The Internet as a Cold War Weapon
The history of the Internet winds through a lot of territory. But America's
fight against communism and the Soviet Union looms over almost every part of
the story.
Yasha Levine
Aug 13
With the global Internet War heating up like never before (even Dmitry
Medvedev is getting in on the action now), I remembered that I've been
forgetting to publish the preface I wrote to the Russian edition of my book
Surveillance Valley: <The Internet as a weapon.>
I've been meaning to do it for a year now. And I'm not gonna wait any
more...
I wrote the text while sitting at a friend's dacha on the outskirts of
Moscow, right before the book went to print in the summer of 2019. Rereading
what I wrote now, I realize that the book - and the preface - is more
relevant than ever.
I focus on the American side of the Internet's history because, the Internet
is an American creation. These days, though, America no longer has a
monopoly on this technology. Other countries and societies, including
Russia, now routinely use this network as a weapon - both internationally
and domestically. Yet the underlying American history of the Internet
remains.
Check it out below.
-Yasha Levine
________________________________________
Russian Edition - Preface
In 2014, President Vladimir Putin made headlines around the world when he
casually described the Internet as a hostile technology developed by the
CIA: "Всё это возникло на первом этапе, на заре интернета, как спецпроект
ЦРУ США. Чего уж там, так и развивается."
Putin's comment, delivered at a journalism conference in St. Petersburg, was
immediately ridiculed in America. The very idea that the Internet could have
been created by an American intelligence agency was dismissed as a nutty
conspiracy theory - something made up by a paranoid, out of touch
authoritarian leader who was deeply afraid of the democratic power of the
Internet and willing to peddle the most crazy lies in order to justify
putting this egalitarian technology under his control.
I was in California at the time and had just started working on this book -
investigating Google's ties to American intelligence agencies and digging
into declassified and obscure military archives dating back to the time the
Internet was created. And I watched this media controversy with amusement
and disbelief. This was a year after Edward Snowden had blown the whistle on
America's digital surveillance apparatus and revealed that the US government
had for years used the Internet as a giant spy machine. The documents he
stole from the National Security Agency made it clear that almost no device
or transmission wire was outside its reach, and that the biggest and most
respected companies in Silicon Valley were in on it - secretly partnering
with with American intelligence agencies to turn their platforms into a vast
surveillance feeder system. What was also clear was that Snowden's
revelations were just a taste of something bigger and older: the Internet
was much more intertwined with the US government and American geopolitical
power than people realized.
And yet, reporters in America seemed unaffected by these disclosures. Many
still acted like the Internet was at its core a neutral technology driven by
egalitarian values - that it was global force of good, unencumbered by spy
agencies, geopolitical struggle, or the American Empire. And anyone who
argued otherwise, well, they were paranoid conspiracy theorists who couldn't
be be taken seriously - and that included Putin.
But just because someone was paranoid didn't mean they're wrong.
As I found out while writing this book, Putin was right about the Internet.
Or, to be clear: he was more right than wrong. His only mistake was that a
slightly different US government "agency" created the Internet: the Advanced
Research Project Agency - a spy-laden outfit inside the Pentagon whose job
was to develop high-tech weapons that could be used to counter the spread of
communism around the world.
But that's a minor detail. He was right on the bigger picture: The Internet
didn't begin with private companies or geeky entrepreneurs in Silicon
Valley. It began with the US military - in the jungles of Vietnam and inside
secret NATO spy stations. When it was developed in the late 1960s, it was
envisioned as a weapon: a direct technological extension of the Cold War.
And it continues to be a weapon today - vastly more powerful in its current
privatized and commercial form than its original military creators ever
imagined.
The history of the Internet winds through a lot of cultural and political
territory, but the Cold War and America's fight against communism and the
Soviet Union is something that looms over just about every part of the
story. It is the central, overarching conflict that birthed and shaped the
Internet. There would be no Internet without it - at least not in the shape
it exists in today.
And that makes this book very personal. Because my own life is a product of
this struggle between America and the Soviet Union. As a Soviet-American who
grew up in Silicon Valley surrounded by computer engineers:
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