Ep. 20: Yasha Levine on Right-Wing Dark Money & the Electronic Frontier Foundation

On this edition investigative journalist Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, joins me to discuss his new article in The Baffler entitled "All EFF'd Up" about about the corporate money and Silicon Valley agenda behind the "digital rights" advocacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

We begin the conversation by discussing Yasha's previous endeavors exposing the corrosive impact of monied interests on the political process starting with how he saw the negative effects of oligarchy on Russia during his time as the former editor of The eXile. Then Yasha details how he and Mark Ames were the first to expose the dark money networks of the now infamous Koch Bros. and their influence on GOP and Tea Party politics, the way mainstream journalists unfairly dismissed it as "conspiracy theory" at the time, and how their initial story on the subject ended up being censored by Playboy thanks to political pressure. Journalist Jane Mayer has done good work on this topic herself in Dark Money, but Yasha and Mark Ames were the first to break this kind of corruption and astroturfing wide-open.

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine

From there we segue into the corporate, Silicon Valley interests behind the "digital rights" advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We discuss a number of topics including EFF's selectiveness (ie: private interest bias) in dealing with digital rights, the influence of a certain libertarian strand of 60's counterculture on the EFF, how Yasha' writing on these matters should not be misconstrued as neo-luddism, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the tides of public opinion beginning to turn on the Silicon Valley in the Age of Trump, former ACLU lawyer Jerry Berman's relationship to the EFF, and whether the left will be able to deal with and imagine a truly democratic internet among other issues.

Please consider purchasing Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, which comes highly recommended by Parallax Views!

Music for this episode by Snog