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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ (CIA's investment arm)

Also whats wrong with the CIA?

A lot of people are probably okay with the US having an organization that murders and tortures people, sabotages other sovereign nations' interests, and helps US corporations compete globally through espionage; but not one that does so much of it as the CIA. An organization like that needs to be neither seen nor heard, and it ought to be used infrequently enough that our country can ostensibly say that we only do those kinds when we have to.

To turn your question on its head, what's not wrong with them? It's not controversial at all that there are many people who don't wish to work in the defense side of aerospace, or on other weapons tech, why would it be controversial that someone wouldn't want to work in intelligence. Some people take professional codes of ethics (or their own personal ethics) more seriously than others.

Yeah but this is like 3rd degree the CIA also has invested in Facebook. The DOD is the largest provider of grants in the academia. And at the end various arms (quite often defense related) of the US public sectors are quite often one of the biggest investors and drivers behind new technologies. The valley could not exist without the USG and specifically without DOD money.

While I completely understand people that say would not like to work on the next generation of guided missiles, one would be hard pressed to find job in the tech sector that is not partially funded by the more militant parts of the US government, and if they completed STEM studies in the US more likely than not that some of their grants and scholarships were funded by the DOD directly.

I was always amused by the imprimatur of the Office of Naval Research on the Lambda the Ultimate papers.

>A lot of people are probably okay with the US having an organization that murders and tortures people

Though it's presented as a trade off, torture isn't just bad from an ethical perspective, it's bad from a technical perspective.

I might normally oppose these agencies but In-Q-Tel is the shit. It was a brilliant move by the CIA to balance the needs of developing specialist tech they needed and gaining advantages of COTS products. So, they noticed that many of their needs are similar to commercial needs that companies shell out of. So, they create a venture capital company that funds potentially great work in all those areas with dual-use configurations. Rather than backwards tech at a loss, they have all kinds of cutting-edge and useful stuff that gains money.

More agencies should consider this model or variations of it. More governments, too. Aligns the incentives right so the market, at least chosen players, will do what you need done. Plus, they built a lot of cool tech this way.

It's essentially an uncontrolled extension of the US government which practices torture [1], murder [2], and sells drugs .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniq... [2] http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/18244-we-kil... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

If you know what they do in your name outside this country, I'm not so sure you'll be asking that question.

It's really not pretty.

Toppling democratically elected governments is generally considered a dick move.

It's torture program, isn't that enough?

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