Glenn E. says:

Back in the early days, the DARPA network was exclusively between the Pentagon, defense contractors, and certain research colleges and think tanks. Supposedly, to when all else fails, orders for new war toys could still get thru. Or whatever.

Then anti-war protest began to heat up. And magically, DARPA’s network encompassed more colleges, and their students. Not just the one’s doing weapons research. Coincidence? Snooping on the “opposition” perhaps?

The idea of email took off. But not everyone was willing to go to college to do it. So commercial and non-commercial email networks were established. To fill the public demand. Remember Prodigy and CompuServe? And I was using some called Relay Mail, and Crash Mail. The problem the Feds had with this was there were just too many “nodes” to spy into. Acquiring high level membership on them, in order to spy on the traffic, proved too difficult (their excuse was catching persons trading stolen credit card numbers). And obviously, not very secret, when so many BBS owners knew of their presence.

That’s about the time it was decided that the DARPA network should be handed over to the public (aka the world). Putting all the independent commercial and free networks out of business. And making AT&T, Bell, and other large commercial systems, the few “providers” of connectivity to this network. All of whom became US Defense contractors, if they hadn’t been already. And the only ones to know, intimately, that any snooping was going on. The NSA plugged inself in to the internet backbone. And scanned all the packet traffic they could handle.

But soon, mail encryption began to be a problem. As word leaked out that you couldn’t trust the internet email to be private. Either via paranoid conspiracy theories. Or one too many publicized court trials, where emails were subpoenaed. How was that possible, even if the defendants erased it on their own PCs? Obviously, it was being stored somewhere else, for a time. And could be recovered, when necessary. So screw email privacy. And that likely started people encrypting, as much as any idea of the Feds snooping. Even without warrants.

So that threat of “going dark” email-wise, is what lead the US agencies to push Microsoft and Apple to provide leaks and backdoors into their OSes. To allow email to be read, before being encrypted. Or the encryption keys to be leaked, afterward. Probably back when Microsoft and Apple were in court over “anti-trust” issues, etc. The DoJ likely struck a secret deal. And anyone who didn’t, got the financial axe. Like Commodore, Atair, Radio Shack, Osborne, etc. No more computer sales for you!

And I suspect the Chip makers were solicited to “starve out” the uncooperative, too. Thus Motorola refused to engage in the “speed race”. Almost killing Apple Macs (before switching to Intel). And killing off most other PC brands, who couldn’t adopt the faster processors.

That’s all speculation of course. It may all have happened quite coincidentally, and completely by accident. So until another Snowden, comes out with the real indisputable history. Believe what you want.