Permanent Record

"Frankenstein effect" cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s

funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state

With the Tor protocol, your traffic is distributed and bounced around through randomly generated pathways from Tor server to Tor server, with the purpose being to replace your identity as the source of a communication with that of the last Tor server in the constantly shifting chain. Virtually none of the Tor servers, which are called "layers," know the identity of, or any identifying information about, the origin of the traffic. And in a true stroke of genius, the one Tor server that does know the origin—the very first server in the chain—does not know where that traffic is headed. Put more simply: the first Tor server that connects you to the Tor network, called a gateway, knows you’re the one sending a request, but because it isn’t allowed to read that request, it has no idea whether you’re looking for pet memes or information about a protest, and the final Tor server that your request passes through, called an exit, knows exactly what’s being asked for, but has no idea who’s asking for it.

This layering method is called onion routing

The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory

China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will.

It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software (Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud services to the US government along with half the Internet). Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law

Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath.

To effect this, the Reich partnered with Dehomag, a German subsidiary of the American IBM, which owned the patent to the punch card tabulator, a sort of analog computer that counted holes punched into cards. Each citizen was represented by a card, and certain holes on the cards represented certain markers of identity. Column 22 addressed the religion rubric: hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, and hole 3 Jewish. Shortly thereafter, this census information was used to identify and deport Europe’s Jewish population to the death camps.

A single current-model smartphone commands more computing power than all of the wartime machinery of the Reich and the Soviet Union combined

The census, which is officially under the jurisdiction of the Senate, was ordered to be performed every ten years, which was roughly the amount of time it took to process the data of most American censuses following the first census of 1790

The crowds were calling for an end to oppression, censorship, and precarity. They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people.

The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called "zero knowledge," a method that ensures that any data you try to store externally—say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform—is encrypted by an algorithm running on your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the users’ hands—and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.