> Telling them what Kevin tells potential recruits: If you do cyber operations for anyone else, you’ll get arrested. If you do them for me in the Air Force, you’ll get a medal.
"Join the military-industrial complex and violate laws with impunity!"
Uh, people have been joining the military so they can break the law (kill people, etc...) for a lot longer than this cyber security stuff has been around.
If you treat the whole country as a battleground and the people as the enemy, don't then ask those same people to pretend you aren't hostile
The moral high ground was lost once mass surveillance with no judicial oversight started. It's not Silicon Valley's problem that the current establishment has a bad reputation and can't poach engineers
You alredy said it better than I can, but anecdotally, when I stopped counting 5+ years ago, my license plate / id was being logged by the government at least three times each way to and from work. Since then, my friends and I have been victims of numerous property crimes that could be solved with a database query or two over those logs, but they’re not available to the people that investigate crimes, apparently.
On the other hand, I can name all sorts of ways technology is used to shake people down for committing victimless crimes...
I’ve worked for product companies and was forced to interact with government clients.
Bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. No risk taking, no point in standing out, promotions based on time in service. You could offer me quadruple my salary to go and work for the government and I still wouldn’t take the job.
Just supporting the government clients on a part time basis made me want to quit my job just to get away from the government clients.
People are talking a lot about how good machine learning engineers don't want to work for the defense industry. But I think the bigger problem is that defense work is really high pressure. If you're working on a radar system to detect an incoming missile and deploy countermeasures if your system doesn't work the pilot dies. So relying on a definable program is more comforting than some kind of unproven machine learning model. So even though the military has pioneered other technologies, they were pretty reluctant to try out anything close to machine learning on something that could potentially kill american soldiers. It was short sighted because machine learning does classification really well, and now nobody in the defense contracting space really knows how to do this now. And the government is forced to get help from companies that can do machine learning like google.
I think this divide is a great thing. You don't want the state having access to and controlling your social networking -- as is the case with Tencent WeChat / China.
Living in a country with no such divide (Israel), articles like this one are alarming. Civil and military bonds run deep here, with a draft military producing graduates who end up in the tech sector and go back to reserve duty on occasion until they're in their 40's. As a result, lots of technologies that might seem incredibly new to the American military have been long since evaluated, tested, and implemented in the Israeli military, because of the cross-pollination that happens here.
America hasn’t fought a defensive war in awhile, the last few wars were about projecting power. A less charitable way of putting it would be: ever since Vietnam the US war machine seems to be concerned principally with bombing poor people in other countries, why should we support this?
Also unlike Israel the US is in a pretty good location defense-wise, surrounded by allies and two oceans, and with the worlds largest nuclear arsenal. I think we’re good..
Say I'm working at NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it, maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed.
Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were all pullin' a tour in the National Guard.
the divide between silicon valley and washington is that not everyone views the world in adversarial us-versus-them terms. washington needs more bridge building than bomb dropping, physical and cyber.
If Washington cut military spending, stop waging wars around the world, and pour the money into education, infrastructure, and things that improve citizens' everyday life, SV will definitely be on board.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] thread"Join the military-industrial complex and violate laws with impunity!"
Sounds like a winning sales pitch to me.
The moral high ground was lost once mass surveillance with no judicial oversight started. It's not Silicon Valley's problem that the current establishment has a bad reputation and can't poach engineers
On the other hand, I can name all sorts of ways technology is used to shake people down for committing victimless crimes...
The salary was a tad more than half the starting salary in the private sector, working for an ethically neutral company.
(It'd probably be 25-33% or less of the salary of a Google or Facebook).
I imagine the case is similar in the US and that it's just like finance vs. the regulators.
Except in technology it's way worse because of the trust issues. Working for a financial regulatory body isn't evil, just boring.
I’ve worked for product companies and was forced to interact with government clients.
Bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. No risk taking, no point in standing out, promotions based on time in service. You could offer me quadruple my salary to go and work for the government and I still wouldn’t take the job.
Just supporting the government clients on a part time basis made me want to quit my job just to get away from the government clients.
Americans need to get their shit together.
Also unlike Israel the US is in a pretty good location defense-wise, surrounded by allies and two oceans, and with the worlds largest nuclear arsenal. I think we’re good..
Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were all pullin' a tour in the National Guard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg
the divide between silicon valley and washington is that not everyone views the world in adversarial us-versus-them terms. washington needs more bridge building than bomb dropping, physical and cyber.