Surveillance Valley The Secret Military History of the Internet

This book is a critical view of both the early phases of what we now know as the internet as well as current state as it has developed during the last 3 decades. His point about the early origin is that all the key proponents of the development always where also strongly active regarding Counter Insurgency activities. In their view, a key target of all these developments should collecting as much data as possible about basically everybody in the world. The beginnings were crude, mainly based on punch cards, but from the very first start, a key goal was to make the data that was collected doing counter insurgency programs available to all the relevant US-agencies. Data considered relevant for this included from the start everything about the US population and everybody else who might develop into a threat for the US. After the privatization of the network in the 90s and the development of the surveyance business modell in the early 2000 the data collection was mainly left to the big internet companies. As the Snowden revelations should, the US government organisations were content with siphoning the data collected by the big businesses. The book also discusses the appearant contradictions that while fighting encryption schemes, the US goverment at the same time supports developments like TOR and Signal messaging. It also shows that although Snowden and others are targetted by US institutions, the same people are also indirectly supporting some of the US activities by promoting those tools like TOR and Signal. The book also discusses the challenges that come from the widespread libertarian view of the internet that is sometimes hindering a critical view of the surveyance activites by the big internet companies.