The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National-Security Threat

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

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.

Americans need to get their shit together.

In the UK, when I started out, I remember once seeing an advert for a GCHQ job.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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!"

Sounds like a winning sales pitch to me.

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.

Offer more money in defense jobs. Talent will show up.