The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 09:
SILICON VALLEY AND THE AMERICAN PANOPTICON
The NSA and Silicon Valley: Not Always at Arm’s Length
Silicon Valley has long been tracking for commercial purposes the activities of every person who uses an electronic device. It is not surprising that the Deep State should wish to hijack the data for its own purposes. Nor is it surprising that it should obtain the Valley’s assistance, although it is not yet clear to what degree this assistance has been voluntary. It is of course in the companies’ self-interest to make it appear that the cooperation was coerced because of widespread indignation over NSA surveillance. Some degree of coercion is undeniable: according to documents declassified by the director of national intelligence, in 2007 Yahoo faced fines of $250,000 a day, to double each week, when it balked on Fourth Amendment grounds at providing access to user information to the NSA without a judicial warrant.
The documents that Edward Snowden gave to journalists suggest that some of the tech industry’s cooperation has been more enthusiastic, however. According to one classified file, an unidentified corporate “partner” of the NSA was “aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors.” Other documents reveal email exchanges between NSA director general Keith Alexander and Google executives Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin which undermine their claims that their cooperation with the agency was legally compelled. The emails suggest cordial relations with the NSA director, who arranged a four-hour classified cyberthreat briefing for them near Palo Alto. It is unusual for anyone outside government to receive a classified briefing of such length, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff even attended. This suggests a relationship in which Silicon Valley was hardly an ill-used underling. It is normal government protocol for subordinates to call on their superiors, and for the nation’s highest-ranking military officer to fly across the country to attend the briefing implies a good deal of deference.
As more than one intelligence veteran has told me, the NSA has made itself completely dependent upon Silicon Valley for the technology necessary for it to do its mission. A tacit part of that mission is to keep the money flowing, and the agency is now helpless without contractors to implement that technology—about 70 percent of the agency’s budget is spent on contracts. The NSA and the rest of the intelligence community are dependent upon high technology and the contractors who install, operate, and service it in exactly the same way the military is for the weapons systems it employs. The technology is so crucial—at least in the minds of senior officials and ambitious mid-level administrators, particularly since 9/11—that the entire American method of conducting warfare, intelligence, antiterrorism, and law enforcement has become predicated on it. All these sectors of the Deep State have become ensnared in the alluring concept of “big data,” and information technology contractors are only too happy to sell them the gear to sort it out.
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