Secrets of Silicon Valley.

[Karl12]

Thought this was a pretty fascinating romp through the history of Silicon Valley and its Pentagon / alphabet agency connections - (D)ARPA's birthing of the internet is also covered.. as are the shady roots of 'popular' sites like Google and Facebook.





• The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know

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In fact, it would be more surprising to find a major Silicon Valley company that was not connected to the US military or to the US intelligence agencies one way or another. 

• Article excerpts:

The Information Industrial Complex


But how many people know the flip side of this coin, the one that demonstrates the pervasive government influence in shaping and directing these companies’ rise to success, and the companies’ efforts to aid the government in collecting data on its own citizens?

How many know, for instance, that Google has a publicly acknowledged relationship with the NSA? Or that a federal judge has ruled that the public does not have the right to know the details of that relationship? Or that Google Earth was originally the brainchild of Keyhole Inc., a company that was set up by the CIA’s own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, using satellite data harvested from government Keyhole-class reconnaissance satellites? Or that the former CEO of In-Q-Tel, Gilman Louie, sat on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Jim Breyer, head of Accel Partners, who provided $12 million of seed money for Facebook? Or that, in 1999, a back door for NSA access was discovered in Microsoft’s Windows operating system source code? Or that Apple founder Steve Jobs was granted security clearance by the Department of Defense for still-undisclosed reasons while heading Pixar in 1988, as was the former head of AT&T and numerous others in the tech industry?

The connections between the IT world and the government’s military and intelligence apparatus run deep. In fact, the development of the IT industry is intimately intertwined with the US Air Force, the Department of Defense and its various branches (including, famously, DARPA), and, of course, the CIA.

A cursory glance at the history of the rise of companies like Mitre Corporation, Oracle, and other household electronics and software firms should suffice to expose the extent of these relations and the existence of what we might dub an “information-industrial complex.”

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Specific links to further research can be found at the links and really wasn't that surprised to learn that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now the Chairman of the Pentagon’s DIB.. and is also on the Bilderberg steering committee.. and is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.

[Karl12]

Haven't read Yasha Levine's book 'Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet' yet but here he is discussing it.

"Today the counterinsurgency origins of the internet have been obscured. They’ve been lost for the most part. Very few histories even mention it, even in a little bit. But at the time that it was being created in the 1960s, the origins of the internet and the origins of this technology as a tool of surveillance and as a tool of control were very obvious to people back then".

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