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I disagree. I have worked with DARPA and the Navy in the past. Now I’m in Silicon Valley. However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unl

I disagree. I have worked with DARPA and the Navy in the past. Now I’m in Silicon Valley. However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed. We are very behind in terms of cyber warfare, and our position is incredibly weak in a post Snowden world, where all our defense strategies were leaked. Our critical infrastructure is sorely in need of software updates - many devices don’t have authentication so one can just shut down a power plant if they get onto the same network. China has been slowly pulling ahead by installing black doors in all the hardware manufactured there. Russia is flexing their muscles with excursions against neighbors critical infrastructure. The US is falling behind rapidly. Despite incessant talk about ‘impact’ and ‘saving the world’, Silicon Valley engineers build glorified slot machines for phones. Refusing to work with the Military sounds like something the ultra privileged would say - they don’t care about the people in this country. When the lights go out because China has taken out power across the US, and Google is no longer working, I wonder then if those ‘3000’ engineers will think twice about the importance of national defense, or if they will continue to sit in their ivory towers and lecture the rest of the world about how they are making the world a better place for selling digital cigarettes. If engineers want REAL impact, there is no where better than cyber defense.

throw2016 8y ago
This idea of 'post Snowden' world makes little sense. The idea that you have to agree to everything your government does smacks of jingoism and is inherently anti democratic. It's far more important to stand up for fundamental democratic values and protect whistle blowers like Snowden who stood by these values, than fight imaginary battles with a 'siege mentality'. This whole idea of 'us vs them' and this narrative of constant threat has always been a tool of despots everywhere.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Nothing the GP said implies having to agree or blindly follow but no one with any shred of sense can argue that Snowden's leaks have not caused significant harm to US (and to an extent 5-Eye/NATO/western) SIGINT/Cyber operations. Whether our society would benefit more from the exposure than the potential damages form exposing intelligence operations and crippling both defensive and offensive capacity is a completely separate argument. And it's not just Snowden, Vault7 which included public source code disclosure and The Shadow Broker / Equation Group leaks also did quite a bit of harm. Like it or not the digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare and maintaining superiority in it is just as important as maintaining all those fancy carrier strike groups.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    "The digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare" is one of those things that DoD-types like to say, and that the consulting industry likes to echo, that doesn't really mean anything. In the airless vacuum of message board reasoning, everything is a domain of modern warfare.
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      I'm not going to argue with you I know who you are (I don't mean it in a negative way). But at least from my previous experience beyond intelligence gathering and information warfare "cyber" has been a key component of military operations. Anything from SEAD to hacking into civilian and critical infrastructure for direct support of an operation is a common place, it was in so about a decade ago which is my last privileged exposure to such activities and it so still now. Tracking enemy combatants via their mobile devices, breaking into mobile carriers disturbing C&C/C4/C3I networks and kinetic payloads to disrupt both temporary/field deployed (I have a few anecdotes about Mitsubishi generators and their TELYS control panels) and permanent infrastructure are not limited to the presale decks that Lockheed Martin presents to the DoD. My exposure is also completely devoid of any contact with any US defense contractors or an other US organization but rather through an MNNA.
Karishma1234 8y ago
> However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed. That is jingoism. If despite spending half trillion dollars if US military is behind something that many people should get fired. Pentagon is hostile to US interests at the moment because how they work is under wraps, they dont pay price of their wrong decisions and they have a limitless credit card paid by taxpayers. Working with military is not same as "caring about people of country". That veteran in wheelchair at local walmart might be an ordinary person but these Generals and highers up are not and must be treated as s*ums.
tptacek 8y ago
This is silly. Silicon Valley doesn't need to team up with the DoD to resolve insecurity, and, in fact, the DoD has very few capabilities to improve the security of Silicon Valley products. Based on what we know, along with pretty straightforward logical extrapolations, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the offensive CS capabilities of the DoD are a specialized subset of what the industry already has. The people staffing offensive operations at NSA are generally working their first job out of college. What we've seen of the quality of their tooling after leaks suggests mediocre software engineering and, if there's an edge to be found at NSA over the best industry offensive teams, it's in router, firewall, and middlebox security --- a consequence of the fact that industry doesn't spend much time working on these targets. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that foreign adversaries outclass us on any of this. The most elaborate, technically sophisticated computer attacks in the last 20 years have all been carried out either by the US or by allies (in other words: largely by US defense contractors). What is the case is that the median target --- in the US or anywhere else in the world --- is so poorly secured that none of this matters. We are still working in an era where you can send someone an email with a blue-underlined link in it, and if a receptionist clicks that link, their entire network is owned up. Despite the indisputably grave state of the US's computer security --- let's be clear, of everyone's computer security, here and abroad --- the US is at little risk of "destruction". Our adversaries also have the ability to conduct kinetic attacks anywhere in the country. Every adversary of ours worth of that name could blow up a US power plant. They don't, because the cost of attribution to them is essentially infinite. People in Silicon Valley aren't great about computer security, but they know at least as much about it as the DoD does, and nobody should pretend they can spook the industry with the specter of "cyber warfare".
- mhneu 8y ago
  > the US is at little risk of "destruction" Propaganda can destroy democracies. (And in most or all autocracies, propaganda is central to the regime's power) Social media, and private data, and disclosure of private emails, and obtaining compromising info by hacking, can all be excellent propaganda tools. So yes, computer security and hackers can threaten the actual destruction of western society. Via propaganda and 'information warfare'. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/9781524762933/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democrac... https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/supercharged-dumdums.html https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/supercharged-dumdums.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/03/how_nazi_propaganda_encouraged_the_masses_to_co_produce_a_false_reality.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017...

throw2016 8y ago

This idea of 'post Snowden' world makes little sense. The idea that you have to agree to everything your government does smacks of jingoism and is inherently anti democratic. It's far more important to stand up for fundamental democratic values and protect whistle blowers like Snowden who stood by these values, than fight imaginary battles with a 'siege mentality'. This whole idea of 'us vs them' and this narrative of constant threat has always been a tool of despots everywhere.

dogma1138 8y ago
Nothing the GP said implies having to agree or blindly follow but no one with any shred of sense can argue that Snowden's leaks have not caused significant harm to US (and to an extent 5-Eye/NATO/western) SIGINT/Cyber operations. Whether our society would benefit more from the exposure than the potential damages form exposing intelligence operations and crippling both defensive and offensive capacity is a completely separate argument. And it's not just Snowden, Vault7 which included public source code disclosure and The Shadow Broker / Equation Group leaks also did quite a bit of harm. Like it or not the digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare and maintaining superiority in it is just as important as maintaining all those fancy carrier strike groups.
- tptacek 8y ago
  "The digital realm is a fully fledged domain of modern warfare" is one of those things that DoD-types like to say, and that the consulting industry likes to echo, that doesn't really mean anything. In the airless vacuum of message board reasoning, everything is a domain of modern warfare.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    I'm not going to argue with you I know who you are (I don't mean it in a negative way). But at least from my previous experience beyond intelligence gathering and information warfare "cyber" has been a key component of military operations. Anything from SEAD to hacking into civilian and critical infrastructure for direct support of an operation is a common place, it was in so about a decade ago which is my last privileged exposure to such activities and it so still now. Tracking enemy combatants via their mobile devices, breaking into mobile carriers disturbing C&C/C4/C3I networks and kinetic payloads to disrupt both temporary/field deployed (I have a few anecdotes about Mitsubishi generators and their TELYS control panels) and permanent infrastructure are not limited to the presale decks that Lockheed Martin presents to the DoD. My exposure is also completely devoid of any contact with any US defense contractors or an other US organization but rather through an MNNA.

Karishma1234 8y ago

> However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed. That is jingoism. If despite spending half trillion dollars if US military is behind something that many people should get fired. Pentagon is hostile to US interests at the moment because how they work is under wraps, they dont pay price of their wrong decisions and they have a limitless credit card paid by taxpayers. Working with military is not same as "caring about people of country". That veteran in wheelchair at local walmart might be an ordinary person but these Generals and highers up are not and must be treated as s*ums.

tptacek 8y ago

This is silly. Silicon Valley doesn't need to team up with the DoD to resolve insecurity, and, in fact, the DoD has very few capabilities to improve the security of Silicon Valley products. Based on what we know, along with pretty straightforward logical extrapolations, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the offensive CS capabilities of the DoD are a specialized subset of what the industry already has. The people staffing offensive operations at NSA are generally working their first job out of college. What we've seen of the quality of their tooling after leaks suggests mediocre software engineering and, if there's an edge to be found at NSA over the best industry offensive teams, it's in router, firewall, and middlebox security --- a consequence of the fact that industry doesn't spend much time working on these targets. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that foreign adversaries outclass us on any of this. The most elaborate, technically sophisticated computer attacks in the last 20 years have all been carried out either by the US or by allies (in other words: largely by US defense contractors). What is the case is that the median target --- in the US or anywhere else in the world --- is so poorly secured that none of this matters. We are still working in an era where you can send someone an email with a blue-underlined link in it, and if a receptionist clicks that link, their entire network is owned up. Despite the indisputably grave state of the US's computer security --- let's be clear, of everyone's computer security, here and abroad --- the US is at little risk of "destruction". Our adversaries also have the ability to conduct kinetic attacks anywhere in the country. Every adversary of ours worth of that name could blow up a US power plant. They don't, because the cost of attribution to them is essentially infinite. People in Silicon Valley aren't great about computer security, but they know at least as much about it as the DoD does, and nobody should pretend they can spook the industry with the specter of "cyber warfare".

mhneu 8y ago
> the US is at little risk of "destruction" Propaganda can destroy democracies. (And in most or all autocracies, propaganda is central to the regime's power) Social media, and private data, and disclosure of private emails, and obtaining compromising info by hacking, can all be excellent propaganda tools. So yes, computer security and hackers can threaten the actual destruction of western society. Via propaganda and 'information warfare'. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/9781524762933/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democrac... https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/supercharged-dumdums.html https://boingboing.net/2018/01/25/supercharged-dumdums.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/03/how_nazi_propaganda_encouraged_the_masses_to_co_produce_a_false_reality.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017...