This is a very telling episode of The Corbett Report which looks at how tech companies, educational establishments and the US military have been inextricably entwined since the very foundational work on the internet, including providing research, funding and the free flow of personnel between the establishments.
As most interested people know the base of what was to become the internet itself was originally a US military project, meant to protect communications during war time. The first communication across what was then ARPAnet was between MIT in Massachusetts and Stanford University (15 mins away from the Valley).
This was a crucial point in the relationship between the military and the educational establishment in this area, but soon tech companies were also being funded, and bright entrepreneurs were appearing and starting tech companies just 15 minutes away from Stanford, in the newly converted (and renamed) Silicon Valley. Since then there has been a truly unholy alliance between these three pillars of American society.
The report traces these relationships and pulls all of it together to show how, not only historically this has been the case, but it is happening still at this point in time, and that the total surveillance sought by the military has been almost perfected in the Valley by tech companies, who now give access to the data they have collected back to the intelligence agencies who have supported them.
The dangers this poses for the individual, of course, are enormous as we now have a state of permanent self-surveillance which we carry out and the state has access to, which leaves any dissidents, or their supporters, at risk. Once the data is available it seems any back story can be outlined by a clever editor in which the truth or true intentions of people are obliterated.
A transcript of this report, and the sources it draws on can be found here: https://www.corbettreport.com/siliconvalley
