’s routing protocols. Now they were about to take it to a new level: ARPANET 2.0, a network of networks, the architecture of what we now call the “Internet.” In 1972, after Kahn was hired to head ARPA’s command and control division, he had convinced Cerf to leave a job he had just taken teaching at Stanford and work for ARPA again.63 A major goal for Kahn was to expand the ARPANET’s usefulness in real-world military situations. That meant, first and foremost, extending the packet-based networking design to wireless data networks, radio, and satellite. Wireless data networks were crucial to the future of military command and control because they would allow traffic to be transmitted over huge distances: naval vessels, aircraft, and mobile field units could all connect to computer resources on the mainland through portable wireless units. It was a mandatory component of the global command and control system ARPA was charged with developing.64 Kahn directed the effort to build several experimental wireless networks. One was called PRNET, short for “packet radio network.” It had the ability to transmit data via mobile computers installed in vans using a network of antennas located in the mountain ranges around San Bruno, Berkeley, San Jose, and Palo Alto. The effort was run out of the Stanford Research Institute. At the same time, Kahn pushed into packet satellite networking, setting up an experimental network called SATNET that linked Maryland, West Virginia, England, and Norway; the system was initially designed to carry seismic data from remote installations set up to detect Soviet nuclear tests. ARPANET’s data packet technology worked remarkably well in a wireless setting. But there was one problem: although they were based on the same fundamental data-packet-switching packet-switching designs, PRNET, SATNET, and ARPANET all used slightly different protocols to run and so could not connect to each other. For all practical purposes, they were standalone networks, which went against the whole concept of networking and minimized their usefulness to the military. ARPA needed all three networks to function as one.65 The question was: How to bring them all together in a simple way? That’s what Kahn and Cerf were trying to figure out in the Cabana conference room. Eventually, they settled on a basic plan for a flexible networking language that could connect multiple types of networks. It was called TCP/IP—Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the same basic network language that powers the Internet today.66 In a 1990 oral history interview, Cerf, who now works as Google’s Chief Evangelist, described how his and Kahn’s efforts to devise an internetwork protocol were entirely rooted in the needs of the military:
  Even the first successful test of the Internet-grade TCP/IP network, which took place on November 22, 1977, simulated a military scenario: using radio, satellite, and wired networks to communicate with an active mobile unit battling a Soviet invasion of Europe. An old GMC delivery van outfitted by SRI with a bunch of radio gear played the role of a motorized NATO division, driving up and down the freeway near Stanford and beaming data over ARPA’s radio network. The data were then forwarded over ARPA’s satellite network to Europe—by way of Sweden and London—and then sent back to the United States to UCLA via satellite and wired ARPA connections.68 “So what we were simulating was a situation where somebody was in a mobile unit in the field, let’s say in Europe, in the middle of some kind of action trying to communicate through a satellite network to the United States, and then going across the US to get to some strategic computing asset that was in the United States,” recalled Cerf. “And there were a number of such simulations or demonstrations like that, some of which were extremely ambitious. They involved the Strategic Air Command at one point where we put airborne packet radios in the field communicating with each other and to the ground using the airborne systems to sew together fragments of Internet that had been segregated by a simulated nuclear attack.”
  Cerf described working very closely with the military every step of the way and in many cases helping find solutions to specific needs. “We deployed a whole bunch of packet radio gear and computer terminals and small processors to Fort Bragg with the 18th Airborne Corps and for several years did a whole bunch of field exercises. We also deployed them to the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, and did a series of exercises with them. In some cases, the outcome of the applications that we used were so good that they became part of the normal everyday operation.”
  Of course, Vint Cerf wasn’t the only one working out practical military applications for the ARPANET. Congressional reports and internal ARPA documents from the 1970s are full of examples of the armed services putting the network to use in a variety of ways, from wirelessly transmitting submarine locator sensor data, to providing portable communication in the field, teleconferencing, remote maintenance of computer equipment, and military supply chain and logistics management.69 And, of course, all of this was intertwined with ARPA’s work on “intelligent systems”—building the data analysis and predictive technologies Godel and Licklider initiated a decade earlier.
• En dit alles had een rare connectie met de hippiescene:
  Years later, filmmaker Adam Curtis interviewed former members of communes in his BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. He discovered that the cybernetic structures that these groups imposed on themselves, rules that were supposed to flatten and equalize power relations among members and lead to a harmonious new society, produced the opposite result and, ultimately, ripped many of the communities apart.
  On the surface, the worlds of ARPA and military computer research and the drugged-out hippie commune scene of the 1960s could not be more different. Indeed, they seemed to occupy different solar systems. One had uniforms, stuffy suits, pocket protectors, thoughts of war, punch cards, and rigid hierarchies. The other had long hair, free love, drugs, far-out music, hostility to authority, and a scrappy and ragged existence. But the differences were superficial. On a deeper level, the two scenes operated on the same cybernetic wavelength and overlapped on multiple fronts. J. C. R Licklider, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and other ARPA and military engineers were deploying cybernetic ideas to build computer networks, while dreaming of building prediction technology to run the world and manage political strife out of existence. The hippies were doing the same with their cybernetic communes. Except, where ARPA and the military were industrial and global, communes were small-scale, boutique. There were direct connections as well. Take the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major ARPA contractor working on everything from counterinsurgency and chemical warfare to running an important ARPANET node and research center. Several SRI staffers were close friends of Stewart Brand and active contributors to the Whole Earth Catalog.25 Brand frequently hung around at SRI and even consulted for the institute on a 1968 demonstration of the interactive computer technology Douglas Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center had developed under an ARPA contract.26 The event featured real-time video conferencing and collaborative document editing carried over the ARPANET, which was then only two months old.27 And then there was Engelbart himself. The engineer and interactive computing guru was a favorite of Licklider’s and received millions in ARPA funding. At the same time, he experimented with LSD and dosed other computer engineers with acid to see whether it made them more efficient and creative. He also went on a tour of various communes and was highly supportive of the movement’s attempt to create new forms of decentralized societies.28 The feeling was mutual. The Bay Area hippie counterculture scene lived and breathed the cybernetic ideas pumped out by America’s military-industrial complex. Richard Brautigan, a shaggy-haired writer with a droopy mustache who lived in San Francisco, composed an ode to the coming cybernetic utopia that demonstrates the spiritual closeness of these two seemingly contradictory worlds. Published in 1967 and titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” the poem describes a world in which computers merge with nature to create a kind of altruistic god-like being that would take care of us all—a world “where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony / like pure water / touching clear sky.”29 Brautigan handed his poem out on Height Street, the epicenter of the counterculture movement.
• Een opvallende rol was weggelegd voor Stewart Brand:
  There was deep sympathy and close ties between the two worlds, and Stewart Brand took it further. In the early 1980s, after the commune dream collapsed, he cashed in his counterculture cred and turned the utopian ideals of the New Communalists into a marketing vehicle for the sprouting consumer computer industry. He was instrumental to the cause. Like an experienced midwife, he guided the birth of this industry’s growing sense of self-importance and cultural relevance. He was shrewd. He understood that the Bay Area sat atop a major economic and cultural fault line. The tectonic plates were shifting and trembling and sending off shockwaves. The whole place felt overdue for a monster quake that would restructure society in a major way, spawning new industries, new businesses, a new politics, and a radically new culture. He really believed it, and he helped a new class of computer entrepreneurs see themselves as he saw them—as counterculture rebels and heroes. He then helped them sell that image to the rest of the world.
  In the parlance of today’s Silicon Valley, Brand “pivoted.” He transformed the Whole Earth Catalog into the Whole Earth Software Catalog and Whole Earth Review—magazines billed as “tools and ideas for the computer age.” He also launched the Good Business Network, a corporate consulting company that applied his counterculture public relations strategies to problems faced by clients such as Shell Oil, Morgan Stanley, Bechtel, and DARPA.31 He also organized an influential computer conference that brought together leading computer engineers and journalists.32 It was called, simply, “Hackers’ Conference” and was held in Marin County in 1984. About 150 of the country’s top computer geniuses attended, including Apple’s Steve Wozniak. Brand cleverly stage-managed the event to give the group maximum cultural cachet. To hear him and other believers tell it, the event was the “Woodstock of the computer elite!” Newspaper accounts regaled readers with tales of strange nerds with fantastical visions of the future. “Giving a computer self-hood. The greatest hack is artificial consciousness,” one attendee told a Washington Post reporter. “My vision of hacking is a fuzzy little intelligent creature growing inside each machine,” quipped another.33 A PBS film crew was on site to shoot a documentary and capture Brand’s role in bringing these hackers together. He was not the young man who launched Whole Earth Catalog two decades earlier. His face showed his age and he sported a shiny, bald pate, but he still had the fire in him. He wore a black-and-white plaid shirt under a sheepskin vest and waxed lyrical about the rebellious nature of those gathered there in Marin.34 “They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and I think more effective in pushing the culture around in good ways than almost any group I can think of.” Off camera, he took to the pages of his Whole Earth Review to further expound on the rebel nature of computer programmers. “I think hackers—innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in an introduction to a photo spread of the 1984 Hackers’ Conference. “No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded…. High tech is now something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them, and that’s a hot item in the world.” He added, “The quietest of the ’60s subsubcultures has emerged as the most innovative and most powerful—and most suspicious of power.”
  The year 1984 was a big and symbolic one for the computer industry beyond Brand’s Hackers’ Conference. That year, William Gibson published Neuromancer, a science fiction novel about a drug-addled hacker battling his way through a dangerous virtual reality cybernetic world run by frightening corporations and their godlike supercomputers. It was a world of no rules, no laws, only power and cleverness. Gibson meant it to be a metaphor for the growth of unrestrained corporate power at a time when poverty and inequality spiked under President Ronald Reagan—a science fiction experiment of what would happen if this trend ran to its natural conclusion. Neuromancer coined the term cyberspace. It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia. Computers and hackers were countercultural rebels taking on power. They were cool. That same year, Apple Computer released its “1984” ad for the Macintosh. Directed by Ridley Scott, who had just wowed audiences with the dystopian hit Blade Runner, and aired during the Super Bowl, Apple’s message could not have been more clear: forget what you know about IBM or corporate mainframes or military computer systems. With Apple at the helm, personal computers are the opposite of what they used to be: they are not about domination and control but about individual rebellion and empowerment. “In a striking departure from the direct, buy-this-product approach of most American corporations, Apple Computer introduced its new line of personal computers with the provocative claim that Macintosh would help save the world from the lockstep society of George Orwell’s novel,” reported the New York Times.36 Interestingly, the paper pointed out that the “1984” ad had grown out of another campaign that the company had abandoned but that had explicitly talked about the ability to misuse computers. A draft of that campaign read: “True enough, there are monster computers lurking in big business and big government that know everything from what motels you’ve stayed at to how much money you have in the bank. But at Apple we’re trying to balance the scales by giving individuals the kind of computer power once reserved for corporations.”
• Big Business, het controleapparaat van de overheid en counterculture: one big happy family?
  A handful of powerful telecommunications companies absorbed most of the privatized NSFNET providers that had been set up with funds from the National Science Foundation a decade earlier. San Francisco Bay Area’s regional provider became part of Verizon. Southern California’s, which was part-owned by the military contractor General Atomics, was absorbed by AT&T. New York’s became part of Cogent Communications, one of the largest backbone companies in the world. The backbone went to Time-Warner. And MCI, which had run the backbone along with IBM, merged with WorldCom, combining two of the biggest Internet service providers in the world.
• Van links naar rechts:
  All the political activity on campus and the increasingly violent nature of the protests only made him move further to the right: to Ayn Rand, libertarian anarchism, and the ideas of nineteenth-century antigovernment fundamentalists and Social Darwinists. He coauthored an essay in the New York Times Magazine that explained the philosophy of libertarianism and criticized the New Left’s focus on wealth redistribution and democratic reforms. To him, this kind of expansive government was the enemy.80 Among his heroes were Ayn Rand and Karl Hess III, former speechwriter for Senator Barry M. Goldwater who rebranded himself as a radical libertarian and saw computer technology as the ultimate antigovernment weapon: “Instead of learning how to make bombs, revolutionaries should master computer programming,” he told a journalist in 1970.81 Rossetto did not heed Hess’s advice. Instead, he enrolled in a business program at Columbia, graduated, dreamed of becoming a novelist, and then spent the next decade drifting around the world. For a man with right-wing libertarian tendencies (de auteur beschouwt hier en verderop in het boek het libertarisme helaas en ten onrechte als rechts, TFB), Rossetto sure had a penchant for showing up in places with left-wing insurgencies: he was in Sri Lanka for the Tamil rebellion and appeared in Peru just in time for the Maoist Shining Path insurgency. He also managed to hang out with mujahedeen in Afghanistan and filed glowing reports in the Christian Science Monitor on their fight against the Soviet Union with American-made weapons.82 Rossetto traveled to the war zone by hitching a ride in a pickup with jihadi fighters.83 Amid all this, he found a job writing editorials for a small investment firm in Paris; met his future partner Jane Metcalfe, who hailed from an old family in Louisville, Kentucky; and launched an early tech magazine called Electric Word that was funded by a Dutch translation software company.84 The magazine went out of business, but during his time there Rossetto got in touch with Stewart Brand and his crew of Bay Area tech boosters. Contact with this influential subculture made him realize that the world lacked a solid technology lifestyle magazine. He was intent on bringing one to life. In 1991, Rossetto and Metcalfe moved to New York to start up the magazine, but all their stateside business and investor leads fizzled. For some reason, they couldn’t drum up excitement. The computer and networking industries were on fire in the Bay Area, yet no one wanted to back their project. No one, that is, except one man: Nicholas Negroponte, a wealthy engineer and businessman who had spent more than two decades working for ARPA.
  Negroponte came from an affluent, highly connected family. His father was a Greek shipping magnate. His older brother, John Negroponte, was a career diplomat and Reagan administration official who had just finished a stint as the highly controversial ambassador to Honduras, where he was accused of playing a central role in a covert CIA-backed counterinsurgency campaign against the left-wing Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua.85 Nicholas Negroponte, like his older brother, was also connected to America’s military-intelligence apparatus, but from a slightly different angle. He was a longtime ARPA contractor and had worked on a variety of military computer initiatives at MIT.86 He had been a prominent member of the ARPANET Cambridge Project. He also ran his own ARPA-funded research outfit at MIT called the Machine Architecture Group (MAG).
• Over de oprichters van Wired en van de TED-conferentie:
  In the early 1990s, when Rossetto and Metcalfe were desperate for investors for their tech lifestyle magazine, Negroponte was one of the most respected and sought-after computer visionaries in the world. So, in 1992, armed with a mockup issue of Wired and a business plan, Rossetto and Metcalfe cornered him at the $1,000-a-head Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference—today known as TED—in Monterey, California. They made their pitch, and to their surprise, Negroponte was impressed and agreed to help them get funding. He lined up meetings with Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, but neither expressed much interest. In the end, Negroponte decided to back the project on his own. He provided $75,000 of seed capital in return for a 10 percent stake. It was a paltry amount for a huge chunk of the business, but Rossetto and Metcalfe agreed. They smartly saw the opportunity: Nicholas Negroponte was a huge name with deep connections to the highest echelons of business, academia, and government. They bet that Negroponte would help prime the investment pump, with his money and involvement brining in other big players who would be willing to invest far greater sums in Wired. They were right. After he came on board, investment money flowed in like water. To help him craft the new magazine, Rossetto hired Stewart Brand’s old apprentice as Wired’s founding executive editor: Kevin Kelly. Pudgy, with an Amish-style beard, Kelly had worked for Stewart Brand in the late 1980s, just as the aging counterculture promoter was beginning to push his publishing business away from communes and into the booming personal computer industry. Kelly was an energetic and eager acolyte, a man ripe for a righteous mission.
  By 1996, Louis Rossetto was ready to cash in on the boom and take the company public. He recruited Goldman Sachs to make it happen, which gave Wired an estimated value of $450 million. The magazine was the face of the dot-com boom and an evangelist for the New Economy, a revolutionary moment in history in which technological progress was supposed to rewrite all the rules and make everything that had come before irrelevant and outdated.
  Wired’s promotion of cutthroat telecom businessmen and Republican politicians and players isn’t so surprising. Louis Rossetto was, after all, a Republican-turned-libertarian who believed in the primacy of business and the free market. There was no ideological disagreement here.
  Wired backed up EFF’s privatized vision, giving the organization space in the magazine to expound its views, while providing fawning coverage of the group’s activities. It compared the lobbying work the EFF was doing on behalf of its powerful telecom donors to the authority-bucking counterculture scene of the 1960s Bay Area. “In some ways, they are the Merry Pranksters, those apostles of LSD, who tripped through the 1960s in a psychedelic bus named Furthur, led by novelist Ken Kesey and chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” wrote Wired journalist Joshua Quittner in a profile of the EFF’s move to Washington, DC.104 “Older and wiser now, they’re on the road again, without the bus and the acid, but dispensing many similar-sounding bromides: Turn on, jack in, get connected. Feed your head with the roar of bits pulsing across the cosmos, and learn something about who you are.”
  Twenty-four years later, Rossetto channeled the same sentiment, promoting personal computers and the Internet as tools that would radically empower the individual and wink armies out of existence. It was a wide-eyed and, perhaps, self-serving view for a man whose fame and fortune rested on the backing of Nicholas Negroponte, a career military contractor whose MIT Media Lab received funding from DARPA even as Rossetto spoke those words. Not surprisingly, the future hasn’t quite worked out according to Rossetto’s dream. The village went global, true. But the lumbering armies of the past did not go away; indeed, as time showed, computer networks and the Internet only expanded the power of American military and intelligence agencies, making them global and omnipresent.
• En zo komen we bij Google en hun connecties met het militair-industrieel complex (er is een bizarre link tussen Google en zijn grote sprong vooruit en 9/11 en de Patriot Act die de NSA machten gaf vergelijkbaar met Google):
  Google cofounder Sergey Brin also remembers where he was on 9/11. But unlike most of us, he had the power to do something. Something of consequence. That morning, Brin rushed into Google’s headquarters on Bayshore Avenue in Mountain View. He quietly convened a small group of his most trusted engineers and managers and charged them with a top-secret assignment: mine Google’s search logs for anything that might help uncover the identity of the people involved in that morning’s attack.
  “Google is big enough at this point that it’s entirely possible the terrorists used it to help plan their attack,” Brin told the antiterror data-mining posse gathered around him. “We can try to identify them based on intersecting sets of search queries conducted during the period prior to the hijackings.” To get them started, he threw together a list of possible search terms, such as “Boeing,” “fuel capacity,” “aviation school.”1 If they discovered several terror-related keywords coming from the same computer, Brin instructed them to try to reverse-engineer the search to reveal the user’s identity and possibly stop the next attack.
  The crack team of terrorist hunters Brin assembled that morning knew all about the type of information the search logs contained; many of them had spent the past three years building what would soon become a multi-billion-dollar targeted advertising business on top of it. So they went looking for suspects. “In a first run, the logs team found about a hundred thousand queries a day that matched some of his criteria,” recalled Douglas Edwards, Google’s first marketing director, in his memoir I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. He was there for the hunt, and he remembered how a deeper analysis of the logs proved disappointing. “The search of our logs for the 9/11 terrorists turned up nothing of interest. The closest we came was a cookie that had searched for both ‘world trade center’ and ‘Egypt air hijack.’ If the terrorists had used Google to plan their attack, they had done so in a way that we couldn’t discover.”4 It’s never been clear whether Brin was searching the logs purely on his own initiative or whether it was an off-the-books request from the FBI or another law enforcement agency. But his data-mining effort preceded by more than a month President George W. Bush’s signing of the Patriot Act, which would give the National Security Agency broad authority to extract and mine search-log data in a very similar way.
• Maar ook Darpa bleef nauw betrokken bij Google:
  It made sense. Back in the 1960s, when the military was dealing with an avalanche of data and needed new tools to digest and analyze the information, ARPA was tasked with finding a solution. Three decades later, the Digital Library Initiative had evolved into an extension of the same project, driven by the same needs. And just like old times, DARPA played a role.22 Indeed, in 1994, just one year before Page had arrived at Stanford, DARPA’s funding of the Digital Library Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University produced a notable success: Lycos, a search engine named after Lycosidae, the scientific name for the wolf spider family.23 Larry Page’s interest in search aligned perfectly with the goals of the Digital Library Initiative, and his research was carried out under its umbrella.24 When he finally published his first research paper in 1998, it bore the familiar disclosure: “funded by DARPA.”
  The agency that had created the Internet remained a central player. 
  In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved into the garage of a house owned by Susan Wojcicki, the sister of Brin’s future wife, Anne Wojcicki. They had an initial $100,000 check from Andy Bechtolsheim, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, a powerful computer company that itself had come out of an ARPA-funded 1970s computer research program at Stanford University.36 The initial small investment was followed by a $25 million tranche from two powerful venture capital outfits, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
• Google, meer dan een zoekmachine:
  All of this was then cross-referenced and combined with data collected through Google’s search and browsing logs, as well as third-party data providers, and added to a user profile. The patents made it clear that this profiling wasn’t restricted to registered Gmail users but applied to anyone who sent email to a Gmail account. Taken together, these technical documents revealed that the company was developing a platform that attempted to track and profile everyone who came in touch with a Google product. It was, in essence, an elaborate system of private surveillance.
• En de link tussen Google en Darpa-projecten is meer dan toeval:
  There was another quality to it. The language in the patent filings—descriptions of using “psychographic information,” “personality characteristics,” and “education levels” to profile and predict people’s interests—bore eerie resemblance to the early data-driven counterinsurgency initiatives funded by ARPA in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, the agency had experimented with mapping the value systems and social relationships of rebellious tribes and political groups, in the hope of isolating the factors that made them revolt and, ultimately, use that information to build predictive models to stop insurgencies before they happened. The aborted Project Camelot was one example. Another was J. C. R. Licklider and Ithiel de Sola Pool’s 1969 ARPA Cambridge Project, which aimed to develop a suite of computer tools that would allow military researchers to build predictive models using complex data, including factors such as “political participation of various countries,” “membership in associations,” “youth movements,” and “peasant attitudes and behavior.”
  The Cambridge Project had been an early attempt at the underlying technology that made prediction and analysis possible. Naturally, Google’s predictive system, which arrived thirty years later, was more advanced and sophisticated than ARPA’s crude first-generation database tools. But it was also very similar. The company wanted to ingest search, browsing history, and email data to build predictive profiles capable of guessing the future interests and behavior of its users. There was only one difference: instead of preventing political insurgencies, Google wanted the data to sell people products and services with targeted ads.
  One was military, the other commercial. But at their core, both systems were dedicated to profiling and prediction. The type of data plugged into them was irrelevant.
  UC Berkeley law professor Chris Hoofnagle, an expert on information privacy law, argued before the California Senate that the difference between military and commercial profiling was illusory. He compared Google’s email scanning to the surveillance and prediction project at DARPA’s then-active Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a predictive policing technology that was initially funded by DARPA and handed to the National Security Agency after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
• En kijk eens wie we hier hebben: de uitvinder van het internet:
  After losing the 2000 presidential election to George Bush, Vice President Gore pivoted to a lucrative career as a tech venture capitalist. As part of that pivot, he accepted Google’s offer to be a “virtual board member,” meaning that from time to time he used his power and connections to resolve Google’s political problems. Now, at McLaughlin’s request, Gore summoned the prickly senator to his suites at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown San Francisco. There he gave her a stern talking to, lecturing her about algorithms and robotic analysis. “He was incredible,” recounted McLaughlin. “He stood up and was drawing charts and did this long analogy to the throw weight of the ICBM, the Minuteman missile.”66 Whatever he did in that room, it worked. Senator Figueroa dropped her opposition, and the first legal challenge to Google’s surveillance business model faded. And at least one journalist rejoiced: “The only population likely not to be delighted by Gmail are those still uncomfortable with those computer-generated ads. Those people are free to ignore or even bad-mouth Gmail, but they shouldn’t try to stop Google from offering Gmail to the rest of us,” declared New York Times technology journalist David Pogue in May. “We know a good thing when we see it.”
• Een andere programma was PredPol : Predictive Policing (en weer speelt Google een rol).
  In 2014, PredPol was one of many companies competing for a fledgling but rapidly expanding market in predictive policing technologies.72 Big, established companies like IBM, LexisNexis, and Palantir all offered predictive crime products.73 PredPol, though small, has raked in contracts with police departments across the country: Los Angeles; Orange County in central Florida; Reading, Pennsylvania; Tacoma, Washington. Local newspapers and television stations loved PredPol’s story: the high-tech miracle cure cash-strapped police departments had been waiting for. It enabled law enforcement officers to reduce crime at low cost. With a price tag of $25,000 to $250,000 a year, depending on a city’s population, PredPol seemed like a bargain. Predictive policing was young, but already it was criticized by activists and social scientists who saw it as a rebranding of the age-old tactic of racial and economic profiling spiffed up with an objective, data-driven sheen.74 Wealthy areas and individuals never seemed to be targeted for predictive policing, nor did the technique focus on white-collar criminals. Journalists and criminologists blasted PredPol, in particular for making claims that it simply could not back up.
  Despite these knocks, PredPol had supporters and backers in Silicon Valley. Its board of directors and advisory board included serious heavy hitters: executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay, as well as a former managing director of In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital outfit operating in Silicon Valley.76 Back in his office, Brantingham offers little about the company’s ties to these Internet giants. Another PredPol executive informed me that, behind the scenes, Google was one of PredPol’s biggest boosters and collaborators. “Google actually came to us,” Donnie Fowler, PredPol’s director of business development, told me by phone.77 “This is not the case of a little, tiny company going to a big behemoth like Google and saying that the only way we’ll survive is if we piggyback on you. It is a very mutually beneficial relationship.”
  Cops? Government contractors? Data-driven counterinsurgency technology? Crime prediction powered by a ubiquitous Internet platform? Was he talking about Google? Or was it one of those Cold War cybernetic counterinsurgency systems the Pentagon dreamed about for so long? Was there a difference?
• Is het angstzweed nog niet uitgebroken? En dan moeten we het nog over eBay en Amazon hebben:
  Pierre Omidyar’s eBay, the world’s biggest online auction site, deployed specialized software that monitored user data and matched them with information available online to unmask fraudulent sellers.81 Jeff Bezos dreamed of building his online retailer Amazon into the “everything store,” a global sales platform that would anticipate users’ every need and desire and deliver products without being asked.82 To do that, Amazon deployed a system for monitoring and profiling. It recorded people’s shopping habits, their movie preferences, the books they were interested in, how fast they read books on their Kindles, and the highlights and margin notes they made. It also monitored its warehouse workers, tracking their movements and timing their performance.83 Amazon requires incredible processing power to run such a massive data business, a need that spawned a lucrative side business of renting out space on its massive servers to other companies. Today, the company is not just the world’s biggest retailer but also the world’s biggest Internet hosting company, bringing in $10 billion a year from storing other firms’ data.
• Maar terug naar Google dat intussen is uitgegroeid tot een mastodont die vele aspecten van ons leven opslaat, analyseert en manipuleert. Het is het machtigste bedrijf online en heeft links met het transhumanisme (DNA sequencering voor genetische manipulatie, levensverlenging....). Het is uiteraard ook de eigenaar van YouTube.
  As the Internet expanded, Google grew along with it. Flush with cash, Google went on a dizzying shopping spree. It bought companies and start-ups, absorbing them into its burgeoning platform. It went beyond search and email, broadened into word processing, databases, blogging, social media networks, cloud hosting, mobile platforms, browsers, navigation aids, cloud-based laptops, and a whole range of office and productivity applications. It could be hard to keep track of them all: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Maps, Android, Google Play, Google Cloud, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Hangouts, Google Chrome, Google+, Google Sites, Google Developer, Google Voice, Google Analytics, Android TV. It blasted beyond pure Internet services and delved into fiber-optic telecommunication systems, tablets, laptops, home security cameras, self-driving cars, shopping delivery, robots, electric power plants, life extension technology, cyber security, and biotech. The company even launched a powerful in-house investment bank that now rivals Wall Street companies, investing money in everything from Uber to obscure agricultural crop monitoring start-ups, ambitious human DNA sequencing companies like 23andME, and a secretive life extension research center called Calico.88 No matter what service it deployed or what market it entered, surveillance and prediction were cooked into the business. The data flowing through Google’s system are staggering. By the end of 2016, Google’s Android was installed on 82 percent of all new smartphones sold around the world, with over 1.5 billion Android users globally.89 At the same time, Google handled billions of searches and YouTube plays daily and had a billion active Gmail users, which meant it had access to most of the world’s emails.90 Some analysts estimate that 25 percent of all Internet traffic in North America goes through Google servers.91 The company isn’t just connected to the Internet, it is the Internet.
  By 2017, it had $90 billion in revenues and $20 billion in profits, with seventy-two thousand full-time employees working out of seventy offices in more than forty countries.92 It had a market capitalization of $593 billion, making it the second-most-valuable public company in the world—second only to Apple, another Silicon Valley giant.93 Meanwhile, other Internet companies depend on Google for survival. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft, and Uber—all have built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. The more people use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them.
• Google is dus de gatekeeper van het internet en doet andere bedrijven zoals Twitter en Facebook naar haar pijpen dansen. Maar wat weet Google allemaal?
  What does Google know? What can it guess? Well, it seems just about everything. “One of the things that eventually happens … is that we don’t need you to type at all,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said in a moment of candor in 2010. “Because we know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”94 He later added, “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.” It is a scary thought, considering Google is no longer a cute start-up but a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximize profits for shareholders. Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs, or a military contractor like Lockheed Martin had this kind of access.
  Even as Google grew to dominate the consumer Internet, a second side of the company emerged, one that rarely got much notice: Google the government contractor. As it turns out, the same platforms and services that Google deploys to monitor people’s lives and grab their data could be put to use running huge swaths of the US government, including the military, spy agencies, police departments, and schools. The key to this transformation was a small start-up now known as Google Earth.   In 2003, a San Francisco company called Keyhole Incorporated was on the ropes. Named like the CIA’s secret 1960s “Keyhole” spy satellite program, the company had been launched two years earlier as a spinoff from a video game outfit. Its CEO, John Hanke, hailed from Texas and had worked for a time in the US Embassy in Myanmar. He told journalists that the inspiration for his company came from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a cult sci-fi novel in which the hero taps into a program created by the “Central Intelligence Corporation” called Planet Earth, a virtual reality construct designed to “keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.”95 Life would imitate art.96.
• Keyhole: een ander Sillicon Valley bedrijf dat verbonden is met de CIA en het Pentagon. Keyhole speelde een "key" role in de "shock and awe" campagne tegen Saddam Hoessein tijdens de tweede Irakoorlog.
  Keyhole derived from video game technology but deployed it in the real world, creating a program that stitched satellite images and aerial photographs into seamless three-dimensional computer models of the earth that could be explored as if they were in a virtual reality game world. It was a groundbreaking product that allowed anyone with an Internet connection to virtually fly over anywhere in the world. The only problem was Keyhole’s timing; it was a bit off. It launched just as the dot-com bubble blew up in Silicon Valley’s face. Funding dried up, and Keyhole found itself struggling to survive.97 Luckily, the company was saved just in time by the very entity that inspired it: the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, the CIA had launched In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund whose mission was to invest in start-ups that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.98 Keyhole seemed a perfect fit.99
  The CIA poured an unknown amount of money into Keyhole; the exact number remains classified. The investment was finalized in early 2003, and it was made in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a major intelligence organization with 14,500 employees and a $5 billion budget whose job was to deliver satellite intelligence to the CIA and the Pentagon. Known by its alphabet-soup acronym “NGA,” the spy agency’s motto was: “Know the Earth … Show the Way … Understand the World.”100 The CIA and NGA were not just investors; they were also clients, and they involved themselves in customizing Keyhole’s virtual map product to meet their own needs.101 Months after In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole software was already integrated into operational service and deployed to support American troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the shock-and-awe campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein.102 Intelligence officials were impressed with the “video game-like” simplicity of its virtual maps.
• Keyhole werd in 2004 door Google opgekocht (inclusief de CIA-operatoren werkzaam bij Keyhole) en werd vervolgend omgeturnd in....Google Maps. Sindsdien is Google in feite gewoon een arm van de Amerikaanse overheid (of was dat de bedoeling all along?).
  Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole. So did Sergey Brin. He liked it so much he insisted on personally demo-ing the app for Google executives. In an account published in Wired, he barged in on a company meeting, punched in the address of every person present, and used the program to virtually fly over their homes.105 In 2004, the same year Google went public, Brin and Page bought the company outright, CIA investors and all.106 They then absorbed the company into Google’s growing Internet applications platform. Keyhole was reborn as Google Earth. The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet company and began integrating with the US government. When Google bought Keyhole, it also acquired an In-Q-Tel executive named Rob Painter, who came with deep connections to the world of intelligence and military contracting, including US Special Operations, the CIA, and major defense firms like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.107 At Google, Painter was planted in a new dedicated sales and lobbying division called Google Federal, located in Reston, Virginia, a short drive from the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. His job at Google was to help the company grab a slice of the lucrative military-intelligence contracting market. Or, as Painter described in contractor-bureaucratese, “evangelizing and implementing Google Enterprise solutions for a host of users across the Intelligence and Defense Communities.”
  Google had closed a few previous deals with intelligence agencies. In 2003, it scored a $2.1 million contract to outfit the NSA with a customized search solution that could scan and recognize millions of documents in twenty-four languages, including on-call tech support in case anything went wrong. In 2004, as it was dealing with the fallout over Gmail email scanning, Google landed a search contract with the CIA. The value of the deal isn’t known, but the CIA did ask Google’s permission to customize the CIA’s internal Google search page by placing the CIA’s seal in one of the Google Os. “I told our sales rep to give them the okay if they promised not to tell anyone. I didn’t want it spooking privacy advocates,” Douglas Edwards wrote in I’m Feeling Lucky.108 Deals like these picked up pace and increased in scope after Google’s Keyhole acquisition.
  In 2006, Painter’s Google Federal went on a hiring spree, snapping up managers and salespeople from the army, air force, CIA, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.109 It beefed up its lobbying muscle and assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives. Google even grabbed ARPA’s old show pony: Vint Cerf, who, as Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist, served as a symbolic bridge between Google and the military.
  While Google’s public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age.110 “We’re functionally more than tripling the team each year,” Painter said in 2008.111 It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s expansion into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off. In 2007, it partnered with Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for the NGA that displayed US military bases in Iraq and marked out Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad—important information for a region that had experienced a bloody sectarian insurgency and ethnic cleansing campaign between the two groups.112 In 2008, Google won a contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modeled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited by the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies.113 Not long after that, Google contracted with the US Army to equip fifty thousand soldiers with a customized suite of mobile Google services.114 In 2010, as a sign of just how deeply Google had integrated with US intelligence agencies, it won a no-bid exclusive $27 million contract to provide the NGA with “geospatial visualization services,” effectively making the Internet giant the “eyes” of America’s defense and intelligence apparatus. Competitors criticized the NGA for not opening the contract to the customary bidding process, but the agency defended its decision, saying it had no choice: it had spent years working with Google on secret and top-secret programs to build Google Earth technology according to its needs and could not go with any other company.115
  Google has been tightlipped about the details and scope of its contracting business. It does not list this revenue in a separate column in quarterly earnings reports to investors, nor does it provide the sum to reporters. But an analysis of the federal contracting database maintained by the US government, combined with information gleaned from Freedom of Information Act requests and published periodic reports on the company’s military work, reveals that Google has been doing brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth, and Google Enterprise (now known as G Suite) products to just about every major military and intelligence agency: navy, army, air force, Coast Guard, DARPA, NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, NGA, and the State Department.116 Sometimes Google sells directly to the government, but it also works with established contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), a California-based intelligence mega-contractor that has so many former NSA employees working for it that it is known in the business as “NSA West.”117 Google’s entry into this market makes sense. By the time Google Federal went online in 2006, the Pentagon was spending the bulk of its budget on private contractors. That year, of the $60 billion US intelligence budget, 70 percent, or $42 billion, went to corporations. That means that, although the government pays the bill, the actual work is done by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, and other powerful contractors.118 And this isn’t just in the defense sector. By 2017, the federal government was spending $90 billion a year on information technology.119 It’s a huge market—one in which Google seeks to maintain a strong presence. And its success has been all but guaranteed. Its products are the best in the business.120 A sign of how vital Google has become to the US government: in 2010, following a disastrous intrusion into its system by what the company believes was a group of Chinese government hackers, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the National Security Agency.121 “According to officials who were privy to the details of Google’s arrangements with the NSA, the company agreed to information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence from the NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers,” wrote defense reporter Shane Harris in @War, a history of warfare. “It was a quid pro quo, information forinformation. And from the NSA’s perspective, information in exchange for protection.”122 This made perfect sense. Google servers supplied critical services to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department, just to name a few. It was part of the military family and essential to American society. It needed to be protected, too.
• Google controleert nu eigenlijk ook de scholen, lokale overheden en de politiediensten:
  Google didn’t just work with intelligence and military agencies but also sought to penetrate every level of society, including civilian federal agencies, cities, states, local police departments, emergency responders, hospitals, public schools, and all sorts of companies and nonprofits. In 2011, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that researches weather and the environment, switched over to Google.123 In 2014, the city of Boston deployed Google to run the information infrastructure for its eighty thousand employees—from police officers to teachers—and even migrated its old emails to the Google cloud.124 The Forest Service and the Federal Highway Administration use Google Earth and Gmail. In 2016, New York City tapped Google to install and run free Wi-Fi stations across the city.125 California, Nevada, and Iowa, meanwhile, depend on Google for cloud computing platforms that predict and catch welfare fraud.126 Meanwhile, Google mediates the education of more than half of America’s public school students.127 “What we really do is allow you to aggregate, collaborate and enable,” explained Scott Ciabattari, a Google Federal sales rep, during a 2013 government contracting conference in Laramie, Wyoming. He was pitching a room full of civil servants, telling them that Google was all about getting them—intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers, and police officers—access to the right information at the right time.128 He ran through a few examples: tracking flu outbreaks, monitoring floods and wildfires, safely serving criminal warrants, integrating surveillance cameras and face recognition systems, and even helping police officers respond to school shootings. “We are starting to see, unfortunately, with some of the incidents that happen with schools, the ability to do a floor plan,” he said.  “We are getting this request more and more. ‘Can you help us publish all the floorplans for our school district. If there is a shooting disaster, God forbid, we want to know where things are.’ Having that ability on a smart phone. Being able to see that information quickly at the right time saves lives.” A few months after this presentation, Ciabattari met with Oakland officials to discuss how Google could help the California city build its police surveillance center.
• Maar het is alleen Google:
  eBay built up an internal police division headed by veterans of the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Justice. It is staffed by over a thousand private investigators, who work closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operates.131 The company runs seminars and training sessions and offers travel junkets to cops around the world.132 eBay is proud of its relationship with law enforcement and boasts that its efforts have led to the arrests of three thousand people around the world—roughly three per day since the division started.133 Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA.134 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies.135 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophisticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA.
  Facebook, too, is cozy with the military. It poached former DARPA head Regina Dugan to run its secretive “Building 8” research division, which is involved in everything from artificial intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet networks. Facebook is betting big on virtual reality as the user interface of the future. The Pentagon is, too. According to reports, Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality headset has already been integrated into DARPA’s Plan X, a $110 million project to build an immersive, fully virtual reality environment to fight cyberwars.138 It sounds like something straight out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it seems to work, too. In 2016, DARPA announced that Plan X would be transitioned to operational use by the Pentagon’s Cyber Command within a year.
• Terug naar Google, dat ook investeerde in CrowdStrike een militaire aannemer bij het Pentagon die het onderzoek leidde naar de zogenaamde hacking door de Russen in de servers dan de DNC:
  It has invested $100 million in CrowdStrike, a major military and intelligence cyber defense contractor that, among other things, led the investigation into the alleged 2016 Russian government hacks of the Democratic National Committee.142 And it also runs JigSaw, a hybrid think tank–technology incubator aimed at leveraging Internet technology to solve thorny foreign policy problems, everything from terrorism to censorship and cyberwarfare.143
• En dan is er JigSaw een bedrijfje opgericht door Eric Schmidt, kennis van zowel G.W.Bush als Barack Obame en later de CEO van Google. JigSaw heeft ook een interessante geschiedenis:
  Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a twenty-nine-year-old State Department whiz kid who served under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, JigSaw has launched multiple projects with foreign policy and national security implications.144 It ran polling for the US government to help war-torn Somalia draft a new constitution, developed tools to track global arms sales, and worked with a start-up funded by the State Department to help people in Iran and China route around Internet censorship.145 It also built a platform to combat online terrorist recruitment and radicalization, which worked by identifying Google users interested in Islamic extremist topics and diverting them to State Department webpages and videos developed to dissuade people from taking that path.146 Google calls this the “Redirect Method,” a part of Cohen’s larger idea of using Internet platforms to wage “digital counterinsurgency.”147
  And, in 2012, as the civil war in Syria intensified and American support for rebel forces there increased, JigSaw brainstormed ways it could help push Bashar al-Assad from power. Among them: a tool that visually maps high-level defections from Assad’s government, which Cohen wanted to beam into Syria as propaganda to give “confidence to the opposition.” “I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like,” Cohen wrote to several top aides of Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state. “Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything else you think we need to account for or think about before we launch.”148 As leaked emails show, Secretary Clinton was intrigued, telling her aides to print out Cohen’s mockup of the application so she could look at it herself.149 JigSaw seemed to blur the line between public and corporate diplomacy, and at least one former State Department official accused it of fomenting regime change in the Middle East.
  “Google is getting [White House] and State Dept. support & air cover. In reality, they are doing things the CIA cannot do,” wrote Fred Burton, a Stratfor executive and former intelligence agent of the Diplomatic Security Service, the armed security branch of the State Department.151
• Nog een andere privaat surveillence bedrijf is Tor, ook al begon het anders (al was ook dat maar schijn):
  A big part of Tor’s mystique and appeal was that it was supposedly a fiercely independent and radical organization—an enemy of the state. Its official story was that it was funded by a wide variety of sources, which gave it total freedom to do whatever it wanted. But as I analyzed the organization’s financial documents, I found that the opposite was true. Tor had come out of a joint US Navy–DARPA military project in the early 2000s and continued to rely on a series of federal contracts after it was spun off into a private nonprofit. This funding came from the Pentagon, the State Department, and at least one organization that derived from the CIA. These contracts added up to several million dollars a year and, most years, accounted for more than 90 percent of Tor’s operating budget. Tor was a federal military contractor. It even had its own federal contracting number.
  The deeper I went, the stranger it got. I learned that just about everyone involved in developing Tor was in some way tied up with the very state that they were supposed to be protecting people from. This included Tor’s founder, Roger Dingledine, who spent a summer working at the NSA and who had brought Tor to life under a series of DARPA and US Navy contracts.79 I even uncovered an old audio copy of a talk Dingledine gave in 2004, right as he was setting up Tor as an independent organization. “I contract for the United States Government to build anonymity technology for them and deploy it,” he admitted at the time.80 I was confused.
  The Tor Project occupies a hallowed place in the mythology and social galaxy of the Chaos Computer Club. Every year, Tor’s annual presentation—“The State of the Onion”—is the most well-attended event in the program. An audience of several thousand packs a massive auditorium to watch Tor developers and celebrity supporters talk about their fights against Internet surveillance. Last year, the stage featured Laura Poitras, the Academy Award–winning director of the Edward Snowden documentary, Citizen Four. In her speech, she held up Tor as a powerful antidote to America’s surveillance state. “When I was communicating with Snowden for several months before I met him in Hong Kong, we talked often about the Tor network, and it is something that actually he feels is vital for online privacy and to defeat surveillance. It is our only tool to be able to do that,” she said to wild applause, Snowden’s face projected onto a giant screen behind her.
• Dus ook Edward Snowdon lijkt dus niet helemaal zuiver op de graad. Een andere geval van "controlled opposition"? Dat laat ik aan u oordeel over. Maar het kan als we zien wat bvb. met de Electronic Frontier Foundation is gebeurd.
  EFF was only a decade old at the time, but it already had developed a history of working with law enforcement agencies and aiding the military. In 1994, EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so that it could be wiretapped by the FBI.22 In 1999, EFF worked to support NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo with something called the “Kosovo Privacy Project,” which aimed to keep the region’s Internet access open during military action.23 Selling a Pentagon intelligence project as a grassroots privacy tool—it didn’t seem all that wild. Indeed, in 2002, a few years before it funded Tor, EFF cofounder Perry Barlow casually admitted that he had been consulting for intelligence agencies for a decade.24 It seemed that the worlds of soldiers, spies, and privacy weren’t as far apart as they appeared. EFF’s support for Tor was a big deal. The organization commanded respect in Silicon Valley and was widely seen as the ACLU of the Internet Age. The fact that it backed Tor meant that no hard questions would be asked about the anonymity tool’s military origins as it transitioned to the civilian world. And that’s exactly what happened.
  The Tor Project was the BBG’s most sophisticated Internet Freedom weapon, and the agency pushed Dingledine to reach out to foreign political activists and get them to use the tool. But as Dingledine quickly discovered, his organization’s ties to the US government aroused suspicion and hampered his ability to attract users. One of those lessons came in 2008. Early that year, the BBG instructed Dingledine to carry out what he dubbed the “Russian Deployment Plan,” which involved adding a Russian language option to Tor’s interface and working to train Russian activists in how to properly use the service.
• Tor dus werkte aan programma's waarmee de V.S. zich mengde in de politieke aangelegenheden in...Rusland. De omgekeerde wereld, dus hoor je hier niets van in de msm. En Rusland was niet de enige.
  The correspondence left little room for doubt. The Tor Project was not a radical indie organization fighting The Man. For all intents and purposes, it was The Man. Or, at least, The Man’s right hand. Intermixed with updates on new hires, status reports, chatty suggestions for hikes and vacation spots, and the usual office banter, internal correspondence reveals Tor’s close collaboration with the BBG and multiple other wings of the US government, in particular those that dealt with foreign policy and soft-power projection. Messages describe meetings, trainings, and conferences with the NSA, CIA, FBI, and State Department.58 There are strategy sessions and discussions about the need to influence news coverage and control bad press.59 The correspondence also shows Tor employees taking orders from their handlers in the federal government, including plans to deploy their anonymity tool in countries deemed hostile to US interests: China, Iran, Vietnam, and, of course, Russia. Despite Tor’s public insistence it would never put in any backdoors that gave the US government secret privileged access to Tor’s network, the correspondence shows that in at least one instance in 2007, Tor revealed a security vulnerability to its federal backer before alerting the public, potentially giving the government an opportunity to exploit the weakness to unmask Tor users before it was fixed.
• En nu wordt het pas echt vreemd....van Tor naar....Julian Assange en Wikileaks:
  Over the next several years, Dingledine’s reports back to the BBG were filled with descriptions of Appelbaum’s successful outreach. “Lots of Tor advocacy,” wrote Dingledine. “Another box of Tor stickers applied to many many laptops. Lots of people were interested in Tor and many many people installed Tor on both laptops and servers. This advocacy resulted in at least two new high bandwidth nodes that he helped the administrators configure.”75 Internal documents show that the proposed budget for Dingledine and Appelbaum’s global publicity program was $20,000 a year, which included a public relations strategy.76 “Crafting a message that the media can understand is a critical piece of this,” Dingledine explained in a 2008 proposal. “This isn’t so much about getting good press about Tor as it is about preparing journalists so if they see bad press and consider spreading it further, they’ll stop and think….”77 Appelbaum was energetic and did his best to promote Tor among privacy activists, cryptographers, and, most important of all, the radical cypherpunk movement that dreamed of using encryption to take on the power of governments and liberate the world from centralized control. In 2010, he snagged the support of Julian Assange, a silver-haired hacker who wanted to free the world of secrets.
  Appelbaum watched as Assange slowly erected WikiLeaks from nothing, building up a dedicated following by trawling hacker conferences for would-be leakers. The two became good friends, and Appelbaum would later brag to journalist Andy Greenberg that they were so close, they’d fuck chicks together. One New Year’s morning the two woke up in an apartment in Berlin in one bed with two women. “That was how we rolled in 2010,” he said. Soon after that supposedly wild night, Appelbaum decided to attach himself to the WikiLeaks cause. He spent a few weeks with Assange and the original WikiLeaks crew in Iceland as they prepared their first major release and helped secure the site’s anonymous submissions system using Tor’s hidden service feature, which hid the physical location of WikiLeaks servers and in theory made them much less susceptible to surveillance and attack. From then on, the WikiLeaks site proudly advertised Tor: “secure, anonymous, distributed network for maximum security.”
  Assange was suddenly one of the most famous people in the world—a fearless radical taking on the awesome power of the United States. Appelbaum did his best to be Assange’s right-hand man. He served as the organization’s official American representative and bailed the founder of WikiLeaks out of tough spots when the heat from US authorities got too hot.81 Appelbaum became so intertwined with WikiLeaks that apparently some staffers talked about him leading the organization if something were to happen to Assange.82 But Assange kept firm control of WikiLeaks, even after he was forced to go into hiding at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to escape extradition back to Sweden to face an investigation of rape allegations.
  It’s not clear whether Assange knew that Appelbaum’s salary was being paid by the same government he was trying to destroy. What is clear is that Assange gave Appelbaum and Tor wide credit for helping WikiLeaks. “Jake has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause,” he told a reporter. “Tor’s importance to WikiLeaks cannot be understated.”
  His association with WikiLeaks and Assange boosted the Tor Project’s public profile and radical credentials. Support and accolades poured in from journalists, privacy organizations, and government watchdogs. The American Civil Liberties Union partnered with Appelbaum on an Internet privacy project, and New York’s Whitney Museum—one of the leading modern art museums in the world—invited him for a “Surveillance Teach-In.”86 The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Tor its Pioneer Award, and Roger Dingledine made it on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers for protecting “anyone and everyone from the dangers of Big Brother.”87 As for Tor’s deep, ongoing ties to the US government? Well, what of them? To any doubters, Jacob Appelbaum was held up as living, breathing proof of the radical independence of the Tor Project. “If the users or developers he meets worry that Tor’s government funding compromises its ideals, there’s no one better than Appelbaum to show the group doesn’t take orders from the feds,” wrote journalist Andy Greenberg in This Machine Kills Secrets, a book about WikiLeaks. “Appelbaum’s best evidence of Tor’s purity from Big Brother’s interference, perhaps, is his very public association with WikiLeaks, the American government’s least favorite website.”
  With Julian Assange endorsing Tor, reporters assumed that the US government saw the anonymity nonprofit as a threat. But internal documents obtained through FOIA from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (USAGM), as well as an analysis of Tor’s government contracts, paint a different picture. They reveal that Appelbaum and Dingledine worked with Assange on securing WikiLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their handlers at the BBG informed about their relationship and even provided information about the inner workings of WikiLeaks’s secure submissions system.
  “Talked to the WikiLeaks people (Daniel and Julian) about their use of Tor hidden services, and how we can make things better for them,” Dingledine wrote in a progress report he sent to the BBG in January 2008.
  “It turns out they use the hidden service entirely as a way to keep users from screwing up—either it works and they know they’re safe or it fails, but either way they don’t reveal what they’re trying to leak locally. So I’d like to add a new ‘secure service’ feature that’s just like a hidden service but it only makes one hop from the server side rather than three. A more radical design would be for the ‘intro point’ to be the service itself, so it really would be like an exit enclave.”88 In another progress report sent to the BBG two years later, in February 2010, Dingledine wrote, “Jacob and WikiLeaks people met with policymakers in Iceland to discuss freedom of speech, freedom of press, and that online privacy should be a fundamental right.” No one at the BBG raised any objections. To the contrary, they appeared to be supportive. We do not know if anyone at the BBG forwarded this information to some other government body, but it would not be hard to imagine that information about WikiLeaks’ security infrastructure and submission system was of great interest to US intelligence agencies.
  Perhaps most telling was that support from the BBG continued even after WikiLeaks began publishing classified government information and Appelbaum became the target of a larger Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks. For example, on July 31, 2010, CNET reported that Appelbaum had been detained at the Las Vegas airport and questioned about his relationship with WikiLeaks.89 News of the detention made headlines around the world, once again highlighting Appelbaum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week later, Tor’s executive director Andrew Lewman, clearly worried that this might affect Tor’s funding, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smoothing things over and answering “any questions you may have about the recent press regarding Jake and WikiLeaks.” But Lewman was in for a pleasant surprise: Roger Dingledine had been keeping the folks at the BBG in the loop, and everything seemed to be okay. “Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a number of questions when he met us this week in DC,” Berman replied.90 Unfortunately, Berman didn’t explain in the email what he and Dingledine discussed about Appelbaum and WikiLeaks during their meeting. What we do know is that Tor’s association with WikiLeaks produced no real negative impact on Tor’s government contracts.91 Its 2011 contracts came in without a hitch—$150,000 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors and $227,118 from the State Department.92 Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of money from the Pentagon: a new $503,706 annual contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, an elite information and intelligence unit that houses a top-secret cyber-warfare division. The navy contract was passed through SRI, the old Stanford military contractor that had done counterinsurgency, networking, and chemical weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larger navy “Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance” program to improve military operations. A year later, Tor would see its government contracts more than double to $2.2 million: $353,000 from the State Department, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors.94
• Tor speelde ook een rol in de zogenaamde Arab Spring, wat betekent dat de V.S. achter deze zogenaamde opstand zat:
  Activists later put the skills taught at these training sessions to use during the Arab Spring, routing around Internet blocks that their governments threw up to prevent them from using social media to organize protests. “There would be no access to Twitter or Facebook in some of these places if you didn’t have Tor. All of the sudden, you had all these dissidents exploding under their noses, and then down the road you had a revolution,” Nasser Weddady, a prominent Arab Spring activist from Mauritania, later told Rolling Stone. Weddady, who had taken part in the Tor Project’s training sessions and who had translated a widely circulated guide on how to use the tool into Arabic, credited it with helping keep the Arab Spring uprisings alive. “Tor rendered the government’s efforts completely futile. They simply didn’t have the know-how to counter that move.”100 From a higher vantage point, the Tor Project was a wild success. It had matured into a powerful foreign policy tool—a soft-power cyber weapon with multiple uses and benefits. It hid spies and military agents on the Internet, enabling them to carry out their missions without leaving a trace. It was used by the US government as a persuasive regime-change weapon, a digital crowbar that prevented countries from exercising sovereign control over their own Internet infrastructure. Counterintuitively, Tor also emerged as a focal point for antigovernment privacy activists and organizations, a huge cultural success that made Tor that much more effective for its government backers by drawing fans and helping shield the project from scrutiny. And Tor was just the beginning. The Arab Spring provided the US government with the confirmation it was looking for. Social media, combined with technologies like Tor, could be tapped to bring huge masses of people onto the streets and could even trigger revolutions. Diplomats in Washington called it “democracy promotion.” Critics called it regime change.101 But it didn’t matter what you called it. The US government saw that it could leverage the Internet to sow discord and inflame political instability in countries it considered hostile to US interests. Good or bad, it could weaponize social media and use it for insurgency. And it wanted more.
  In the wake of the Arab Spring, the US government directed even more resources to Internet Freedom technologies. The plan was to go beyond the Tor Project and launch all sorts of crypto tools to leverage the power of social media to help foreign activists build political movements and organize protests: encrypted chat apps and ultrasecure operating systems designed to prevent governments from spying on activists, anonymous whistle-blowing platforms that could help expose government corruption, and wireless networks that could be deployed instantaneously anywhere in the world to keep activists connected even if their government turned off the Internet.103 Strangely enough, these efforts were about to get a major credibility boost from an unlikely source: an NSA contractor by the name of Edward Snowden.
• En hier hebben we Edward Snowden weer:
  In Berlin, Appelbaum caught another lucky break for the Tor Project. In 2013, his good friend and sometimes-lover Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker who also lived in the German capital in self-imposed exile, was contacted by a mysterious source who told her he had access to the crown jewels of the National Security Agency: documents that would blow America’s surveillance apparatus wide open.107 Poitras tapped Appelbaum’s knowledge of Internet systems to come up with a list of questions to vet the possible leaker and to make sure he really was the NSA technician he claimed to be. This source turned out to be Edward Snowden.
  From the start, the Tor Project stood at the center of Snowden’s story. The leaker’s endorsement and promotion introduced the project to a global audience, boosting Tor’s worldwide user base from one million to six million almost overnight and injecting it into the heart of a burgeoning privacy movement. In Russia, where the BBG and Dingledine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deployment plan, use of the software increased from twenty thousand daily connections to somewhere around two hundred thousand.
  Snowden didn’t talk about Tor’s continued government funding, nor did he address an apparent contradiction: why the US government would fund a program that supposedly limited its own power.
  Indeed, a lot of hate and malice was pointed in Snowden’s direction, but to those running the Internet Freedom wing of the US military intelligence apparatus, his embrace of Tor and crypto culture could not have come at a better moment. In early January 2014, six months after Snowden’s leaks, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, an omnibus federal spending bill. Tucked into the bill’s roughly fifteen hundred pages was a short provision that dedicated $50.5 million to the expansion of the US government’s Internet Freedom arsenal. The funds were to be split evenly between the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors.113 Although Congress had been providing funds for various anticensorship programs for years, this was the first time that it budgeted money specifically for Internet Freedom. The motivation for this expansion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US government would maintain its technological advantage in the censorship arms race that began in the early 2000s, but the funds were also going into developing a new generation of tools aimed at leveraging the power of the Internet to help foreign opposition activists organize into cohesive political movements.
  But if OTF appeared scrappy, it was also extremely well connected. The organization was supported by a star-studded team—from best-selling science fiction authors to Silicon Valley executives and celebrated cryptography experts. Its advisory board included big names from the Columbia Journalism School, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Google, Slack, and Mozilla. Andrew McLaughlin, the former head of Google’s public relations team who had brought in Al Gore to talk a California state senator into canceling legislation that would regulate Gmail’s email scanning program, was part of the OTF team. So was Cory Doctorow, a best-selling young adult science fiction author whose books about a totalitarian government’s surveillance were read and admired by Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine, and Edward Snowden.122 Doctorow was a huge personality in the crypto movement who could fill giant conference halls at privacy conferences. He publicly endorsed OTF’s Internet Freedom mission. “I’m proud to be a volunteer OTF advisor,” he tweeted. From behind this hip and connected exterior, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a vertically integrated incubator for Internet Freedom technologies, pouring millions into projects big and small, including everything from evading censorship to helping political organizing, protests, and movement building. With its deep pockets and its recruitment of big-name privacy activists, the Open Technology Fund didn’t just thrust itself into the privacy movement. In many ways, it was the privacy movement.
  It set up lucrative academic programs and fellowships, paying out $55,000 a year to graduate students, privacy activists, technologists, cryptographers, security researchers, and political scientists to study “the Internet censorship climate in former Soviet states,” probe the “technical capacity” of the Great Firewall of China, and track the “use of oppressive spyware command and control servers by repressive governments.”123 It expanded the reach and speed of the Tor Project network and directed several million dollars to setting up high-bandwidth Tor exit nodes in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, both high-priority regions for US foreign policy.124 It bankrolled encrypted chat apps, ultrasecure operating systems supposedly impervious to hacking, and next-generation secure email initiatives designed to make it hard for governments to spy on activists’ communications. It backed anonymous WikiLeaks-like tools for leakers and whistle-blowers who wanted to expose their government’s corruption. It coinvested with the State Department in several “mesh networking” and “Internet-in-a-box” projects designed to keep activists connected even if their government tried turning off local Internet connections.125 It provided a “secure cloud” infrastructure with server nodes all around the world to host Internet Freedom projects, operated a “legal lab” that offered grantees legal protection in case something came up, and even ran a “Rapid Response Fund” to provide emergency support to Internet Freedom projects that were deemed vital and that required immediate deployment.126 The Tor Project remained the best-known privacy app funded by the Open Technology Fund, but it was quickly joined by another: Signal, an encrypted mobile phone messaging app for the iPhone and Android.
• Het was dus wellicht allemaal opgezet spel: privacy, internet freedom, Snowdon, anonieme whistle blowers....allemaal bedoeld om de macht van de powers that be te vergroten ipv. te verkleinen. Heel listig allemaal, zoals Signal:
  Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation run by Moxie Marlinspike, a tall, lanky cryptographer with a head full of dreadlocks. Marlinspike was an old friend of Jacob Appelbaum, and he played a similar radical game. He remained cryptic about his real name and identity, told stories of being targeted by the FBI, and spent his free time sailing and surfing in Hawaii. He had made a good chunk of money selling his encryption start-up to Twitter and had worked with the State Department on Internet Freedom projects since 2011, but he posed as a feisty anarchist fighting the system. His personal website was called thoughtcrime.org...
  Signal was a huge success. Journalists, privacy activists, and cryptographers hailed Signal as an indispensable Internet privacy tool. It was a complement to Tor in the age of mobile phones. While Tor anonymized browsing, Signal encrypted voice calls and text, making it impossible for governments to monitor communication. Laura Poitras gave it two secure thumbs up as a powerful people’s encryption tool and told everyone to use it every day. People at the ACLU claimed that Signal made federal agents weep.128 The Electronic Frontier Foundation added Signal alongside Tor to its Surveillance Self-Defense guide…
  Silicon Valley fears a political solution to privacy. Internet Freedom and crypto offer an acceptable alternative. Tools like Signal and Tor provide a false solution to the privacy problem, focusing people’s attention on government surveillance and distracting them from the private spying carried out by the Internet companies they use every day. All the while, crypto tools give people a sense that they’re doing something to protect themselves, a feeling of personal empowerment and control. And all those crypto radicals? Well, they just enhance the illusion, heightening the impression of risk and danger. With Signal or Tor installed, using an iPhone or Android suddenly becomes edgy and radical. So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from. (Deze commentaar van de auteur slaat me wel met verstomming, plots is de verwevenheid vergeten en is het blijkbaar private bedrijen TEGENOVER de overheid, terwijl de feiten die de auteur zelf aanhaalt bewijzen dat het één pot nat is. Is de auteur zelf controlled opposition? Niet onmogelijk, gezien bij blijkbaar voor The Guardian schrijft, een globalistisch krantje gesponserd door Soros, Gates en de Britse overheid).