I write about about Internet privacy that's funded by spies
Pando just published an important story I've been working on for the past several months.
It's a story about how the US weaponized today's radical anti-government/anti-surveillance activists, using them to expand US military and corporate power abroad. It looks at the dark and murky history of the BBG — a US government agency that funds today's hippest Internet privacy apps — tracing its history from the CIA's Cold War-era covert “psychological warfare” in Eastern Europe to today's Internet-era war on "hostile" regimes like Iran, Burma, Russia, China, Cuba...
It's just a small part of the wild hidden history of the Internet that I'll tell in my Surveillance Valley book.
—Yasha Levine
...why is a federally-funded CIA spinoff with decades of experience in “psychological warfare” suddenly blowing tens of millions in government funds on privacy tools meant to protect people from being surveilled by another arm of the very same government? To answer that question, we have to pull the camera back and examine how all of those Cold War propaganda outlets begat the Broadcasting Board of Governors begat Radio Free Asia begat the Open Technology Fund. The story begins in the late 1940’s.
