Elsewhere, he takes a less sympathetic view. For example, Levine seems to be all for the cypherpunk movement of hackers, which seeks to expose powerful interests and fights for freedom from government surveillance. This leads to some rather contorted double accounting. Viewed from this perspective, Google’s interests are one and the same as the Pentagon’s, and America becomes one giant military-industrial complex seeking to impose free-market capitalism on the world.īy the same token, anyone who seeks to resist this global conspiracy becomes, in Levine’s view, a doughty David against the American Goliath. American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.”īut what does that actually mean? What are America’s military interests? As Levine argues that Silicon Valley is so intertwined with the US military and intelligence agencies that it’s hard to tell them apart, he makes little distinction between corporate and military agendas. As he puts it: “the internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today. Levine argues that weaponisation was encoded in the internet from the outset, and that Google, Facebook and Amazon have all played a role in supporting the US government’s aggressive foreign policy. Levine seems to be all for the cypherpunk movement of hackers … as long as it's in the west It’s no secret that the internet grew out of Arpanet, an early computer network that was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – an arm of the US defence department. Entitled Surveillance Valley, the book’s subtitle is The Secret Military History of the Internet, and this is the focus of Levine’s often diligent investigations.

Surveillance valley yasha levine