>> thank you for being here in the curator out of seattle and on behalf of townhall and our partners set up in the back of the room i am pleased to welcome you tonight presented by townhall as the civic series the cap min foundation the boeing foundation in realnetworks all the

infrastructure of the internet and townhall. so i will welcome him to the microphone he will have a 40 minute presentation afterwards q&a with the audience and we get to the question answer please use the microphone so we can pick you up in the room and the archival recordings after all of that there will be a book signing you can pickup a copy of the book in the back and he will sign at this table in the corner we have first couple quick announcements of upcoming events we are actually not at townhall one of the homes during the inside out season while we undergo top to bottom renovation. a wild week tomorrow night we

have david lynch on stage talks about transcendental meditation and to be in conversation on the american institution of the presidency followed by veteran journalist with the war in afghanistan the history of the afghan war focusing on the cia and its role in the conflict and to that more events adding to our calendar technology, politics over the next few months and that is what we do here at townhall you can see this on our website and thinking to to our members in the room.

so now on to tonight's program in investigative journalist from the san francisco-based newsmagazine covering the power of tech published in wired slate new york observer and many others also appeared on network television including msnbc and his work by vanity fair among others he is here tonight to discuss a book surveillance valley the secret military history of the internet which is the luck at the little discussed background of so much of what we see as free-market internet and surveillance state and the subject of science talk these join me to welcome. [applause]

>> hello. thank you for the kind introduction. i am glad to be in seattle i appreciate i was invited to speak here tonight about the internet. i think we all know what it is. we talk about it and use it all the time but increasingly we are bogged down and scared by it especially after president donald trump won the election i was in d.c. a few days ago speaking to people there and you get the sense

just about everybody in d.c. is convinced vladimir putin took what was normally a glorious democratic technology, the internet and turned into a weapon of influence that that he trained on the american people and helped to elect donald trump. . . . .

the senators have been pressuring companies like google, facebook and twitter to work more closely with intelligence agencies in order to secure the internet and protect it from foreign influence. if you know anything about the history of the internet, this outrage would be funny comics of the problem is that comes with possible danger because what is pushing people to do is to hand over even more power and more control than they already have but there's another aspect to the story. the outrage is based on a deeply flawed premise if this idea that

if there was ever a point in the internet history when it was the use of the weapon. the notion that the internet is some kind of democracy machine is a myth. the internet was designed by at the pentagon as a weapon of surveillance and social control from the very beginning going back to the 1950s when it was developed by the weighing of the pentagon that we know now. it was an informatio information then and today privatized in commercial form much more powerful than today and anyone in the 1960s or 70s could have imagined yet for years we have been fed a myth about the origins of the internet. we've learned and have been told that it's supposed to do with

terry and potential. it is supposed to lead to a better world between average citizens and average people and the most powerful corporations and entities in the world. it's supposed to lead to global direct democracy to erase corruption and the need for government altogether because they would come together as other people on a global level and collectively as well and mediated by this technology. the you can't really call it anything else but that in this campaign has branded what has always been a military technology built by military

contractors it's something democratic and egalitarian, and it's kind of amazing once you go back and look at it that we've actually been convinced this is true. in the beginnings of this because i was in the soviet union and i family and i eventually ended up in san francisco at the start of the boom. he had fled a fabled utopia. my homeland communism had failed and there were no more, they were dead and it was turning into this dark place but when we came to san francisco and we found out that a new utopia was

in hand and communism was dead but the internet was about to take its place and the internet in silicon valley and the market economy would bring into being all the same as communism could not achieve, it would equalize power relations and destroy corruption because of this kind of system, fully transparent. we would all be working together in this platform. of course the promise of the internet didn't come true. america is less equal than it was 30 years ago. there is more poverty, unemployment even than the average lifespan and in the

internet itself it's also not very egalitarian or democratic. it's a private telecommunication system dominated by immensely powerful corporations that have turned this platform into a for-profit surveillance machine. so the question is what happened. how did this technology go astray and how do we make sense of it? to understand what it has become you have to go back to the very beginning. the. facing this world it was the vietnam war, that the u.s. is

facing insurgencies all around the world from latin america to southeast asia and it's also facing an increasingly volatile violent domestic environment. they looked at this and saw the vast communist conspiracy of course. they solve the soviet union expanding globally underwriting insurgencies all around the world back into the country's posting in america at the same time they were underwriting the opposition movement in america

and they solve this happening. it's not a traditional horror that you coulwar thatyou could l weapons or that you could drop a nuke or send a division into. so it was a new kind of a war and global insurgency. anand in certain verified circln the military, people who were familiar with a new kind of technology being developed, they believed the only way to fight and win this new war was to develop new information weapon. computer technology that code in just data on the movements that

could come by in opinion surveys and criminal history and draft history, photographs, telephone conversations intercepted by the services and put the ball into the databases that could allow analysts to perform sophisticated analysis. the idea was to find out the yot the enemy and isolate it from the general population. at the same time, one day creating a global system of management that could watch the world in real time much in the same way they did for hostile aircraft. this is the general background for which the general internet emerged. today it is the counterinsurgency origin of the internet that had been obscured

and lost for the most part. they even mentioned it a little bit, but at the time that it was being created in the 1960s, the origin of the internet and of this technology as a tool of surveillance and control owners very obvious to people back then. at the time people didn't see computers and computer networks through that the motivation or a utopian technology. they sold them as they political and social control. my book is an attempt to recover some of the flaws to history. it's important not just from the

historical perspective but you can draw a straight line from the internet counterinsurgency origin's and the internet technology that we use today from google to facebook. i'm going to read a couple of excerpts to give you a sense of the vote in the history of the culture has lost and forgotten. the sub september 26, all was

not well. several hundred angry students marched down the office to the e dean anthedean and a coward cowd refused to leave. a day earlier they marched to camputhecampus and a small contf activist's with the democratic society they had broken into the schools. they forced administrators out on the street and similar troubles were afoot just across the river where they were holding protests. flyers posted on the campuses railed against the manipulation and social science for the war machine.

what exactly were they protesting. a document ran to 100 pages that outlined the harvard mit progr program. it was called the cambridge project and one of completed the pullout analysts i and the military planet connected to the net to upload financial transactions, opinion surveys, welfare and criminal record histories and any other kind of data for the nothing out of social relationships and running simulations to predict human

behavior. the pamphlet handed out explained the whole computer set up and the whole arpa network will allow the government to consult the data to be used in policy decisions and the results will be to make the international fully support effective at suppressing popular movements around the world. it gives a visual representation to the computer shaped like an octopus for every sector of society and for the activists that was part of a network surveillance political control

and ainto the college campuses d the country. the college kids had a point. now i'm going to go to a segme segment. june 21975 the correspondent appeared to report a stunning exposé he spoke straight into the camera and told them they were building a sophisticated network using it to spy on americans and share surveillance with the csa. he was talking about the internet. we don't know who gave the order to copy it but we do know that once the defense department technology makes it incredibly

easy to move information from one computer to another. this network links the cia to the defense intelligence agency more than 20 universities and research centers like the rand corporation. they spend months and for three days after the initial broadcast he and his colleagues. what has become a habit has become more relevant in

hindsight. today people still feel that surveillance was formed to the internet. it shows how the military and intelligence agencies used the technology to a. of popular history of the internet today and there is no mentioning of it even for most t historians did not seem to know that it had occurred.

how are we on time? i'm going to go 40 years into the future. 2011. the harassment and extortion at the local end of the police. it's better to jordan, libya and syria. the air of spring had arrived.

in tunisia and egypt and libya opposition forces deposed and killed gadhafi after a bombing campaign from the nato forces. protests were met with a brutal crackdown from the government and led to a protracted war that claimed thousands of lives every al qaeda, isis, arab spring turned into a long bloody wint winter. with deep complex would vary from country to country. youth unemployment, corruption, drought, high food prices, political repression, economic stagnation and geopolitical aspirations which are a few of

the factors. for the state officials these movements have one thing in common. they arose because of the power in the intranet. the salt social media sites like twitter and q q2 as democratic multipliers that allow people to get down to the information sources and organize political movements. this. the hypocrisy perhaps ignorance he after all was executed by forces in the united states and particularly the cia. but the idea that social media could be weaponize was impossible to be addressed. for years the state department

and partnership of the broadcasting board of governors and companies that facebook and google. the times was supposed to find many activists tha played a leag role for egypt to syria to yemen have taken part in these sessions. the youth political theater that attended the state department training session and went on to lead protests told the paper we learn how to organize and build coalitions and this helped bring the revolution. a different activist participated in the uprising was equally enthusiastic about the state department social media training. it helped because i used to think it only cheap debate takes place by force and weapons.

staff from the project eight u.s. government to the powers that are planned played a leading role in the session. activists were all involved. as one activist explained that there would be no access if all of a sudden you had been exploring under their noses and down thintodown the road you haa revolution. they didn't know how to counter this move. it was a wild success. they have been funding it for years and it had turned into a

policy tool for soft power weapon with multiple uses and benefits. on the internet enabling them to carry out their missions without leaving a trace it was used by the u.s. government to prevent countries from exercising control over their own interest infrastructure and i also emergd as a focal point for privacy activists and organizations that huge cultural success with this much more effective by helping shield project and was just beginning. they provided the u.s. government with the confidence and confirmation that it was looking for combined with the technology could be bringing masses of people onto the streets and could even trigger the revolution. diplomats in washington called democracy promotion. critic scolded regime change but

it didn't matter what you called it, they saw that they could have political instability to those in the u.s. interest. good or bad it could weaponize social media and use it incident in. in the wake of the spring they did that get even more resources to the technologies and the plan was to go beyond and launch all sorts of tools to leverage the power of the social media and the political movements. strange enough these efforts are about to get a move from an unlikely source, a man by the

name of edward snowden. [applause] time for a question concerning the dark web. there's a bunch of myths building on the last couple of years. india into the military control of or to tak take it further cau avoid google by using the dark web?

>> the first part is it any into the military controlled though because the military funds the dark web, so the project that is the dark web. a third of its funding comes from the navy and from the state department and the broadcasting board of governors which is close to the state department initiative. basically the american propaganda or media free europe. there would be very easy solutions to deal with it so that is the first part of your

question. let's say you never log in to any surface then you can protect your self but as soon as you have a phone that's tied to your identity and you login and as soon as you walk into any of the services offered, and they are all basically walled in serviceslogin services,they do u because it doesn't matter which door cool you emerge out of you were just walking in with your personal information. it can hide who you are and hide your traffic entry and things like that.

they do not threaten the business model and it doesn't threaten facebook business model because you have to. if you don't login you can protect yourself. they support them financially in various ways and the reason that they support it is because it does not threaten their business model i in any way impact it helped by redirecting them into these tools so they don't think about what google is doing.

they think about the privacy so it icircuit is to redirect peops attention to the surveillance that is happening as a matter of the silicon valley platforms a few weeks ago i was sitting home alone mumbling to myself as i often do and i realized some of what i was saying would be this turbine to another person. >> i find mysel >> i find myself in that situation, too. >> i was carrying my own personal screen with me in that moment which means i may not have been alone at the moment. you used the term memory hold in your talk. have our rulers coincidentally

found themselves on the path towards a george orwell future or is it a conscious decision that they are using that as a model? >> i think george orwell it is a great novel but it's been proven he didn't predict the future, the future isn't a centralized government would take clearly evil space on something. it doesn't seem to be a productive of any kind. they smashed big brother and a i

don't think there is a grand conspiracy to hide this stuff. if you read my book i traced through how we got this amnesia or how the culture completely forgot something is new enough that long ago. one of the things that surprised and shocked me is how obvious it was as a tool to people back then. 1961969 this is the year that te arpa net went online and already people are protesting and talking about it as a technology of surveillance and social control that if allowed to grow and expand with become a

surveillance tool and be used not just to monitor both controlled. so, when the internet became lucrative there is a lot of marketing kicked in to this space and the 1980s were a prime example of that sort of cultural shift driven back by a love of money in commercial interest, so i don't think there was a big brother conspiracy to make us forget that it's more pernicious than that because when you look at history you get a sense that it tracks power and so people remember things that

go against power so the ideas are not given space in society. you have to make a journalistic living through it is a decentralized process but our memory tracks the power and silicon valley is the victor. if somebody switched out a burner phone once a week and only used wifi would that help protect them? why does the government care -- don't answer the question. [laughter]

the question is who is watching and to what end. i know that wealthy people are always eat out about the irs watching them. it's something that they hate. i don't care because i usually don't have that much to declare a. there's also this kind of surveillance. the code industry is worried int the epa and surveillance that industry can carry out a. there have to be methods of making sure people follow these and thirst processes in place so

when people are worried about surveillance you have to say what are you actually worried about and if it is just some idea of some big brother watching you, when you walked on the streewalk downthe street doy people watching? >> edward documents a couple of show even if you go to the website you will be tracked much more severely and closely. if you used it's easy to see

figures is that it makes it more obvious. so who are you hiding from and i think that this is the key point we need to think about much mo more. i am a journalist and i've reported on all sorts of countries. i would see people jump out and snap pictures of me. you accept the territory and there's nothing you can do to stop that. you just know that it is part of the job. >> they are okay.

>> in regards to surveillance of everything you talked about in so far as internet-based we have a rise of camera surveillance, publicly located and due to the inherent conductivity and how that information is captured and used for their own normal purposes, what connection do you see with that aspect tied together it's much more sinister

sounding. >> the internet is just one aspect of it. it's to create a radar system that's been there from the beginning and a lot of people that went on to design the internet actually cut their teeth on building the first early warning radar stage. so from then on, the idea of treating the society as monitored they could monitor everything and you can predict

where that airplane will be in the future with the possibilities and work and limitations of how fast they are doing you can actually predict with some certainty where they will be so if you can do that for an airplane mechanic you do that for a person, for a group of people for the whole country so the idea is you have all the inputs if it is cameras, wifi signals and things like that.

what started out as a system of transferring data and sharing among intelligence agencies to analyze that data but wanted and commercial it wasn't just a tool, it became the place where things happened. it became the field of battle. people were doing things on the internet rather than collecting data is already being input in real-time and so what do we do on the internet we don't go just to get our stuff to the nsa we go out to buy things, to chat with friends and share stories. things we do normally but that

just enhances the capability of the system sai so they are connd and i think your comment -- maybe if there is another person. >> everyone is interested in this. >> i have two questions the first is more personal hell do you live your life withhol withs information into second, how has this impacted your use on the internet? >> there's nothing i can do on an individual level about this.

after he revealed it was all this surveillance have been on the internet the partnership they were working together in secret to turn the internet into this massive apparatus of. they didn't politically get together and do anything. at the moment evaporated into so where there was public consciousness and people were focused on this to start some reform i think it's a political issue not a technical issue surveillance always happens in a

society you walk down the street and you are being surveyed because other people are watching you. privacy is something we've come to see as the most a strange fetish whereas in reality we are not private animals we are social and we want to be around people and we want people to look at us. there's different kinds of privacy so regulating and figuring out what it is is and a technical issue. and the same goes for the internet so if we want an internet that isn't spying on people and being dominated by these companies tracking everything you do and then of course plugging that system into the national security space we need a society that doesn't do that. it's dominated by size and corporations because the society is dominated by the forces. me downloading something and then hiring isn't going to do anything because again as

journalists i understand it's going to make me even more obvious so i spend my life realizing there's not much i can do if. if someone reads all my e-mails then i'm screwed. >> there's no backlash or e-mails flex >> well, they've taken -- it depends who. people that make the project there were death threats and all these things, but they take a smarter approach they ignore and just don't answer the phone so they ignore you until they can't ignore you anymore. >> then i have one technical question if the dark web is

funded by a big business, why don't they do anything about it this [inaudible] is never getting out of jail and he's the guy that invented the dark web marketplace. again if you look at the history of the project it is useful to the government in many different ways it's useful to have around but it only works there's all sorts of people using it isn't just spires, revolutionaries backed by the government in other countries. everybody uses it. people who are running massively illegal businesses are using it. it's like a busy marketplace square that hides all the other

stuff that happens. so it's kind of hard to accept why would they be finding something that is to diminish its own power. i feel like there should be another microphone here. i was wondering if you could talk about your process of writing the book that came up in the thesis before or after. >> it came after because i thought the book initially was going to be somewhat limited in scope because i knew of course

that was developed by the pentagon but like a lot of other people i thought that was something that happened and that is the kind of transformation that occurred and that's all there is to it tha but when i wt into the archives and i started looking at the old reports and contracts and proposals i didn't realize there was this whole other thing on the surface it wasn't even deep that there was a hold counterinsurgency components that i haven't seen mentioned in the history of the internet may be bits and pieces and it was like the prominent thing that you see when you go into the archives to get the

original document so the thesis i didn't go into the book thinking it was going to be my thesis i just sort of looked at the interface between silicon valley and between the two entities and the business of the for-profit surveillance that in the end it became a smaller component of the book that is part of the continuum, the narrative is to narrate and educate and it was an actual process. finding out how much dumber we

are today than people half a century ago there is no way to put it. we've grown up with this internet, we think we understand it yet our concept of it and its history and integration with political structures and politics when i went back and read an incredible book that produced from 1969 back to this episode quite a bit they produced a rule booklet and predicted that the internet would become because it was much more kaleidoscopic back then it was just a government system backed by a military contractor and now it's much more sophisticated but at their core

they predicted what the internet is and understood very deeply so when i came across that i think this is incredible and it made me wonder how can other historians went into the same come across the same documents how come they didn't try to do this and this wasn't mentioned. i don't think it's a conspiracy i just think ideology is a powerful thing so it's to the point we think democracy and the internet are almost synonyms so when you write the history and see if they counterinsurgency tool people are protesting 50 years ago but it's supposed to

be this thing that will please the world and jus just as hard o explain so it is dropped and not looked at so many books as the first collapse but it's not the last one and we will see this excavated and analyzed because it is just the tip of the iceberg probably more than you bargained for. [inaudible] people were much more critical of the u.s. empire and the interface between corporations and the military industrial

complex this was like my colleague likes to call it where they had this period of openness that the soviet union had in the 80s where archives were opened and restrictions were lifted a little bit and it was a kind of softening of control in the 60s and 70s were kind of like that and there was a kind of political openness. in the end of a failed so it couldn't have been that sophisticated and a large part of it is backhen computers were always tied to some powerful entity such even have a

computer and you would have to be powerful so they were usually tied to a corporation or government agency much easier to see this connection between the two that when we have computers in our bedrooms is harder to see the reality because it is a giant corporation making it and fire at a storfired a store ownt corporations so in a way it was clear to see the connection. >> this wil >> this will be the last question. >> i have two quick yes or no questions and then the actual question. my understanding is i it is central to anonymous activists to stay anonymous is that true

flex >> i think so, yes. >> [inaudible] they keep their ip addresses from tracking them down. >> there are some that are still at large so that the government controls this why haven't they caught them all blacks >> because they don't need to catch everyone all the time and they didn't do anything. there is anonymous activists that went to paypal to protest and they got pretty screwed in the process. it does protect to some degree but if you are an actual threat

and you use it all the time you will be unmasked but it does work. it's not like a totally transparent although i don't know. again when you're dealing with entities like the nsa, if you are funding a tool that he wants peoplyou wantpeople to think wot want to catch everyone who uses it, that doesn't make sense so it's hard to read into the intentions of some of the most secretive agencies and the planet. we just don't know. all i can do as a journalist is to follow the money and the funding and look at the interest and who benefits from this handheld with used. sure a kid sitting somewhere making jokes about scientology

isn't a threat to anybody so that if you run these marketplaces like silk road and he's in jail and if you look at the logs he kept as he was running this is us more like the server crashed and leaked my address. he knew that they were actively looking for him at that moment like to agence had infiltrated his organization and were pretending to be his friend. he was being actively sought and his server was crashing all the time and that's how he was caught in the end so i look at that and i think that's crazy he believed in it so much that even

reality didn't stop them. knowing his server crashed and leaked his identity he still used it and believed in it. again, ideology is a powerful thing and it makes you ignore facts and things that are pretty apparent to other people. i don't know if that answers your question. >> thank you so much. [applause]