Welcome to Media Roots Radio.

Today we have a very special in-person guest in the studio.

Journalist and author, Yasha Levine.

He's the former editor of Moscow-based satirical newspaper The Exile, the author of Surveillance Valley,

The Secret Military History of the Internet, and also a journalist for Pando Daily.

I first heard of Yasha Levine when he wrote an extremely controversial article called

Almost Everyone Involved in Developing Tor was or is funded by the U.S. government.

I remember when I first read this article, I found it pretty jarring myself, taken aback by a lot of the details that he included in the article.

As Yasha Levine says, this information is out there, but it's not very well known.

And it's certainly not emphasized by those who promote it.

So today I'm extremely excited to be able to interview Yasha Levine.

And this is going to be a very long interview, longer than what we normally do.

But I thought it would be best to leave pretty much the entire discussion in its entirety.

And mostly we spend time

talking about his book, Surveillance Valley, and sort of the history of how the internet started

as a military program and was turned into something for the public. I apologize for reading

this verbatim, but it sums up his book better than I could.

In Surveillance Valley, Yasha Levine traces the history of the internet back to its beginnings,

as a Vietnam-era tool for spying on guerrilla fighters and anti-war protesters, a military

computer networking project that ultimately envisioned the creation of a global system of surveillance and prediction.

Levine shows how the same military objectives that drove the development of early internet technology

are still at the heart of Silicon Valley today.

...