Part 2 :Surveillance Valley The Secret Military History of the Internet..Spying on Americans..Utopia and Privatization

Surveillance Valley

The Secret Military History of the Internet

By Yasha Levine

Chapter 3

Spying on Americans

Historical myth making is made possible only by forgetting.

—Nancy Isenberg, White Trash

On June 2, 1975, NBC correspondent Ford Rowan appeared on the evening news to report a stunning exposé. Baby-faced with light blue eyes, he spoke straight into the camera and told viewers that the military was building a sophisticated computer communications network and was using it to spy on Americans and share surveillance data with the CIA and NSA. 1 He was talking about the ARPANET.

“Our sources say, the Army’s information on thousands of American protesters has been given to the CIA, and some of it is in CIA computers now. We don’t know who gave the order to copy and keep the files. What we do know is that once the files are computerized, the Defense Department’s new technology makes it incredibly easy to move information from one computer to another,” Rowan reported. “This network links computers at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, more than 20 universities, and a dozen research centers, like the RAND Corporation.”

Rowan had spent months piecing the story together from several “reluctant whistleblowers”— including ARPA contractors who were alarmed at how the technology they were building was being used. For three days after the initial story, he and his colleagues at NBC evening news aired several more reports looking more closely at this mysterious surveillance network and the shadowy agency that had built it.

The key breakthrough in the new computer technology was made at a little known unit of the Defense Department—the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA.

ARPA scientists created something new in computer communications with this device, it’s known as the IMP, the interface message processor. Different computers communicate in different computer languages. Before the IMP it was enormously difficult, in many cases impossible, to link the various computers. The IMP, in effect, translates all computer messages into a common language. That makes it very very easy to tie them into a network.

The government is now using this new technology in a secret computer network that gives the White House, the CIA, and the Defense Department access to FBI and Treasury Department computer files on 5 million Americans.

The network, and it is referred to as “the network,” is now in operation.… This means that from computer terminals now in place at the White House, the CIA, or the Pentagon, an official can push a button and get whatever information there might be on you in the FBI’s vast computer files. Those files include records from local police agencies which are hooked to the FBI by computer. 2

Rowan’s exposé was phenomenal. It was based on solid sources from the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Secret Service, as well as key ARPANET insiders, some of whom were concerned about the creation of a network that could so seamlessly link multiple government surveillance systems. In the 1970s, the historical significance of the ARPANET was not yet apparent; what Rowan uncovered has become only more relevant in hindsight. It would take more than twenty years for the Internet to spread into most American homes, and four decades would pass before Edward Snowden’s leaks made the world aware of the massive amount of government surveillance happening over the Internet. Today, people still think that surveillance is something foreign to the Internet—something imposed on it from the outside by paranoid government agencies. Rowan’s reporting from forty years ago tells a different story. It shows how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet. Surveillance was baked in from the very beginning.

This is an important fact in the history of the Internet. Yet it has vanished down the collective memory hole. Crack any popular history of the Internet and there is no mention of it. Even today’s foremost historians do not seem to know it occurred. 3

Counterinsurgency Comes Home

In the late 1960s, as engineers at MIT, UCLA, and Stanford diligently worked to build a unified military computer network, the country convulsed with violence and radical politics—much of it directed at the militarization of American society, the very thing that the ARPANET represented. These were some of the most violent years in American history. Race riots, militant black activism, powerful left-wing student movements, and almost daily bombings in cities across the country. 4 The United States was a pressure cooker, and the heat kept building. In 1968, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, the latter’s death triggering riots across the nation. Antiwar protests swept American university campuses. In November 1969, three hundred thousand people descended on Washington, DC, for the largest antiwar protest in the history of the United States. 5 In May 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired on protesters at Kent State University, killing four students—called “Nixon’s Massacre” by Hunter S. Thompson.

To many, it seemed that America was about to explode. In January 1970, a former military intelligence officer by the name of Christopher Pyle tossed more wood on the blaze.

Pyle was political science PhD student at Columbia University. He wore glasses, had a mop of hair parted on the side, and carried himself with the thoughtful and meticulous manner of an academic. He had been an instructor at the US Army Intelligence School in Fort Holabird outside Baltimore and saw something there that concerned him enough that he had to blow the whistle. 6

In early 1970, he published an exposé in the Washington Monthly that revealed a massive domestic surveillance and counterinsurgency operation run by the US Army Intelligence Command. Known as “CONUS Intel”—Continental United States Intelligence—the program involved thousands of undercover agents. They infiltrated domestic antiwar political groups and movements, spied on left-wing activists, and filed reports in a centralized intelligence database on millions of Americans. 7 “When this program began in the summer of 1965, its purpose was to provide early warning of civil disorders which the Army might be called upon to quell in the summer of 1967,” reported Pyle. “Today, the Army maintains files on the membership, ideology, programs, and practices of virtually every activist political group in the country.”

CONUS Intel was masterminded in part by General William P. Yarborough, the army’s top intelligence officer at the time. He had a long, distinguished career in counterinsurgency and psychological operations, from World War II to the Korea and Vietnam conflicts. In 1962, General Yarborough took part in the influential US Army “limited war” counterinsurgency symposium held in Washington, DC, which J. C. R. Licklider also attended. 8 Fear of a domestic insurgency was swirling in military circles, and the general was not immune. He came to believe that there existed a growing communist conspiracy to foment unrest and to overthrow the United States government from within. His evidence? The burgeoning civil rights movement and the surging popularity of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yarborough looked at the masses of people agitating for racial equality and didn’t see Americans getting politically involved because of legitimate grievances and concerns. He saw dupes and foreign agents who, whether they realized it or not, were part of a sophisticated insurgency operation financed and directed by the Soviet Union. This was not the view of a lone conspiracy nut but was shared by many of Yarborough’s peers in the army. 9 [well they were wrong, and apparently they still are, because we are still being called Russian dupes because we do not care for the tyranny Washington has become DC]

When race riots broke out in Detroit in 1967 a few months after Martin Luther King delivered a speech trying to unite the civil rights and antiwar movements, Yarborough told his subordinates at the US Army Intelligence Command: “Men, get out your counterinsurgency manuals. We have an insurgency on our hands.” 10

William Godel had set up ARPA’s Project Agile to fight insurgencies abroad. General Yarborough focused on an extension of that same mission: fighting what he saw as a foreign insurgency on American soil. Just as in Vietnam, his first order of business was to take out the insurgents’ base of local support. But before he could start clearing the weeds, his men needed information. Who were these insurgents? What motivated them? Who called the shots? Who were their domestic allies? Among what groups did they hide?

To root out the enemy, General Yarborough oversaw the creation of CONUS Intel. Priests, elected officials, charities, after-school programs, civil rights groups, antiwar protesters, labor leaders, and right wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society were targeted, but it seemed the primary focus of CONUS Intel was the Left: anyone perceived to be sympathetic to the cause of economic and social justice. It didn’t matter if they were clergy, senators, judges, governors, long-haired radicals from Students for a Democratic Society, or members of the Black Panthers—all were fair game. 11

By the late 1960s, CONUS Intel involved thousands of agents. They attended and reported on even the smallest protest at a time when protests were as common as PTA bake sales. They monitored labor strikes and kept note of groups and individuals who supported unions. They bugged the phone of Senator Eugene McCarthy, a critic of the Vietnam War, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. They noted that the senator had taken a call from a “known radical group” to discuss providing medical assistance to protesters who had been injured by Chicago police. That same year, agents infiltrated a meeting of Catholic priests who protested the church’s ban on birth control. They spied on Martin Luther King’s funeral, mixing with mourners and recording what was talked about. They infiltrated the 1970 Earth Day festival and took photographs and filed reports on what anti-pollution activists were discussing and doing. 12

Some of their surveillance targets were downright comical. A young army recruit from the Fifth Military Intelligence Detachment at Fort Carson, Colorado, spied on the Young Adults Project, which was established by church groups and a ski club to provide recreation for “emotionally disturbed young people.” 13 The reason it was targeted? Apparently, local clergy did not like the project’s hippie associations and thought its leaders were leading these young adults to “drugs, loud music, sex, and radicalism.” 14 The damning evidence proving that this group was part of a nefarious plot to take down the United States? One of its founders had attended an antiwar rally outside the Fort Carson military base. 15 Then in 1968, agents were ordered to report on the Poor People’s March on Washington—and to pay particular attention to the mules’ buttocks. The pack animals were used to pull covered wagons from the rural South, and the army wanted its spies to look for sores or abrasions on the animals’ hides that could show signs of abuse. The idea was to accuse and charge protesters with animal cruelty. 16

Much of the justification for the surveillance on suspected “foreign agents” was weak or nonexistent, but it did not matter. When army agents failed to find evidence of communist orchestration, their commanders told them to get back out there and try harder: “You haven’t looked hard enough. It must be there.” 17

CONUS Intel agents used all sorts of tactics to spy on and infiltrate groups considered to be threats to America. Agents grew out their hair, joined groups, and marched in movements. They even created a “legitimate” news media front: Mid-West News. Wearing press accreditation passes, agents posed as reporters and attended protests, photographed attendees, and secured interviews with participants and organizers. The army even had its own sound and TV truck to videotape demonstrations. 18

In an interview forty-five years after he blew the whistle on this surveillance program, Christopher Pyle told me:

The generals wanted to be consumers of the latest hot information. During the Chicago riots of 1968, the army had a unit called MidWest News with army agents in civilian clothes and they went around and interviewed all the antiwar protesters. They shipped the film footage to Washington every night on an airliner so the generals could see movies of what was going on in Chicago when they got to work in the morning. That made them so happy. It was a complete waste of time. You could pick up the same thing on TV for far less, but they felt they needed their own film crew. The main thing they were going after was a pig named Pigasus, who was the Yippies’ candidate for president. They were really excited about Pigasus. 19

Surveillance of left-wing activists and political groups was nothing new. Going back to the nineteenth century, law enforcement agencies, both local and federal, kept files on labor and union leaders, socialists, civil rights activists, and anyone suspected of having left-wing sympathies. The Los Angeles Police Department maintained a huge file on suspected communists, labor organizers, black leaders, civil rights groups, and celebrities. Every other major city in America had its own “Red Squad” and extensive files. 20 Private companies and right-wing vigilante groups like the John Birch Society also maintained their own files on Americans. In the 1960s, private security contractor Wackenhut boasted of having two million Americans under surveillance. 21 This information was shared freely with the FBI and police departments but was usually stored the old-fashioned way: on paper in filing cabinets. The US Army database was different. It had the backing of an unlimited Pentagon budget and access to the latest computer technology.

Pyle’s reporting revealed that CONUS Intel’s surveillance data were encoded onto IBM punch cards and fed into a digital computer located at the Army Counter Intelligence Corps center at Fort Holabird, which was equipped with a terminal link that could be used to access almost a hundred different information categories as well as print out reports on individual people. “The personality reports—to be extracted from the incident reports—will be used to supplement the Army’s seven million individual security clearance dossiers and to generate new files on the political activities of civilians wholly unassociated with the military,” he wrote in the Washington Monthly. 22 “In this respect, the Army’s data bank promises to be unique. Unlike similar computers now in use at the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in Washington and New York State’s Identification and Intelligence System in Albany, it will not be restricted to the storage of case histories of persons arrested for, or convicted of, crimes. Rather it will specialize in files devoted exclusively to the descriptions of the lawful political activity of civilians.”

Big Data Totalitarianism

The late 1960s was the beginning of America’s computerization gold rush, a time when police departments, federal government agencies, military and intelligence services, and large corporations began to digitize their operations. They bought and installed computers, ran databases, crunched numbers, automated services, and linked computers via communication networks. Everyone was in a hurry to digitize, link up, and join the glorious computer revolution. 23

Digital government databases popped up across the country. 24 Naturally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation led the pack. It began building out a centralized digital database in 1967, by order of J. Edgar Hoover. Called the National Crime Information Center, it spanned all fifty states and was available to state and local law enforcement agencies. It contained information on arrest warrants, stolen vehicles and property, and gun registrations and was accessible via a dispatcher service. By the mid-1970s, the system was expanded to support keyboard terminals mounted in police cruisers for immediate data search and retrieval. 25

As the FBI database grew, it interfaced and plugged into local law enforcement databases that were sprouting up around the country, systems like the one built in Bergen County, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. There, the sheriff and local police departments pooled resources to create the Regional Enforcement Information Network, a county-wide computerized database system that digitized and centralized law enforcement records of arrests, indictments, warrants, suspects, and stolen property information. The database was run on an IBM 360/40, and participating agencies could access it on local computer terminals. The system was linked to state police and FBI databases, which allowed local agencies to quickly call up county, state, and federal records. 26

At the same time, multiple attempts were made to set up national data banks that would tie in and centralize all sorts of disparate data. They had names like “National Data Bank” and FEDNET. 27 In 1967, the Bureau of the Budget wanted to build the National Data Center, a centralized federal database that would pull together, among other things, income tax and arrest records, health data, military draft status, social security information, and banking transactions and combine this information with a unique number that would serve both as a person’s lifelong identification number and permanent telephone number. 28

Not just the cops and the feds rushed to computerize. Corporate America was an enthusiastic adopter of digital databases and networked computers to increase efficiency and bring down labor costs. Credit card companies, banks, credit rating bureaus, and airlines all began to digitize their operations, utilize centralized computer databases, and tap into the information via remote terminals. 29

In 1964, American Airlines rolled out its first fully computerized registration and booking system, which was built by IBM and modeled after SAGE, America’s first early warning and air defense system, meant to guard against a sneak nuclear bombing raid by the Soviet Union. The airline’s system even had a similar name. 30 SAGE stood for “Semi-Automatic Ground Environment”; the American Airlines system was called SABRE, which stood for “Semi-Automated Business-Related Environment.” Unlike SAGE, which was outdated the moment it came online because it could not intercept Soviet ballistic missiles, SABRE was a huge success. It connected more than a thousand Teletype machines to the company’s centralized computer located just north of New York City. 31 The system not only promised to help American Airlines fill empty seats but also to “supply management with abundant information on day-to- day operations.” And that it did.

“From its first day of operation SABRE began accumulating reels of information, the most detailed information ever compiled on the travel patterns emanating from every major city—by destination, by month, by season, by day of the week, by hour of the day—information that in the right hands would become exceedingly valuable in the industry that American sought to dominate,” writes Thomas Petzinger Jr. in Hard Landing. 32 With SABRE, American Airlines set up a monopoly on computerized bookings, and it later leveraged that power to crush its competition. 33 Eventually, American Airlines spun the system off as a standalone company. Today, SABRE is still the number one travel booking system in the world, with ten thousand employees and revenues of $3 billion. 34

The growth of all these databases did not go unnoticed. The dominant public fear at the time was that proliferation of corporate and government databases and networked computers would create a surveillance society—a place where every person was monitored and tracked, and where political dissent was crushed. Not just left-wing activists and student protesters worried. 35 These concerns pervaded almost every layer of society. People feared government surveillance and corporate surveillance as well.

A 1967 cover story for the Atlantic Monthly exemplifies these fears. Written by a University of Michigan law professor named Arthur R. Miller, it mounts an attack on the push by both businesses and government agencies to centralize and computerize data collection. The story includes amazing cover art, showing Uncle Sam going berserk at the controls of a giant computer. It focuses on one proposed federal database in particular: the National Data Center, which would centralize personal information and connect it to a unique identification number for every person in the system.

Miller warned that such a database was a grave threat to political freedom. Once it was put in place, it would invariably grow to encompass every part of people’s lives:

The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications we are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time.…

The very existence of a National Data Center may encourage certain federal officials to engage in questionable surveillance tactics. For example, optical scanners—devices with the capacity to read a variety of type fonts or handwriting at fantastic rates of speed—could be used to monitor our mail. By linking scanners with a computer system, the information drawn in by the scanner would be converted into machine-readable form and transferred into the subject’s file in the National Data Center.

Then, with sophisticated programming, the dossiers of all of the surveillance subject’s correspondents could be produced at the touch of a button, and an appropriate entry—perhaps “associates with known criminals”—could be added to all of them. As a result, someone who simply exchanges Christmas cards with a person whose mail is being monitored might find himself under surveillance or might be turned down when he applies for a job with the government or requests a government grant or applies for some other governmental benefit. An untested, impersonal, and erroneous computer entry such as “associates with known criminals” has marked him, and he is helpless to rectify the situation. Indeed, it is likely that he would not even be aware that the entry existed. 36

The Atlantic wasn’t alone. Newspapers, magazines, and television news programs of that time are filled with alarming reports about the growth of centralized databases—or “data banks,” as they were called back then—and the danger they posed to a democratic society.

In this fearful time, Christopher Pyle’s exposé exploded like a nuclear bomb. CONUS Intel was frontpage news. Protests and outraged editorials followed, as did cover stories in just about every major news magazine in America. Television networks followed up on his reporting and carried out their own in depth investigations. There were congressional queries to get to the bottom of the accusations. 37

The most forceful investigation was led by Senator Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat with a bald head, thick bushy eyebrows, and fleshy bulldog jowls. Ervin was known as a moderate Southern Democrat, which meant that he consistently defended Jim Crow laws and the segregation of housing and schools and fought against attempts to secure equal rights for women. He was frequently called a racist, but he saw himself as a strict constitutionalist. He hated the federal government, which also meant he hated domestic surveillance programs. 38

In 1971, Senator Ervin convened a series of hearings on Pyle’s revelations and recruited Pyle to help with the effort. Initially, the investigation focused narrowly on the army’s CONUS Intel program, but it quickly expanded to encompass a much bigger issue: the proliferation of government and corporate computer databases and surveillance systems. 39 “These hearings were called because it is clear from the complaints being received by Congress that Americans in every walk of life are concerned about the growth of government and private records on individuals,” Senator Ervin said before the Senate in the dramatic opening statement for his investigation. “They are concerned about the growing collection of information about them which is none of the business of the collectors. A great telecommunications network is being created by the computer transmissions which crisscross our country every day.… Led on by the systems analysts, State and local governments are pondering ways of hooking their data banks and computers onto their Federal counterparts, while Federal officials attempt to ‘capture’ or incorporate State and local data in their own data systems.” 40

The first day of the hearings—which were titled “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights”—attracted a huge amount of news media coverage. “Senators Hear of Threat of a ‘Dossier Dictatorship,’” declared a front-page New York Times headline; the story shared space with one about the South Vietnamese bombing offensive into Laos. 41 “The private life of the average American is the subject of 10 to 20 dossiers of personal information in the files and computer data banks of Government and private agencies… most Americans are only vaguely aware of the extent to which they are watched.”

Over the next several months Senator Ervin grilled Pentagon brass about the program, but he met stiff resistance. Defense officials stalled, ignored requests to provide witnesses, and refused to declassify evidence. 42 The confrontations grew from a minor annoyance into a full-blown scandal, and Senator Ervin threatened to publicly denounce the army’s surveillance program as unconstitutional and use his power to subpoena the necessary evidence and legally compel testimony if Pentagon representatives continued to be uncooperative. In the end, Senator Ervin’s efforts succeeded in shedding light on the scope of the military’s computerized domestic surveillance apparatus. His committee established that the US Army had amassed a powerful domestic intelligence presence and had “developed a massive system for monitoring virtually all political protest in the United States.” There were over 300 regional “records centers” nationwide, with many containing more than 100,000 cards on “personalities of interest.” By the end of 1970, a national defense intelligence center had 25 million files on individuals and 760,000 files on “organizations and incidents.” These files were full of lurid details—sexual preferences, extramarital affairs, and a particular emphasis on alleged homosexuality—things that had nothing to do with the task at hand: gathering evidence on people’s supposed ties to foreign governments and their participation in criminal plots. 43 And, as the committee established, the Army Intelligence Command had several databases that could cross-reference this information and map out relationships between people and organizations.

Senator Sam Ervin’s committee confirmed something else as well: the army surveillance program was a direct extension of America’s bigger counterinsurgency strategy, which had been developed for use in foreign conflicts but which was immediately brought back and used on the home front. “The men who ran the domestic war room kept records not unlike those maintained by their counterparts in the computerized war rooms in Saigon,” noted a final report on Senator Ervin’s investigations. 44

Indeed, the army referred to activists and protesters as if they were organized enemy combatants embedded with the indigenous population. They “billeted,” planned assaults on “targets and objectives,” and even had an “organized sniper element.” The army used standard war game colors: blue for “friendly forces” and red for “Negro neighborhoods.” Yet, as the report made very clear, the people being watched were not combatants, but regular people: “Army intelligence was not just reconnoitering cities for bivouac sites, approach routes and Black Panther arsenals. It was collecting, disseminating, and storing amounts of data on the private and personal affairs of law-abiding citizens. Comments about the financial affairs, sex lives, and psychiatric histories of persons unaffiliated with the armed forces appear throughout the various records systems.” That is, the army was spying on a huge swath of American society for no good reason.

“The hypothesis that revolutionary groups might be behind the civil rights and anti-war movements became a presumption which infected the entire operation,” explained Senator Ervin in a final report his staff produced based on his investigation. “Demonstrators and rioters were not regarded as American citizens with possibly legitimate grievances, but as ‘dissident forces’ deployed against the established order. Given this conception of dissent, it is not surprising that army intelligence would collect information on the political and private lives of the dissenters. The military doctrines governing counterintelligence, counterinsurgency, and civil affairs operations demanded it.” 45

Senator Ervin’s hearings drew a lot of attention and shone a light on the proliferation of federal surveillance databases being assembled in the background unchecked. The army promised to destroy the surveillance files, but the Senate could not obtain definitive proof that the files were ever fully expunged. On the contrary, evidence mounted that the army had deliberately hidden and continued to use the surveillance data it collected. 46 Indeed, even as army generals were making promises to destroy files that they had amassed on hundreds of thousands of Americans, ARPA contractors fed them into a new real time data analysis and retrieval system hooked up to the ARPANET. 47 [same crap as with Mockingbird...'yeah we will shut it down'...which really means, now we will ramp it up...DC]

ARPANET Surveillance

It was 1975 when NBC aired Ford Rowan’s reporting that the ARPANET was being used to spy on Americans. Three years had passed since Senator Ervin’s investigation of the army’s CONUS Intel spying operation, and the scandal had long become old news, eclipsed by the Watergate investigation that brought down President Richard Nixon. But Rowan’s reporting dragged the sordid CONUS Intel affair back into the spotlight. 48 [ told you they shut it down...not DC]

“In the late 1960’s at the height of the demonstrations against the war, President Johnson ordered the CIA, the FBI, and the Army to find out who was behind the protests. What followed was a major campaign of infiltration and surveillance of antiwar groups,” Rowan told NBC viewers on June 2, 1975. “In 1970, Senator Sam Ervin exposed the extent of Army spying. He got the Pentagon to promise to stop its surveillance program and to destroy the files. But four years after the promise to Sam Ervin, the Army’s domestic surveillance files still exist. NBC News has learned that a new computer technology developed by the Defense Department enabled the Pentagon to copy, distribute, and secretly update the Army files.”

Two days later, Rowan delivered a follow-up segment:

The secret computer network was made possible by dramatic breakthroughs in the technique of hooking different makes and models of computers together so they can talk to one another and share information. It’s a whole new technology that not many people know about. If you pay taxes, or use a credit card, if you drive a car, or have ever served in the military, if you’ve ever been arrested, or even investigated by a police agency, if you’ve had major medical expenses or contributed to a national political party, there is information on you somewhere in some computer. Congress has always been afraid that computers, if all linked together, could turn the government into “big brother” with the computers making it dangerously easy to keep tabs on everyone.

He then got specific about what happened to those surveillance files that the army was supposed to destroy: “According to confidential sources, much of the material that was computerized has been copied and transferred, and much of it has been shared with other agencies where it has been integrated into other intelligence files.… In January 1972, at least part of the computerized Army domestic surveillance files were stored in the NSA’s Harvest computer at Fort Meade, Maryland. Through the use of a defense department computer network, the materials were transmitted and copied in Massachusetts at MIT, and were stored at the Army’s Natick Research Center.”

The first ARPANET node between UCLA and Stanford went online in 1969 and the network expanded nationally that same year. Now, with Rowan’s exposé six years later, this groundbreaking military network had its first big moment in the public spotlight.

When I finally tracked down Rowan, he was surprised to hear me bring up that old NBC transmission. No one had discussed it with him in decades. “I haven’t heard anyone who talked about this in a long time. I’m honored that you dug it all out,” he said.

He then told me how he broke the story. 49 In the early 1970s, he was working the Washington beat. He covered Watergate and the Church Committee Hearings run by Senator Frank Church, which remain the most thorough and damning government investigation into the illegal activities of American intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA, and FBI. It was during the Church Committee that he first stumbled on the ARPANET story and began piecing it together. “This was post-Watergate, post-Vietnam. This was also the time when they were investigating the assassinations of Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King and later the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Then stories came out about massive domestic spying by the FBI and DoD on antiwar protesters. These investigations were things I was covering and so I would speak to people who were living in that world—the FBI and CIA and the Department of Defense,” Rowan explained. The ARPANET surveillance operation was closely connected to the political upheavals taking place in America at the time, and he learned of its existence in bits and pieces while pursuing other stories. “It was not something that was very easy to find. There was no Deep Throat. No one person that knew it all. You had to really dig.”

His ARPANET investigation took months to complete. Most sources would not go on the record, but one of them did. 50 He was an MIT computer technician named Richard Ferguson, who was there in 1972 when the Pentagon transferred the surveillance data to his lab. He decided to come forward with the information and personally appeared on NBC to make the accusation. He explained that the files were in fact dossiers containing personal information as well as political beliefs. “I’ve seen the data structure that they’ve used and it concerns a person’s occupation, their politics, their name,” he told NBC. He explained that he got fired from his job for objecting to the program.

Multiple intelligence sources and people involved with the spy file transfer corroborated Ferguson’s claims, but not on the record. In time, other journalists verified Rowan’s reporting. 51 There was no doubt: the ARPANET was being used to monitor domestic political activity. “They stressed that the system did not perform any actual surveillance, but rather was designed to use data which had been collected in ‘the real world’ to help build predictive models which might warn when civil disturbances were imminent,” he later wrote in Technospies, a little-known book that expanded on his investigation into the network surveillance technology built by ARPA. 52 At least part of the work of writing the database “maintenance program” for the army’s illegal surveillance files appeared to have been carried out at MIT through the Cambridge Project, J. C. R. Licklider’s grand initiative to build computer counterinsurgency data tools. 53 They were possibly transferred to other ARPANET sites.

Harvard and MIT students who protested ARPA’s Cambridge Project back in 1969 saw the ARPANET as a surveillance weapon and a tool of social and political control. They were right. Just a few years after their protests failed to stop the project, this new technology was turned against them and the American people.

Ford Rowan’s reporting, and the revelations that the army had not destroyed its illegal surveillance files, triggered another round of congressional investigations. Senator John Tunney, a Democrat from California, led the biggest one. On June 23, 1975, he convened a special session of the Committee on the Judiciary to investigate surveillance technology and to specifically address the role that ARPA’s networking technology played in disseminating the army’s domestic surveillance files.

Senator Tunney opened the hearings with a condemnation: “We have just gone through a period in American history called Watergate where we saw certain individuals who were prepared to use any kind of information, classified or otherwise, for their own political purposes, in a way that was most detrimental to the interests of the United States and individual citizens,” he said. “We know that the Department of Defense and the Army violated their statutory powers. We know that the CIA violated its statutory power as it related to the collecting of information on private citizens and putting it on computers.”

He vowed to get to the bottom of the current surveillance scandal to prevent this kind of abuse from happening again and again. For three days, Senator Tunney grilled top defense officials. But just like Senator Sam Ervin, he ran into resistance. 54

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense David Cooke, a portly man with a clean-shaven head and slick manner, was one of the main officials representing the Pentagon. He had served under Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy, the man who created ARPA, and he commanded respect and authority. In his testimony, Cooke denied that the army’s domestic surveillance data banks were still in existence, and he doubly denied that the ARPANET had anything to do with transferring or utilizing these nonexistent surveillance files. “Officials at MIT and ARPA state that no transmission of civil disturbance data over ARPANET was ever authorized and they have no evidence it ever occurred,” he testified. He also did his best to convince Senator Tunney that the Pentagon had no operational need for the ARPANET, which he described as a pure research and academic network. “The ARPANET itself is a totally unclassified system, which was developed by and is widely utilized by the scientific and technological community throughout the United States,” he told the committee. “Neither the White House nor any of the intelligence agencies has a computer connected to the ARPANET.”

As Cooke explained it, the military did not need the ARPANET because it already had its own secure database and network for communication and intelligence files: the Community Online Intelligence System, known simply as COINS. “It is a secure system, connecting selected data banks of three intelligence agencies, the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the National Photo Interpretation Center. It is designed to exchange classified and highly sensitive foreign intelligence data among these intelligence agencies and within the Department of Defense. The Central Intelligence Agency and Department of State can access the system,” he explained, and then added emphatically: “COINS and the ARPANET are not linked, and will not be linked.”

He was either misinformed or stretching the truth.

Four years earlier, in 1971, ARPA director Stephen Lukasik, who had run the agency during the build out of the ARPANET, very clearly explained in his testimony to the Senate that the whole point of the ARPANET was to integrate government networks—both classified (like COINS) and unclassified—into a unified telecommunications system. 55 “Our objective is to design, build, test and evaluate a high performance, low-cost, reliable computer network to meet the growing DoD requirements for computer-to-computer communications,” he said. He added that the military had just started testing the ARPANET as a way to connect operational computer systems. 56

According to Lukasik, the beauty of the ARPANET was that, although it was technically an unclassified network, it could be used for classified purposes because data could be digitally encrypted and sent over the wire without the need to physically secure actual lines and equipment. It was a general-purpose computer network that could connect to public networks and be used for classified and non-classified tasks. 57

Lukasik was right. Between 1972 and 1975, multiple military and intelligence agencies not only connected directly to the ARPANET but also began to build their own operational subnetworks that were based on the ARPANET design and that could interconnect with it. The navy had multiple air bases tied to the network. The army used the ARPANET to link supercomputer centers. In 1972, the NSA had commissioned Bolt, Beranek and Newman—J. C. R. Licklider’s company and major ARPANET contractor—to build an upgraded ARPANET version of its COINS intelligence system, the very system that Cooke promised three years later would never be plugged into the ARPANET. This system ended up being connected to the ARPANET to provide operational data communication services for the NSA and the Pentagon for many years afterward. 58

Even as Cooke denied to Senator Tunney that the ARPANET was used for military communications, the network featured multiple connections from the army, navy, NSA, and air force—and very likely contained unlisted nodes maintained by intelligence agencies such as the CIA. 59 But the issue soon became moot. A few weeks after Cooke’s testimony, the ARPANET was officially absorbed by the Defense Communications Agency, which ran the communications systems for the entire Pentagon. In other words, even if still somewhat experimental, the ARPANET was the definition of an operational military network. 60

Military Internet

In the summer of 1973, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf locked themselves in a conference room at the upscale Hyatt Cabana El Camino Real just a mile south of Stanford. The Cabana was the most glamorous hotel in Palo Alto, having hosted the Beatles in 1965, among other celebrities. Kahn was stocky and had thick black hair and sideburns. Cerf was tall and lanky, with an unkempt beard. The two could have been a folk music duo passing through on tour. But Kahn and Cerf weren’t there to play or socialize or party. They didn’t have any booze or drugs. They didn’t have much more than a few pencils and pads of paper. For the past several months, they had been trying to create a protocol that could connect three different types of experimental military networks. At the Cabana, their mission was to finally get their thoughts on paper and hash out the final technical design of an “inter-net.” 61

“Do you want to start or shall I?” asked Kahn.

“No, I’ll be happy to begin,” Cerf replied, and then sat there staring at a blank piece of paper. After about five minutes, he gave up: “I don’t know where to start.” 62 Kahn took over and scribbled away, jotting out thirty pages of diagrams and theoretical network designs. Both Cerf and Kahn had been involved in building the ARPANET: Cerf had been part of a UCLA team responsible for writing the operating system for the routers that formed ARPANET’s backbone, while Kahn had worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman helping to design the network’s routing protocols. Now they were about to take it to a new level: ARPANET 2.0, a network of networks, the architecture of what we now call the “Internet.”

In 1972, after Kahn was hired to head ARPA’s command and control division, he had convinced Cerf to leave a job he had just taken teaching at Stanford and work for ARPA again. 63 A major goal for Kahn was to expand the ARPANET’s usefulness in real-world military situations. That meant, first and foremost, extending the packet-based networking design to wireless data networks, radio, and satellite. Wireless data networks were crucial to the future of military command and control because they would allow traffic to be transmitted over huge distances: naval vessels, aircraft, and mobile field units could all connect to computer resources on the mainland through portable wireless units. It was a mandatory component of the global command and control system ARPA was charged with developing. 64

Kahn directed the effort to build several experimental wireless networks. One was called PRNET, short for “packet radio network.” It had the ability to transmit data via mobile computers installed in vans using a network of antennas located in the mountain ranges around San Bruno, Berkeley, San Jose, and Palo Alto. The effort was run out of the Stanford Research Institute. At the same time, Kahn pushed into packet satellite networking, setting up an experimental network called SATNET that linked Maryland, West Virginia, England, and Norway; the system was initially designed to carry seismic data from remote installations set up to detect Soviet nuclear tests. ARPANET’s data packet technology worked remarkably well in a wireless setting. But there was one problem: although they were based on the same fundamental data-packet-switching designs, PRNET, SATNET, and ARPANET all used slightly different protocols to run and so could not connect to each other. For all practical purposes, they were standalone networks, which went against the whole concept of networking and minimized their usefulness to the military.

ARPA needed all three networks to function as one. 65 The question was: How to bring them all together in a simple way? That’s what Kahn and Cerf were trying to figure out in the Cabana conference room. Eventually, they settled on a basic plan for a flexible networking language that could connect multiple types of networks. It was called TCP/IP—Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, the same basic network language that powers the Internet today. 66

In a 1990 oral history interview, Cerf, who now works as Google’s Chief Evangelist, described how his and Kahn’s efforts to devise an internetwork protocol were entirely rooted in the needs of the military:

There were lots of ramifications for the military. For example, we absolutely wanted to bring data communications to the field, which is what the packet radio project and the packet satellite projects were about; how to reach wide areas, how to reach people on the oceans. Can’t do it by dragging fiber, can’t do it very well with terrestrial store-and-forward radio because line-of-site doesn’t work very well on a wide ocean. So you need satellites for that. So the whole effort was very strongly motivated by bringing computers into the field in the military and then making it possible for them to communicate with each other in the field and to assets that were in the rear of the theatre of operations. So all of the demonstrations that we did had military counterparts. 67

Even the first successful test of the Internet-grade TCP/IP network, which took place on November 22, 1977, simulated a military scenario: using radio, satellite, and wired networks to communicate with an active mobile unit battling a Soviet invasion of Europe. An old GMC delivery van outfitted by SRI with a bunch of radio gear played the role of a motorized NATO division, driving up and down the freeway near Stanford and beaming data over ARPA’s radio network. The data were then forwarded over ARPA’s satellite network to Europe—by way of Sweden and London—and then sent back to the United States to UCLA via satellite and wired ARPA connections. 68 “So what we were simulating was a situation where somebody was in a mobile unit in the field, let’s say in Europe, in the middle of some kind of action trying to communicate through a satellite network to the United States, and then going across the US to get to some strategic computing asset that was in the United States,” recalled Cerf. “And there were a number of such simulations or demonstrations like that, some of which were extremely ambitious. They involved the Strategic Air Command at one point where we put airborne packet radios in the field communicating with each other and to the ground using the airborne systems to sew together fragments of Internet that had been segregated by a simulated nuclear attack.”

Cerf described working very closely with the military every step of the way and in many cases helping find solutions to specific needs. “We deployed a whole bunch of packet radio gear and computer terminals and small processors to Fort Bragg with the 18th Airborne Corps and for several years did a whole bunch of field exercises. We also deployed them to the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, and did a series of exercises with them. In some cases, the outcome of the applications that we used were so good that they became part of the normal everyday operation.”

Of course, Vint Cerf wasn’t the only one working out practical military applications for the ARPANET. Congressional reports and internal ARPA documents from the 1970s are full of examples of the armed services putting the network to use in a variety of ways, from wirelessly transmitting submarine locator sensor data, to providing portable communication in the field, teleconferencing, remote maintenance of computer equipment, and military supply chain and logistics management. 69 And, of course, all of this was intertwined with ARPA’s work on “intelligent systems”—building the data analysis and predictive technologies Godel and Licklider initiated a decade earlier. 70

This was the great thing about ARPANET technology: it was a general-purpose network that could carry all sorts of traffic. It was useful to everyone involved.

“It turned out I was correct,” Ford Rowan told me forty-one years after he broke the ARPANET army surveillance story on NBC. “The concerns that a lot of people had were largely that the federal government was making one big computer that would have everything. One of the new things that came out was that you did not need one big computer. You could link a lot of computers together. That was the leap that occurred in the early 1970s as they were doing this research. We could figure out a way to share info across the network without having to actually have one big computer that knows everything.” 71

Part II

False Promises

Chapter 4

Utopia and Privatization

Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. —Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR,” 1972

If you got hit by a bus and fell into a coma in 1975, and then woke up two decades later, you would have thought Americans had gone crazy or had joined a millennial cult en masse. Probably both.

In the 1990s the country was ablaze with sweeping religious proclamations about the Internet. People talked of a great leveling—an unstoppable wildfire that would rip through the world, consuming bureaucracies, corrupt governments, coddled business elites, and stodgy ideologies, clearing the way for a new global society that was more prosperous and freer in every possible way. It was as if the End Times had arrived. Utopia was at hand.

Louis Rossetto, the founder of a new, hip tech magazine called Wired, compared computer engineers to Prometheus: they brought gifts of the gods to us mortals that spurred “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire,” he wrote in his magazine’s inaugural issue. 1 Kevin Kelly, a bearded evangelical Christian and Wired editor, agreed with his boss: “No one can escape the transforming fire of machines. Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established. The mighty tumble, the once confident are left desperate for guidance, and the nimble are given a chance to prevail.” 2

It wasn’t just the tech kids pushing these visions. It did not matter who you were—Republican, Democrat, liberal, or libertarian—everyone seemed to share this single, unflinching conviction: the world was on the cusp of a technology revolution that would change everything, and change it for the better.[wrong..DC]

Few embodied the early years of this new Great Awakening more than George Gilder, an old-school Reaganomics pundit who in the early 1990s reinvented himself as a techno prophet and investment guru. In his book Telecosm, he explained how computer networks combined with the power of American capitalism were about to create a paradise on earth. He even came up with a name for this utopia: the Telecosm. “All of the monopolies and hierarchies and pyramids and power grids of industrial society are going to dissolve before the constant pressure of distributing intelligence to the fringes of all the networks,” he wrote, predicting that the power of the Internet would destroy the physical structure of society. “The telecosm can destroy cities because then you can get all the diversity, all the serendipity, all the exuberant variety that you can find in a city in your own living room.” 3 Vice President Al Gore agreed, telling anyone who’d listen that the world was in the grips of a “revolution as sweeping and powerful as any revolution in history.” 4

Indeed, something was happening. People were buying personal computers and hooking them up with screeching modems to a strange new place: the World Wide Web. A labyrinth of chat rooms, forums, corporate and government networks, and an endless collection of webpages. In 1994, a start-up called Netscape appeared with an exciting new product, a web browser. A year later, the company went public and surged to a market value of $2.2 billion by the end of the first day of trading. It was the start of a new gold rush in the San Francisco Bay Area. People cheered as obscure tech companies went public on the stock market, the price of their shares doubling, even tripling on the first day. What did these companies do? What did they make? How did they make money? Few investors really knew. More importantly: no one cared! They were innovating. They were driving us forward into the future! Stocks were booming, with no end in sight. From 1995 to 2000, the NASDAQ spiked from 1,000 to 5,000, quintupling before crashing down on itself. [fakeass .com bubble that Clinton used to get reelected DC]

I was still a kid, but I remember these times well. My family had just emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. We left Leningrad in 1989 and spent six months bouncing around a series of refugee camps in Austria and Italy until we finally made it to New York, and then quickly relocated to San Francisco, where my father, Boris, used his incredible talent for languages to land a job as a Japanese translator. My mother, Nellie, retooled her Soviet pedagogical PhD and began to teach physics in Galileo High School, while my brother Eli and I tried to acclimate and fit in as best we could. By the time we got our bearings, the Bay Area was in peak dot-com hysteria. Everyone I knew was getting into tech and seemed to be making out like a bandit. The city was full of pimply kids driving convertibles, buying homes, and throwing lavish techno raves. My friend Leo traded his kiddie hacker skills into a high five figure salary—real money for a teenager. Another immigrant kid I knew made a small fortune speculating on domain names. My older brother got a great job with a great salary at a mystifying start-up that pivoted half a dozen times in the span of a few years and then folded without putting out a viable product. “We had some investors from the Midwest who had no idea what the Internet was, they just heard that you needed to invest in it,” he recalls. Computer games, the Internet, webpages, never-ending porn, remote commuting, distance learning, streaming movies, and music on demand: the future was here. I enrolled in community college and transferred to UC Berkeley, intent on pursuing a computer science degree.

Two decades earlier, Americans had feared computers. People, especially the young, saw them as a technocratic tool of surveillance and social control. But everything changed in the 1990s. The hippies who protested computers and the early Internet now said that this tool of oppression would liberate us from oppression! Computers were the great equalizer! They would make the world freer, fairer, more democratic and egalitarian.

It was impossible not to believe the hype. Looking back on it now, with full knowledge of the history of the Internet, I can’t help but marvel at the transformation. It’s as weird as waking up and seeing hippies marching for the military draft.

So, what happened? How did a technology so deeply connected to war and counterinsurgency suddenly become a one-way ticket to global utopia? It’s an important question. Without it, we can’t begin to understand the cultural forces that have shaped the way we view the Internet today.

In a way, it all started with a disillusioned entrepreneur named Stewart Brand. 5

Hippies at ARPA

October 1972. It’s evening, and Stewart Brand, a young, lanky freelance journalist and photographer, is hanging out at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an ARPA contractor located in the Santa Cruz mountains above the campus. And he is having a lot of fun.

He’s on assignment for Rolling Stone, the edgy house magazine of America’s counterculture, partying with a bunch of computer programmers and math geeks on ARPA’s payroll. Brand is not there to inspect computerized dossiers or to press engineers about their surveillance data subroutines. He is there for fun and frivolity: to play SpaceWar, something called a “computer video game.”

Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI’s huge PDP-10 computer. AI’s Head System Programmer and most avid Spacewar nut, Ralph Gorin, faces a display screen. Players seize the five sets of control buttons, find their spaceship persona on the screen, and simultaneously: turn and fire toward any nearby still-helpless spaceships, hit the thrust button to initiate orbit before being slurped by the killer sun, and evade or shoot down any incoming enemy torpedoes or orbiting mines. After two torpedoes are fired, each ship has a three-second unarmed reloading time. 6

Playing a video game against other people in real time? Back then, this was wild stuff, something most people only saw in science fiction films. Brand was transfixed. He had never heard of or experienced anything like that before. It was a mind-expanding experience. Thrilling, like taking a gigantic hit of acid.

He looked at his fellow players squeezed into that tiny, drab office and had a vision. The people around him—their bodies were stuck on earth, but their minds had been teleported to another dimension, “effectively out of their bodies, computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, locked in life-or-death space combat for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friends and wasting their employer’s valuable computer time.” 7

The rest of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was straight out of science fiction, too. While Brand and his new buddies obsessively played the video game, one-eyed robots wandered autonomously on wheels in the background. Computer-generated music filled the air, and weird lights projected on the walls. Was this a military-funded Stanford computer lab or a psychedelic Jefferson Airplane concert? To Brand, it was both, and much more. He marveled at “a fifteen-ring circus in ten different directions” going on around him. It was “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.” 8

At the time, the atmosphere around Stanford was charged with anti-ARPA sentiment. The university had just come off a wave of violent antiwar protests against military research and recruitment on campus. Activists from Students for a Democratic Society specifically targeted the Stanford Research Institute—a major ARPA contractor deeply involved in everything from the ARPANET to chemical weapons and counterinsurgency—and forced the university to cut official ties.

To many on campus, ARPA was the enemy. Brand disagreed. In a long article he filed for Rolling Stone, he set out to convince the magazine’s young and trendsetting readership that ARPA was not some big bureaucratic bummer connected to America’s war machine but instead was part of an “astonishingly enlightened research program” that just happened to be run by the Pentagon. The people he was hanging with at the Stanford AI lab were not soulless computer engineers working for a military contractor. They were hippies and rebels, counterculture types with long hair and beards. They decorated their cubicles with psychedelic art posters and leaflets against the Vietnam War. They read Tolkien and smoked pot. They were “hackers” and “computer bums… full of freedom and weirdness.… These are heads, most of them,” wrote Brand. 9

They were cool, they were passionate, they had ideas, they were doing something, and they wanted to change the world. They might be stuck in a computer lab on a Pentagon salary, but they were not there to serve the military. They were there to bring peace to the world, not through protest or political action but through technology. He was ecstatic. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics,” he told Rolling Stone readers.

And video games, as out-of-this-world cool as they were, just scratched the surface of what these groovy scientists were cooking up. With help from ARPA, they were revolutionizing computers, transforming them from giant mainframes operated by technicians into accessible tools that any person could afford and use at home. And then there was something called the ARPANET, a newfangled computer network that promised to connect people and institutions all around the world, make real-time communication and collaboration across vast distances a cinch, deliver news instantaneously, and even play music on demand. The Grateful Dead on demand? Imagine that. “So much for record stores,” Stewart Brand predicted.

The way he described it, you’d think that working for ARPA was the most subversive thing a person could do.

Cults and Cybernetics

Brand was thirty-four and already a counterculture celebrity when he visited Stanford’s AI Lab. He had been the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, a wildly popular lifestyle magazine for the commune movement. He ran with Ken Kesey and his LSD-dropping Merry Pranksters, and he had played a central role in setting up and promoting the psychedelic concert where the Grateful Dead debuted and rang in San Francisco’s Summer of Love. 10 Brand was deeply embedded in California’s counterculture and appeared as a major character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Yet there he was, acting as a pitch man for ARPA, a military agency that had in its short existence already racked up a bloody reputation— from chemical warfare to counterinsurgency and surveillance. It didn’t seem to make any sense. 11

Stewart Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois. His mother was a homemaker; his father, a successful advertising man. After graduating from an elite boarding school, Brand attended Stanford University. His diaries from the time show a young man deeply attached to his individuality and fearful of the Soviet Union. His nightmare scenario was that America would be invaded by the Red Army and that communism would take away his free will to think and do whatever he wanted. “That my mind would no longer be my own, but a tool carefully shaped by the descendants of Pavlov,” he wrote in one diary entry. 12 “If there’s a fight, then, I will fight. And fight with a purpose. I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty. If I must be a fool, I want to be my own particular brand of fool—utterly unlike other fools. I will fight to avoid becoming a number—to others and to myself.” 13

After college, Brand enrolled in the US Army and trained as a parachutist and a photographer. In 1962, after finishing his service, he moved to the Bay Area and drifted toward the growing counterculture. He hooked up with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, took a lot of psychedelic drugs, partied, made art, and participated in an experimental program to test the effects of LSD that, unknown to him, was secretly being conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of its MK-ULTRA program. 14

While the New Left protested against the war, joined the civil rights movement, and pushed for women’s rights, Brand took a different path. He belonged to the libertarian wing of the counterculture, which tended to look down on traditional political activism and viewed all politics with skepticism and scorn. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a spiritual leader of the hippie- libertarian movement, channeled this sensibility when he told thousands of people assembled at an anti– Vietnam War rally at UC Berkeley that their attempt to use politics to stop the war was doomed to failure. “Do you want to know how to stop the war?” he screamed. “Just turn your backs on it, fuck it!” 15

Many did exactly that. They turned their backs, said “fuck it!” and moved out of the cities to rural America: upstate New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, western Massachusetts. They blended eastern spirituality, romantic notions of self-sufficiency, and the cybernetic ideas of Norbert Wiener. Many tended to see politics and social hierarchical structures as fundamental enemies to human harmony, and they sought to build communities free of top-down control. They did not want to reform or engage with what they saw as a corrupt old system, so they fled to the countryside and founded communes, hoping to create from scratch a new world based on a better set of ideals. They saw themselves as a new generation of pioneers settling the American frontier.

Stanford University historian Fred Turner called this wing of the counterculture the “New Communalists” and wrote a book that traced the cultural origins of this movement and the pivotal role that Stewart Brand and cybernetic ideology came to play in it. “If mainstream America had become a culture of conflict, with riots at home and war abroad, the commune world would be one of harmony. If the American state deployed massive weapons systems in order to destroy faraway peoples, the New Communalists would deploy small-scale technologies—ranging from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, slide projectors, and LSD—to bring people together and allow them to experience their common humanity,” he wrote in From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 16

The commune kids were moving to the wilderness and striking out on their own. For that they needed more than just ideas. They needed tools and the most cutting-edge survival gear they could get. Brand saw opportunity. After taking an extended tour of the communes with his wife, Lious, he cashed in a part of his inheritance to launch a consumer and lifestyle guide marketed to that world. He called it the Whole Earth Catalog. It highlighted tools, featured discussions about science and technology, gave farming and building tips, ran letters and articles from commune members all across the country, and suggested books and literature, mixing pop libertarian titles like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged with Wiener’s Cybernetics. 17 “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along,” was how Steve Jobs, a young fan of the magazine, later described it. “It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” 18

The mail-order L.L. Bean catalogue was what inspired Brand to create the Whole Earth Catalog. But it was not just about commerce. Like other New Communalists, Brand was enamored with cybernetics ideas—the notion that all life on earth was one big, harmonious interlocking information machine appealed to his sensibilities. He saw his fellow New Communalists as the start of a new society that fit into a larger global ecosystem. He wanted the Whole Earth Catalog to be the connective tissue that held all these isolated communes together, a kind of print magazine–based information network that everyone read and contributed to and that bound them into one collective organism. 19

The Whole Earth Catalog was a huge success, and not just with the hippies. In 1971, a special issue of the magazine topped bestseller book lists and won a National Book Award. Yet, despite the cultural and financial success, Brand faced an identity crisis. By the time Whole Earth won the National Book Award, the commune movement it served and celebrated lay in ruins.

Years later, filmmaker Adam Curtis interviewed former members of communes in his BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. He discovered that the cybernetic structures that these groups imposed on themselves, rules that were supposed to flatten and equalize power relations among members and lead to a harmonious new society, produced the opposite result and, ultimately, ripped many of the communities apart. 20

“We were trying to create a society based on understanding ecosystems, a society based on interrelationships and balance—a man machine biological system working in combination,” recalled Randall Gibson, a member of the Synergia commune in New Mexico that ran on a cybernetic notion he called eco-technics. 21 The community had strict rules against collective action or organization. Members had to resolve problems and conflicts through “connection sessions,” where two people carried out one-on-one discussions in full view of the commune but could not solicit support or backing from anyone else. “The idea of eco-technics is simply that you are part of the system in which there would be less, if not no hierarchy at all,” Gibson said. Ultimately, these connection sessions descended into something darker: exercises in shaming, bullying, and control, where dominant members took advantage of weaker and meeker members. “In practice these would be 20-and 30-minute hazing sessions and were usually met by silence with the rest of one’s peers.” 22

Other communes went through similar transformations, morphing from upbeat youthful experiments into repressive environments and, often, straight-up personality cults. “There was fear actually because the people who were more dominating—there was anger. There was constantly a background of fear in the house—like a virus running in the background. Like spyware. You know it’s there but you don’t know how to get rid of it,” said Molly Hollenback, a member of a commune called The Family in Taos, New Mexico. 23 Formed by students from UC Berkeley in 1967, The Family quickly transformed into a rigid hierarchy, with men addressed with titles like “sir” and “Lord,” and women forced to wear skirts and assigned conservative gender-based work: cooking, child care, and washing. A founding member who called himself Lord Byron presided over the group and reserved the right to have sex with any woman in the commune. 24

Most communes lasted only a few years, and some less than that. “What tore them all apart was the very thing that they were supposed to have banished: power,” explained Adam Curtis. “Strong personality came to dominate the weaker members of the group, but the rules of a self-organizing system refused to allow any organized opposition to this oppression.” In the end, what were supposed to be experiments in freedom and new utopian societies simply replicated and magnified the structural inequality of the outside world that people brought with them.

But Stewart Brand did not admit defeat, nor did he try to understand why the cybernetic-libertarian ideology underpinning the experiment failed so spectacularly. He simply transferred the utopian ideas of the mythical commune into something that had long fascinated him: the rapidly growing computer industry.

Rebranding Stewart Brand

On the surface, the worlds of ARPA and military computer research and the drugged-out hippie commune scene of the 1960s could not be more different. Indeed, they seemed to occupy different solar systems. One had uniforms, stuffy suits, pocket protectors, thoughts of war, punch cards, and rigid hierarchies. The other had long hair, free love, drugs, far-out music, hostility to authority, and a scrappy and ragged existence.

But the differences were superficial. On a deeper level, the two scenes operated on the same cybernetic wavelength and overlapped on multiple fronts. J. C. R Licklider, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and other ARPA and military engineers were deploying cybernetic ideas to build computer networks, while dreaming of building prediction technology to run the world and manage political strife out of existence. The hippies were doing the same with their cybernetic communes. Except, where ARPA and the military were industrial and global, communes were small-scale, boutique.

There were direct connections as well. Take the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major ARPA contractor working on everything from counterinsurgency and chemical warfare to running an important ARPANET node and research center. Several SRI staffers were close friends of Stewart Brand and active contributors to the Whole Earth Catalog. 25 Brand frequently hung around at SRI and even consulted for the institute on a 1968 demonstration of the interactive computer technology Douglas Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center had developed under an ARPA contract. 26 The event featured real-time video conferencing and collaborative document editing carried over the ARPANET, which was then only two months old. 27 And then there was Engelbart himself. The engineer and interactive computing guru was a favorite of Licklider’s and received millions in ARPA funding. At the same time, he experimented with LSD and dosed other computer engineers with acid to see whether it made them more efficient and creative. He also went on a tour of various communes and was highly supportive of the movement’s attempt to create new forms of decentralized societies. 28

The feeling was mutual. The Bay Area hippie counterculture scene lived and breathed the cybernetic ideas pumped out by America’s military-industrial complex. Richard Brautigan, a shaggy-haired writer with a droopy mustache who lived in San Francisco, composed an ode to the coming cybernetic utopia that demonstrates the spiritual closeness of these two seemingly contradictory worlds. Published in 1967 and titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” the poem describes a world in which computers merge with nature to create a kind of altruistic god-like being that would take care of us all—a world “where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony / like pure water / touching clear sky.” 29 Brautigan handed his poem out on Height Street, the epicenter of the counterculture movement. Naturally, Brand was a fan of Brautigan and published his work in the Whole Earth Catalog. “Richard could not code. I’m not sure he knew any computers personally,” Brand would later recall. You didn’t need to be a programmer to believe.

There was deep sympathy and close ties between the two worlds, and Stewart Brand took it further. In the early 1980s, after the commune dream collapsed, he cashed in his counterculture cred and turned the utopian ideals of the New Communalists into a marketing vehicle for the sprouting consumer computer industry. He was instrumental to the cause. Like an experienced midwife, he guided the birth of this industry’s growing sense of self-importance and cultural relevance. He was shrewd. He understood that the Bay Area sat atop a major economic and cultural fault line. The tectonic plates were shifting and trembling and sending off shockwaves. The whole place felt overdue for a monster quake that would restructure society in a major way, spawning new industries, new businesses, a new politics, and a radically new culture. He really believed it, and he helped a new class of computer entrepreneurs see themselves as he saw them—as counterculture rebels and heroes. He then helped them sell that image to the rest of the world.

In this new role, Brand was still a utopian idealist, but he was also an entrepreneur. “I’m a smallbusiness man who is hit with the same kind of problems that face any small entrepreneur,” he told Newsweek magazine. 30

Over the coming years, as personal computers gained traction, he gathered around himself a crew of journalists, marketing types, industry insiders, and other hippies-turned-entrepreneurs. Together, they replicated the marketing and aesthetics that Brand had used during his Whole Earth Catalog days and sold computers the same way he once sold communes and psychedelics: as liberation technologies and tools of personal empowerment. This group would spin this mythology through the 1980s and 1990s, helping obfuscate the military origins of computer and networking technologies by dressing them up in the language of 1960s acid-dropping counterculture. In this rebranded world, computers were the new communes: a digital frontier where the creation of a better world was still possible.

In the parlance of today’s Silicon Valley, Brand “pivoted.” He transformed the Whole Earth Catalog into the Whole Earth Software Catalog and Whole Earth Review—magazines billed as “tools and ideas for the computer age.” He also launched the Good Business Network, a corporate consulting company that applied his counterculture public relations strategies to problems faced by clients such as Shell Oil, Morgan Stanley, Bechtel, and DARPA. 31 He also organized an influential computer conference that brought together leading computer engineers and journalists. 32 It was called, simply, “Hackers’ Conference” and was held in Marin County in 1984. About 150 of the country’s top computer geniuses attended, including Apple’s Steve Wozniak. Brand cleverly stage-managed the event to give the group maximum cultural cachet. To hear him and other believers tell it, the event was the “Woodstock of the computer elite!” Newspaper accounts regaled readers with tales of strange nerds with fantastical visions of the future. “Giving a computer self-hood. The greatest hack is artificial consciousness,” one attendee told a Washington Post reporter. “My vision of hacking is a fuzzy little intelligent creature growing inside each machine,” quipped another. 33

A PBS film crew was on site to shoot a documentary and capture Brand’s role in bringing these hackers together. He was not the young man who launched Whole Earth Catalog two decades earlier. His face showed his age and he sported a shiny, bald pate, but he still had the fire in him. He wore a black-and-white plaid shirt under a sheepskin vest and waxed lyrical about the rebellious nature of those gathered there in Marin. 34 “They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and I think more effective in pushing the culture around in good ways than almost any group I can think of.” Off camera, he took to the pages of his Whole Earth Review to further expound on the rebel nature of computer programmers. “I think hackers —innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in an introduction to a photo spread of the 1984 Hackers’ Conference. “No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded.… High tech is now something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them, and that’s a hot item in the world.” He added, “The quietest of the ’60s sub- subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and most powerful—and most suspicious of power.” 35 [most suspicious of power??? that is a joke in 2021, THEY have become the nazi censors in the extreme, me thinks they have lost sight of their beginnings, either that or they were liars and into tyranny the whole time DC]

The Hackers’ Conference was a big moment in the cultural history of Silicon Valley. It helped introduce computer programmers to the public in a totally different way. These were no longer engineers working for big corporations and military contractors but “hackers”—geniuses and rebels bucking the system. Although Brand was an important figure driving this change of perception, he was not operating in isolation but represented a bigger cultural sea change.

The year 1984 was a big and symbolic one for the computer industry beyond Brand’s Hackers’ Conference. That year, William Gibson published Neuromancer, a science fiction novel about a drug addled hacker battling his way through a dangerous virtual reality cybernetic world run by frightening corporations and their god-like supercomputers. It was a world of no rules, no laws, only power and cleverness. Gibson meant it to be a metaphor for the growth of unrestrained corporate power at a time when poverty and inequality spiked under President Ronald Reagan—a science fiction experiment of what would happen if this trend ran to its natural conclusion. Neuromancer coined the term cyberspace. It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia. Computers and hackers were countercultural rebels taking on power. They were cool.

That same year, Apple Computer released its “1984” ad for the Macintosh. Directed by Ridley Scott, who had just wowed audiences with the dystopian hit Blade Runner, and aired during the Super Bowl, Apple’s message could not have been more clear: forget what you know about IBM or corporate mainframes or military computer systems. With Apple at the helm, personal computers are the opposite of what they used to be: they are not about domination and control but about individual rebellion and empowerment. “In a striking departure from the direct, buy-this-product approach of most American corporations, Apple Computer introduced its new line of personal computers with the provocative claim that Macintosh would help save the world from the lockstep society of George Orwell’s novel,” reported the New York Times. 36 Interestingly, the paper pointed out that the “1984” ad had grown out of another campaign that the company had abandoned but that had explicitly talked about the ability to misuse computers. A draft of that campaign read: “True enough, there are monster computers lurking in big business and big government that know everything from what motels you’ve stayed at to how much money you have in the bank. But at Apple we’re trying to balance the scales by giving individuals the kind of computer power once reserved for corporations.”

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was a huge Stewart Brand fan. 37 He was just a kid in the late 1960s when the magazine and commune culture were at their peak of popularity and power, but he read the Whole Earth Catalog and absorbed its culture into his own worldview. So it wasn’t surprising that the original Apple ad campaign that hinted at computers as corporate and government monsters was left in the Dumpster while Brand’s view of personal computers as a technology of freedom prevailed.

Stewart Brand offered a powerful vision that was planted deep in the American psyche. His push to rebrand military computer technology as liberation coincided with a less visible force: the gradual privatization of the ARPANET and the creation of a global commercial Internet.

The Man Who Privatized the Internet

It was sometime in 1986 when Stephen Wolff walked into the offices of the National Science Foundation on Wilson Boulevard in Washington, DC, across the Potomac River from the White House and just around the corner from the Pentagon.

Like most people involved in the early Internet, Wolff was a military man. Tall and skinny, with a calm, reassuring voice, he spent the 1970s working on the ARPANET at the US Army Ballistic Research Lab at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a chunk of lush marshland and forest jutting into the Chesapeake Bay about thirty-five miles north of Baltimore. Aberdeen, now closed, enjoyed a long and storied history. It was established during World War I and tasked with developing and testing field artillery and heavy weapons: cannons, air defense guns, ammunition, trench mortars, and bombs. Norbert Wiener served there as a precomputer human calculator, working out ballistic trajectories for the massive guns being developed. During World War II, it was the birthplace of America’s first fully digital and electronic computer, the ENIAC. In the 1960s, Aberdeen was connected to something a bit spookier: a series of “limited war laboratory” experiments in which the US Army Chemical Corps deployed mind-bending drugs—including LSD and the nightmare super-hallucinogen known as BZ, which could put a person into a hallucinatory coma lasting days—as chemical weapons. 38

Stephen Wolff’s job at Aberdeen in the 1970s involved working on the ARPANET and linking it with the US Army’s network of supercomputers. 39 In 1986, the National Science Foundation’s Networking Office hired him to do the same thing, but with a major twist: he was to build a government-funded network that extended the ARPANET design into the civilian world, and then spin this network off to the private sector. 40 In the end, Wolff oversaw the creation and privatization of the Internet.

When I spoke to Wolff, I asked, “Is it right to call you the man who privatized the Internet?”

“Yes, that is a fair assessment,” he replied. 41

Even before Stephen Wolff arrived at the National Science Foundation, it was clear ARPANET’s days were numbered. In 1975, the Pentagon had officially relieved ARPA of its responsibilities for running the network and placed it under the direct control of the Defense Communication Agency. The army, navy, air force, and National Security Agency had all started building out their own networks based on ARPANET technology. They maintained links to the original ARPANET infrastructure, but the physical network, with its limited 56K modem speeds, was beginning to show its age. The experiment had been a success, but as the 1980s approached, it looked as if the original ARPANET was going to be dumped in the trash.

The network had become obsolete, but the technology and framework on which it ran were only getting started. Many of the original ARPANET architects and designers cashed in on their ARPA experience in trade for lucrative private sector jobs in the rapidly growing computer networking industry; others remained at the Pentagon, pushing and evangelizing for a wider adoption of the ARPANET network design. Many were eager to see the original ARPANET grow beyond military circles and into a commercial network that everyone could use. 42 The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency created by Congress in 1950 with a mission to “promote the progress of science” and “secure the national defense,” was the vehicle that would ultimately get the job done.

In the early 1980s, the NSF ran a small network that connected a handful of university computer science departments to the ARPANET. By 1985, administrators wanted to expand the project into a bigger, faster network that would connect a larger pool of universities, extending the ARPANET out of purely military and computer science circles and making it available to all academic and educational users. 43 On the basis of his decade of experience connecting US Army supercomputers to the ARPANET at Aberdeen, Wolff was brought on to build and manage this new educational network project—called the NSFNET.

The first version of the NSFNET came online in 1986. It was a modest effort, connecting supercomputer centers at five universities funded by the NSF, wiring them together so they could share data, and plugging them into a wider set of universities connected to the old military ARPANET. The network was limited in scope, but demand for it was so high that it crashed the system. Its puny leased lines had the combined throughput of a slow modem and could not handle the swell of users. Clearly, the NSFNET needed a major upgrade and more bandwidth. The question was: What would this new network look like?

The answer came quickly.

“Starting with the inauguration of the NSFNET program in 1985, we had the hope that it would grow to include every college and university in the country,” recalled Wolff in an interview. 44 “But the notion of trying to administer a three-thousand-node network from Washington—well, there wasn’t that much hubris inside the Beltway.”

Hubris, indeed. This was the height of the Reagan era, a time of privatization and deregulation, when public ownership of vital infrastructure was considered a barbaric relic that had no place in the modern world; if anything, it needed to be lanced like a boil. Everything was being deregulated and privatized— from the banking sector to telecommunications and broadcast industries. Wolff and his team at the NSF, like the obedient public servants that they were, toed the line.

In early 1987, he and his team finally hashed out a design for an improved and upgraded NFSNET. This new network, a government project created with public money, would connect universities and be designed to eventually function as a privatized telecommunications system. That was the implicit understanding everyone at NSF agreed on. They viewed the public nature of the NSFNET as a transitory state: a small government pollywog that would transition into a commercial bullfrog. According to specs, the new NSFNET would be built as a two-tier network. The top layer would be a national network, a high-speed “backbone” that spanned the entire country. The second layer would be made up of smaller “regional networks” that would connect universities to the backbone. Instead of building and managing the network itself, the NSF would outsource the network to a handful of private companies. The plan was to fund and nurture these network providers until they could become self-sufficient, at which point they would be cut loose and allowed to privatize the network infrastructure they built for the NSFNET.

Later in 1987, the NSF awarded contracts for its upgraded NSFNET design. The most important part of the system, the backbone, was run by a new nonprofit corporation, a consortium including IBM, MCI, and the state of Michigan. 45 The second-tier regional networks were farmed out to a dozen other newly created private consortiums. With names like BARRNET, MIDNET, NYSERNET, WESTNET, and CERFNET, they were run by a mix of universities, research institutions, and military contractors. 46 [I would guess the underlined above would be quite a rabbit hole to venture into, a lot has happened in 34 years. DC]

In July 1988, the NSFNET backbone went online, connecting thirteen regional networks and over 170 different campuses across the country. 47 The physical network ran on MCI’s T-1 lines capable of transmitting 1.54 megabits per second and was routed through data switches built by IBM. The network stretched from San Diego to Princeton—snaking through regional network exchange points in Salt Lake City, Houston, Boulder, Lincoln, Champaign, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Ithaca and throwing out an international transatlantic line to the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. 48 The network was a huge success in the academic community. 49

Even as demand surged, NSF managers began the privatization process. “We told them: ‘You guys will eventually have to go out and find other customers. We don’t have enough money to support the regionals forever.’ So they did,” Wolff explained. “We tried… to ensure that the regionals kept their books straight and to make sure that the taxpayers weren’t directly subsidizing commercial activities. But out of necessity, we forced the regionals to become general-purpose network providers.” 50

Telling NSFNET providers to diversify their client base by seeking commercial clients—it seems like a minor decision. Yet, it is a crucial detail that had a huge impact, allowing the agency a few years later to quietly and quickly privatize the Internet while making it seem like the transition was inevitable and even natural. People on the inside understood the gravity of what Wolff and the NSF were doing. They saw it as a kind of clever trick, a sleight of hand.

Vinton Cerf, who in 1982 had left his job at ARPA to head up MCI’s networking division, described Wolff’s private-public network provider scheme as “brilliant.” He said, “The creation of those regional nets and the requirement that they become self-funding was the key to the evolution of the current Internet.” 51

Cerf is right. The Internet is perhaps one of the most valuable public inventions of the twentieth century, and decisions made by a few key unelected officials in the federal bureaucracy set the Internet on the certain path to privatization. There was no real public debate, no discussion, no dissension, and no oversight. It was just given away, before anyone outside this bureaucratic bubble realized what was at stake.

The privatization of the Internet—its transformation from a military network to the privatized telecommunications system we use today—is a convoluted story. Wade in deep enough and you find yourself in a swamp of three-letter federal agencies, network protocol acronyms, government initiatives, and congressional hearings filled with technical jargon and mind-numbing details. But on a fundamental level, it was all very simple: after two decades of lavish funding and research and development inside the Pentagon system, the Internet was transformed into a consumer profit center. Businesses wanted a cut, and a small crew of government managers were all too happy to oblige. To do that, with public funds the federal government created a dozen network providers out of thin air and then spun them off to the private sector, building companies that in the space of a decade would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today—Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, Comcast. But how did it happen exactly? Unravelling the tale requires looking at the first privatized NSFNET provider: a consortium led by IBM and MCI. 52 [oh good,we are heading down that hole, we know already its convoluted and done with our money DC]

The National Science Foundation functioned on an educational mandate and could support only initiatives that had an education dimension. Legally, NSFNET contractors were not allowed to route their commercial traffic through the government-funded network. These terms were baked into the federal agency’s “Acceptable Use Policy” contract, and they were quite clear. How could the network be privatized if it couldn’t route commercial traffic? Later, the NSF managers claimed that NSFNET providers didn’t violate these terms and that they routed commercial traffic through separate, privately built network infrastructure. But a backroom deal the NSF made with its backbone operator shows that the truth is a bit murkier.

In 1990, the MCI-IBM consortium, with approval from NSF, split into two corporate entities: a nonprofit called Advanced Network Services and a for-profit confusingly named ANS CO+RE Systems. Advanced Network Services—ANS—continued to contract with the NSF to maintain and run the physical NSFNET backbone. Meanwhile, its for-profit division, ANS CO+RE, sold commercial network services to business clients on a new network it called the ANSNET. 53 Of course, this new ANSNET ran on the exact same physical network infrastructure that powered the NSFNET. Legally, though, the two— NSFNET and ANSNET—were treated as completely separate entities by the National Science Foundation, which meant that despite the Acceptable Use Policy that forbade commercial traffic on the NSFNET, the IBM-MCI consortium had a green light to do just that for profit. 54 It was a clever maneuver. On a basic level, it allowed the MCI-IBM consortium to double book the same asset, pocketing government money to run the NSFNET and then selling this same network to commercial clients. More fundamentally, it allowed a corporate entity with a direct stake in the business of computer networking to privatize a government asset without doing so explicitly. That’s exactly how executives at MCI-IBM’s newly formed ANS division saw it: “[We] have privatized the NSFNET,” the president of ANS bragged at a networking industry workshop at Harvard in 1990. 55

This public-private flip was not announced to the public, and it was also hidden from other NSFNET providers. When they finally discovered the existence of this sly deal a year later, they raised alarm and accused the agency of privatizing the network to a favored corporate insider. Some called for a congressional investigation into what they saw as mismanagement and possibly fraud. “It’s like taking a Federal park and giving it to K Mart. It’s not right,” a manager of a large NSFNET provider told the New York Times. 56

They had a right to be upset. This backbone privatization deal gave a powerful company a privileged position that allowed it to quickly dominate the budding commercial networking market, frequently at the expense of other regional NSFNET providers. 57 The key to this advantage was the NSFNET backbone itself. Built and sustained with government funds, the network spanned the width of the United States and had connections to more than thirty other countries. Regional networks, on the other hand, were smaller, usually restricted to geographic areas like Greater New York, the Midwest, or northern California. Those that expanded into the national commercial market could not route commercial traffic through the NSFNET backbone but had to build their own private networks without government funding. In short, the NSF directly subsidized the MCI-IBM consortium’s national business expansion. The company used its privileged position to attract commercial clients, telling them that its service was better and faster because it had direct access to the national high-speed backbone. 58 [this is wrong on so many levels, yet they let it proceed...DC]

Stephen Wolff understood that backing a telecommunications company like MCI could lead to a situation where a handful of powerful corporations controlled the newly created Internet, but he brushed those dangers aside. As Wolff explained in an interview at the time, his main objective was to bring a viable commercial Internet into existence. Regulating fairness and competitive practices was someone else’s job. 59 On a very basic level, he was right. His objective was just to build a network, not regulate it. The problem was that by building a privatized network, he was also building an industry and, by extension, laying down the basic rules that governed and regulated this industry. These were intertwined. 60

Wolff’s laissez-faire management style triggered an outcry among the smaller regional NSFNET providers. There were accusations of conflict of interest, insider dealings, favoritism. William Schrader, president of a New York area provider called PSINET, charged the NSF pointblank with granting a monopoly over government assets to a single privileged corporation. “The Government has privatized the ownership of a federal resource,” he said at a 1992 congressional hearing held to investigate possible government mismanagement of the NSFNET. “The privatization unnecessarily provided the contractor [IBM-MCI] with an exclusive monopoly position to use Federal resources paid by taxpayer funds.” 61

Schrader’s PSINET banded together with other regional NSFNET providers to push the government to end MCI-IBM’s privilege and to finally open the network to unrestricted commercial traffic. “A level playing field can only be built by changing current NSF policies which favor one competitor,” Schrader told Congress. 62

Schrader wasn’t contesting the privatization itself. Why would he? His own company, PSINET, had also been spun off from a regional NSFNET provider seeded with federal money as a for-profit entity. 63 Like IBM-MCI’s ANS, PSINET represented a de facto privatization of a government-subsidized asset by a few privileged insiders who happened to be at the right place at the right time. Schrader didn’t challenge that. What he opposed was the NSF giving a different—and perhaps more powerful—group of privileged insiders more privilege than his company had received. This was a spat between competing government-subsidized networking companies in an industry created by the government. It was not a fight about privatization. It was a scrabble over how to divvy up the future profits in an emerging market worth billions. [And where is the publics $$$, on all this seeing the public payed for it all DC]

In the mid-1980s, while Stephen Wolff was planning the NSFNET upgrade, the United States was in the grips of two closely related computer technology booms: the explosion of cheap personal computers and easy access to computer networking. First, IBM released a powerful personal computer and licensed the design so that any computer manufacturer could make compatible IBM computer components. A few years later, in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, complete with a graphical user interface and mouse. Microsoft’s text-based DOS operating system for IBM computers was followed by a crude version of Windows. Computers were suddenly easy to use and affordable. It wasn’t just giant corporations, big universities, and government and military agencies anymore—smaller businesses and geeky middle-class early adopters could all get their own systems. It quickly became apparent that the true power of the personal computer was not personal at all, but social. Computers allowed people to tap into remote servers and connect with other computers, communicating and sharing information with people hundreds and thousands of miles away. Hundreds of thousands of people brought their computers home, plugged in their modems, and connected to a weird and early form of the Internet.

A few select companies had been providing ARPANET-like access to large corporations since the 1970s. But, in the late 1980s, all sorts of dial-up and networking services popped up across the country. There were big firms like CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online as well as hundreds of smaller outfits. Some, no more than dial-up messaging boards, were run as hobbies on servers set up in basements and garages. Others were small businesses that served up a series of features: forums, chat rooms, email, rudimentary computer games, and news. 64 All of them were text-based and simple, a shadow of the real Internet that would emerge later, but they were extremely popular. Even Stewart Brand got onboard. He co-founded an early message board called The Well, which provided a forum and online meeting place for his vast network of hippie business associates, artists, writers, and journalists. The Well became popular very quickly, turning into a social hub for the up-and-coming “digirati”—Bay Area opinion makers, entrepreneurs, authors, hackers, and journalists who came to the fore in the 1990s to shape digital culture.

This was not the globally connected Internet we know today. Services like The Well and America Online were not connected to one another and allowed communication only between members of the same service. Effectively, they were siloed, at least for a time. Everyone in the industry understood that this was going to be a huge and extremely profitable industry, and that some kind of national network would connect it all. “It was no secret that whatever the network was then, it was going to become a big commercial success at some point. Nobody ever doubted that,” Wolff told me in an interview. 65

Indeed, NSFNET contractors began fighting for control of this untapped and growing market as soon as Stephen Wolff gave them the green light to privatize their operations—that’s what the fight between providers like PSINET and ANS was all about. They were licking their chops, happy that the government bankrolled the network and even happier that it was about to get out of the business. There was a lot of money to be made. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, Schrader’s humble PSINET had customers in twenty eight countries and was worth $3 billion on the NASDAQ. 66

I asked Stephen Wolff about the stealth privatization of the Internet, wanting to know how it was possible that a decision of such magnitude was carried out with no input from the public or discussions about what it would entail. It was shocking to me that one person, or even a group of people, would have that much power. [ No S*#t DC]

Aside from interindustry wrangling, there was no real opposition to Stephen Wolff’s plan to privatize the Internet—not from NFSNET insiders, not from Congress, and certainly not from the private sector. 67 “I had people working for me, and we all agreed this was the way to go,” Wolff said. “There wasn’t any conflict there.” 68 In fact, the opposite was true. Whether inside or outside the NSF, it seemed everyone supported this plan.

Cable and phone companies pushed for privatization, as did Democrats and Republicans in Congress. 69 “There was little public debate or opposition to the privatization of the NSFNET,” write Jay Kesan and Rajiv Shah in their detailed dissection of the Internet privatization process, “Fool Us Once Shame on You—Fool Us Twice Shame on Us.” “By the early 1990s, telecommunications policy for both political parties was based upon notions of deregulation and competition. At numerous junctures before the privatization of the NSFNET, politicians and telecommunication executives made it clear that the private sector would own and operate the Internet.” 70

Senator Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, was one of the few elected officials in Washington who objected to this wholesale privatization. He wanted to soften the push for privatization with a proposal that would reserve 20 percent of future Internet capacity for noncommercial use by nonprofits, local community groups, and other public-benefit groups. 71 His reasoning was that because the federal government had funded the creation of this network, it should be able to reserve a small part for the public. But his modest proposal was no match for the industry lobbying and the privatization fervor of his colleagues in the Congress. [smfh...the story of this country since WWII.$$$ is their god. DC]

In 1995, the National Science Foundation officially retired the NSFNET, handing control of the Internet to a handful of private network providers that it had created less than a decade earlier. There was no vote in Congress on the issue. 72 There was no public referendum or discussion. It happened by bureaucratic decree, and Stephen Wolff’s government-funded privatized design of the network made the privatization seem seamless and natural.

A year later, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a law that deregulated the telecommunications industry, allowing for the first time since the New Deal nearly unlimited corporate cross-ownership of the media: cable companies, radio stations, film studios, newspapers, phone companies, television broadcasters, and, of course, Internet service providers. 73 The law triggered massive consolidation, culminating in just a handful of vertically integrated companies owning the bulk of the American media market. “This law is truly revolutionary legislation that will bring the future to our doorstep,” President Clinton declared when he signed the act.

A handful of powerful telecommunications companies absorbed most of the privatized NSFNET providers that had been set up with funds from the National Science Foundation a decade earlier. San Francisco Bay Area’s regional provider became part of Verizon. Southern California’s, which was part owned by the military contractor General Atomics, was absorbed by AT&T. New York’s became part of Cogent Communications, one of the largest backbone companies in the world. The backbone went to Time-Warner. And MCI, which had run the backbone along with IBM, merged with WorldCom, combining two of the biggest Internet service providers in the world. 74

All these mergers represented the corporate centralization of a powerful new telecommunications system that had been created by the military and ushered into commercial life by the National Science Foundation. 75 To put it another way, the Internet was born. 76

Amid all this consolidation, a new tech publication appeared on the scene, one that grafted the utopian ideals of Stewart Brand’s cybernetic communes to the free-market fervor of the 1990s. It helped sell this emerging privatized Internet as a true countercultural political revolution: it called itself Wired. [maybe we have the folks behind the 2020 election, children of the hippy's have been in bed with government for decades it appears....how f*#king rich is that? DC]

Whole Earth 2.0

Louis Rossetto, a lanky preppy with a Patrick Swayze haircut, started Wired in 1993. Rossetto grew up in Long Island in a conservative Catholic family. His father, Louis Rossetto Sr., was an executive at a printing company and had worked in missile development and weapons production during World War II. 77 The younger Rossetto enrolled at Columbia University in the late 1960s and was there during the student protests against the Vietnam War and ARPA’s militarization of academic research. 78 He watched as his fellow students occupied buildings and clashed violently with police, but he didn’t share their zeal. 79 Rossetto was on the opposite side of the barricades. He was against the left-wing antiwar politics that dominated New York’s radical student circles. He was president of Columbia’s College Republicans and a diehard Richard Nixon supporter.

All the political activity on campus and the increasingly violent nature of the protests only made him move further to the right: to Ayn Rand, libertarian anarchism, and the ideas of nineteenth-century antigovernment fundamentalists and Social Darwinists. He co-authored an essay in the New York Times Magazine that explained the philosophy of libertarianism and criticized the New Left’s focus on wealth redistribution and democratic reforms. To him, this kind of expansive government was the enemy. 80 Among his heroes were Ayn Rand and Karl Hess III, former speechwriter for Senator Barry M. Goldwater who rebranded himself as a radical libertarian and saw computer technology as the ultimate anti-government weapon: “Instead of learning how to make bombs, revolutionaries should master computer programming,” he told a journalist in 1970. 81

Rossetto did not heed Hess’s advice. Instead, he enrolled in a business program at Columbia, graduated, dreamed of becoming a novelist, and then spent the next decade drifting around the world. For a man with right-wing libertarian tendencies, Rossetto sure had a penchant for showing up in places with left-wing insurgencies: he was in Sri Lanka for the Tamil rebellion and appeared in Peru just in time for the Maoist Shining Path insurgency. He also managed to hang out with mujahideen in Afghanistan and filed glowing reports in the Christian Science Monitor on their fight against the Soviet Union with American-made weapons. 82 Rossetto traveled to the war zone by hitching a ride in a pickup with jihadi fighters. 83 [ Criminally Insane Association asset DC]

Amid all this, he found a job writing editorials for a small investment firm in Paris; met his future partner Jane Metcalfe, who hailed from an old family in Louisville, Kentucky; and launched an early tech magazine called Electric Word that was funded by a Dutch translation software company. 84 The magazine went out of business, but during his time there Rossetto got in touch with Stewart Brand and his crew of Bay Area tech boosters. Contact with this influential subculture made him realize that the world lacked a solid technology lifestyle magazine. He was intent on bringing one to life.

In 1991, Rossetto and Metcalfe moved to New York to start up the magazine, but all their stateside business and investor leads fizzled. For some reason, they couldn’t drum up excitement. The computer and networking industries were on fire in the Bay Area, yet no one wanted to back their project. No one, that is, except one man: Nicholas Negroponte, a wealthy engineer and businessman who had spent more than two decades working for ARPA.

Negroponte came from an affluent, highly connected family. His father was a Greek shipping magnate. His older brother, John Negroponte, was a career diplomat and Reagan administration official who had just finished a stint as the highly controversial ambassador to Honduras, where he was accused of playing a central role in a covert CIA-backed counterinsurgency campaign against the left-wing Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. 85

Nicholas Negroponte, like his older brother, was also connected to America’s military-intelligence apparatus, but from a slightly different angle. He was a longtime ARPA contractor and had worked on a variety of military computer initiatives at MIT. 86 He had been a prominent member of the ARPANET Cambridge Project. He also ran his own ARPA-funded research outfit at MIT called the Machine Architecture Group (MAG). 87

MAG did all kinds of research for the military. It worked on video conferencing technology that would enable the president and his top generals, scattered across the country in underground bunkers, to interact with each other in a natural manner in the event of a nuclear war. 88 It developed an interactive “video map” of Aspen, Colorado, an experimental virtual reality environment that could be used to practice military raids. 89 Perhaps MAG’s creepiest experiment involved creating a robotic maze populated by gerbils. The project, called SEEK, was a giant cage filled with light blocks that the animals would bump into and shift as they moved through the environment. A computer watched the scene and deployed a robotic arm to reorganize the shifted blocks and place them into spots it “thought” the animals wanted them to be in. The idea was to create a computer-mediated dynamic environment—a “cybernetic world model”—that changed according to the demands and wishes of the gerbils. 90

In 1985, Negroponte pivoted Machine Architecture Group into something cooler and more in line with the personal computer revolution: the MIT Media Lab, a hub that connected business, military contracting, and university research. He aggressively pursued corporate sponsorship, trying to find ways to commercialize and cash in on the development of the computer, networking, and graphics technology that he had been developing for ARPA. For a hefty annual membership fee, sponsors gained access to all the technology developed at the Media Lab without having to pay licensing fees. It was a runaway success. Just two years after opening its doors, the Media Lab racked up a huge list of corporate sponsors. Every major American newspaper and television network was part of the club, as were major automobile and computer companies, including General Motors, IBM, Apple, Sony, Warner Brothers, and HBO. 91 ARPA, which by that time had rebranded as DARPA, was a major sponsor as well. 92

The MIT Media Lab was a big sensation at the time—so much so that Stewart Brand practically begged Negroponte for a chance to hang out there. In 1986, he was given an opportunity to spend a year at the Media Lab as a “visiting scientist.” Later, he published a book about Negroponte and the cutting-edge technology his lab ushered into the world. It reads like marketing copy, giddy for a world of computer gadgets, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and globe-encompassing computer networks. Brand described Negroponte as a “visionary” singularly driven to “invent the future,” and he helped cement Negroponte’s status as a rebellious High Tech Priest, who straddled the worlds of big corporations and big governments but transcended them both.

In the early 1990s, when Rossetto and Metcalfe were desperate for investors for their tech lifestyle magazine, Negroponte was one of the most respected and sought-after computer visionaries in the world. So, in 1992, armed with a mockup issue of Wired and a business plan, Rossetto and Metcalfe cornered him at the $1,000-a-head Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference—today known as TED—in Monterey, California. They made their pitch, and to their surprise, Negroponte was impressed and agreed to help them get funding. He lined up meetings with Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, but neither expressed much interest. In the end, Negroponte decided to back the project on his own. He provided $75,000 of seed capital in return for a 10 percent stake. It was a paltry amount for a huge chunk of the business, but Rossetto and Metcalfe agreed. They smartly saw the opportunity: Nicholas Negroponte was a huge name with deep connections to the highest echelons of business, academia, and government. They bet that Negroponte would help prime the investment pump, with his money and involvement brining in other big players who would be willing to invest far greater sums in Wired. They were right. After he came on board, investment money flowed in like water.

To help him craft the new magazine, Rossetto hired Stewart Brand’s old apprentice as Wired’s founding executive editor: Kevin Kelly. Pudgy, with an Amish-style beard, Kelly had worked for Stewart Brand in the late 1980s, just as the aging counterculture promoter was beginning to push his publishing business away from communes and into the booming personal computer industry. Kelly was an energetic and eager acolyte, a man ripe for a righteous mission.

The son of a Time magazine executive, Kelly spent most of the 1970s backpacking around the world. In 1979, while he was traveling through Israel, he had a divine vision. By his own account, he was locked out of his hotel and was forced to wander around Jerusalem at night. He fell asleep on a stone slab inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and upon waking had a religious vision in which he realized that Jesus was the son of God and had come back from the dead as humanity’s savior. “In the end, it comes down to a decision that one makes. You go down one road and within that road, everything makes complete sense,” Kelly later said of his conversion experience. “I think that is sort of what I did. It took going to Jerusalem on Easter morning out to the empty tombs to really trigger an acceptance of this alternative view. Once I accepted it, there is a logic, comfort, leverage that I have because of that view.” 93

Leverage is a good word for Kelly’s sudden religious inspiration. His faith in God matched his faith in the power of technological progress, which he saw as a part of God’s divine plan for the world. Over the years, he developed the belief that the growth of the Internet, the gadgetization and computerization of everything around us, the ultimate melding of flesh and computers, and the uploading of human beings into a virtual computer world were all part of a process that would merge people with God and allow us to become gods as well, creating and ruling over our own digital and robotic worlds just like our maker. “I had this vision of the unbounded God binding himself to his creation. When we make these virtual worlds in the future—worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options—it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations,” Kelly explained in an interview with Christianity Today.

At Wired, Kelly injected this theology into every part of the magazine, infusing the text with an unquestioning belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of markets and decentralized computer technology, no matter how it was used.

The first issue of Wired hit newsstands in January 1993. It was printed on glossy paper in neon inks and featured jarring layouts that deliberately copied the chaotic DIY zine aesthetic used by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Just like Whole Earth, Wired positioned itself as a publication for and by a new and radical digital counterculture that lived on the cutting edge of a new networked world. It was also a guide for outsiders who wanted to be a part of this exciting future, teaching readers how to talk and think about the technology revolution. 94 “There are a lot of magazines about technology,” Rossetto explains in the magazine’s inaugural issue. “Wired is not one of them. Wired is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.” 95 [they even do elections DC]

Wired was an immediate financial and critical success. It had thirty thousand subscribers by the end of its first year. In its second year of publication, it snagged a prestigious National Magazine Award and racked up two hundred thousand subscribers. It launched a television subsidiary and a search engine called HotBot. By 1996, Louis Rossetto was ready to cash in on the boom and take the company public. He recruited Goldman Sachs to make it happen, which gave Wired an estimated value of $450 million. The magazine was the face of the dot-com boom and an evangelist for the New Economy, a revolutionary moment in history in which technological progress was supposed to rewrite all the rules and make everything that had come before irrelevant and outdated.

America’s computer industry press dated to the 1960s. It wasn’t flashy or hip, but it covered the emerging computer and networking business very well—it did not shy away from critical reporting. Publications like ComputerWorld were at the forefront of covering the privacy debate and the danger of centralized computer databases in the 1970s and provided in-depth coverage of the NSFNET privatization scandals of the 1990s. Wired was different. Just like Whole Earth, Wired was not fully a journalistic enterprise; nor was it an industry publication. 96 It seemed more a networking hub and marketing vehicle for the industry, a booster intended to create a brand around the cult of technology and the people who made and sold it, and then repackage it for the mainstream culture. It was continuing a tradition that Stewart Brand had started, overlaying an increasingly powerful computer industry with images of the counterculture to give it a hip and grassroots revolutionary edge. [marxist propaganda platform DC]

This wasn’t just posturing. In those first few years, the energy and evangelism soaked every neon colored page of Wired. The magazine covered cutting-edge Pentagon virtual reality battlefield technology. 97 It profiled cryptographers and fringe entrepreneurs rebelling against the federal government. It reported on a new class of computer capitalists building a new tech world among the ruins of the Soviet Union. It cheered the dot-com boom and the red-hot stock market, arguing that this was not a speculative bubble but a new phase in civilization when technological advances meant that the stock market would never crash again. 98 It reviewed books and films, showcased the latest computer gadgets, featured interviews with musicians like Brian Eno, and commissioned sci-fi authors like William Gibson to do investigative reporting. And, of course, Stewart Brand frequently graced the magazine’s pages, starting with the inaugural issue. In Wired’s world, computers and the Internet were changing everything. Governments, armies, public ownership of resources, traditional left-right alignment of political parties, fiat money—all these were relics of the past. Computer networking technology was sweeping it all away and creating a new world in its place.

Wired’s impact was not just cultural but also political. The magazine’s embrace of a privatized digital world made it a natural ally of the powerful business interests pushing to deregulate and privatize American telecommunications infrastructure.

Among the pantheon of techno-heroes promoted in the magazine’s pages were right-wing politicians and pundits, telecom tycoons, and corporate lobbyists who swirled around Washington to whip up excitement and push for a privatized, corporate-dominated Internet and telecommunications infrastructure. Republican congressman Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan’s economics guru George Gilder graced the magazine’s cover, their push for a privatized telecommunication system profiled—and their retrograde views on women’s rights, abortion, and civil rights played down and ultimately ignored. 99 John Malone, the billionaire cable monopolist at the head of TCI and one of the largest landowners in the United States, made the cut as well. Wired put him on the cover as a punk counterculture rebel for his fight against the Federal Communications Commission, which was putting the brakes on his cable company’s multibillion-dollar merger with Bell Atlantic, a telephone giant. He is pictured walking down an empty rural highway with a dog by his side, wearing a tattered leather jacket and holding a shotgun. The reference is clear: he was Mel Gibson of Road Warrior, fighting to protect his town from being overrun by a savage band of misfits, which, to extend the metaphor, was the FCC regulators. The reason this billionaire was so cool? He had the guts to say that he’d shoot the head of the FCC if the man didn’t approve his merger fast enough. 100

'Wired’s promotion of cutthroat telecom businessmen and Republican politicians and players isn’t so surprising. Louis Rossetto was, after all, a Republican-turned-libertarian who believed in the primacy of business and the free market. There was no ideological disagreement here.

One group that frequented Wired’s pages, and one that would later come to mainstream prominence, was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 101 Founded in San Francisco in 1990 by three millionaires who hung out on Stewart Brand’s The Well messaging board, EFF got its start lobbying for the budding Internet service provider industry. 102 In 1993, EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor wrote an article for Wired that laid out his and EFF’s position on the future Internet: “Private, not public… life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.” 103

Wired backed up EFF’s privatized vision, giving the organization space in the magazine to expound its views, while providing fawning coverage of the group’s activities. It compared the lobbying work the EFF was doing on behalf of its powerful telecom donors to the authority-bucking counterculture scene of the 1960s Bay Area. “In some ways, they are the Merry Pranksters, those apostles of LSD, who tripped through the 1960s in a psychedelic bus named Furthur, led by novelist Ken Kesey and chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” wrote Wired journalist Joshua Quittner in a profile of the EFF’s move to Washington, DC. 104 “Older and wiser now, they’re on the road again, without the bus and the acid, but dispensing many similar-sounding bromides: Turn on, jack in, get connected. Feed your head with the roar of bits pulsing across the cosmos, and learn something about who you are.”

Writing about corporate lobbyists working on behalf of telecoms to deregulate the Internet as if they were rebels and acid heads? It might seem cynical, even gauche. But Wired was serious and genuine, and it somehow fit, and people believed it. Because in the world Wired constructed for its readers, anything tied to the Internet was different and radical. It made sense. Wired and the EFF were extensions of the same larger business-counterculture-New-Right network and ideology that emerged out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth. That’s where Wired’s real cultural power lay: using cybernetic ideals of the counterculture to sell corporate politics as a revolutionary act.

Wired magazine was just the hippest, youngest outlet representing a bigger cultural and political trend in American society. In the 1990s, it seemed like wherever you looked—the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the New York Times—pundits, journalists, economists, and politicians predicted an era of abundance where just about everything was going to change. 105 Old rules—scarcity, labor, wealth and poverty, political power—no longer applied. Computers and networking technology were ushering in the Information Age, where the human race would be freed at last, freed from overbearing governments and borders, freed even from its very identity. 106

In 1996, the same year that the Telecommunications Act was passed, Louis Rossetto made a bold prediction: the Internet was going to change everything. It was even going to make the military obsolete. “I mean, everything—if you have a bunch of preconceived ideas about how the world works, you better reconsider them, because change is instantaneous out there,” he said. 107 “And you don’t need, you know, lumbering armies in a global village, you need maybe a police force at the most and you need good will on the part of the inhabitants, but otherwise you don’t need these kinds of structures that have already been built.”

Back in 1972, Stewart Brand tried to convince Rolling Stone readers that the young Pentagon contractors holed up in a Stanford lab, playing video games and building powerful computer tools for ARPA, were not really working in the service of war. They were hacking the system, using military computer technology to end the military. “Spacewar serves Earthpeace,” he wrote back then. “So does any funky playing with computers, any computer-pursuit of your own peculiar goals, and especially any use of computers to offset other computers.” Brand saw computers as a path toward a utopian world order where the individual wielded the ultimate power. Everything that came before—militaries, governments, big oppressive corporations—would melt away and an egalitarian system would spontaneously emerge. “When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over: We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as cooperators.” 108 [too much LSD dc]

Twenty-four years later, Rossetto channeled the same sentiment, promoting personal computers and the Internet as tools that would radically empower the individual and wink armies out of existence. It was a wide-eyed and, perhaps, self-serving view for a man whose fame and fortune rested on the backing of Nicholas Negroponte, a career military contractor whose MIT Media Lab received funding from DARPA even as Rossetto spoke those words.

Not surprisingly, the future hasn’t quite worked out according to Rossetto’s dream. The village went global, true. But the lumbering armies of the past did not go away; indeed, as time showed, computer networks and the Internet only expanded the power of American military and intelligence agencies, making them global and omnipresent.

next

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/08/part-3-surveillance-valleythe-secret.html

Surveillance .Inc

notes

Chapter 3

1. Transcripts of Ford Rowan’s June 1975 NBC broadcasts were read into the Congressional Record. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, US Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975).

2. Ibid.

3. “That is interesting to me. I had not heard that,” Christopher Pyle, a US Army whistleblower and today’s leading expert on American military surveillance in the 1970s, told me. “It doesn’t terribly surprise me. They often do stuff like that simultaneously. They both shut the system down and transfer the information to other people. But I never found that they had given stuff to ARPA.” Christopher Pyle, interview with author, April 2016.

4. Bobby Allyn, “1969: A Year of Bombings,” New York Times, August 27, 2009.

5. Joan Herbers, “250,000 War Protesters Stage Peaceful Rally in Washington; Militants Stir Clashes Later,” New York Times, November 16, 1969.

6. Richard Halloran, “An Expert in Counterintelligence,” New York Times, February 25, 1975.

7. Christopher Pyle, “Vast Army Intelligence Operation Monitors Political Scene,” Hartford Courant, January 25, 1970 (reprint from Washington Monthly).

8. At the symposium, one general remarked on the disparity between the North Vietnamese and the American soldiers in their motivation and willingness to die for the cause and wondered how the army could go about closing that gap. Like others at the conference, he stressed the need to collect more data on the culture and people in places like Vietnam in order to make the army’s counterinsurgency ops more effective. So here his concern was in reverse: to understand the enemy so America could make its soldiers just as tough and ready to die for the cause. US Army’s Limited-War Mission and Social Science Research symposium, Special Operations Research Office, American University, Washington, DC, June 1962.

9. Comm. on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics: A Report, S. Rep. 93-S7-312 (1973), https://archive.org/stream/Military-Surveillance-Civilian-Politics-1973/MilitarySurveillance CivilianPolitics#page/n0/mode/2up.

10. This quote comes from Christopher Pyle’s Senate testimony. Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights: Hearings,” 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 163 (1971) (statement of Christopher H. Pyle, graduate student at Columbia University).

11. Information on the army’s CONUS Intel operation comes mostly from two Senate reports—Army Surveillance of Civilian Politics: A Documentary Analysis and Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics—released in 1972 and 1973 by a special Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights that was convened by Senator Sam Ervin to investigate Christopher Pyle’s revelations.

12. “Persons of Interest,” Life, March 26, 1971.

13. “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights: Hearings,” 174 (statement of Christopher Pyle).

14. Ibid.

15. Christopher Pyle, “CONUS Revisited: The Army Covers Up,” Washington Monthly, July 1970.

16. “Persons of Interest,” 22.

17. “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights: Hearings,” 164 (statement of Christopher Pyle).

18. Ibid.

19. Christopher Pyle, interview with author, April 28, 2016.

20. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

21. John Connolly, “Inside the Shadow CIA,” Spy, September 1992.

22. Pyle, “Vast Army Intelligence Operation Monitors Political Scene.”

23. “Unraveling Data Networks,” ComputerWorld, November 26, 1975.

24. Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

25. Daniel R. Kashey, “A Look Inside NCIC,” ComputerWorld, December 12, 1977.

26. William D. McDowell, “73 Law Enforcement Agencies All Under One Roof,” ComputerWorld, August 2, 1972.

27. Richard E. Rotman, “GSA Denies ‘Secrecy’ of Data Bank,” Washington Post, June 21, 1974.

28. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975).

29. Arthur R. Miller, “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy,” The Atlantic, November 1967; “Unraveling Data Networks”; Mark Radwin, “Nets Make Reference Data Available in 50 Cities,” ComputerWorld, November 26, 1975.

30. Leslie Goff, “1960: Sabre Takes Off,” CNN, June 29, 1999.

31. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 120.

32. Thomas Petzinger Jr., Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos (New York: Times Business, 1995).

33. SABRE could process seventy-five hundred reservations per hour. Not blazing by modern standards, but at the time it was the most sophisticated commercial system of its kind and it quickly became the common platform on which all air booking was done. “By the mid-1960s, Sabre became the largest private, real-time data processing system, second in size only to the US government’s system,” according to IBM’s official history. “Sabre: The First Online Reservation System,” IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/.

34. “SABRE Press Kit,” SABRE, April 29, 2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20170524143915/https://www.sabre.com/files/PressKitUPDATED.4.29.14.pdf.

35. Steven Lubar, “‘Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate’: A Cultural History of the Punch Card,” Journal of American Culture, June 2004.

36. Arthur R. Miller, “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy,” The Atlantic, November 1967.

37. Lawrence M. Baskir, “Reflections on the Senate Investigation of Army Surveillance,” Indiana Law Journal, Summer 1974.

38. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008); Karl E. Campbell, Senator Sam Ervin: Last of the Founding Fathers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

39. “Federal Data Banks, Computers and the Bill of Rights. Part I,” Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 92nd Cong, 1st sess. (1971).

40. In his opening statement (ibid.), Senator Ervin mentioned that the number of federal government computer systems had increased more than tenfold in a decade. “In 1959, there were 403 computers in use by the Federal Government. There are now over 5,000. From a total of $464,000 in 1959, we have leaped to a national budget of over $2 million.”

41. Richard Halloran, “Senators Hear of Threat of a ‘Dossier Dictatorship,’” New York Times, February 24, 1971.

42. Baskir, “Reflections on the Senate Investigation of Army Surveillance.”

43. Senator Ervin’s committee destroyed US Army surveillance files they obtained to protect people’s privacy, but the final report on the investigation contained a few anonymized details. An entry on “nationally known civil rights leader” noted that he “has subversive Communist background, and is a sex pervert.” An intelligence report on a youth group in Colorado noted that its members engaged in “sex activities of both heterosexual and homosexual varieties.”

44. “Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis,” Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Comm. on the Judiciary, US Senate, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess. (1972), 93.

45. Ibid., v.

46. Senator Ervin’s Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis report at multiple points discusses lack of evidence that the army destroyed its surveillance files as well as evidence showing that the data had been deliberately preserved: “Many of the records undoubtedly have been destroyed; many others undoubtedly have been hidden away.… On two subsequent occasions it was learned that the Intelligence Command had failed to carry out orders to destroy its computerized files on civilians unaffiliated with the armed forces.… The order to destroy the mug books was issued on February 18, 1970, but as of August 26, 1970, less than half had been reported destroyed.… At the Counterintelligence Analysis Division this directive was interpreted to permit microfilming of the Compendium before destruction of the office copy was carried out” (v-8). Three years later, Senator Ervin introduced a bill that outlawed domestic military surveillance. The proposed law was supposed to put this issue to rest once and for all, but it was fiercely opposed by the Pentagon. Despite having wide bipartisan support, it never made it past its first reading. By then, public attention had moved on. The army surveillance scandal was old news, eclipsed by the Watergate investigation. Paul J. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1945–1992 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History of the United States Army, 2012), 398.

47. Christopher Pyle told me that army computers back then were still very rudimentary and could do only the most basic analysis on the surveillance data they contained. “I never came across any information that the computers were able to talk to each other. That was a little too sophisticated for them” (Christopher Pyle, interview with author, April 2016). But that was already changing. ARPA was hard at work building exactly the kind of networked computer database technology that Pyle said the domestic army intelligence program lacked.

48. Transcripts of Ford Rowan’s June 1975 NBC broadcasts were read into the Congressional Record. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 4–9.

49. Ford Rowan, interview with author, November 10, 2015.

50. Ford Rowan told me that at the time he aired the story, he was afraid the Pentagon would sue him and NBC and attempt to get him to disclose his anonymous sources. To protect his sources and to protect himself, he wrote their names down on a piece of paper and stuck it in a bank vault. “I ended up footnoting all of those and have the names of all the people I talked with and there was only one copy made. This was back in the days before you had computers to write everything on. So you had a typewriter. I put it in a safe deposit box and gave the key to my editor and in the end six months later he gave me the key back. He said, ‘throw it away, as far as I’m concerned.’ So I burned the list. Or actually tore it up.” Ford Rowan, interview with author, November 10, 2015.

51. Nancy French, a correspondent for ComputerWorld, hit up her contacts at MIT, and they confirmed that files on antiwar activists and protesters had indeed been transferred over ARPANET to MIT. French’s sources explained that the reason those files were transferred was because MIT, in partnership with Harvard, was developing a special database system for the Pentagon that would handle these surveillance files. One source told French that an army lieutenant colonel had explained that the surveillance data was being sent from the National Security Agency at Fort Mead. “Files were transmitted over the ARPANET to certain parties on a joint MIT-Harvard project who were writing data bank maintenance programs for use on Army surveillance files on civilian antiwar protestors,” writes Nancy French. A “data bank maintenance program” in 1970s techie lingo was simply a program that allowed a user to interact with a database, to enter and retrieve data, to search for information, that kind of thing (Nancy French, “Army Files on Citizens Still Not Destroyed,” ComputerWorld, June 11, 1975). Reporters from MIT’s The Tech pursued the story, too, looking at allegations that the surveillance files were transferred to ARPA’s Project CAM and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. “Although Defense Department officials testified in 1971 that the program had been terminated and its records destroyed, informed sources—including former military intelligence officers—have told The Tech that many of the files were retained. The information, according to intelligence sources, was transferred and stored at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), at Fort Meade, Maryland. The Army files were transmitted on the ARPANET in about January 1972, sources say, more than two years after the material—and the data banks maintained at the Fort Holabird facility—were ordered destroyed” (Norman D. Sandler and Mike McNamee, “Computers Carried Army Files; MIT Investigation Underway,” The Tech, April 11, 1975, http://web.archive.org/web/20170530223241/http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N17.pdf).

52. Ford Rowan, Technospies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 55.

53. In Senator Tunney’s investigation, Pentagon officials made multiple references to the “Cambridge Project.” They denied that it was used for surveillance, but this was the MIT center that Rowan identified in his reporting. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 21, 52.

54. Ibid., 42.

55. “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 73, Part 1,” Subcommittee on DOD Appropriations, Comm. on Appropriations, Senate Comm. on Appropriations (February 25, 28, March 14, 16, 22–24, May 4, 1972) (testimony of Stephen Lukasik, APRA director, March 14, 1972).

56. In his testimony to the Senate in 1972, Lukasik explains that the ARPANET was already on its way to being integrated into operational military communications systems including the Worldwide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS), a global command and control network operated by the Department of Defense. “Now that ARPA has demonstrated the feasibility of distributed network operation, the Defense Communications Agency has ordered three of ARPA’s Interface Message Processors so that a prototype ARPANET operation can be established between three of the WWMCCS computers. When this is completed and the network operation has been proven as operationally effective, the WWMCCS network will be expanded to worldwide operation,” he said. Ibid.

57. ARPA began developing end-to-end encryption over the ARPANET in 1976. As a report to the Senate explains, this was superior because it did not require physically securing the lines and allowed a general-purpose defense network to be used for both classified and non-classified tasks. “Department of Defense Appropriations for FY78 Part 5: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation,” Hearings, Subcommittee of the Comm. on Appropriations, 95th Cong., 1st sess. (February–March 1977).

58. “The operational defense agencies first became interested in the ARPANET as a model for replacing their existing networks with more advanced technology. The National Security Agency commissioned Bolt, Beranek and Newman to create two smaller versions of the ARPANET for the intelligence community. These were the Community Online Intelligence System (‘COINS’), begun around 1972, and the Platform Network, built in the late 1970s. According to Eric Elsam, who managed network projects at BBN’s Washington office, both systems provided regular data communications service for intelligence agencies for many years” (Abbate, Inventing the Internet). “The most obvious and striking thing that pops out at you while looking at old maps of the ARPANET is that the NSA became a node in the mid-1970s. What does being a node mean? It meant that there was a computer at the NSA that was responsible for routing traffic on the ARPANET. The NSA could connect any computer it wanted to their IMP (the refrigerator-sized modems of the 1960s and 70s) and access the ARPANET and any networks to which it connected” (Matt Novak, “A History of Internet Spying, Part 2,” Gizmodo, February 20, 2015, http://gizmodo.com/ahistory-of-internet-spying-part-2-1686760364).

59. Recently declassified CIA documents show that in 1974 the CIA planned to install ARPANET terminals for its analysts to use. Other declassified CIA files talk about installing terminals as well. Memorandum: CASCON Report to DCI (draft), Central Intelligence Agency, January 31, 1974, https://www.cia.gov/library /readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79M00096A000500010002-6.pdf; an official map of the ARPANET released in June 1975 lists an NSA node as well as multiple nodes at air force and army bases and military contractors’ sites.

60. Stephen J. Lukasik, “Why the Arpanet Was Built,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 3 (July–September 2011).

61. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 380.

62. Robert Kahn, interviewed by Vinton Cerf, September 30, 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20170530211316/http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access /text/2013/05/102657973-05-01-acc.pdf.

63. ARPA’s command and control division was later renamed the Information Processing Technology Office, a more generic name that, whether intentionally or not, masked its military origins.

64. The agency had first-hand experience with the need for this kind of technology. In Vietnam, many battlefield projects relied on data transmission over long distances. There was Igloo White, the ambitious attempt to “bug the battlefield” and detect enemy movement by creating a computer network tied to wireless seismic sensors and microphones along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Also, multiple ARPA projects worked via remote-controlled helicopters—what we’d now call drones. Several models were being tested in battle by 1968. One model was a submarine hunter-killer launched from navy vessels and equipped with sonar and torpedoes. Another was outfitted for jungle duty with night vision and multiple weapon configurations: Vulcan cannons, missiles, grenade launchers, and cluster bomb dispensers. The drone’s real-time video signal was relayed to a mobile control station mounted on an army jeep, and it provided recon information used to call in bomber strikes (F. A. Tietzel, M. R. VanderLind, and J. H. Brown Jr., Summary of ARPA-ASO, TTO Aerial Platform Programs. Volume 2. Remotely Piloted Helicopters [Columbia, OH: Battelle, July 1975], http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations /ADB007793). Early models hunted for submarines; others attacked ground forces, did recon, or worked as hovering antennas for long-distance radio links (Adverse Effects of Producing Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopters Before Completion of Development and Tests [Washington, DC: Comptroller of the United States, December 31, 1970]). These drones more or less worked, but they were crude. Their main limitations were short flight times and lack of long-distance control. And, of course, none of them used the ARPANET or any other network because it did not yet exist.

65. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 127–128.

66. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,” IEEE Transactions on Communications 22, no. 5 (May 1974).

67. Vinton Cerf, interviewed by Judy O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute.

68. Ibid.

69. “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1978, Part 5—Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation,” 95th Cong., 1st sess. (February 4, 1977–March 18, 1977).

70. For example: in 1973, even as Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf sketched out the ARPANET 2.0, ARPA director Stephen Lukasik was asking Congress for $6.5 million to fund an “intelligent systems” program to fulfill the “objective of developing the capability to have computers consider large quantities of complex, real world information and form generalizations and plans based on the totality of information. Progress in these areas is important for the intelligence agencies, especially in intelligence analysis and question-answering systems.” Lukasik pointed out: “the tools and techniques to be developed will be available on systems of the ARPA network and therefore will be immediately accessible by the services.” “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1973, Part 1,” Subcommittee on DOD Appropriations, Comm. on Appropriations, Senate Comm. on Appropriations (February 25, 28, March 14, 16, 22–24, May 4, 1972).

71. Ford Rowan, phone interview with author, November 10, 2015.

Chapter 4

1. Rossetto expanded this quote into a full-blown manifesto in Wired’s UK edition: “The most fascinating and powerful people today are not politicians or priests, or generals or pundits, but the vanguard who are integrating digital technologies into their business and personal lives, and causing social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.”

2. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking Adult, 1998).

3. Rich Karlgaard and Michael Malone, “City vs. Country: Tom Peters & George Gilder Debate the Impact of Technology on Location,” Forbes ASAP, February 27, 1995.

4. “Task Force to Focus on Information Revolution,” Deseret (UT) News, September 15, 1993, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/309821/TASK-FORCE-TO-FOCUS-ON-INFORMATION-REVOLUTION.html.

5. I attempted to interview Stewart Brand for this book, but he declined. “I have to pass,” he told me by email on May 28, 2015. “Working too hard on totally other subjects. May your book thrive.”

6. Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Frantic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968).

11. This chapter was greatly influenced and inspired by Fred Turner’s pioneering work on the ties between the military and industrial worlds that spawned the Internet and the hippie culture of the 1960s. Turner is a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. I recommend that anyone who wants a better understanding of the utopian ideas that undergirds so much of our Internet culture today read his fabulous book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. It shows very clearly that what we consider to be new developments are really warmed-over ideas and notions that originated in the 1960s. Indeed, in that sense, Internet culture is not so different from the rest of American contemporary culture.

12. Quoted in Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 41.

13. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking Adult, 2005).

14. Bruce Shlain and Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 155–156.

15. Ibid., 109.

16. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 4.

17. Ibid.

18. “Steve Jobs’ Commencement address,” YouTube video, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=UF8uR6Z6KLc.

19. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 71–72.

20. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (London: BBC, 2011), documentary series.

21. The founder of Synergia would go on to lead the Biosphere, a project to create a self-sustaining ecosystem inside a giant glass bowl, which was financed by Edward P. Bass, an oil heir from Texas who had been a member of Synergia in the 1970s. William J. Broad, “As Biosphere Is Sealed, Its Patron Reflects on Life,” New York Times, September 24, 1991.

22. Quoted in ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Theresa Hogue, “Cult Survivors Share Experiences,” Corvallis Gazette-Times, August 4, 2005, https://www.culteducation.com/group/1289-general-information /8651-cult-survivors-share-their-experiences.html.

25. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 97, 101, 109–111.

26. “The Demo,” MouseSite, http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4 /sloan/MouseSite/1968Demo.html.

27. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, chap. 5, “From his platform behind the audience…”

28. According to Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Engelbart described himself as “very empathetic to the counterculture’s notions of community and how that could help with creativity, rationality and how a group works together” (109).

29. Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (San Francisco: Communication Company, 1967).

30. Quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 128.

31. “Bio… Stewart Brand,” The Long Now Foundation, http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Bio.html.

32. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 135.

33. Michael Schrage, “Hacking Away at the Future,” Washington Post, November 18, 1984.

34. Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (Arlington, VA: PBS, 1985), short film.

35. Stewart Brand, “Keep Designing,” Whole Earth Review, May 1985.

36. “The advertisements appeared after a Harris poll, the I.R.S. had begun testing the use of computerized life-style information, such as the types of cars people own, to track down errant taxpayers, while an F.B.I. advisory committee had recommended that the bureau computer system include data on people who, though not charged with wrongdoing, associate with drug traffickers.” David Burnham, “The Computer, the Consumer and Privacy,” New York Times, March 4, 1984.

37. “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid1970s and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road. The kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: stay hungry, stay foolish. It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself,” said Steve Jobs at a commencement speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005. “Steve Jobs’ Commencement address,” YouTube video, 15:04, June 12, 2005, posted March 7, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc.

38. By some accounts, BZ was deployed in Vietnam to psychologically paralyze North Vietnamese fighters. It was also tested on American soldiers, whose harrowing experiences later inspired the cult classic horror film Jacob’s Ladder. Bruce Shlain and Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1994).

39. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.

40. “That is, it was his role to commercialize the Internet and get the government out of this business. So he did that,” Phil Dykstra, a scientist at the Army Research Laboratory, said during a 1996 US Army symposium on the history of the Internet, “50 Years of Army Computing.”

41. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.

42. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

43. Karen D. Frazer, NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking (Ann Arbor, MI: Merit Network, 1996).

44. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 463.

45. Mary Linehan, “NSFNET Boost Under Way,” Network World, December 14, 1987.

46. Mary Petrosky, “NSF T-1 Net Links Schools,” Network World, March 30, 1987.

47. America’s Investment in the Future (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2000), 10, https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf0050/.

48. “Physical Initial NSFNET Topology,” Center for Cartographic and Spatial Analysis, Michigan State University, http://internethalloffame.org/sites/default /files/nsfnet_topology.gif. The NSFNET was a civilian academic network, but the entire initiative had heavy military and defense involvement. On a bigger level, most computer science researchers—the principal users of the NSFNET—were funded through military grants. But it was even more specific: many of the network providers were tied to military agencies, contractors, engineers, and key government insiders who had played pivotal roles in developing the ARPANET, and several of the biggest regional network providers were actually run by military contractors, among them CERFNET, which linked universities in Southern California and was operated by a division of General Atomics, a major military contractor based in San Diego and best known today as the US government’s premier supplier of drones.

49. Less than a year later, in 1989, the National Science Foundation was already pushing to expand backbone capacity to a T-3 line, which would increase total bandwidth by a factor of 30.

50. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 463.

51. Ibid., 463.

52. This chapter’s discussion of the privatization process relies on the work of Jay P. Kesan and Rajiv C. Shah, who did an amazing postmortem analysis of the National Science Foundation’s privatization of the NSFNET. See: “Fool Us Once Shame on You—Fool Us Twice Shame on Us: What We Can Learn from the Privatizations of the Internet Backbone Network and the Domain Name System,” Washington University Law Review 79, no. 1 (2001): 91–220.

53. Ellen Messmer, “IBM, MCI and Merit Look to Sign New NSFNET Users,” Network World, October 1, 1990.

54. The consortium was being paid $9.3 million a year to run the backbone ($9.3 million in 1989 is equivalent to $18.3 million in 2017 dollars). See Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 123.

55. “Although few understood, he meant that the NSF was now buying its NSFNet service as a portion of ANS’s private network, rather than paying him to operate the NSF’s network,” William Schrader, president of NSFNET regional provider PSINET, said in congressional testimony during hearings on the management of the NSFNET. “After the agreements which the NSF had signed creating ANS, and providing it with exclusive commercial access, were released in December of 1991, it was clear that ANS’s president was correct, the T3 had been privatized. This occurred without public discussion or disclosure, and was effectively hidden for a year” (“Management of NSFNET,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Science of the Comm. on Science, Space, and Technology, US House of Representatives, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess. [March 12, 1992]). From then on, the NSFNET backbone ran as part of a larger private network owned by MCI and IBM.

56. John Markoff, “Data Network Raises Monopoly Fear,” New York Times, December 19, 1991.

57. Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 122–123.

58. Ibid. “ANS took advantage of the public in several ways. First, it relied heavily on support from the government. Second, ANS did not find new customers, instead it attempted mainly to convert customers from the government-subsidized regional networks. Finally, ANS’s decision to create a for-profit subsidiary raised questions as to ANS’s responsibility to the NSFNET and to the public interest. At the time of ANS’s creation, it depended on its only customer, the government, for its operating revenue of $9.3 million.… In effect, it could be suggested that the federal government funded a competitor to other commercial backbone providers. Some of ANS’s national competitors included Sprint and PSI,” wrote Kesan and Shah.

59. Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 89. “Might telcos become dominant? Of course there is such a danger. Be careful when you begin to dance with the elephants. But remember if they employ illegal means of increasing market share, we have laws against anti-competitive behavior. I doubt that they would do something questionable and walk away unchallenged,” Wolff said in a 1994 interview.

60. “The decisions made by the NSF affected issues such as security, privacy, innovation, and competition. Through these decisions, the NSF essentially regulated the Internet. It is important to note that although the NSF consulted with the affected parties and limited their intervention to broad technical issues, the intervention was not insignificant and did constitute regulation of the Internet.” Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You.”

61. Ibid.

62. And despite the danger that a handful of powerful players would dominate an unregulated privatized Internet market, smaller regional networks like PSINET balked at having the government regulate the budding Internet service provider industry. Instead, they pushed for an early version of “net neutrality”—a market-driven self-regulation scheme that would enforce a level playing field among competing Internet service providers. Resolving this conflict was the first real lobbying effort by the newly created Electronic Frontier Foundation. Despite the market power of national carriers like IBM-MCI’s ANS to restrict competition, EFF wanted the government to stay out of any overt regulation of the industry. Mitch Kapor, co-founder of EFF, testified before Congress to push for a self-regulatory scheme: “To avoid government involvement, Kapor suggested the use of binding agreements between the commercial backbone networks to interconnect.” Ibid.

63. PSINET offered another example of the NSFNET privatization process. It was founded in 1989 by the board of directors of NYSERNET, a regional provider that had been set up in 1986 to connect universities in the New York area to the NSFNET. A few years after setting it up, NYSERNET’s directors—led by William Schrader—realized that they could make money by personally buying up the network assets of this federally funded nonprofit and transforming it into a private company that sold commercial services on a network infrastructure subsidized by the federal government. “A year or two after NYSERNet took over it became apparent to some people that there might be a commercial opportunity in its technology. They proposed to NYSERNet’s Board of Directors that they buy the network assets from the corporation and operate it as a for-profit corporation. This commercial spin-off from NYSERNet was called PSINet, formed in 1989,” Ben Chi, director of NYSERNET, said in an interview in 2003 (“Talking with Ben Chi of NYSERNet,” Ubiquity 2003 [September 2003]: article no. 7). From then on, the NSF regional provider NYSERNET bought network services from PSINET, the privatized component of the old NYSERNET, and sold them to the NSFNET (Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 197–198). “To provide these services, PSINet bought out NYSERNet’s infrastructure. NYSERNet became a broker of network service rather than a provider, buying service from PSINet and selling it to NSF-sponsored users. Since the network infrastructure was no longer directly paid for by the US government, PSINet could also sell its services to business customers for additional profits. PSINet proved to be a successful business venture, and other spin offs of regional networks quickly followed along the same lines,” writes Abbate.

64. Michael Margolis and David Resnick, Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000).

65. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.

66. Keith Epstein, “The Fall of the House of Schrader,” Washington Post, April 7, 2001.

67. These budding Internet service providers wanted the government out of the networking business, and soon enough they got their wish. In 1993, after several years of acrimonious spats and conflicts, meetings, and congressional hearings, the National Science Foundation finally addressed the demands of the regional providers by unveiling a new privatized NSFNET design. The original ANSNET backbone would be retired, and multiple market-driven commercial backbones would be allowed to take its place, opening the market to unregulated competition between old NSFNET regional providers and anyone else who wanted to get into the business.

68. Wolff continued: “It was clear to all of us that NSF support for such things [the NSFNET] would not go on forever, and we saw that our job was to compensate for that in the best way that we could. So what we did was to provide for the privatization, that is, to stop funding the network, but at the same time give the money that we had been spending while we still had it, to the regional networks so they could buy the connectivity from the commercial providers.” Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.

69. Consider Al Gore, the Democratic senator from Tennessee. In 1989, a few years before he became vice president of the United States, Senator Gore introduced a bill to finance a program to support the development of a national computer network—which would be developed with federal funds but privatized as soon as “commercial networks can meet the networking needs of American researchers.” Gore’s bill eventually morphed into the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided $495 million for the creation of a high-bandwidth fiber optic educational computer network and expanded funding for computer and networking research. The act led directly to the creation of Mosaic, the first modern web browser created at the University of Illinois and a legend among early computer start-ups. Mosaic started as a government-funded research project but was immediately spun off by members of the University of Illinois research team as a private company called Netscape. Even more important: Senator Gore’s bill explicitly called for the privatization of the government-funded NSFNET backbone. During discussions of the bill, Gore repeatedly stressed his intention to support the privatization of the network. Under pressure from telecommunications companies, he had to make it loud and clear that he did not support the government operating a public network—even if the American people had financed its development.

70. Hostility to government regulation of networking ran deep and wide. Even the military scientists and contractors who helped bring the technology into being portrayed government regulations of commercial networks as a slippery slope toward totalitarianism. Ithiel de Sola Pool, the longtime ARPA contractor who worked with J. C. R. Licklider to create counterinsurgency computing technology for the US Army and who dreamed of creating computer systems that could surveil and control entire societies, suddenly took to calling computer networks “technologies of freedom.”

71. Steve Behrens, “Inouye Bill Would Reserve Capacity on Infohighway,” Current, June 20, 1994, https://current.org/wpcontent/uploads/archive-site/in/in412.html.

72. Stephen Wolff, interview with author, October 23, 2015.

73. The law was backed by telephone, cable, and broadcasting companies and had deep bipartisan support, but it was spearheaded by a resurgent Republican Party, which had just won a dual majority in Congress (Dawn Holian, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Telecom Industry Front Groups and Astroturf [Washington, DC: Common Cause, March 2006]). Leading the charge was House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican congressman from Georgia. His Progress and Freedom Foundation, which was a principal mover and shaker in this deregulatory fervor, was funded by major telephone, cable, and broadcast companies—AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, T-Mobile, Sprint, Clear Channel Communications, and Viacom. According to its mission statement, the organization was set up to promote telecommunications reforms “based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.”

74. Here’s a roundup of what happened to the NSFNET providers in greater detail: America Online bought up the NFSNET backbone built by the IBM-MCI consortium. Using access to this high-speed national network to outpace competitors like Prodigy and CompuServe, AOL would later end up merging with Time-Warner. The San Francisco Bay Area’s BARNET became part of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, J. C. R. Licklider’s old firm and an original ARPANET contractor, which itself grew into one of the largest Internet providers in the country and eventually had its networking division absorbed by Verizon (while the rest of the company went to Raytheon) (Nathan Newman, Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002]). CERFNET was first bought by Teleport, a large phone company, which was itself bought by AT&T in 1998 (Seth Schiesel, “AT&T to Pay $11.3 Billion for Teleport,” New York Times, January 9, 1998). PSI went public on the NASDAQ in 1995 with an initial valuation of $1 billion, collapsed in the wake of the dot-com bubble, and was snapped up in 2002 by Cogent Communications (Keith Epstein, “The Fall of the House of Schrader,” Washington Post, April 7, 2001).

75. Timothy B. Lee, “40 Maps That Explain the Internet,” Vox, June 2, 2014, https://www.vox.com/a/internet-maps.

76. Neil Weinberg, “Backbone Bullies,” Forbes, June 12, 2000. The industry would continue to consolidate over the next decade, not just domestically but also internationally. As I write this in 2017, two decades after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, the US media and telecommunications markets are concentrated in a way that has not been seen for a century: a handful of global, vertically integrated media companies—Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Charter Communications, Time Warner—own most of the domestic media today, including television and radio networks, film studios, newspapers, and, of course, commercial Internet service providers.

77. “Louis Rossetto Sr., 78, Typesetting Executive,” New York Times, July 31, 1991.

78. Frank da Cruz, “Columbia University 1968,” Columbia University 1968, April 1998, updated May 26, 2016, accessed March 15, 2016, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/.

79. George Keller, “Six Weeks that Shook Morningside,” Columbia College Today, Spring 1968.

80. Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto Jr., “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism,” New York Times, January 10, 1971.

81. Sam Tanenhaus and Jim Rutenberg, “Rand Paul’s Mixed Inheritance,” New York Times, January 25, 2014; Tames Boyd, “From Far Right to Far Left,” New York Times, December 6, 1970.

82. Louis Rossetto Jr., “Afghan Guerrilla Wants Soviets Out, but Has No Illusions of Victory,” Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1985.

83. Gary Wolf, Wired: A Romance (New York: Random House, 2003).

84. Ibid.

85. Michael Dobbs, “Negroponte’s Time in Honduras at Issue,” Washington Post, March 21, 2005; Carla Anne Robbins, “Negroponte Has Tricky Mission,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2004; Scott Shane, “Cables Show Central Negroponte Role in 80’s Covert War Against Nicaragua,” New York Times, April 13, 2005.

86. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking Adult, 1987).

87. “It was our bread and butter for a decade, and I wish it would become again,” Nicholas Negroponte said. Brand, Media Lab, 163; Edward Fredkin, ed., Project MAC Progress Report IX, July 1971 to July 1972, AD-756689 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 1973), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext /u2/756689.pdf; Project MAC Progress Report III, July 1965 to July 1966, AD-648346 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 17, 1967), http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/648346.pdf.

88. “We came up with the idea of projecting onto video screens sculpted like people’s faces and also having the screens swivel a bit—so they could nod, shake their head, turn to each other,” Negroponte explained to Stewart Brand in The Media Lab. “At my site I’m real and you’re plastic and on my right, and at your site you’re real and I’m plastic and on your left. If we’re talking and looking at each other, and one of the faces across the table interrupts, we would stop and turn toward him” (92).

89. “It was a byproduct of Pentagon interest in the Entebbe hostage-freeing raid of 1973, where the Israeli commandos made a mockup of the airport in the desert and practiced there before trying the real thing” (Brand, Media Lab, 141). It was sophisticated for its time, complete with a “season knob” that toggled between different times of the year to show what streets and buildings looked like. It also allowed viewers to walk into buildings and check out what was inside, and even read the menu of a restaurant. “It was the whole town. It let you drive through the place yourself, having a conversation with the chauffeur,” explained one the developers of the project (141).

90. Brand, Media Lab, 137. “A block slightly askew would be realigned. One substantially dislocated would be placed (straight, of course) in the new position, on the assumption that the gerbils wanted it there. The outcome was a constantly changing architecture that reflected the way the little animals used the place,” Negroponte explained.

91. Clients included, according to Brand’s Media Lab, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, HBO, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount. IBM, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sony, NEC, Mitsubishi, and General Motors were also members, as were major newspapers and news publishing businesses: Time Inc., the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

92. Among other things, DARPA funded lab research on speech recognition technology that promised to identify people by their voices or to visually read their lips from a distance.

93. Todd Hertz, “How Computer Nerds Describe God,” Christianity Today, November 20, 2002.

94. “Wired was meant to be a lifestyle magazine as well as a technology guide,” writes John Cassidy in Dot.Con, a book about the dot-com bubble. “Sections like ‘Fetish’ and ‘Street Cred’ told readers which new gadgets to buy, while ‘Idees Forte’ and ‘Jargon Watch’ told them what to think and say.” Cassidy, Dot.Con (New York: Perfect Bound/HarperCollins, 2009), 44.

95. Louis Rossetto, Wired, January 1, 1993.

96. Fred Turner writes: “As he told a reporter for Upside magazine in 1997, ‘The mainstream media is not allowing us to understand what’s really happening today because it’s obsessed with telling you, “Well, on the one hand” and “on the other hand”; under conditions of digital revolution, Rossetto believed that a magazine could tell the truth—and achieve distinction—only by ‘not being objective.’” Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2016.

97. The inaugural issue of Wired featured a cover story by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, who was dispatched to profile DARPA’s virtual tank battlefield simulator project: a multiplayer online tank game run on a powerful new military ARPANET-like network built just for battle simulations called SIMNET. “The seams between reality and virtuality will be repeatedly and deliberately blurred. Ontology be damned—this is war!” Bruce Sterling, “War Is Virtual Hell,” Wired, January 1, 1993.

98. Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020,” Wired, July 1, 1997.

99. For more on Wired’s embrace of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Right, see Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Here is how he describes the magazine’s profile of Gingrich: “In her introduction to the [Wired interview with Newt Gingrich], Esther Dyson expressed reservations about Gingrich’s social politics, explaining, ‘I like his ideals—but not necessarily the people who espouse them. Or the society that will result from them.’ But by the end of her interview, the doubts seemed to have washed away. Dyson and Gingrich clearly spoke the same language.… Moreover, for regular readers of Wired, their encounter came at the end of a long series of articles in which the cybernetic, countercultural, and deregulationist strains of their rhetoric had already been legitimated… the notion of business as a source of social change, of digital technology as the tool and symbol of business, and of decentralization as a social ideal were well established in the pages of Wired,” he writes. “From here, it took little imagination to guess that perhaps the Republican ‘revolution’ of 1994 might itself be riding the same ‘Third Wave’” (232).

100. David Kline, “Infobahn Warrior,” Wired, July 1994. “I’ll make a commitment to Al Gore, OK? Listen, Al, I know you haven’t asked for it, but we’ll make a commitment to complete the job by the end of ’96. All we need is a little help… you know, shoot [FCC Commissioner] Hundt! Don’t let him do any more damage, know what I’m saying?” he declared in the interview.

101. “Wired—the monthly bible of the ‘virtual class’—has uncritically reproduced the views of Newt Gingrich, the extreme-right Republican leader of the House of Representatives, and the Tofflers, who are his close advisors. Ignoring their policies for welfare cutbacks, the magazine is instead mesmerized by their enthusiasm for the libertarian possibilities offered by new information technologies,” wrote Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in their influential 1995 essay, “The Californian Ideology.” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Magazine, September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology.

102. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Lotus Notes creator Mitch Kapor, cattle rancher and Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, and early Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore. It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs. It did not take long for EFF to find its calling: lobbying Congress on behalf of the budding Internet service providers that came out of the NSFNET network and pushing for a privatized Internet system, where the government stayed pretty much out of the way—“Designing the Future Net” is how EFF’s Barlow described it.

103. Mitch Kapor, “Where Is the Digital Highway Really Heading?” Wired, March 1, 1993.

104. Joshua Quittner, “The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington,” Wired, June 1, 1994.

105. “Thanks in part to a confluence of extraordinary economic, technological, and political currents, its technocentric optimism became a central feature of the biggest stock market bubble in American history. Its faith that the Internet constituted a revolution in human affairs legitimated calls for telecommunications deregulation and the dismantling of government entitlement programs elsewhere as well,” remarks Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture while examining Wired’s place in the deregulatory and privatization frenzy of the 1990s.

106. John Perry Barlow, “Jack In, Young Pioneer!” (keynote essay for the 1994 Computerworld College Edition, August 11, 1994), https://w2.eff.org/Misc /Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/jack_in_young_pioneer.html.

107. “Louis Rossetto,” Charlie Rose, season 1996, episode 01.24.96 (Arlington, VA: PBS, January 24, 1996).

108. Brand, “SPACEWAR.”

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