Reddit reviews Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet

>Just give it a read and let me know what you think. Thanks

sure, have an upvote and a real reply: I think the Forbes article makes a bunch of big, ideological claims that I simply don't agree with, such as

> The U.S. government has shown time after time that it is ineffective at managing much of anything.

I don't want to get into a big debate overall about liberalism versus libertarianism, so I'll just say that a comment like this is flamebait which is going to rile up people who disagree, and get those who agree nodding their heads. So, we should should instead try to focus on very specific things. I think this article does a very bad job of that, to me it reads basically "private industry good [citations needed], government bad [citations needed]." If we look at what we have in other utility industries (I work in Power) -- power is mostly a confederation of regional monopolies which have been very tightly regulated. I think in 2018 internet access is more like a utility than it is like television, and I think that model might work to some extent. Now we're in an era of that regulatory grip loosening in the power sector, and there is certainly interesting innovation happening as a result, but, two key thoughts there:

• The starting point for deregulation was already being in a situation where every household in the US could get electricity. We're nowhere near that with broadband.
  
  
• The kind of deregulation happening is far short of the complete land-grab "let the telecomms do whatever they want" that Ajit Pai is suggesting.
  
  > If the telecoms are forced to compete in a truly free market, Comcast and Time Warner won’t exist 10 years from now. They’ll be replaced by options that give us better service at a lower price.
  
  Again, huge red flag and citations needed from where I sit; the existing entrenched telecomms in many cases own the lines and the copper right down to the last mile. Disrupting that is not going to be as "easy" as disrupting the cab industry or something.
  
  I am equally dismissive of the second article because the author very clearly states that they're not a subject matter expert and then makes a bunch of dubious claims. Comparisons to the early days of the internet do not hold water for me; I was online through a VAX server in 1991, it was a completely different landscape, it was mostly limited to military and academic use and had almost no utility to the average person. Also, the internet was (and still is) a government weapons project. That's tangential, but this book is pretty good because it paints the whole mythology of the internet in a very different light and makes a strong case that at its core it's a surveillance system for government and corporate interests: https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025
  
  The article suggests that there is zero middle ground by which we could have basic neutrality ensured and also allow, for instance, T-Mobile's Binge On to be legal. That's much too black and white, so it strikes me as either naive or willfully obtuse.
  
  Okay, I read your articles end to end, here are a couple I would offer:
  
  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/the-conservative-case-for-net-neutrality/382650/
  
  https://www.ft.com/content/1a421e0a-b4d7-11e8-b3ef-799c8613f4a1
  
  Just my .02 as someone who requires broadband to eat.
  

lol, not even fox news is pinned as "state funded". youtube is obviously partial towards US propaganda.

​

as is expected.

https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025

America is now pretty much an intelligence agency. https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025

https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025

The journalist in that website made Freedom of Information Requests toward several government agencies that provide Tor with funding. Most of these requests were shot down for national security reasons, but one of the organizations wasn't covered under such an exemption and the government provided him with the data he asked for. He then published emails between Tor developers and that one particular government agency that showed how The Tor Project provided the agency with newly discovered bugs that security researchers brought to their attention.

Here's the book that the journalist eventually published:
https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-Internet/dp/1610398025

The US Navy developed TOR and spun it off into the private sector, and ever since then the US government has been giving TOR something on the scale of 70-80% of it's income. Read this book. The government needed other people to use TOR. It doesn't matter if the people and destinations can't be matched exactly if the only people using it are the government, every person and destination is still relevant. Hence, spinning it into the private sector to gain users to cover the secret shit.

The government likes TOR, having developed it and funded it. It's anti-government stance is mostly BS, like most tech companies.

Which really does make you wonder why the fuck the CIA didn't have its sources using TOR. After the Iranians found their sites, they just tracked people who went to it and where they accessed the sites from to find them. Easily could have saved their lives to use TOR and/or a VPN