How we lost to Big Brother

There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately — to reveal things. Apparently, readers like to feel they’ve got the inside track, even when there are no secrets to uncover. Perhaps this drove Yasha Levine to call his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. It promises to shine a light on the close and ongoing relationship between state surveillance and Silicon Valley. There are two problems with this. First, most of it is not secret. Second, I don’t think it’s right.

For all its later ubiquity, the internet started life as a niche project funded by the US Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s to connect the tiny number of computers engaged in the computer science projects it supported. While ARPA was indeed part of the Department of Defence, much of its research, including this project, was unclassified. Indeed, the network was literally called the ARPANET. But it went far beyond this, argues Levine, and was always intended to be a large-scale surveillance tool, with monitoring of populations ‘built in’. Most historians of the early internet, reckons Levine, have glossed over this bit.

Fortunately, I know one of the people who helped develop the ARPANET, Professor Peter Kirstein. For more than a decade, starting in 1973, Kirstein ran the UK’s connection to ARPANET out of his office at University College, London (where he remains a professor of computer communications). So I phoned him, and he told me:

Unless everyone’s been lying to me for 40 years, the ARPANET was not intended as, or used as, a surveillance system. The 1966 concept could never include more than 64 locations, with four computers in each location. It took the invention of the Internet Protocols a decade later to envisage a capacity of millions of locations and billions of devices.