![]() ![]() In the early 20th century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tapped phone systems with impunity, spying on bootleggers, labor activists, civil rights leaders, and anyone J. In the 19th century, President Abraham Lincoln gave his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, broad powers over the country’s telegraph network, allowing him to spy on communications and to control the spread of unwanted information during the Civil War. Governments have been spying on telecommunications systems for as long as they’ve been around, going back to the days of the telegraph and the early phone systems. So, of course, the US government leveraged the technology it had created, and keeps leveraging it to the max. That effort was a success, exceeding all expectations. The truth is that the Internet came out of a Pentagon project to develop modern communication and information systems that would allow the United States to get the drop on its enemies, both at home and abroad. That it did shock so many is a testament to the fact that the military history of the Internet had been flushed from society’s collective memory. But given the Internet’s counterinsurgency origins, its role in spying on Americans going back to the 1970s, and the close ties between the Pentagon and such companies as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, this news should not have come as a surprise. And Snowden himself, on the run from the US government, became the stuff of legend, his story immortalized on the big screen: an Academy Award-winning documentary and a Hollywood film directed by Oliver Stone, his role played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.įollowing Snowden’s disclosures, people were suddenly appalled and outraged that the US government would use the Internet for surveillance. Privacy, surveillance, and data-gathering on the Internet were no longer considered fringe matters relegated mostly to the margins but important subjects that won Pulitzers and deserved front-page treatment in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. The revelations triggered a scandal of global proportions. Even mobile games like Angry Birds didn’t escape the spy agency’s notice. The US government was running a vast Internet surveillance program, hacking mobile phones, splicing into undersea fiber-optic cables, subverting encryption protocols, and tapping just about every major Silicon Valley platform and company-Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon. The material backed up his claims, no doubt about it. Over the next few months, a small group of journalists reviewed and reported on the documents Snowden had taken from the NSA. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.” I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things. “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything,” he said in a calm, measured voice during a videotaped interview that first introduced the leaker and his motives to the world. Sitting in his room at the five-star Hotel Mira in Hong Kong, Snowden told journalists from the Guardian that watching the global surveillance system operated by NSA had forced his hand and compelled him to become a whistleblower. His résumé was a veritable treasure trove of spook world subcontracting: Central Intelligence Agency, US Defense Intelligence Agency, and, most recently, Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor that ran digital surveillance operations for the National Security Agency. His name was Edward Snowden-“Ed,” as he wanted people to call him. Finally, a photograph emerged: a thin, pale young man with disheveled hair, wire-rim glasses, and a gray shirt open at the collar sitting on a hotel room sofa-calm but looking like he hadn’t slept for days. Journalists descended on Hong Kong, scouring hotel lobbies desperately hunting for leads. At first the identity of this NSA leaker remained shrouded in mystery. In June 2013, headlines flashed across the world: an employee of the National Security Agency had fled the country with a huge cache of top-secret documents and was blowing the whistle on America’s global surveillance apparatus. May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988 ![]() A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.
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