The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

After world war 2, Fredrick Terman became head of Standford University School of Engineering. He brought personnel that work with him at Harvard University that created technology used in World War 2. The office of Naval Research gave the Stanford University Engineering Department their first contract. (microwave research). In 1951 he created the Stanford industrial park. The Stanford Industrial Park which eventually became Silicon Valley leased land to companies such as Lockheed Corporation, Hewlett Packard, General Electric, and other important technology companies.

Mr Terman was an adviser to the Army's Signal Corp R and D Advisory Council, the Air Force Counter Measure Scientific Advisory Board, a trustee of the Institute Defence Analysis, the Navy Research Advisory Committee, the Defence Science Board, a consultant to the US president science advisory committee. He was on the board of many big tech firms; Forever linking Silicon valley to US military. Silicon Valley has prospered on Pentagon money and US Department of Defence dollars from its inception to the present.

The Stanford Research Institute was funded by US Military to create ARPA and DARPA which became the internet. The US surveillance industry was created at Stanford applied electronic lab. The NSA and CIA use Stanford to develop technology they needed. DARPA was one such project.

Google started as a result of a research project funded by the US defence department while Larry Page and Sergey Brin was at Stanford University. DARPA was thanked in a White Paper for the creation of Google. Google usually worked with the US defence department. In 2003, Google signed a 2.1million dollar contract with the national security agency Google built a search engine for the NSA that can search in 24 languages. In 2005 inQtel the CIA venture Capitalist Vehicle sold over 5000 shares of Google. Google map technology was developed for the US military under the name Keyhole Inc named after keyhole satellite used by the US military. In August, 2013, the Guardian Newspaper revealed that The National Security Agency paid millions to cover the cost of companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook involved in the Prism Surveillance programme after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities was unconstitutional.

In June 2003, the Information Processing technique office posted request for help to build an ontology based system called LifeLog that built a profile of people’s activities – of people movement, email phone calls, shopping. It created controversy. Wire magazine on February 4, 2004 announced cancellation of the project. On February 4, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook which now has similar capabilities. He moved Facebook from Harvard to Silicon Valley and got large capital from the US intelligence connected insiders (Peter Thiel cofounder of pay pal, Accel partners). Paypal co-founder created palantir a data mining software used by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other US intelligence agencies.

It is hard to find a big tech company in Silicon Valley not connected to the US military or intelligence agencies. This is not an accident of history. According to Yasha Levine author of "Survellance Valley,” the Secret military history of the internet, the internet was intended to be used as a tool of warfare against target population. In 1960s the US was facing insurgencies all around the world from Latin America to South East Asia. It was facing an increasingly volatile society. It had the anti-Vietnam war movement, black militancy and race riots in major cities. They saw this as a new kind of war. The combatants were civilians so a new kind of global insurgency. They believed the only way to fight and win the war was to develop a new information weapon, computer technology that could ingest data on people and political movements that combine options, economic data, criminal histories, photographs, telephone conversations. Some dream they can watch the world in real time and intercept threat before they happen."

The internet was intended to track, surveil and controlling a target population but today it is viewed as a tool of liberation. People are willing to surrender their personal data for the services of big tech companies. Silicon Valley did not miraculously appear by itself, but was seeded there by US military and intelligence agencies that require the technology to fight the information Warfare of the 21st Century. 5 G called the internet of things will increase data mining because a person’s personal items will be connected to the internet. I wonder why the US banned Huawei?

BRIAN ELLIS PLUMMER

Nassau,

July 21, 2019

N.B. Huawei is the world’s largest seller of phones and connected to China.

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