Most people don’t know much about networking technology and very few of those who do are also aware of how the intelligence agencies intervened in key technical decision often covertly to produce an inherently irremediably insecure network desired by no one – except the intelligence agencies whose nefarious purposes it serves.
Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, trained in formal logics, which was coupled with a powerful imagination inherited from her father, the poet Lord Byron. Ada dreamed of a future where mankind was free from repetitive procedural thought – and saw that the tedious burden could be lifted by mechanical computation. Man can fly because computers can count. The machine envisioned by Babbage and programmed by Ada Lovelace was never built; yet Ada Lovelace knew even so, she and Babbage had changed the world of the future irrevocably and forever.
Ada assumed it was for the better. As did the visionary Vannevar Bush, president of MIT, who imagined the memex, an automated machine that could call up all human knowledge on microfilm and display it as an aid to fugitive human memory.
Douglas Engelbart dreamt, built and demo’d a networked collaborative computer featuring a mouse operated cursor in common workspace in 1968. Engelbart’s technology would reach most of us 30 years later, and change us forever.
Vint Cerf designed what would become the host protocol of the internet – intended as a DEMO protocol, never meant for wider use, because the headers of IPv4 were unencrypted and information could never be secure. Vint Cerf didn’t say anything at the time about the lack of encryption, he was moonlighting for NSA and was not permitted by NDA to mention the encryption he used on the government network being developed at the same time as the anonymous public network, the internet.