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. It may not have succeeded at being what they set out to make, like most things in life, but it most certainly started out in that vein. The utility as a surveillance facilitator only came much later near the Oughts, particularly after a rather notorious event in mid September when the attempt to utilize the practice of intelligence fusion and total information awareness for law enforcement and national defense purpose got a huge boost in national popular support.

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.