Yasha Levine, an American investigative reporter of Russian extraction, was born in the Soviet Union. His background is in a certain kind of fashionable radicalism, set on exposing liberal hypocrisy from an anticapitalist perspective. One of his previous books was entitled The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell, which portrayed the celebrated New Yorker writer as a shill for big pharma and the tobacco industry.
His polemical method is to assemble all the supporting evidence he can find for his thesis and skirt round or dismiss anything that gets in its way. His latest book targets the tech industry, which, let’s face it, is a massive and deserving target. But he’s less concerned about surveillance capitalism per se than what he sees as a weaponised front in the west’s battle for hegemony and control.
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. 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.
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. As he puts it: “the internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today. American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.”
But 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. 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.
By the same token, anyone who seeks to resist this global conspiracy becomes, in Levine’s view, a doughty David against the American Goliath. This leads to some rather contorted double accounting. 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. As long as it’s in the west. Elsewhere, he takes a less sympathetic view.
Levine tends to see the capitalised version of “internet freedom” – the corporate effort to enable citizens of authoritarian regimes to enjoy the online liberties taken for granted by those in democracies (and, of course, expand potential markets) – as an attack on the sovereignty of countries such as China. Anti‑censorship becomes, in this context, not a cause but a weapon.
Thus Levine takes the CIA to task for funding Falun Gong, “a controversial Chinese anti-communist cult”, which he dismisses as a racist organisation of nutjobs (perhaps it is, but its beliefs are no more extreme than those of Scientology or the Nation of Islam). Yet he says nothing of the savage repression and human rights abuses to which its members have been subjected by the Chinese government.
Levine seems appalled that Tor, the software enabling anonymous communication, was largely funded by the US government and has not provided foolproof anonymity – government agencies have used it to target al-Qaida followers.
But, as much as one may stand opposed to the kind of transgressions of data protection committed by both US governments and corporations, they surely have to be seen as less grievous than the wholesale control of information and persecution of dissent practised by the Chinese government.
There is a perfectly good argument contained in this book that the relationship between large internet corporations and US governmental agencies demands close scrutiny and criticism. But the attempt to characterise it as a giant military conspiracy is overwrought and not fully supported by the evidence.
Never is this clearer than in Levine’s conclusion, in which he travels to Mauthausen, a former Nazi concentration camp in Austria, where punch-card tabulators made by IBM were used to manage the system of slave labour.
The camp, he argues, is “a powerful reminder of how computer technology can’t be separated from the culture in which it is developed and used”.
While technically correct, it’s an utterly spurious observation, like saying the use of railways to deliver prisoners to Auschwitz shows that transportation can’t be separated from the culture in which it’s used. Unfortunately, that kind of righteous bad faith is not restricted to the book’s closing.
• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine is published by Icon Books (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
