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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Educational. But I wonder how many US scientific bodies could be just as easily vivisected. E.g. I'm sure Physics, for example, is full of people with connections to defense, and we know that lots of top Mathematicians have worked for the NSA.

It does remind me of a story on NPR (about a book -- http://www.amazon.com/Harvard-Unabomber-Education-American-T...) detailing how a prominent psychology professor basically tortured a group of students over a period of years, concentrating special intensity for an awkward scholarship student, Theodore Kaczynski.

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"I'm sure Physics, for example, is full of people with connections to defense, and we know that lots of top Mathematicians have worked for the NSA."

Not to mention the strong historical Silicon Valley links to the "defense", prison, law-enforcement and intelligence industries.

One also has to ask what weight should be given to indirect cooperation with and enablement of said industries. If one is not working for a defense contractor, but a supplier of said contractor, or if one even takes money from or in any way benefits from these contractors or contractors of contractors, what's your culpability? Where do you draw the line?

I am also reminded of "IBM and the Holocaust",[1] which is deserving of its own HN article.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Interesting, I did not know about this.

Here are the NPR story and related Atlantic article by the author of the book:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...

http://download.npr.org/real.npr.na-central/npr/wesat/2000/0...

That was a bit of a skeptical thought for me too. In the 20th century the military industrial complex was the only meal ticket in town for a lot of things. In many ways our new VC-finance-disruptive-industrial complex, while evil in some of its own ways, is a moral improvement. while it might spin out dickish ventures like über, as far as I know it has yet to firebomb any villages.

I do agree with the author about complicity in torture and am glad a few have stood up to that.

And the prof married one of the involved graduate students. (no: I don't think marrying a graduate students is in general wrong- but marrying one you supervised in an abusive experiment is a bit off).

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