While often mythologized as having been created to champion human freedom, the internet and many of its most popular companies, like ARPANET, were directly birthed out of the national security apparatus of the United States.<\/p>\n
Today, the world\u2019s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world \u2013 the United States.<\/p>\n
The ARPANET<\/h4>\n
Specifically, the\u00a0internet began<\/a>\u00a0as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower\u00a0in 1958<\/a>\u00a0within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in\u00a0direct response<\/a>\u00a0to the U.S.\u2019 greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth\u2019s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (\u201ctime-sharing\u201d), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.<\/p>\n In\u00a0October 1962<\/a>, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN,\u00a0currently<\/a>\u00a0owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in\u00a0August 1962<\/a>\u00a0that birthed his \u201cIntergalactic Computer Network\u201d concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute\u00a0a memo<\/a>\u00a0to his IPTO colleagues \u2013 addressed to \u201cMembers and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network\u201d\u2013 describing a \u201ctime-sharing network of computers\u201d \u2013 building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his\u00a01954 paper<\/a>\u00a0\u201cParallel Control\u201d commissioned by defense contractor RAND \u2013 which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today\u2019s Internet.<\/p>\n Prior to the technological innovations explored by Licklider and his ARPA colleagues, data communication \u2013 at this time, mainly voice via telephone lines \u2013 were based on circuit switching, in which each telephone call would be manually connected by a switch operator to establish a dedicated, end-to-end analog electrical connection between the two parties. The RAND Corporation\u2019s Paul Baran, and later ARPA itself, would begin to work on\u00a0methods<\/a>\u00a0to allow formidable data communication in the event of a partial disconnection, such as from a nuclear event or other act of war, leading to a distributed network of unmanned nodes that would compartmentalize the desired information into smaller blocks of data \u2013 today referred to as packets \u2013 before routing them separately, only to be rejoined once received at the desired destination.<\/p>\n While certainly unbeknownst to the technologists at the time, this achievement of both distributed routing and global information settlement via data packets created an entirely new commodity \u2013 digital data.<\/p>\n Long before the USSR spooked the United States into formalizing ARPA due to fears of militarized satellite applications post-Sputnik launch, data brokers have played a significant role in warfare and specifically the markets surrounding military conflict. One well-known yet early example occurred during the Napoleonic wars in the\u00a019th<\/sup>\u00a0century<\/a>, when the banking stalwart Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and horseback couriers to gain an information settlement edge related to battle outcomes, while speedily communicating with their traders back in London. These animal-driven technological exploits allowed Rothschild-affiliated brokers to place well-informed bets on the outcome of France\u2019s warmongering to position themselves on the winning sides of large currency and commodity bets. This similar but modernized technique would later be employed by figures like commodity trader (and\u00a0Mossad asset<\/a>) Marc Rich in the\u00a01980s<\/a>, who used satellite phones and optical imagery techniques to track and relay oil tanker flows between nations, giving his trades an asymmetric advantage when dealing within the active petrodollar system. Similarly, Louis Bacon\u2019s Moore Capital achieved\u00a086% gains<\/a>\u00a0in its first year largely due to correctly anticipating Saddam Hussein\u2019s invasion of Kuwait due to astute intelligence sharing from military sources, and correctly going long on oil prices while shorting stocks.<\/p>\n As the front of modern warfare slowly evolved from direct military action into weaponized financial speculation, the market for data became just as valuable as the defense budget itself. It is for this reason that the necessity of sound data emerged as the foremost issue of national security, leading to a proliferation of advanced data brokers coming out of DARPA and the intelligence community, akin to the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century\u2019s Manhattan Project.<\/p>\n Exemplified by the creation of the CIA\u2019s venture firm, In-Q-Tel, and the proliferation of Silicon Valley-based venture firms coalescing on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, CA, the financialization of a new crop of American data brokers was complete. The first firm to grace Sand Hill Road was Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, better known as KPCB, which participated in funding internet pioneers Amazon, AOL, and Compaq, while also directly seeding Netscape and Google. KPCB partners have included such government stalwarts as former Vice President\u00a0Al Gore<\/a>, former Secretary of State\u00a0Colin Powell<\/a>, and\u00a0Ted Schlein<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the latter being a board member of In-Q-Tel and member of the NSA\u2019s advisory board. KPCB also had an intimate connection with internet networking pioneer\u00a0Sun Microsystems<\/a>, best known for building out the majority of network switches and other infrastructure needed for a modern broadband economy.<\/p>\n Outside of the obvious need for network infrastructure for a data economy, an early Sun employee and eventual KPCB partner Bill Joy\u00a0patented<\/a>\u00a0a widely-used distributed file system software known as NFS, or Network File System. Sun also established a public-sector focused subsidiary known as Sun Federal at the start of the 1990s. By\u00a01991<\/a>, Sun Federal was responsible for more than half of the workstations ordered by local, state and federal governments in the country. Perhaps the world\u2019s most famous data broker, Google, whose founders both came out of Stanford University, was seeded by former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his partner at the Ethernet switching company Granite Systems (later acquired by Cisco), David Cheriton, with Google\u2019s most iconic CEO,\u00a0Eric Schmidt<\/a>, being the former CTO of Sun Microsystems.<\/p>\n The emergence of Silicon Valley out of the academic circuit in Northern California was no accident, and in fact was directly influenced by\u00a0an unclassified program<\/a>\u00a0known as the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project. The MDDS was created with direct participation from the CIA, NSA, and DARPA itself within the computer science programs at Stanford and CalTech, alongside MIT, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. According to\u00a0reporting<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Quartz<\/em>, this research, with clear national security implications, would be largely \u201cfunded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF (the National Science Foundation) allowing \u201cthe architecture to be scaled up in the private sector\u201d in an attempt \u201cto achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.\u201d The MDDS white paper was released in\u00a01993<\/a>, and over a few years, more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each were distributed via the NSF in order to capture the most promising efforts, ensuring that those efforts would become intellectual property controlled by the United States regulatory regime.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,\u201d reads the MDDS white paper. \u201cConsequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n The first unclassified briefing for scientists was titled \u201cbirds of a feather briefing<\/a>\u201d and was formalized during a\u00a01995<\/a>\u00a0conference in San Jose, CA, which was titled the \u201cBirds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems.\u201d That same year, one of the first\u00a0MDDS grants<\/a>\u00a0was awarded to Stanford University, which was already a decade deep in working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was to \u201cquery optimization of very complex queries,\u201d with a closely-followed\u00a0second grant<\/a>\u00a0that aimed to build a massive digital library on the internet. These two grants funded research by then-Stanford graduate students and future Google cofounders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Two intelligence-community managers regularly met with Brin while he was still at Stanford and completing the research that would lead to the incorporation of Google, all paid for by grants provided by the NSA and CIA via MDDS.<\/p>\n While often not discussed when describing Google\u2019s origin story, the principal investigator for the MDDS grant\u00a0specifically named<\/a>\u00a0Google as directly resulting from their research: \u201cIts core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0Jeffrey Ullman. Furthering this concept, Stanford\u2019s Infolab website\u00a0explains<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthe development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford.\u201d<\/p>\n Google would certainly set the standard for success during the first Dot Com bubble. Yet, shortly following their incorporation, two similar Silicon Valley companies with significant ties to the intelligence community would also emerge from colleges affiliated with the MDDS \u2013 PayPal and Facebook.<\/p>\n PayPal was launched in\u00a0December 1998<\/u><\/a>\u00a0as Confinity Inc. by founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, alongside Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The company sought to provide financial institutions with the technological ability to make mobile and online economic transactions secure using cryptography \u2013 technology at the time heavily regulated by the United States. Thiel had graduated from Stanford Law School in 1992, and then had a brief stint at the Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell \u2013 a legal practice long known for its ties to\u00a0the U.S. intelligence apparatus<\/u><\/a>. Early on, Confinity Inc. operated out of\u00a0165 University Avenue<\/a>\u00a0in Palo Alto, CA at, a building that had previously housed Google during their \u201cformative years,\u201d after previously sharing an office with Elon Musk\u2019s X.com.<\/p>\n It was also during these formative years that the PayPal team worked closely with the intelligence community. Levchin later stated in\u00a0an interview<\/a>\u00a0with Charlie Rose that: \u201cI think the government working with a private sector is a great thing. When we were working on security and anti-fraud measures at PayPal, we collaborated with every imaginable three and four-letter agency and those were some of the best, most productive relationships I\u2019ve had as a business person\u2026I think if the private sector can help them, we should.\u201d Due to an unprecedented viral growth of their user base, PayPal engineers spent much of the formation period of the company\u00a0building software<\/a>\u00a0to help identify fraudulent transactions to mitigate the growing costs of rampant fraud in the ecosystem, eventually developing an adaptive algorithm named \u201cIgor\u201d after a Russian criminal that would frequently taunt PayPal\u2019s fraud department.<\/p>\n In 2003, a year after PayPal was sold to eBay, Thiel approached Alex Karp, a fellow alumnus of Stanford with a new venture concept: \u201cWhy not use Igor to track terrorist networks through their financial transactions?\u201d Thiel took funds from the PayPal sale to seed the company, and after a few years of pitching investors, the newly-formed Palantir received an estimated\u00a0$2 million<\/a>\u00a0investment from the CIA\u2019s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir\u2019s co-founders\u00a0consulted<\/a>\u00a0with John Poindexter during his tenure as head of DARPA\u2019s then-embattled Total Information Awareness in efforts to\u00a0privatize<\/a>\u00a0the controversial surveillance program. In 2020,\u00a0Intelligencer\u00a0<\/em>spoke<\/a>\u00a0with a former intelligence official who was involved in the investment who claimed the CIA had hoped that \u201ctapping the tech expertise of Silicon Valley\u201d would allow it to \u201cintegrate widely disparate sources of data regardless of format.\u201d<\/p>\n As of\u00a02013<\/u><\/a>, Palantir\u2019s client list included \u201cthe CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS\u201d with around \u201c50% of its business\u201d coming from public sector contracts. Palantir is closely connected to the U.S. government, but its financial spin-off, Palantir Metropolis, is focused on providing \u201canalytical tools\u201d for \u201chedge funds, banks and financial services firms\u201d to outsmart each other. As\u00a0The Guardian<\/a><\/em>\u00a0<\/u><\/em>reports: \u201cPalantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Facebook, not unlike Palantir, was\u00a0one of the vehicles<\/u><\/a>\u00a0used to privatize controversial U.S. military surveillance projects after 9\/11, having also been birthed out of one of the MDDS partners, Harvard University. PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel became Facebook\u2019s first significant investor at the behest of file-sharing pioneer Sean Parker, whose first contact with the CIA took place at\u00a0age 16<\/a>. What Facebook became after the involvement of Thiel and Parker bore such an uncanny resemblance to another shuttered DARPA project of the same era, known as LifeLog, that LifeLog\u2019s architect and project manager at DARPA has even noted the direct parallels. One of these parallels, though left unmentioned by former DARPA project managers, is the fact that Facebook launched the very same day that LifeLog was shut down. Facebook\u2019s long-standing ties to the military and intelligence communities go far beyond its origins, including revelations about its\u00a0collaboration<\/u><\/a>\u00a0with spy agencies as part of\u00a0the Snowden leaks<\/u><\/a>\u00a0and its role in influence operations \u2013 some have even directly involved Google and Palantir.<\/p>\n An unspoken outcome of the global proliferation of Facebook was the sly, roundabout creation of the first digital ID system \u2013 a necessity for the coming digital economy. Users would set up their profiles by feeding the social network with a plethora of personal information, with Facebook being able to use this data to generate large webs of connectivity between otherwise unknown social groups. There is even evidence that Facebook generated placeholder accounts for individuals that appeared in user data but did not have a profile of their own. Both Google and PayPal would also use similar digital identification methods to allow users to sign into other websites, creating interoperable identification systems that could permeate the internet.<\/p>\n A similar evolution is occurring in the financial sector, as data broker social networks \u2013 including Facebook and Musk\u2019s X (formerly Twitter) \u2013 are posturing themselves as the future of financial service companies. This idea makes more sense when you consider that money itself is a communication technology, and can easily be built into existing communication platforms \u2013 especially ones driven by user data and identity systems. We are simultaneously seeing financial services, such as the largest dollar stablecoin issuer Tether \u2013 with excessive ties to PayPal \u2013 spending millions on investments in next generation data broker technology. Tether has recently\u00a0funded<\/a>\u00a0the Earth observation\/Satellite-as-a-service company Satellogic, the brain chip company Blackrock Neurotech, AI-computation firm Northern Data, and even\u00a0Rumble<\/a>, a Thiel-funded competitor to Google\u2019s YouTube.<\/p>\n As outlined above, it is clear that the public sector\u2019s intelligence community used the veil of the private sector to establish financial incentives and commercial applications to build out the modern data economy. A simple glance at the\u00a0seven largest stocks<\/a>\u00a0in the American economy demonstrate this concept, with Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), and Amazon \u2013 with founder Jeff Bezos being the\u00a0grandson<\/a>\u00a0of ARPA founder Lawrence Preston Gise \u2013 leading the software side, and Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA and Tesla leading the hardware component. While many of these companies have egregious ties to the intelligence community and the public sector during their incubation, now these private sector companies are driving the globalization and national security interests of the public sector.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/unlimitedhangout.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/licklider.avif\")
![](\"https:\/\/activistpost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/AUTONOMY_S12_ads_800x450.png?v=5997\" "\\"AUTONOMY_S12_ads_800x450\\"\/")
<\/a><\/div>\nA Brief History of Weaponized Financial Intelligence<\/h4>\n
The San Jose Project: Google, Facebook, and PayPal<\/h4>\n
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From Public-Private, to Private-Public<\/h4>\n