It was providing a self healing command and control network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. It evolved into a Internetwork of trusted hosts to facilitate rapid information dissemination. It took a bunch of advertisers to turn it into surveillance nirvana by realizing that you could use http requests and your own portable sensor platform and in-house OS to rake in profit overwhelming.
At least early on, the latter had the excuse of lack of foresight regarding the dystopia they were building, but for decades now it's been more than obvious to everyone and most of them are continuing to cobble together their own prisons and ours.
That's a nice myth. But it wasn't so.
As https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br... explains, the idea of packet switching was invented twice. The Internet came out of the invention by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Separately Paul Baran and others at RAND had demonstrated that packet switching could be used to build a network to survive a nuclear attack.
Even though the Internet came out of military research, it was not designed to withstand nuclear attack. As can be verified by the fact that the early network had no redundancy, and neither computers nor the network were shielded from the EMP that a nuclear bomb could be expected to emit.
That's not to say there weren't earlier efforts to leverage networks for security purposes. I'm reminded of a tale of connecting FBI branches in the southern U.S. to facilitate case information sharing to close a series of cases involving a multi-state child and human trafficking ring in the Southern U.S. as well. Again though, that wasn't something bearing the character of "Hey! Let's 1984 these disgusting subhumans!" It was more, "Hey, seeing as our entire reason for existence is to work on crimes that cross State boundaries, doesn't it make sense that we should be able to keep the entire organization connected enough so that all our distributed branches can be kept up-to-date on what we've all found?"
Nothing controversial there. At all. Where things started getting controversial is where we started to take Lincoln's "tap the telegraph lines", an extreme wartime measure, and make it matter of fact through the establishment of the NSA/DIA. Where we started seeing the privatized Palantir's pop up, and seeing government agencies exercise or otherwise excuse investigative techniques they could not justifiably engage in themselves through delegation or voluntary action by private organizations.
It's these private businesses building datasets that never should gave existed that have outright corrupted things, and the at the time far more reasonable Third Party Doctrine that have driven things off the rails. Not the Internet itself.
So on the one hand a random internet stranger claims to have known someone important who said something.
On the other hand we have a history written by people including the author of the first paper on packet switching, the program manager at DARPA who authorized the project, the inventor of TCP/IP and so on and so forth.
I'll believe the paper that I cited.
Packet switching can be used to build networks that are resilient in the face of disruptions, whether natural or manmade. That is where the myth of "designed to survive a nuclear war" comes from. But the original Internet was designed using packet switching to allow computers to freely talk to each other without having an insane number of dedicated circuits kept open.
That said, I agree with you that it was not designed for surveillance. But I disagree on the timeline. While the response to 9/11 certainly stepped up the level of surveillance to an insane level, all evidence is that ECHELON had been tapping the Internet long before that.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for more. Also note that ECHELON predated the internet, and to them it was simply another telecommunications network.
Pretty much same thing as complaining about bad leaders when the sheeple putting in the bad votes is the actual problem.
Who really is the loser here.
This was a very disjoint cultural shift in from the research I've done, and it was really pushed by only a handful of big names.