[ih] Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet -- Some Questions

[Eric Gade]

Hello list members,

Please excuse the length of this email.

I am in the process of writing a review of Yasha Levine's new history of
the Internet, "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the
Internet." His overall thesis is that the development of the Internet has,
from the beginning, grown from "counterinsurgency" and surveillance
operations, and that these aspects have not been adequately chronicled in
other histories. Many of his claims about the early ARPA work I have not
encountered before, and I imagine that some would find them provocative.

I'm hoping there are members of this list with knowledge about these claims
who can help me clarify a few points:


   1. Levine asserts that there was some overlap or relationship between
   William Godel's Project Agile and work conducted by the ARPA Command and
   Control division under Licklider. He pulls a lot from Sharon Weinberger's
   recent book ("The Imagineers of War") in discussing both Godel and the
   potential connection. He writes, "[Licklider's] work at ARPA was part of
   the military's larger counterinsurgency efforts and directly overlapped
   with William Godel's Project Agile." (52). In making this statement he
   actually cites Weinberger's prologue, in which she says "Godel personally
   signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his
   Vietnam budget." It appears Weinberger is herself citing this document: (
   https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/arpa-order-internet.pdf).
   It is a part of a series that may still be classified (I have the NDC
   looking into it). My question about this is: was there really any kind of
   working relationship? What does this transfer of funds represent? And
   perhaps more broadly: to what extent was ARPA C&C/IPTO involved in
   counterinsurgency data collection and processing?
   2. A large section of the early history in this book deals with the
   Cambridge Project (aka Project CAM) at MIT and controversy surrounding it
   at the time. I am awaiting a copy of the original proposal from MIT (it
   might not come in before deadline; should anyone on this list have a copy
   I'd really appreciate it). Levine asserts that the project "would directly
   aid the agency's counterinsurgency mission." He claims that the work of the
   project "could be accessed from any computer with an ARPANET connection"
   (68) and that "It was a kind of stripped down 1960s version of Palantir,
   the powerful data mining, surveillance, and prediction software the
   military and intelligence planners use today." He goes on: "the project was
   customized to the military's needs, with particular focus on fighting
   insurgencies and rolling back communism [...] It was clear that the
   Cambridge Project wasn't just a tool for research, it was a
   counterinsurgency technology." (68-69)

   Is that not an accurate description of the proposal? Were any members on
   this list involved in this research? If so, are these characterizations
   accurate to your mind?
   3. There is yet another section where Levine finds some reporting from
   the early 70s, where NBC News' Rowan Ford conducted a 4 month investigation
   and found evidence that intelligence files about American anti-war
   protestors and others had been transferred, perhaps stored, and perhaps
   processed somehow, over the ARPANET and linked host machines. His report
   was entered into the Congressional Record as a part of Tunney's hearings in
   1975:
   https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078638619;view=1up;seq=7

   The claim is that these files might have been a part of previous CONUS
   intel that, in 1972, the Army was ordered to delete. One of the claims in
   the report is that such files were transferred via the ARPANET to MIT for
   some reason. Ford had 4 sources for this story who had knowledge of the
   incident; only one, Richard Ferguson (who apparently was fired from MIT for
   this disclosure), gave information publicly.

   Does anyone on this list have knowledge of this incident, and/or whether
   or not the ARPANET/ARPA IPTO was used to move around, eventually store, or
   otherwise process these kinds of dossiers?


These are all the questions I have for now. Thanks for taking the time to
read.

-- 
Eric
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