While it's insightful to reevaluate history in a larger background, such the military-industrial complex, and it's also appropriate to criticize these driving forces and its culture, but I'm not a fan of framing the entire development of computing, the Internet and the web as a giant government conspiracy.<p>There are certainly some secret projects. But the majority comes from groups of academic and industrial researchers working on their own projects, and grants from DARPA, the NSF, the Army or the Navy is how everyone's project is supported. Even today, the vast majority of papers on infosec and cryptography are still supported in the same way, and by no means that the researchers are under total control of these agencies. Developers at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (where /bin/ping was developed) did hacking on 4.3BSD, just like how Berkeley researchers did hacking on 4.3BSD.<p>No conspiracy is needed here, the researchers take advantages of the funding to do their projects, and the government take advantages of these results they funded and put them into military and espionage applications. Feel free the criticize the driving forces and their influences to the projectile of computing R&D, but remember that it's a complex interplay between different sectors without clear boundary, rather than a conspiracy planned by a monolithic governmental entity (which is why it's called the military-industrial complex, not the military-industrial conspiracy).