Skip to main content

Surveillance Valley - Yasha Levine ***

This is a very powerful and insightful book on the relationship between the internet, the big US tech companies and the US military and intelligence services. It's just such a shame that its message is almost ruined by a naive, black hat/white hat polarised approach that totally distorts some of the facts.

Broadly, Yasha Levine makes five claims. The the internet has a military background, that it was set up to to undertake surveillance on the American people, that the big tech companies sell to the military and intelligence services, that the Tor 'dark web' was supported by the US authorities to act as a honey trap and that the internet is used by both business and intelligence as a surveillance tool.

The military background is no surprise to anyone who has read anything about the internet's origins as ARPANET. Levine covers the history in a sometimes summary fashion, making a rather dismissive reference ('upbeat and zany') to the excellent technical history, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. His approach changes markedly, though, with the two claims that the internet was brought into existence to spy on the American people and that it is somehow shocking that Google etc. sell products and services to the military and intelligence services.

What Levine means by the internet being constructed to undertake surveillance on people is that it was used from early on to send surveillance data from one computer to another. As such it was no more being used for surveillance than the mail is being used for surveillance if that data was sent through the post. All communication technology can be used to send information of this kind - is Levine suggesting because of this we shouldn't ever communicate?

As for the fact that Google et al sell products and services to the military, again I don't understand what Levine thinks should be the case? He seems to imply throughout that the military and intelligence services (and early on also the police) are the bad guys and so should not be allowed to make use of the tools developed by tech companies. This isn't helped by the language used. Levine repeatedly says that Google 'integrated' with the military or intelligence where what he is referring to is selling them products. So presumably Microsoft and Apple are integrated with me because I use their products? The whole tenor of this seems linked to a peculiarly American libertarian concept of the government as a bad thing - exactly the same attitude that drives attitudes to gun control.

What is a real shame is that this biassed reporting then makes it harder to take in the really important aspects of the book. Levine raises perfectly reasonable concerns about large tech companies using our data, about the US government using the modern internet for surveillance and and more. He shows us examples of the American government's terrible mishandling of civil unrest and citizen's rights. But it's easy to lose the message because of the lack of balance elsewhere. It's also worrying that he pays little attention to the attempts by countries such as Russia and China to do exactly the same thing - it's as if the US government is the only bad guy so because of the black hat/white hat approach, everyone else is a victim.

By far the most interesting bit is the section on the Tor/dark web business. It's fascinating that this mechanism used by the infamous Silk Road, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden (who is revealed as a fascinatingly divided character) was funded in considerable part by the American military and intelligence services. Levine makes a good case that Tor was set up as a honey trap which led both dubious individuals and honest whistleblowers to assume they were totally anonymous, but which could be broken quite easily by the intelligence services.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the book is a remark in the epilogue. Levine says 'Today a lot of people still see the Internet as something uniquely special, something uncorrupted by earthly human flaws and sins... This belief embedded deep in our culture, resistant to facts and evidence.' But I've never come across anyone who thought like that and I worked in IT for many years, across the period when the internet became widespread. Perhaps Levine is projecting the culture of his own bubble on the world. I think most people see the internet as an incredibly useful communication tool that comes with costs in terms of giving away information and benefits in the amazing services it provides - which it surely does. I certainly couldn't do my job without it.

To reiterate, this is a genuinely important book. Levine reveals a lot that is surprising and worrying. But it's a shame that he presents that information in the way he does.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more