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Comment by danjoc | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley corporations that are doing this are run by foreign nationals. I'm not surprised they don't support our military. If you're Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella, who do you want to win? USA or India? Google won't help with Project Maven, and Microsoft won't support ICE.

In contrast, American Jeff Bezos hasn't backed down to pressure from ACLU about supporting law enforcement with facial recognition and his newspaper here is pointing out the problem of foreign nationals attempting to cripple our military readiness.

I realize this won't be a popular view here, but it's fairly obvious to the layperson. Some of our premier companies have been infiltrated at the very highest levels of command and are being turned against us.

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Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are US citizens who live in the US. They are not foreign nationals.

MSFT sells ICE a lot of software and regularly sells software/services to the DoD as well as other parts of the USG.

Google was opposed to working on military tech for years before Sundar Pichai became CEO.

> I realize this won't be a popular view here

Blatant factual inaccuracies and ignorance of extremely obvious alternative explanations should be unpopular. Both are avoidable and both derail potentially productive conversations.

>Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are US citizens who live in the US. They are not foreign nationals.

Correction, foreign born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

>Blatant factual inaccuracies

You're assuming bad faith.

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There is a huge difference between a foreign national and a naturalized citizen. Proceeding in a conversation on this topic without using these terms correctly will only lead to confusion.

> You're assuming bad faith.

On the contrary, I misinterpreted your meaning precisely because I was being charitable.

Your original post could've been interpreted in two ways:

1. Charitably: you simply didn't know that these people were citizens of the USA, and are reasonably suspicious of someone who built their career and fortune here but who doesn't want to obtain citizenship.

2. Uncharitably: you distrust people because of where they were born.

I chose the charitable interpretation.

I choose to judge people by their actions. Their actions are not up for debate. They are working against the US military and law enforcement community through their actions, while the American born Bezos is impartial in assisting US government. That's a huge difference and will be attributed to their national origin by many American born citizens. Those two CEOs are not be eligible to run our country as president under the constitution, but they are running two of our most powerful institutions as president and using those institutions to weaken US military readiness. At some point soon, this becomes a national security matter.

> I choose to judge people by their actions.

I would not work on autonomous weapons or mass surveillance technology, and if I were the CEO of a company, I would abstain from deploying that company's resources in this fashion.

In your mind, does this statement provide sufficient evidence to prove that I obviously intend to work in the interests of whichever country my ancestors immigrated from?

You not working on them is entirely different than Google not working on them AND the looming threat of a Google patent lawsuit preventing anyone else in the country from working on them too.

I stated:

"...and if I were the CEO of a company, I would abstain from deploying that company's resources in this fashion."

Including Google. If I were the CEO of Googe, I would do this.

Don't avoid the question. In your mind, does this statement provide sufficient evidence to prove that I obviously intend to work in the interests of whichever country my ancestors immigrated from?

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