Why Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Work with the Pentagon

Yes. That's factually correct. But at what cost? How many wars? How many lives lost due to our infatuation with the MIC?

The Pentagon does not have to be the only road to basic research, R&D, etc. What if there were other agencies with the budget (to burn) clout of the DoD?

Put another way:

What might the societal perks have been if the deep pockets' lens was not military-centric?

For example, is there an alt-earth in an alt-universe with no mobile phones, but also no poverty?

The things you've mentioned are nice. They certainly are shiny. But just because we made them doesn't mean we should have.

The days where the govt seeded tech in the US are long gone. This is not to say there’s no contribution, but when was the last time someone cared about govt or defense contractor involvement? Not many who are alive and still working in the Bay Area today.

The article is correct and there is a fear of being co-opted by the state. There is a question whether there is some middle ground. Traditionally that middle ground was held by defense contractors. Today there are tech-like companies that are increasingly filling that niche. Examples of such companies are Pivotal (which recently filed its S-1) and Palantir (which might never file its S-1). I would argue that Amazon and Google are getting into these DoD contracts because Pivotal, Redhat, etc. failed to build a compelling-enough PAAS solution that the government can deploy on its own. The government would love to own its own datacenters, but apparently that isn’t working out, or there’s still some need for agility that’s not being fulfilled.

Given how much space Palantir leases in downtown Palo Alto (and the fact that they seem to have no need or responsibility to ever exit or behave like any other tech company), I think the fear of being consumed by the government is not at all unfounded. Now you can argue that Pivotal and Palantir are nice companies (for vastly different reasons) but when you really take stock of it, no one can say they’re really tech companies (and, that is fine). To Silicon Valley, they represent something else, something bureaucratic.

On one hand Silicon Valley needs to be a bit more realistic about geopolitics. The government isn’t going away. In practice, it's just the simple fact that we are more beholden to political stability than we think, and we tend to take it for granted. On the other hand, the government represents that side of society that forces things and pretty much can’t get free-spirited commercial innovation right. And again, in practice, it's like trying to do anything interesting when you have your nanny mother (who has no real fiscal or creative responsibility) watching over your shoulder. The reality is more boring than people realize, but the tension is there and the problem is real.

While the low level protocols like TCP came out of DARPA, the web protocols like HTTP were all civilian. Neither personal computers or smartphones were military inventions. Modern encryption is sometimes traced to WW2, but cryptography is thousands of years old.

It's far more important to stand up for fundamental democratic values and protect whistle blowers like Snowden who stood by these values, than fight imaginary battles with a 'siege mentality'.

This whole idea of 'us vs them' and this narrative of constant threat has always been a tool of despots everywhere.

That is jingoism. If despite spending half trillion dollars if US military is behind something that many people should get fired.

Pentagon is hostile to US interests at the moment because how they work is under wraps, they dont pay price of their wrong decisions and they have a limitless credit card paid by taxpayers.

Working with military is not same as "caring about people of country". That veteran in wheelchair at local walmart might be an ordinary person but these Generals and highers up are not and must be treated as s*ums.

Based on what we know, along with pretty straightforward logical extrapolations, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the offensive CS capabilities of the DoD are a specialized subset of what the industry already has. The people staffing offensive operations at NSA are generally working their first job out of college. What we've seen of the quality of their tooling after leaks suggests mediocre software engineering and, if there's an edge to be found at NSA over the best industry offensive teams, it's in router, firewall, and middlebox security --- a consequence of the fact that industry doesn't spend much time working on these targets.

I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that foreign adversaries outclass us on any of this. The most elaborate, technically sophisticated computer attacks in the last 20 years have all been carried out either by the US or by allies (in other words: largely by US defense contractors).

What is the case is that the median target --- in the US or anywhere else in the world --- is so poorly secured that none of this matters. We are still working in an era where you can send someone an email with a blue-underlined link in it, and if a receptionist clicks that link, their entire network is owned up.

Despite the indisputably grave state of the US's computer security --- let's be clear, of everyone's computer security, here and abroad --- the US is at little risk of "destruction". Our adversaries also have the ability to conduct kinetic attacks anywhere in the country. Every adversary of ours worth of that name could blow up a US power plant. They don't, because the cost of attribution to them is essentially infinite.

People in Silicon Valley aren't great about computer security, but they know at least as much about it as the DoD does, and nobody should pretend they can spook the industry with the specter of "cyber warfare".

Case in point:

"Brian Shields, former Nortel security adviser, alleges Huawei hacked company for 10 years..."

"It was on behalf of Huawei and ZTE and other Chinese companies that could have used this information to compete against us in the marketplace. It gave them a strategic advantage. How can you survive when you have a competitor basically right there knowing all your moves, what you're doing, what you see as the future products?"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-aga...

Given the USA's history, the better question is: why wouldn't Russia and China do that?

Put another way: If you were the Native Americans wouldn't you still be wishing you embraced the gun sooner rather than later?

Is this necessarily/automatic enough of a Good Thing as to be assumed as such by fiat?

This seems largely equivalent to "From a pure game theory perspective, everybody who could should work to advance nuclear missile design".

The controversial part of the DoD is not national defense, its imperialism.

Citation needed, because there have been a lot of injuries and deaths they have failed to prevent (domestic violence, poor healthcare, etc) and even many cases of them causing death for US citizens (wars on vague ideas like "drugs", "terrorism", etc).

Internet and GPS originated from ARPA-funded research. That might seem like a minor difference in nomenclature but a person feeling ecstatic about DoD involvement in research might want to look at how much bang for their buck the government got as the defense establishment's involvement increased and increased over the years.