Are we arming our enemies?
In Star Wars VIII - The Last Jedi, the hacker DJ ("Don't Join") says; "They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow. It's just business." Arms dealers and mercenaries are indifferent about who they sell to, and I started to ask, am I any better?
I fondly remember my students and wonder where those lovely people are today. I taught them to reverse engineer, to fuzz and find exploits, craft reverse shells, hide payloads and DDOS systems. The Russian students are no different. Or maybe Ukrainian? Or Iraqi? I must admit I don't know. Because of "political correctness" it became uncool to ask.
But it's not like I could ever refuse to instruct a specific individual for political reasons. It's not like the administrators tell us where recruits come from. They pay their money, and we shut up and deliver training. That's what higher education became under global neoliberalism, and I wonder if that is the West's Achilles's Heel?
My response to what I see as a national security blind-spot has been to accept the limits of my political reach, and take a different approach. I've improved my courses on "Ethical Hacking" to actually include a huge amount of _ethics_ and _politics_. Bringing human values to academia can feel like a tooth and nail struggle.
Here's what I wrote about it in this weeks THE [1]
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/should-i-be-worried-about-where-my-cybersecurity-students-will-end