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IPFS News Link • Corbett Report

How Big Brother Seeded the Tech Revolution

• https://www.corbettreport.com/how-big-brother-seed

Earlier this week Wired Magazine released a background check of Steve Jobs conducted by the Department of Defense in 1988. The background check highlights Jobs' use of LSD in the 1970s and his fears of blackmail or kidnapping due to his substantial wealth. The check was part of a security clearance investigation conducted by the DoD during Jobs' tenure at Pixar, an investigation that was first revealed earlier this year. Precisely what Steve Jobs needed security clearance for has not yet been revealed, but that Jobs did have some relationship with the Department of Defence will come as no surprise to those who know the long and intimate history between the US military, the US intelligence apparatus, and Silicon Valley.

The Valley was born in the post-World War II era when then-provost of Stanford College, Frederick Terman, proposed the creation of Stanford Industrial Park, now known as the Stanford Research Park. The land was to be leased out to high-tech firms created by Stanford's graduate students and alumni.

Terman himself had an interesting history as a radio engineer and researcher who was called upon by the US government to direct the top secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University during World War II. While there, Terman and his researchers developed some of the earliest signals intelligence and electronic intelligence equipment, including radar detectors, radar jammers and aluminum chaff to be used as countermeasures against German anti-air defenses.

Upon his return to Stanford after the war, Terman brought his experience, and his military contacts, with him, and began transforming the San Francisco Bay Area into a high-tech research hotspot dubbed "Microwave Valley."

In 1951, William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor, set up the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, current day home of Google Inc. Although unsuccessful as a businessman himself, defectors from his company would go on to found the core of the Silicon Valley enterprises, including Intel Corporation, National Semiconductor, and Advanced Micro Devices.

As the Microwave Valley of Terman began to gave way to the Silicon Valley of Shockley, an avowed eugenicist who argued for the sterilization of the less intelligent, so too did the nature of US government involvement in the technology industry itself. Rather than directly hiring the technology companies to produce the technology, consumer electronics would increasingly be regulated, directed, overseen and infiltrated by government workers, who could then use that technology as the basis for a worldwide signals intelligence operation, directed not at the militaries of foreign countries, but at the population of the world as a whole.

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