Half-Light

When I started this show, I knew I wanted "internet history" to be part of it. But what goes in that category isn't always obvious.

I often get this feeling like the more I learn about something, the less confident I am in my understanding of it. And that's sort of what happened with "internet history," and why this episode took months to happen.

I mean, what actually counts as internet history? I say the podcast covers it, but what am I really talking about? Inventions? Discoveries? Standards? Infrastructure? Norms? Something else? This episode about Mark Klein and what he uncovered in Room 641A is something else. But every time I tried thinking through the history of the internet, I always hit the NSA. So I decided that I couldn't leave out the spying.

But I did not know how to turn mass surveillance into a story until I found Mark's book.

I was hunting for computing history titles to add to my Bookshop.org shop, and the title stopped my scroll. "Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine" caught my attention. So I bought it, read it, and thought it was a fit. But then I got stuck.

I spent hours talking it through with my husband because I could not let go of a question underneath the story itself: why isn't the outrage louder? We are more online than we have ever been, the technology keeps getting more capable, and somehow this is not sitting at the front of anyone's mind. The closest comparison I could land on is someone constantly searching your house on a loop. As long as nothing looks relevant to them, you never notice and they say nothing. But someone is still in the house. Why do we let that pass?

The conversations kept circling back to this feeling I have that this isn't a "wake up sheeple" situation. It's not like everyone is just deciding not to care and to look away. It's more nuanced than that but I couldn't get my thoughts together about it. And I couldn't write the story without having a hypothesis I could articulate to myself.

Then the scene with my son that opens the episode happened a few weeks ago, and it clicked.

The episode became two stories running in parallel. One is what Mark Klein actually found in that room on Folsom Street. The other is infrastructure blindness and the technology itself.

I will admit the timing was not incidental either. FISA Section 702 expired this June, right alongside the run up to America's 250th anniversary, and that felt like the right moment.

What didn't make it in

There was a lot I had to leave on the floor for this one.