
The Divide Between Silicon Valley and Washington Is a National-Security Threat - remarkEon
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/growing-gulf-between-silicon-valley-and-washington/577963/
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ENGNR
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

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hedora
You alredy said it better than I can, but anecdotally, when I stopped counting
5+ years ago, my license plate / id was being logged by the government at
least three times each way to and from work. Since then, my friends and I have
been victims of numerous property crimes that could be solved with a database
query or two over those logs, but they’re not available to the people that
investigate crimes, apparently.

On the other hand, I can name all sorts of ways technology is used to shake
people down for committing victimless crimes...

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solatic
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.

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chillacy
America hasn’t fought a defensive war in awhile, the last few wars were about
projecting power. A less charitable way of putting it would be: ever since
Vietnam the US war machine seems to be concerned principally with bombing poor
people in other countries, why should we support this?

Also unlike Israel the US is in a pretty good location defense-wise,
surrounded by allies and two oceans, and with the worlds largest nuclear
arsenal. I think we’re good..

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esotericn
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.

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patriotism404
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](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.

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mips_avatar
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.

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Hydraulix989
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.

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ForHackernews
> 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.

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JimmyAustin
This is just the cyber equivalent of "Shoot someone and you'll go to jail,
join the military and shoot someone, get a medal".

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zachguo
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.

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

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carboy
It’s not just about the money.

I’ve worked for product companies and was forced to interact with government
clients.

Bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. No risk taking, no point in standing
out, promotions based on time in service. You could offer me quadruple my
salary to go and work for the government and I still wouldn’t take the job.

Just supporting the government clients on a part time basis made me want to
quit my job just to get away from the government clients.

