That's cute, but I've got primary sources who indicate otherwise. I'll take the word of someone who at one point maintained a list of every addressed machine on

That's cute, but I've got primary sources who indicate otherwise. I'll take the word of someone who at one point maintained a list of every addressed machine on ARPANet and the proto-Internet once it went beyond a strictly DoD effort, over a blatant attempt at trying to rewrite history to fit their own narrative, thank you. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for more. Also note that ECHELON predated the internet, and to them it was simply another telecommunications network.