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For The Record  

FTR #1079 Surveillance Valley, Part 5: Double Agents (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 2)

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This broad­cast was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Con­tin­u­ing with our exam­i­na­tion of Yasha Levine’s sem­i­nal vol­ume Sur­veil­lance Val­ley, we con­tin­ue our analy­sis of the indi­vid­u­als, insti­tu­tions and tech­nolo­gies cen­tral to the so-called “online pri­va­cy” effort. The Tor Project, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund and Jacob Appel­baum are all the oppo­site of what they have been rep­re­sent­ed as being.

We begin with infor­ma­tion over­lapped from our last pro­gram, high­light­ing how Jacob Appel­baum and the Tor net­work hooked up with Wik­iLeaks.

In FTR #‘s 724, 725, 732, 745, 755 and 917,  we have detailed the fas­cist and far right-wing ide­ol­o­gy, asso­ci­a­tions and pol­i­tics of Julian Assange and Wik­iLeaks.

Tor, Appel­baum, Assange and Wik­iLeaks:

  1. Became increas­ing­ly inter­twined, enjoy­ing acco­lades from many, appar­ent­ly unsus­pect­ing, groups: ” . . . .  His [Appel­baum’s] asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks and Assange boost­ed the Tor Pro­jec­t’s pub­lic pro­file and rad­i­cal cre­den­tials. Sup­port and acco­lades poured in from jour­nal­ists, pri­va­cy orga­ni­za­tions, and gov­ern­ment watch­dogs. The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union part­nered with Appel­baum on an Inter­net pri­va­cy project, and New York’s Whit­ney Museum—one of the lead­ing mod­ern art muse­ums in the world—invited him for a ‘Sur­veil­lance Teach-In.’ The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion gave Tor its Pio­neer Award, and Roger Din­gle­dine made in on For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine’s Top 100 Glob­al Thinkers for pro­tect­ing ‘any­one and every­one from the dan­gers of Big Broth­er.’ . . . .”
  2.  Dif­fered fun­da­men­tal­ly from the accept­ed text: ” . . . . With Julian Assange endors­ing Tor, reporters assumed that the US gov­ern­ment saw the anonymi­ty non­prof­it as a threat. But inter­nal doc­u­ments obtained through FOIA from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, as well as analy­sis of Tor’s gov­ern­ment con­tracts paint a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. They reveal that Appel­baum and Din­gle­dine worked with Assange on secur­ing Wik­iLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their han­dlers at the BBG informed about their rela­tion­ship and even pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion about the inner work­ings of Wik­iLeak­s’s secure sub­mis­sion sys­tem. . . .”
  3. Did not adverse­ly affect the gov­ern­ment fund­ing of Tor at all, as might be expect­ed by the super­fi­cial appar­ent real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion: ” . . . . Per­haps most telling was that sup­port from the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] con­tin­ued even after Wik­iLeaks began pub­lish­ing clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion and Appel­baum became the tar­get of a larg­er Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion into Wik­iLeaks. For exam­ple, on July 31, 2010, CNET report­ed that Appel­baum had been detained at the Las Vegas air­port and ques­tioned about his rela­tion­ship with Wik­iLeaks. News of the deten­tion made head­lines around the world, once again high­light­ing Appel­baum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week lat­er, Tor’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Andrew Lew­man, clear­ly wor­ried that this might affect Tor’s fund­ing, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smooth­ing things over and answer­ing ‘any ques­tions you may have about the recent press regard­ing Jake and Wik­iLeaks.’ But Lew­man was in for a pleas­ant sur­prise: Roger Din­gle­dine had been keep­ing folks at the BBG in the loop, and every­thing seemed to be okay. ‘Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a num­ber of ques­tions when he met us this week in DC,’ Berman replied. . . .”
  4. ” . . . . In 2011 con­tracts came in with­out a hitch–$150,000 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and $227,118 from the State Depart­ment. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of mon­ey from the Pen­ta­gon: a new $503,706 annu­al con­tract from the Space and Naval War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, an elite infor­ma­tion and intel­li­gence unit that hous­es a top-secret cyber-war­fare divi­sion.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stan­ford mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that had done coun­terin­sur­gency, net­work­ing, and chem­i­cal weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larg­er Navy ‘Com­mand, Con­trol, Com­munca­tions, Com­put­ers, Intel­li­gence, Sur­veil­lance, and Recon­nais­sance’ pro­gram to improve mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. A year lat­er, Tor would see its gov­ern­ment con­tracts more than dou­ble to $2.2 mil­lion: $353,000 from the State Depart­ment, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. . . .”

In this con­text, we recall some ear­li­er obser­va­tions about Wik­iLeaks. John Young, one of Wik­iLeaks’ founders turned crit­ic of the orga­ni­za­tion har­bors deep sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing the group. ” . . . they’re act­ing like a cult. They’re act­ing like a reli­gion. They’re act­ing like a gov­ern­ment. They’re act­ing like a bunch of spies. They’re hid­ing their iden­ti­ty. They don’t account for the mon­ey. They promise all sorts of good things. They sel­dom let you know what they’re real­ly up to. . .There was sus­pi­cion from day one that this was entrap­ment run by some­one unknown to suck a num­ber of peo­ple into a trap. So we actu­al­ly don’t know. But it’s cer­tain­ly a stan­dard coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence tech­nique. And they’re usu­al­ly pret­ty elab­o­rate and pret­ty care­ful­ly run. They’ll even pros­e­cute peo­ple as part of the cov­er sto­ry. That actu­al­ly was talked about at (Sunday’s) pan­el. They’ll try to con­ceal who was inform­ing and betray­ing oth­ers by pre­tend­ing to pros­e­cute them. . . .” The Tor/Appelbaum/BBG (read “CIA”)/WikiLeaks nexus may very well be proof of Young’s sus­pi­cions.

Appel­baum, Wik­iLeaks and Tor became fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tions of Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den. In past dis­cus­sion, we have not­ed that in the sum­mer of 2009, when Snow­den made his deci­sion to dis­close the NSA doc­u­ments, he was work­ing for the very same CIA from which the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund were derived. Jacob Appel­baum was fund­ed by BBG, as was Tor. ” . . . . From the start, the Tor Project stood at the cen­ter of Snow­den’s sto­ry. The leak­er’s endorse­ment and pro­mo­tion intro­duced the project to a glob­al audi­ence, boost­ing Tor’s world­wide user base from one mil­lion to six mil­lion almost overnight and inject­ing it into the heart of a bur­geon­ing pri­va­cy move­ment. In Rus­sia, where the BBG and Din­gle­dine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deploy­ment plan, use of the soft­ware increased from twen­ty thou­sand dai­ly con­nec­tions to some­where around two hun­dred thou­sand.

“Dur­ing a pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the Tor Project, Snow­den said: ‘With­out Tor, the streets of the Inter­net become like the streets of a very heav­i­ly sur­veilled city. There are sur­veil­lance cam­eras every­where, and if the adver­sary sim­ply takes enough time, they can fol­low the tapes back and see every­thing you’ve done. With Tor, we have pri­vate spaces and pri­vate lives, where we can choose who we want to asso­ciate with and how, with­out the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. The design of the Tor sys­tem is struc­tured in such a way that even if the US Gov­ern­ment want­ed to sub­vert it, it could­n’t.’ Snow­den did­n’t talk about Tor’s con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment fund­ing, nor did he address an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion: why the US gov­ern­ment would fund a pro­gram that sup­pos­ed­ly lim­it­ed its own pow­er. What­ev­er Snow­den’s pri­vate thought on the mat­ter, his endorse­ment gave Tor the high­est pos­si­ble seal of approval. It was like a Hack­er’s Medal of Val­or. With Snow­den’s back­ing, no one even thought to ques­tion Tor’s rad­i­cal antigov­ern­ment bona fides. . . .”

Next, we review infor­ma­tion about the so-called “Arab Spring.” In FTR #‘s 733 through 739, we pre­sent­ed our view that the so-called Arab Spring was a U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, aimed at plac­ing the Broth­er­hood in pow­er in Mus­lim coun­tries dom­i­nat­ed either by a sec­u­lar dic­ta­tor or absolute monar­chy.

Yasha Levine has high­light­ed the role of U.S. tech per­son­nel in train­ing and prep­ping the Arab Spring online activists. As we have not­ed in the past, the so-called Arab Spring might have been bet­ter thought of as “The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring,” as the neo-lib­er­al, pri­va­ti­za­tion ide­ol­o­gy of Broth­er­hood eco­nom­ic icon Ibn Khal­dun was fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tion.

The eco­nom­ic goals of the Arab Spring “op” were reviewed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 1025 and 1026.

Recall while read­ing the fol­low­ing excerpts of this remark­able and impor­tant book, that:

  1. The Tor net­work was devel­oped by, and used and com­pro­mised by, ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence.
  2. One of the pri­ma­ry advo­cates and spon­sors of the Tor net­work is the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. As we saw in FTR #‘s 891, 895, is an exten­sion of the CIA.
  3. Jacob Appel­baum has been financed by the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, advo­cates use of the Tor net­work, has helped Wik­iLeaks with its exten­sive use of the Tor net­work, and is an ide­o­log­i­cal acolyte of Ayn Rand.

The Arab Spring pro­vid­ed moti­va­tion for enhanced U.S. fund­ing for Inter­net Free­dom. The Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, like the BBG a CIA “deriv­a­tive,” was at the cen­ter of this: ” . . . . The moti­va­tion for this expan­sion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US gov­ern­ment would main­tain its tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage in the cen­sor­ship arms race that began in the ear­ly 2000s, but the funds were also going into devel­op­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of tools aimed at lever­ag­ing the pow­er of the Inter­net to help for­eign oppo­si­tion activists orga­nize into cohe­sive polit­i­cal move­ments. The BBG’s $25.5 mil­lion cut of the cash more than dou­bled the agen­cy’s anti­cen­sor­ship tech­nol­o­gy bud­get from the pre­vi­ous year, and the BBG fun­neled the mon­ey into the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, a new orga­ni­za­tion it had cre­at­ed with­in Radio Free Asia to fund Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies in the wake of the Arab Spring. . . .”

The fun­da­men­tal posi­tion of BBG and OTF (read “CIA”) to the so-called online pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty was con­cise­ly expressed by Yasha Levine: ” . . . . From behind this hip and con­nect­ed exte­ri­or, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed incu­ba­tor for Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies, pour­ing mil­lions into projects big and small, includ­ing every­thing from evad­ing cen­sor­ship to help­ing polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, protests, and move­ment build­ing. With its deep pock­ets and its recruit­ment of big-name pri­va­cy activists, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund did­n’t just thrust itself into the pri­va­cy move­ment. In many ways, it WAS the pri­va­cy move­ment. . . .”

1a. Tor, Appel­baum, Assange and Wik­iLeaks:

  1. Became increas­ing­ly inter­twined, enjoy­ing acco­lades from many, appar­ent­ly unsus­pect­ing, groups: ” . . . .  His [Appel­baum’s] asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks and Assange boost­ed the Tor Pro­jec­t’s pub­lic pro­file and rad­i­cal cre­den­tials. Sup­port and acco­lades poured in from jour­nal­ists, pri­va­cy orga­ni­za­tions, and gov­ern­ment watch­dogs. The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union part­nered with Appel­baum on an Inter­net pri­va­cy project, and New York’s Whit­ney Museum—one of the lead­ing mod­ern art muse­ums in the world—invited him for a ‘Sur­veil­lance Teach-In.’ The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion gave Tor its Pio­neer Award, and Roger Din­gle­dine made in on For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine’s Top 100 Glob­al Thinkers for pro­tect­ing ‘any­one and every­one from the dan­gers of Big Broth­er.’ . . . .”
  2.  Dif­fered fun­da­men­tal­ly from the accept­ed text: ” . . . . With Julian Assange endors­ing Tor, reporters assumed that the US gov­ern­ment saw the anonymi­ty non­prof­it as a threat. But inter­nal doc­u­ments obtained through FOIA from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, as well as analy­sis of Tor’s gov­ern­ment con­tracts paint a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. They reveal that Appel­baum and Din­gle­dine worked with Assange on secur­ing Wik­iLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their han­dlers at the BBG informed about their rela­tion­ship and even pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion about the inner work­ings of Wik­iLeak­s’s secure sub­mis­sion sys­tem. . . .”
  3. Did not adverse­ly affect the gov­ern­ment fund­ing of Tor at all, as might be expect­ed by the super­fi­cial appar­ent real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion: ” . . . . Per­haps most telling was that sup­port from the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] con­tin­ued even after Wik­iLeaks began pub­lish­ing clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion and Appel­baum became the tar­get of a larg­er Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion into Wik­iLeaks. For exam­ple, on July 31, 2010, CNET report­ed that Appel­baum had been detained at the Las Vegas air­port and ques­tioned about his rela­tion­ship with Wik­iLeaks. News of the deten­tion made head­lines around the world, once again high­light­ing Appel­baum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week lat­er, Tor’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Andrew Lew­man, clear­ly wor­ried that this might affect Tor’s fund­ing, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smooth­ing things over and answer­ing ‘any ques­tions you may have about the recent press regard­ing Jake and Wik­iLeaks.’ But Lew­man was in for a pleas­ant sur­prise: Roger Din­gle­dine had been keep­ing folks at the BBG in the loop, and every­thing seemed to be okay. ‘Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a num­ber of ques­tions when he met us this week in DC,’ Berman replied. . . .”
  4. ” . . . . In 2011 con­tracts came in with­out a hitch–$150,000 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and $227,118 from the State Depart­ment. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of mon­ey from the Pen­ta­gon: a new $503,706 annu­al con­tract from the Space and Naval War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, an elite infor­ma­tion and intel­li­gence unit that hous­es a top-secret cyber-war­fare divi­sion.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stan­ford mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that had done coun­terin­sur­gency, net­work­ing, and chem­i­cal weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larg­er Navy ‘Com­mand, Con­trol, Com­munca­tions, Com­put­ers, Intel­li­gence, Sur­veil­lance, and Recon­nais­sance’ pro­gram to improve mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. A year lat­er, Tor would see its gov­ern­ment con­tracts more than dou­ble to $2.2 mil­lion: $353,000 from the State Depart­ment, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. . . .”

 Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC]; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; pp. 245—247.

 . . . . His [Appel­baum’s] asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks and Assange boost­ed the Tor Pro­jec­t’s pub­lic pro­file and rad­i­cal cre­den­tials. Sup­port and acco­lades poured in from jour­nal­ists, pri­va­cy orga­ni­za­tions, and gov­ern­ment watch­dogs. The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union part­nered with Appel­baum on an Inter­net pri­va­cy project, and New York’s Whit­ney Museum—one of the lead­ing mod­ern art muse­ums in the world—invited him for a “Sur­veil­lance Teach-In.” The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion gave Tor its Pio­neer Award, and Roger Din­gle­dine made in on For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine’s Top 100 Glob­al Thinkers for pro­tect­ing “any­one and every­one from the dan­gers of Big Broth­er.”

As for Tor’s deep and ongo­ing ties to the U.S. gov­ern­ment? Well, what of them? To any doubters, Jacob Appel­baum was held up as liv­ing, breath­ing proof of the rad­i­cal inde­pen­dence of  the Tor Project. “If the users or devel­op­ers he meets wor­ry that Tor’s gov­ern­ment fund­ing com­pro­mis­es its ideals, there’s no one bet­ter than Apple­baum to show the group does­n’t take orders from the feds.” wrote jour­nal­ist Andy Green­berg in This Machine Kills Secrets, a book about Wik­iLeaks. “Appel­baum’s best evi­dence of Tor’s puri­ty from Big Broth­er’s inter­fer­ence, per­haps, is his very pub­lic asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks, the Amer­i­can gov­ern­men­t’s least favorite web­site.

With Julian Assange endors­ing Tor, reporters assumed that the US gov­ern­ment saw the anonymi­ty non­prof­it as a threat. But inter­nal doc­u­ments obtained through FOIA from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, as well as analy­sis of Tor’s gov­ern­ment con­tracts paint a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. They reveal that Appel­baum and Din­gle­dine worked with Assange on secur­ing Wik­iLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their han­dlers at the BBG informed about their rela­tion­ship and even pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion about the inner work­ings of Wik­iLeak­s’s secure sub­mis­sion sys­tem.

“Talked to the Wik­iLeaks peo­ple (Daniel and Julian) about their use of Tor hid­den ser­vices, and how we can make things bet­ter for them,” Din­gle­dine wrote in a progress report he sent to the BBG in Jan­u­ary, 2008. “It turns out they use the hid­den ser­vice entire­ly as a way to keep users from screw­ing up—either it works and they know they’re safe or it fails, but either way they don’t reveal what they’re try­ing to leak local­ly. So I’d like to add a new ‘secure ser­vice’ fea­ture that’s just like a hid­den ser­vice but it only makes one hop from the serv­er side rather than three. A more rad­i­cal design would be for the ‘intro point’ to be the serv­er itself, so it real­ly would be like an exit enclave.” In anoth­er progress report sent to the BBG two years lat­er, in Feb­ru­ary 2010, Din­gle­dine wrote, “Jacob and Wik­iLeaks peo­ple met with pol­i­cy­mak­ers in Ice­land to dis­cuss free­dom of speech, free­dom of press, and that online pri­va­cy should be a fun­da­men­tal right.”

No one at the BBG raised any objec­tions. To the con­trary, they appeared to be sup­port­ive. We do not know if any­one at the BBG for­ward­ed this infor­ma­tion to some oth­er gov­ern­ment body, but it would not be hard to imag­ine that infor­ma­tion about Wik­iLeaks’ secu­ri­ty infra­struc­ture and sub­mis­sion sys­tem was of great inter­est to intel­li­gence agen­cies.

Per­haps most telling was that sup­port from the BBG con­tin­ued even after Wik­iLeaks began pub­lish­ing clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion and Appel­baum became the tar­get of a larg­er Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion into Wik­iLeaks. For exam­ple, on July 31, 2010, CNET report­ed that Appel­baum had been detained at the Las Vegas air­port and ques­tioned about his rela­tion­ship with Wik­iLeaks. News of the deten­tion made head­lines around the world, once again high­light­ing Appel­baum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week lat­er, Tor’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Andrew Lew­man, clear­ly wor­ried that this might affect Tor’s fund­ing, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smooth­ing things over and answer­ing “any ques­tions you may have about the recent press regard­ing Jake and Wik­iLeaks.” But Lew­man was in for a pleas­ant sur­prise: Roger Din­gle­dine had been keep­ing folks at the BBG in the loop, and every­thing seemed to be okay. “Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a num­ber of ques­tions when he met us this week in DC,” Berman replied.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Berman did­n’t explain in the email what he and Din­gle­dine dis­cussed about Appel­baum and­Wik­iLeaks dur­ing their meet­ing. What we do know is that Tor’s asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks pro­duced no real neg­a­tive impact on tor’s gov­ern­ment con­tracts.

In 2011 con­tracts came in with­out a hitch–$150,000 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and $227,118 from the State Depart­ment. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of mon­ey from the Pen­ta­gon: a new $503,706 annu­al con­tract from the Space and Naval War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, an elite infor­ma­tion and intel­li­gence unit that hous­es a top-secret cyber-war­fare divi­sion.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stan­ford mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that had done coun­terin­sur­gency, net­work­ing, and chem­i­cal weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larg­er Navy ‘Com­mand, Con­trol, Com­munca­tions, Com­put­ers, Intel­li­gence, Sur­veil­lance, and Recon­nais­sance’ pro­gram to improve mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. A year lat­er, Tor would see its gov­ern­ment con­tracts more than dou­ble to $2.2 mil­lion: $353,000 from the State Depart­ment, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors.

When I crunched the num­bers, I could­n’t help but do a dou­ble take. It was incred­i­ble. Wik­iLeaks had scored a direct hit on Tor’s gov­ern­ment back­ers, includ­ing the Pen­ta­gon and State Depart­ment. Yet Appel­baum’s close part­ner­ship with Assange pro­duced no dis­cern­able down­side. [!–D.E.]

I guess it makes sense, in a way. Wik­iLeaks might have embar­rassed some parts of the US gov­ern­ment, but it also gave Amer­i­ca’s pre­mier Inter­net Free­dom weapon a major injec­tion of cred­i­bil­i­ty, enhanc­ing its effec­tive­ness and use­ful­ness. It was an oppor­tu­ni­ty. . . .

1b. John Young, one of Wik­iLeaks’ founders turned crit­ic of the orga­ni­za­tion har­bors deep sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing the group. ” . . . they’re act­ing like a cult. They’re act­ing like a reli­gion. They’re act­ing like a gov­ern­ment. They’re act­ing like a bunch of spies. They’re hid­ing their iden­ti­ty. They don’t account for the mon­ey. They promise all sorts of good things. They sel­dom let you know what they’re real­ly up to. . .There was sus­pi­cion from day one that this was entrap­ment run by some­one unknown to suck a num­ber of peo­ple into a trap. So we actu­al­ly don’t know. But it’s cer­tain­ly a stan­dard coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence tech­nique. And they’re usu­al­ly pret­ty elab­o­rate and pret­ty care­ful­ly run. They’ll even pros­e­cute peo­ple as part of the cov­er sto­ry. That actu­al­ly was talked about at (Sunday’s) pan­el. They’ll try to con­ceal who was inform­ing and betray­ing oth­ers by pre­tend­ing to pros­e­cute them. . . .” The Tor/Appelbaum/BBG (read “CIA”)/WikiLeaks nexus may very well be proof of Young’s sus­pi­cions.

2. Appel­baum, Wik­iLeaks and Tor became fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tions of Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den. In past dis­cus­sion, we have not­ed that in the sum­mer of 2009, when Snow­den made his deci­sion to dis­close the NSA doc­u­ments, he was work­ing for the very same CIA from which the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund were derived. Jacob Appel­baum was fund­ed by BBG, as was Tor. ” . . . . From the start, the Tor Project stood at the cen­ter of Snow­den’s sto­ry. The leak­er’s endorse­ment and pro­mo­tion intro­duced the project to a glob­al audi­ence, boost­ing Tor’s world­wide user base from one mil­lion to six mil­lion almost overnight and inject­ing it into the heart of a bur­geon­ing pri­va­cy move­ment. In Rus­sia, where the BBG and Din­gle­dine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deploy­ment plan, use of the soft­ware increased from twen­ty thou­sand dai­ly con­nec­tions to some­where around two hun­dred thou­sand.

“Dur­ing a pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the Tor Project, Snow­den said: ‘With­out Tor, the streets of the Inter­net become like the streets of a very heav­i­ly sur­veilled city. There are sur­veil­lance cam­eras every­where, and if the adver­sary sim­ply takes enough time, they can fol­low the tapes back and see every­thing you’ve done. With Tor, we have pri­vate spaces and pri­vate lives, where we can choose who we want to asso­ciate with and how, with­out the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. The design of the Tor sys­tem is struc­tured in such a way that even if the US Gov­ern­ment want­ed to sub­vert it, it could­n’t.’ Snow­den did­n’t talk about Tor’s con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment fund­ing, nor did he address an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion: why the US gov­ern­ment would fund a pro­gram that sup­pos­ed­ly lim­it­ed its own pow­er. What­ev­er Snow­den’s pri­vate thought on the mat­ter, his endorse­ment gave Tor the high­est pos­si­ble seal of approval. It was like a Hack­er’s Medal of Val­or. With Snow­den’s back­ing, no one even thought to ques­tion Tor’s rad­i­cal antigov­ern­ment bona fides. . . .”

Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC]; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; pp. 252—253.

. . . . Appel­baum con­tin­ued to draw a high five-fig­ure salary from Tor, a gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor fund­ed almost exclu­sive­ly by mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence grants. But, to the pub­lic, he was a real-life super­hero on the run from the US sur­veil­lance state—now hid­ing out in Berlin, the nerve cen­ter of the glob­al hack­er scene known for its nerdy mix of machis­mo, all-night hackathons, drug use, and part­ner swap­ping. He was a mem­ber of the Inter­net Free­dom elite, cham­pi­oned by the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union and the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, giv­en a board seat on eBay founder Pierre Omid­yar’s Free­dom of the Press Foun­da­tion, and occu­pied an advi­so­ry role for Lon­don’s Cen­tre for Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ism. His fame and rebel sta­tus only made his job as Tor’s pitch­man more effec­tive.

In Berlin, Appel­baum caught anoth­er lucky break for the Tor Project. In 2013, his good friend and some­times-lover Lau­ra Poitras, an Amer­i­can doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er who also lived in the Ger­man cap­i­tal in self-imposed exile, was con­tact­ed by a mys­te­ri­ous source who told her he had access to the crown jew­els of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency: doc­u­ments that would blow Amer­i­ca’s sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus wide open. Poitras tapped Appel­baum’s knowl­edge of Inter­net sys­tems to come up with a list of ques­tions to vet the pos­si­ble leak­er and to make sure he real­ly was the NSA tech­ni­cian he claimed to be. This source turned out to be Edward Snow­den.

From the start, the Tor Project stood at the cen­ter of Snow­den’s sto­ry. The leak­er’s endorse­ment and pro­mo­tion intro­duced the project to a glob­al audi­ence, boost­ing Tor’s world­wide user base from one mil­lion to six mil­lion almost overnight and inject­ing it into the heart of a bur­geon­ing pri­va­cy move­ment. In Rus­sia, where the BBG and Din­gle­dine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deploy­ment plan, use of the soft­ware increased from twen­ty thou­sand dai­ly con­nec­tions to some­where around two hun­dred thou­sand.

Dur­ing a pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the Tor Project, Snow­den said: “With­out Tor, the streets of the Inter­net become like the streets of a very heav­i­ly sur­veilled city. There are sur­veil­lance cam­eras every­where, and if the adver­sary sim­ply takes enough time, they can fol­low the tapes back and see every­thing you’ve done. With Tor, we have pri­vate spaces and pri­vate lives, where we can choose who we want to asso­ciate with and how, with­out the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. The design of the Tor sys­tem is struc­tured in such a way that even if the US Gov­ern­ment want­ed to sub­vert it, it could­n’t.”

Snow­den did­n’t talk about Tor’s con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment fund­ing, nor did he address an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion: why the US gov­ern­ment would fund a pro­gram that sup­pos­ed­ly lim­it­ed its own pow­er.

What­ev­er Snow­den’s pri­vate thought on the mat­ter, his endorse­ment gave Tor the high­est pos­si­ble seal of approval. It was like a Hack­er’s Medal of Val­or. With Snow­den’s back­ing, no one even thought to ques­tion Tor’s rad­i­cal antigov­ern­ment bona fides. . . .

3. Among the advo­cates for the Tor Project is Pen­ta­gon Papers lumi­nary Daniel Ells­berg, who, him­self, has a long-stand­ing rela­tion­ship to CIA.

Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC]; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; p. 209.

. . . . Daniel Ells­berg, the leg­endary whis­tle-blow­er who in 1971 leaked the Pen­ta­gon Papers, backed Tor as a pow­er­ful weapon of the peo­ple. . . .

4a.  Next, we review infor­ma­tion about the so-called “Arab Spring.” In FTR #‘s 733 through 739, we pre­sent­ed our view that the so-called Arab Spring was a U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, aimed at plac­ing the Broth­er­hood in pow­er in Mus­lim coun­tries dom­i­nat­ed either by a sec­u­lar dic­ta­tor or absolute monar­chy.

Yasha Levine has high­light­ed the role of U.S. tech per­son­nel in train­ing and prep­ping the Arab Spring online activists. As we have not­ed in the past, the so-called Arab Spring might have been bet­ter thought of as “The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring,” as the neo-lib­er­al, pri­va­ti­za­tion ide­ol­o­gy of Broth­er­hood eco­nom­ic icon Ibn Khal­dun was fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tion.

The eco­nom­ic goals of the Arab Spring “op” were reviewed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 1025 and 1026.

Recall while read­ing the fol­low­ing excerpts of this remark­able and impor­tant book, that:

  1. The Tor net­work was devel­oped by, and used and com­pro­mised by, ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence.
  2. One of the pri­ma­ry advo­cates and spon­sors of the Tor net­work is the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. As we saw in FTR #‘s 891, 895, is an exten­sion of the CIA.
  3. Jacob Appel­baum has been financed by the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, advo­cates use of the Tor net­work, has helped Wik­iLeaks with its exten­sive use of the Tor net­work, and is an ide­o­log­i­cal acolyte of Ayn Rand.

Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Hatch­ette Book Group [HC]; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; pp. 248–250.

. . . . With­in weeks, mas­sive antigov­ern­ment protests spread to Egypt, Alge­ria, Oman, Jor­dan, Libya, and Syr­ia. The Arab Spring had arrived.

In Tunisia and Egypt, these protest move­ments top­pled long-stand­ing dic­ta­tor­ships from with­in. In Libya, oppo­si­tion forces deposed and sav­age­ly killed Muam­mar Gaddafi, knif­ing him in the anus, after an exten­sive bomb­ing cam­paign from NATO forces. In Syr­ia, protests were met with a bru­tal crack­down from Bashar Assad’s gov­ern­ment, and led to a pro­tract­ed war that would claim hun­dreds of thou­sands of lives and trig­ger the worst refugee cri­sis in recent his­to­ry, pulling in Sau­di Ara­bia, Turkey, Israel, the CIA, the Russ­ian Air Force and spe­cial oper­a­tions teams, Al-Qae­da, and ISIL. Arab Spring turned into a long, bloody win­ter. . . .

. . . . The idea that social media could be weaponized against coun­tries and gov­ern­ments deemed hos­tile to US inter­ests was­n’t a sur­prise. For years, the State Depart­ment, in part­ner­ship with the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and com­pa­nies like Face­book and Google, had worked to train activists from around the world on how to use Inter­net tools and social media to orga­nize oppo­si­tion polit­i­cal move­ments. Coun­tries in Asia, the Mid­dle East, and Latin Amer­i­ca as well as for­mer Sovi­et sites like the Ukraine and Belarus were all on the list. Indeed, the New York Times report­ed that many of the activists who played lead­ing roles in the Arab Spring–from Egypt to Syr­ia to Yemen–had tak­en part in these train­ing ses­sions.

“The mon­ey spent on these pro­grams was minute com­pared with efforts led by the Pen­ta­gon,” report­ed the New York Times in April of 2011. “But as Amer­i­can offi­cials and oth­ers look back at the upris­ings of the Arab Spring, they are see­ing that the Unit­ed States’ democ­ra­cy-build­ing cam­paigns played a big­ger role in foment­ing protests than was pre­vi­ous­ly known, with key lead­ers of the move­ments hav­ing been trained by the Amer­i­cans in Cam­paign­ing, orga­niz­ing through new media tools and mon­i­tor­ing elec­tions.” The train­ings were polit­i­cal­ly charged and were seen as a threat by Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain–all of which lodged com­plaints with the State Depart­ment to stop med­dling in their domes­tic affairs, and even barred US offi­cials from enter­ing their coun­tries.

An Egypt­ian youth polit­i­cal leader who attend­ed State Depart­ment train­ing ses­sions and then went on to led protests in Cairo told the New York Times, “We learned how to orga­nize and build coali­tions. This cer­tain­ly helped dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion.” A dif­fer­ent youth activist, who had par­tic­i­pat­ed in Yemen’s upris­ing, was equal­ly enthu­si­as­tic about the State Depart­ment social media train­ing: “It helped me very much because I used to think that change only takes place by force and by weapons.”

Staff from the Tor Project played a role in some of these train­ings, tak­ing part in a series of Arab Blog­ger ses­sions in Yemen, Tunisia, Jor­dan, Lebanon, and Bahrain, where Jacob Appel­baum taught oppo­si­tion activists how to use Tor to get around gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. “Today was fan­tas­tic . . . . real­ly a fan­tas­tic meet­ing of minds in the Arab world! It’s enlight­en­ing and hum­bling to have ben invit­ed. I real­ly have to rec­om­mend vis­it­ing Beirut. Lebanon is an amaz­ing place. . . . Appel­baum tweet­ed after an Arab Blog­gers train­ing event in 2009, adding“IF you’d like to help Tor please sign up and help trans­late Tor soft­ware in Ara­bic.”

Activists lat­er put the skills taught at these train­ing ses­sions to use dur­ing the Arab Spring, rout­ing around Inter­net blocks that their gov­ern­ments threw up to pre­vent them from using social media to orga­nize protests. “There would be no access to Twit­ter or Face­book in some of these places if you did­n’t have Tor. All of the sud­den, you had all these dis­si­dents explod­ing under their noses, and then down the road you had a rev­o­lu­tion,” Nass­er Wed­dady, a promi­nent Arab Spring activist from Mau­ri­ta­nia, lat­er told Rolling Stone. Wed­dady, who had tak­en part in the Tor Pro­jec­t’s train­ing ses­sions and who had trans­lat­ed a wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed guide on how to use the tool into Ara­bic, cred­it­ed it with help­ing keep the Arab Spring upris­ings alive. “Tor ren­dered the gov­ern­men­t’s efforts com­plete­ly futile. They sim­ply did­n’t have the know-how to counter that move.” . . . .

4b. The Arab Spring pro­vid­ed moti­va­tion for enhanced U.S. fund­ing for Inter­net Free­dom. The Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, like the BBG a CIA “deriv­a­tive,” was at the cen­ter of this: ” . . . . The moti­va­tion for this expan­sion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US gov­ern­ment would main­tain its tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage in the cen­sor­ship arms race that began in the ear­ly 2000s, but the funds were also going into devel­op­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of tools aimed at lever­ag­ing the pow­er of the Inter­net to help for­eign oppo­si­tion activists orga­nize into cohe­sive polit­i­cal move­ments. The BBG’s $25.5 mil­lion cut of the cash more than dou­bled the agen­cy’s anti­cen­sor­ship tech­nol­o­gy bud­get from the pre­vi­ous year, and the BBG fun­neled the mon­ey into the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, a new orga­ni­za­tion it had cre­at­ed with­in Radio Free Asia to fund Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies in the wake of the Arab Spring. . . .”

The fun­da­men­tal posi­tion of BBG and OTF (read “CIA”) to the so-called online pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty was con­cise­ly expressed by Yasha Levine: ” . . . . From behind this hip and con­nect­ed exte­ri­or, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed incu­ba­tor for Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies, pour­ing mil­lions into projects big and small, includ­ing every­thing from evad­ing cen­sor­ship to help­ing polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, protests, and move­ment build­ing. With its deep pock­ets and its recruit­ment of big-name pri­va­cy activists, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund did­n’t just thrust itself into the pri­va­cy move­ment. In many ways, it WAS the pri­va­cy move­ment. . . .”

Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC]; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; pp. 254—256.

. . . . In ear­ly Jan­u­ary 2014, six months after Snow­den’s leaks, Con­gress passed the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Appro­pri­a­tions Act, an omnibus fed­er­al spend­ing bill. Tucked into the bil­l’s rough­ly fif­teen hun­dred pages was a short pro­vi­sion that ded­i­cat­ed $50.5 mil­lion to the expan­sion of the US gov­ern­men­t’s Inter­net Free­dom arse­nal. The funds were to be split even­ly between the State Depart­ment and the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors.

Although Con­gress had been pro­vid­ing funds for var­i­ous anti-cen­sor­ship pro­grams for years, this was the first time that it bud­get­ed mon­ey specif­i­cal­ly for Inter­net Free­dom. The moti­va­tion for this expan­sion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US gov­ern­ment would main­tain its tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage in the cen­sor­ship arms race that began in the ear­ly 2000s, but the funds were also going into devel­op­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of tools aimed at lever­ag­ing the pow­er of the Inter­net to help for­eign oppo­si­tion activists orga­nize into cohe­sive polit­i­cal move­ments.

The BBG’s $25.5 mil­lion cut of the cash more than dou­bled the agen­cy’s anti­cen­sor­ship tech­nol­o­gy bud­get from the pre­vi­ous year, and the BBG fun­neled the mon­ey into the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, a new orga­ni­za­tion it had cre­at­ed with­in Radio Free Asia to fund Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Ini­tial­ly launched by the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency in 1951 to tar­get Chi­na with anti­com­mu­nist radio broad­casts, Radio Free Asia had been shut­tered and relaunched sev­er­al times over the course of its his­to­ry. In 1994, after the fall of the Sovi­et Union, it reap­peared Ter­mi­na­tor-like as a pri­vate non­prof­it cor­po­ra­tion whol­ly con­trolled and fund­ed by the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. . . .

. . . . Now, with the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund (OTF), Radio Free Asia over­saw the fund­ing of Amer­i­ca’s Inter­net Free­dom pro­grams. To run OTF’s day-to-day oper­a­tions, Radio Free Asia hired Dan Mered­ith, a young techie who worked at Al-Jazeera in Qatar and who had been involved in the State Depart­men­t’s anti­cen­sor­ship ini­tia­tives going back to 2011. With a scruffy beard and messy blond surfer hair, Mered­ith was­n’t a typ­i­cal stuffy State Depart­ment suit. He was flu­ent in cypher­punk-hack­tivist lin­go and was very much a part of the grass­roots pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty he sought to woo. In short, he was­n’t the kind of per­son you’d expect to run a gov­ern­ment project with major for­eign pol­i­cy impli­ca­tions.

With him at the helm, OTF put a lot of effort on brand­ing. Out­ward­ly, it looked like a grass­roots pri­va­cy activist orga­ni­za­tion, not a gov­ern­ment agency. It pro­duced hip 8‑bit YouTube videos about its mis­sion to use “pub­lic funds to sup­port Inter­net free­dom projects” and pro­mote “human rights and open soci­eties.” Its web lay­out con­stant­ly changed to reflect the trendi­est design stan­dards.

But if OTF appeared scrap­py, it was also extreme­ly well con­nect­ed. The orga­ni­za­tion w as sup­port­ed by a star-stud­ded team—from best-sell­ing sci­ence fic­tion authors to Sil­i­con Val­ley exec­u­tives and cel­e­brat­ed cryp­tog­ra­phy experts. Its advi­so­ry board includ­ed big names from the Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism School, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, the Ford Foun­da­tion, Open Soci­ety Foun­da­tions, Google, Slack, and Mozil­la. Andrew McLaugh­lin, the for­mer head of Google’s pub­lic rela­tions team who had bought in Al Gore to talk to a Cal­i­for­nia state sen­a­tor into can­cel­ing leg­is­la­tion that would reg­u­late Gmail’s email scan­ning pro­gram, was part of the OTF team. So was Cory Doc­torow, a best-sell­ing young adult sci­ence fic­tion author, whose books about a total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­men­t’s sur­veil­lance were read and admired by Lau­ra Poitras, Jacob Apple­baum, Roger Din­gle­dine, and Edward Snow­den. Doc­torow was a huge per­son­al­i­ty in the cryp­to move­ment who could fill giant con­fer­ence halls at pri­va­cy con­fer­ences. He pub­licly endorsed OTF’s Inter­net Free­dom mis­sion. “I’m proud to be a vol­un­teer OTF advi­sor,” he tweet­ed.

From behind this hip and con­nect­ed exte­ri­or, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed incu­ba­tor for Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies, pour­ing mil­lions into projects big and small, includ­ing every­thing from evad­ing cen­sor­ship to help­ing polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, protests, and move­ment build­ing. With its deep pock­ets and its recruit­ment of big-name pri­va­cy activists, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund did­n’t just thrust itself into the pri­va­cy move­ment. In many ways, it was the pri­va­cy move­ment. . . .

Discussion

One comment for “FTR #1079 Surveillance Valley, Part 5: Double Agents (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 2)”

  1. There’s a sto­ry about the ongo­ing fall­out in some aca­d­e­m­ic cir­cles from their past asso­ci­a­tions with Jef­frey Epstein and will­ing­ness to take his mon­ey that con­nects up to the his­to­ry cov­ered in Yasha Levine’s Sur­veil­lance Val­ley in a notable way: Joichi Ito, the direc­tor of the MIT Media Lab, just stepped down fol­low­ing a report the New York­er by Ronan Far­row that the Media Lab was accept­ing Epstein’s mon­ey even after it was aware of his sta­tus as a con­vict­ed sex offend­er and that the size of the con­tri­bu­tions were far in excess of what MIT has pub­licly admit­ted. But Ito isn’t the only Media Lab offi­cial who is find­ing him­self under scruti­ny. As the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review report­ed last week, when this issue was dis­cussed dur­ing an inter­nal meet­ing at the Media Lab, the lab’s co-founder, Nicholas Negro­ponte, appeared to defend tak­ing the mon­ey and admit­ted to mak­ing that rec­om­men­da­tion to Ito at the time. Based on the ini­tial report­ing, it sound­ed like Negro­ponte was defend­ing tak­ing Epstein’s mon­ey even after the Media lab became aware of Epstein’s sex traf­fick­ing con­vic­tion, but Negro­ponte has sub­se­quent­ly assert­ed that he was­n’t defend­ing tak­ing the mon­ey at that point. He was only defend­ing tak­ing the mon­ey back when no one knew about this side of Epstein.

    Part of what makes this sto­ry about Negro­pon­te’s atti­tude regard­ing the tak­ing of Epstein’s mon­ey so inter­est­ing is that at the same time there’s a big mys­tery swirling around Epstein’s con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, we can’t for­get that Negro­ponte, broth­er of John Negro­ponte, has his own exten­sive con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty and ARPA, as Yasha cov­ered in Sur­veil­lance Val­ley. It’s the kind of back­ground that makes the ques­tions about Epstein’s intel­li­gence con­nec­tions more intrigu­ing in the con­text of ques­tions about the nature of his exten­sive phil­an­thropy for the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. Was were Epstein and Negro­ponte work­ing in con­cert to fun­nel intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed mon­ey into aca­d­e­m­ic research?

    Ok, first, here’s the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review arti­cle about the shock with­in the MIT Media Lab over Nicholas Negro­pon­te’s defense of the Joichi Ito’s tak­ing Epstein’s mon­ey and his admis­sion that, as direc­tor of the Media Lab, he rec­om­mend­ed to Ito that he take Epstein’s mon­ey at the time. As the arti­cle describes, it ini­tial­ly was report­ed that Negro­ponte was defend­ing tak­ing the mon­ey even after Epstein was con­vict­ed for under­age sex traf­fick­ing, which obvi­ous­ly would be a high­ly con­tro­ver­sial stance. But Negro­ponte lat­er insist­ed he was only talk­ing about tak­ing the mon­ey before Epstein’s con­vic­tion:

    MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

    MIT Media Lab founder: Tak­ing Jef­frey Epstein’s mon­ey was jus­ti­fied
    At an inter­nal meet­ing, Nicholas Negro­ponte shocked some peo­ple with his com­ments on fund­ing from the alleged sex traf­fick­er.

    by Angela Chen and Karen Hao
    Sep 4, 2019

    MIT Media Lab direc­tor Joichi Ito has has faced pres­sure to resign after reveal­ing that he took research fund­ing from financier and alleged sex traf­fick­er Jef­frey Epstein. But today Nicholas Negro­ponte, who cofound­ed the Media Lab in 1985 and was its direc­tor for 20 years, said he had rec­om­mend­ed that Ito take Epstein’s mon­ey. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeat­ed, more emphat­i­cal­ly, “‘Take it.’

    Negroponte’s com­ments, made at the end of an all-hands Media Lab meet­ing this after­noon (Sep­tem­ber 4), shocked many peo­ple in the audi­ence. At least some in the room under­stood him to be say­ing that he would have sup­port­ed tak­ing the mon­ey even if he had known then that Epstein was a sus­pect­ed sex traf­fick­er.

    In an ear­li­er ver­sion of this sto­ry, that is how we report­ed his remarks. Negro­ponte had not respond­ed to a request for com­ment at that point. He sub­se­quent­ly told the Boston Globe, and has since con­firmed to us, that he was defend­ing only the orig­i­nal deci­sion to take mon­ey from Epstein, who at that point had already been con­vict­ed of and served time for a sex­u­al offense involv­ing a minor. “Giv­en what we know today [about the recent sex-traf­fick­ing charges]... nobody would or should have tak­en his mon­ey,” Negro­ponte wrote in an email. “But wind the clock back­wards, giv­en what we knew then, I would have accept­ed his mon­ey now.”

    ...

    “Good grief”

    Epstein, who died by sui­cide in August, was arrest­ed in July and accused of run­ning a years-long sex traf­fick­ing oper­a­tion. In 2008 he had been con­vict­ed of procur­ing an under­age girl for pros­ti­tu­tion. Epstein was a patron of many famous sci­en­tists, includ­ing geneti­cist George Church, biol­o­gist Mar­tin Nowak, physi­cist Lawrence Krauss, and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Robert Trivers.

    In August, Ito, who has led the MIT Media Lab since 2011, revealed that he too had tak­en mon­ey from Epstein for both the Media Lab and his pri­vate ven­tures. (Ito is also on the board of MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, none of Epstein’s mon­ey con­tributed to this publication’s fund­ing, which comes from the MIT gen­er­al bud­get.) Ito’s dis­clo­sures led to the res­ig­na­tion of both Ethan Zuck­er­man—a well-known tech­nol­o­gy activist who ran the Media Lab’s Cen­ter for Civic Media, and who said he had urged Ito in 2014 not to meet with Epstein—and Media Lab vis­it­ing schol­ar J. Nathan Matias. Nei­ther Zuck­er­man nor Matias respond­ed to requests for com­ment regard­ing their depar­tures.

    Today’s meet­ing, attend­ed by a jour­nal­ist from MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, was meant to be a high­ly chore­o­graphed attempt to ease ten­sions over the con­tro­ver­sy and begin address­ing its root caus­es. The after­noon start­ed off with a col­lec­tive breath­ing exer­cise. The orga­niz­ers then shared a 90-day action plan before giv­ing Ito the floor to answer ques­tions he had faced since the rev­e­la­tions.

    One of those ques­tions was whether he had con­sid­ered resign­ing. He said he had, but after con­sult­ing many peo­ple, includ­ing civ­il rights lead­ers, on how to con­duct an effort in restora­tive jus­tice, he con­clud­ed that he should stay at the Media Lab and help with the heal­ing process. Ito struck an apolo­getic and plead­ing tone, repeat­ed­ly admit­ting to his mis­takes in accept­ing the mon­ey, and acknowl­edg­ing the pain he had caused and the learn­ing he still need­ed to do. “I’m part of the prob­lem when I thought I was part of the solu­tion,” he said. “I’m that guy that I thought I was going after.” The room stayed qui­et and somber, and his com­ments end­ed in silence.

    Answer­ing sub­se­quent ques­tions, Ito said he had tak­en $525,000 in fund­ing from Epstein for the Lab. Because of the way it was allo­cat­ed and spent, it had inad­ver­tent­ly been used by every­one there.

    Through­out, the meet­ing had pro­ceed­ed calm­ly. But as one of the orga­niz­ers began to wrap things up, Negro­ponte stood up, unprompt­ed, and began to speak. He dis­cussed his priv­i­lege as a “rich white man” and how he had used that priv­i­lege to break into the social cir­cles of bil­lion­aires. It was these con­nec­tions, he said, that had allowed the Media Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay peo­ple full salaries, and allow researchers to keep their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty.

    Negro­ponte said that he prid­ed him­self on know­ing over 80% of the bil­lion­aires in the US on a first-name basis, and that through these cir­cles he had come to spend time with Epstein. Over the years, he had two din­ners and one ride in Epstein’s pri­vate jet alone, where they spoke pas­sion­ate­ly about sci­ence. (He didn’t say whether these occurred before or after Epstein’s 2008 con­vic­tion.) It was these inter­ac­tions, he said, that warmed him to Epstein and made him con­fi­dent­ly and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly rec­om­mend that Ito take the mon­ey.

    It was at this point that Negro­ponte said he would still have giv­en Ito the same advice today. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple in atten­dance had con­flict­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of his state­ment. Some under­stood him to mean he would act the same way even know­ing what he knows now about Epstein’s alleged sex traf­fick­ing. But Negro­ponte told the Boston Globe that in ret­ro­spect, “Yes, we are embar­rassed and regret tak­ing his mon­ey.”

    The com­ments clear­ly stunned some of his lis­ten­ers. A woman in the front row began cry­ing. Kate Dar­ling, a research sci­en­tist at the MIT Media Lab, shout­ed, “Nicholas, shut up!” Negro­ponte respond­ed that he would not shut up and that he had found­ed the Lab, to which Dar­ling said, “We’ve been clean­ing up your mess­es for the past eight years.”

    Zuck­er­man, who had spo­ken ear­li­er in the meet­ing, also had a brief spat with Negro­ponte. Negro­ponte pressed on: in the fund-rais­ing world, he said, these types of occur­rences were not out of the ordi­nary, and they shouldn’t be rea­son enough to cut off busi­ness rela­tion­ships. It wasn’t until Dar­ling yelled “Shut up!” again that Negro­ponte mum­bled “Good grief,” and sat down. Soon after, the meet­ing dis­band­ed.

    The future of the “Future Fac­to­ry”

    The Media Lab was found­ed in 1985 and became famous through­out the 1980s and 1990s for its inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research. “It has a giant rep­u­ta­tion and a cachet that oth­ers do not,” says Mar­garet O’Mara, a his­to­ri­an of tech­nol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton. “The cool kids of the tech world have been cel­e­brat­ing the Media Lab for a long time.” That’s par­tic­u­lar­ly because of its ide­al­is­tic ethos.

    Coun­ter­cul­ture icon Stew­art Brand wrote a book on the Lab, and Negro­ponte, who once had an influ­en­tial col­umn in Wired—a mag­a­zine in which he was also an ear­ly investor—was key to build­ing the aura of cool. “Negro­ponte was excep­tion­al­ly good at pro­ject­ing what the lab was doing exter­nal­ly, talk­ing it up, bring­ing in the cor­po­rate fund­ing,” says Thomas Haigh, a his­to­ri­an of sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Mil­wau­kee.

    Negroponte’s com­ments today under­line the broad­er cul­tur­al reck­on­ing that MIT may be fac­ing around the Epstein scan­dal. Ito today said he did not make the deci­sion to accept Epstein’s fund­ing on his own, but had asked many advi­sors to weigh in and had received a full due-dili­gence review from the uni­ver­si­ty. (Reports from the New York­er and New York Times dis­pute this. They allege that Ito active­ly solicit­ed Epstein’s fund­ing and hid the con­nec­tion from the uni­ver­si­ty.) Many more of his advi­sors, he said, encour­aged him to pro­ceed than cau­tioned against it.

    Since Ito’s apol­o­gy, promi­nent mem­bers of the tech­nol­o­gy community—including MIT Media Lab mem­bers Jonathan Zit­train and Ros­alind Picard and Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Lawrence Lessig—have signed an unof­fi­cial peti­tion in sup­port of Ito though oth­ers with the Media Lab have pub­licly called for him to step down.

    MIT pres­i­dent L. Rafael Reif acknowl­edged the university’s “mis­take of judg­ment” in an email sent to the MIT com­mu­ni­ty in late August. MIT received $800,000 over 20 years from Epstein, some of it pre­dat­ing Ito—all of which went to either the Media Lab or MIT pro­fes­sor Seth Lloyd. MIT provost Mar­ty Schmidt will be con­ven­ing a group to inves­ti­gate the Epstein dona­tions, and the uni­ver­si­ty will donate an amount equal­ing those funds to a char­i­ty, either to Epstein’s vic­tims or to oth­er vic­tims of sex­u­al abuse.

    ———-

    “MIT Media Lab founder: Tak­ing Jef­frey Epstein’s mon­ey was jus­ti­fied” by Angela Chen and Karen Hao, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, 09/04/2019

    “MIT Media Lab direc­tor Joichi Ito has has faced pres­sure to resign after reveal­ing that he took research fund­ing from financier and alleged sex traf­fick­er Jef­frey Epstein. But today Nicholas Negro­ponte, who cofound­ed the Media Lab in 1985 and was its direc­tor for 20 years, said he had rec­om­mend­ed that Ito take Epstein’s mon­ey. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeat­ed, more emphat­i­cal­ly, “‘Take it.’””

    So the scan­dal of Joichi Ito’s accep­tance of Epstein’s mon­ey was real­ly a scan­dal about Nicholas Negro­ponte, the co-founder of Media Lab and direc­tor for 20 years, rec­om­mend­ing to Ito that he take Epstein’s mon­ey. And it sound­ed to many in the room when Negro­ponte made these com­ments that he would have con­tin­ued to rec­om­mend Ito take Epstein’s mon­ey even after Epstein’s child-traf­fick­ing con­vic­tion but Negro­ponte now insists he was­n’t make that rec­om­men­da­tion:

    ...
    Negroponte’s com­ments, made at the end of an all-hands Media Lab meet­ing this after­noon (Sep­tem­ber 4), shocked many peo­ple in the audi­ence. At least some in the room under­stood him to be say­ing that he would have sup­port­ed tak­ing the mon­ey even if he had known then that Epstein was a sus­pect­ed sex traf­fick­er.

    In an ear­li­er ver­sion of this sto­ry, that is how we report­ed his remarks. Negro­ponte had not respond­ed to a request for com­ment at that point. He sub­se­quent­ly told the Boston Globe, and has since con­firmed to us, that he was defend­ing only the orig­i­nal deci­sion to take mon­ey from Epstein, who at that point had already been con­vict­ed of and served time for a sex­u­al offense involv­ing a minor. “Giv­en what we know today [about the recent sex-traf­fick­ing charges]... nobody would or should have tak­en his mon­ey,” Negro­ponte wrote in an email. “But wind the clock back­wards, giv­en what we knew then, I would have accept­ed his mon­ey now.”

    ...

    Inter­est­ing­ly, as part of Negro­pon­te’s defense for why he has a friend­ly rela­tion­ship with Epstein, Negro­ponte explained that he knows 80% of the bil­lion­aires in the US on a first-name basis. That’s he he met Epstein. Through his exten­sive bil­lion­aire con­nec­tions:

    ...
    Through­out, the meet­ing had pro­ceed­ed calm­ly. But as one of the orga­niz­ers began to wrap things up, Negro­ponte stood up, unprompt­ed, and began to speak. He dis­cussed his priv­i­lege as a “rich white man” and how he had used that priv­i­lege to break into the social cir­cles of bil­lion­aires. It was these con­nec­tions, he said, that had allowed the Media Lab to be the only place at MIT that could afford to charge no tuition, pay peo­ple full salaries, and allow researchers to keep their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty.

    Negro­ponte said that he prid­ed him­self on know­ing over 80% of the bil­lion­aires in the US on a first-name basis, and that through these cir­cles he had come to spend time with Epstein. Over the years, he had two din­ners and one ride in Epstein’s pri­vate jet alone, where they spoke pas­sion­ate­ly about sci­ence. (He didn’t say whether these occurred before or after Epstein’s 2008 con­vic­tion.) It was these inter­ac­tions, he said, that warmed him to Epstein and made him con­fi­dent­ly and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly rec­om­mend that Ito take the mon­ey.

    It was at this point that Negro­ponte said he would still have giv­en Ito the same advice today. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple in atten­dance had con­flict­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of his state­ment. Some under­stood him to mean he would act the same way even know­ing what he knows now about Epstein’s alleged sex traf­fick­ing. But Negro­ponte told the Boston Globe that in ret­ro­spect, “Yes, we are embar­rassed and regret tak­ing his mon­ey.”

    The com­ments clear­ly stunned some of his lis­ten­ers. A woman in the front row began cry­ing. Kate Dar­ling, a research sci­en­tist at the MIT Media Lab, shout­ed, “Nicholas, shut up!” Negro­ponte respond­ed that he would not shut up and that he had found­ed the Lab, to which Dar­ling said, “We’ve been clean­ing up your mess­es for the past eight years.”

    Zuck­er­man, who had spo­ken ear­li­er in the meet­ing, also had a brief spat with Negro­ponte. Negro­ponte pressed on: in the fund-rais­ing world, he said, these types of occur­rences were not out of the ordi­nary, and they shouldn’t be rea­son enough to cut off busi­ness rela­tion­ships. It wasn’t until Dar­ling yelled “Shut up!” again that Negro­ponte mum­bled “Good grief,” and sat down. Soon after, the meet­ing dis­band­ed.
    ...

    “Negro­ponte pressed on: in the fund-rais­ing world, he said, these types of occur­rences were not out of the ordi­nary, and they shouldn’t be rea­son enough to cut off busi­ness rela­tion­ships.”

    It sure sounds like Negro­ponte is describ­ing a world where poten­tial­ly unsa­vory bil­lion­aires make dona­tions like this all the time. Which is prob­a­bly true and an expect­ed con­se­quence of a world where almost all of the wealth is cap­tured by bil­lion­aires. When almost all the mon­ey is held by bil­lion­aires that more or less guar­an­tees a large amount of the phil­an­thropy of the world will come from unpleas­ant peo­ple. And Negro­ponte would know. He knows almost all the bil­lion­aires. Being a con­duit between bil­lion­aires and aca­d­e­m­ic appears to be one of his spe­cial­ties. And that’s how Yasha Levine cov­ered Nicholas Negro­ponte in Sur­veil­lance Val­ley: As a human nexus where aca­d­e­m­ic research and the mil­i­tary, intel­li­gence, and com­mer­cial sec­tors con­verged:

    ...
    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 Uni­veristy 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 the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry antigov­ern­ment fun­da­men­tal­ists and Social Dar­win­ists. He coau­thored an essay in the New York Times Mag­a­zine that explained the phi­los­o­phy of lib­er­tar­i­an­is­ma and crit­i­cized the New Left­’s focus on wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion and demo­c­ra­t­ic reforms. To him, this kind of expan­sive gov­ern­ment was the enemy.80 Amont 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 antigov­ern­ment weapon: “Instead of learn­ing hwo 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 muja­hedeen in Afghanistan and filed flow­ing reports in the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor on their fight against the Sovi­ety Uniont with Amer­i­can-made weapons.82 Ros­set­to trav­eled to the war zone by hitch­ing a ride in a pick­up with jiha­di jighters.83

    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 trans­la­tions soft­ware company.84 The mag­a­zine went out of busi­ness, but dur­ing his time there Res­set­to 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 sold 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. Hi father was a Greek ship­ping mag­nate. His old­er broth­er, John Negro­ponte, was a career diplo­mat and Rea­gan admin­si­traiton offi­cial who had just fin­ished a stint as the high­ly con­tro­ver­sial ambas­sador to Hon­duras, where he was accused of plyaing a cen­tral role in a covert CIA-backed countin­sur­gency 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, Coloar­do, 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 watned 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 tech­nol­goy 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 netowrk 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

    ...
    ———-
    Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine, Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC], Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine, ISBN 978–1–61039–802–2

    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″

    Con­nect­ing the mil­i­tary, intel­li­gence, and com­mer­cial spaces with aca­d­e­m­ic researchers. That was lit­er­al­ly the pur­pose of the MIT Media Lab when Nicholas Negro­ponte co-found­ed it in 1985. In that sense, tak­ing mon­ey from a mys­te­ri­ous bil­lion­aire with unex­plained ties to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty is kind of what the Media Lab was set up to do. And that’s all part of what’s makes the mys­tery of Jef­frey Epstein a mys­tery in the sto­ry of Sur­veil­lance Val­ley too.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 9, 2019, 10:55 am

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