The History of the Internet under Surveillance Capitalism: Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, by Yasha Levine, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2018, 371 pp., $18.30 (paperback).

In I Surveillance Valley i , Yasha Levine makes the case that the Internet has always been about surveillance, starting with the U.S. military and the companies its research and financial assistance helped to create. Levine draws from government documents to establish the military motivations behind its formation and identifies several of the applications that grew from this research in both strategic planning to address the Soviet threat and in counterinsurgency to advance U.S. military interests in Vietnam and elsewhere. Of these companies, Levine chooses to focus on Google by concentrating on its use of surveillance, especially by gathering and marketing data on user searches and on Gmail. For example, the company's Google Earth mapping application resulted from the purchase of a CIA-backed company which had worked for the agency on three-dimensional computer modeling of the planet. [Extracted from the article]