(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
What happened to MIT? Pressing charges against Aaron Swartz; pushing what seems like blatant intelligence community propaganda...
I genuinely don't mind that law enforcement and intelligence agencies (US or otherwise) would try to find and use these vulnerabilities to achieve goals. That's their job. They wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't do such things. (And, indeed, Google's security teams wouldn't be doing their job, either, if they didn't fix such things when they discovered them.)
I might even support Five Eyes' particular operation, here, if the sole targets of the exploitation genuinely are violent terrorists who massacre innocent civilians. But the onus is on them to not get caught by Google security when developing and deploying exploits. The onus isn't on Google to let people exploit their products and services, whether or not they may subjectively judge it might be used for a moral or "patriotic" end.
IC's job is to be sneaky and covert and manipulative. MIT's job definitely is not to be sneaky and covert and manipulative. I'm not saying they couldn't or shouldn't report on it and the debate over it, but the article is clearly framed towards a pro-Five Eyes exploitation, anti-Google security angle.
MIT has been very heavily funded by the military-industrial complex since the 1940s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Tec...
As the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Technology_Review says:
MIT Technology Review is a magazine wholly owned by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially
independent of the universityFor example, if WaPo had were instead named the Amazon Post (analogous to "MIT Technology Review") and had written a highly pro-Amazon article when it didn't quite seem merited, would you say that the ownership is irrelevant since they're editorially independent?
But more to the point, the closer analogy is an Amazon Post that claims to be editorially independent that publishes an editorial that's supportive of, say, Bashar al Assad, and people taking this to mean Amazon supports Bashar al Assad.
There are basically two logical leaps going on there: (1) if the editorial writer supports X then the paper must support X (historically not how editorials work) and (2) if the paper supports X then the organization that owns the paper supports X (not how editorial independence of a paper works).
True, that's a better analogy, though I'll try to make it even closer later in the post.
> (1) if the editorial writer supports X then the paper must support X (historically not how editorials work)
Indeed, but if there's only one single editorial about a certain topic, with no differing viewpoints expressed in any other editorial, it can potentially imply where the paper on average tends to lean. I can't find any other piece about it, at the moment.
Even if it's not an official position of the paper, who they hire and what they choose to publish can still be relevant.
The author: https://www.technologyreview.com/author/patrick-howell-oneil...
>Patrick Howell O’Neill is the cybersecurity senior editor for MIT Technology Review. He covers national security, election security and integrity, geopolitics, and personal security: How is cyber changing the world? Before joining the publication, he worked at the Aspen Institute and CyberScoop covering cybersecurity from Silicon Valley and Washington DC.
He's their cybersecurity senior editor, and a large percentage or majority of what he's written appears to cover US national cybersecurity topics. He probably considers this just another: Google would be allegedly acting against the US's cybersecurity interests, here.
The fact that he's who they hired to write about such topics - with no one else offering differing viewpoints, it appears - could imply something about the paper's leanings.
>> (2) if the paper supports X then the organization that owns the paper supports X (not how editorial independence of a paper works).
Yes, this is more of a stretch, but given some of the other stuff shared in this sub-thread, it doesn't seem that far-fetched that some percentage of MIT staff might feel this way.
It's possible it really does say nothing about the university, but let's say a hypothetical Amazon Post started spewing out a lot of these pro-Assad pieces, and there was evidence Bezos has had some large business deals with Assad or his regime going back decades.
Even though it says it's editorially independent, people would rightly start to question things. Given all the work MIT has done to support the US government and military, I don't think this situation is all that different. I think it could possibly hint something about the culture, there.
But I acknowledge that the second claim is indeed a pretty big leap, and I have no actual evidence to connect this reporter's articles or opinions to the opinions of MIT staff.
> it doesn't seem that far-fetched that some percentage of MIT staff might feel this way.
I can pretty much guarantee that some percentage of MIT staff feel this way, sure. I would actually be pretty worried if MIT had, as a job requirement, anything about feelings one way or another in this area.
And yes, there has been a significant presence of military projects at MIT in general, starting with work on radar and up through the present in the form of the Lincoln Laboratory.
What I am not on board with, based on the evidence we have, is the specific claim that MIT, as an organization, is in favor of suppressing reporting of vulnerabilities that the US government or some ally is exploiting. My strong suspicion is that there is no official position on it at the Institute level, and significant diversity of opinion on the matter among MIT affiliates when viewed as individuals, though I have no data to back up those suspicions.
Something about the slanted, biased tone of the article just really rubbed me the wrong way, whether or not it's a case of it solely being the opinion of this one writer and they just don't happen to have other cybersecurity writers, or a case of the paper having had this slant in general for a long time, or the unsubstantiated (and I think unlikely) case that any powerful people at MIT itself somehow had a direct role in the article being published or that the writer independently felt they had to toe the line with such people.