Silicon Valley Built NSA's Surveillance State

"Some of America's biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency's recently-exposed "PRISM" and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government's massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats but by Silicon Valley and private defense contractors."

So begins Michael Hirsh's fascinating piece, based on an interview with former CIA Director Michael Hayden, in this week's Atlantic, "Silicon Valley Doesn't Just Help the Surveillance State — It Built It." Among Hirsh's points:

• NSA contracted with America's social media and tech companies to set up and administer these surveillance programs.
• "There isn't a phone or a computer at Fort Meade [NSA headquarters] that the government owns" today.
• "For the tech industry, especially the social-media companies, the controversy over the extent of NSA's domestic data gathering has become an acute embarrassment," with heads of two of the biggest, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Larry Page, issuing "near-identical statements late last week saying neither of them had ever heard 'of a program called PRISM' until the press reports."
• "Yet for Hayden, who was one of the longest-serving NSA directors ever, remaking the stodgy Cold Ward spy agency into a private-tech-sector enterprise was a logical outgrowth of dramatic changes in the nature of both threats and technology."

By the time 9/11 arrived, the American tech industry was building the best stuff and had the best minds, so the NSA no longer had any choice but to enlist Silicon Valley's help. Signals intelligence "has to look like its target. We have to master whatever technology the target is using to turn his beeps and squeaks into something humanly intelligible," Hayden says. Not only was much of this traffic being routed through the United States, but the tech sector knew how to penetrate and "mine" it. He concludes: "Why would we not turn the most powerful telecommunications and computing management structure on the planet to our use?"

The NSA did. But now some of these companies may come to regret what is emerging as a public relations disaster.

Welcome to the 21st Century's military-intelligence complex.