The fact that any association with the NSA and CIA is considered evil shows how much of the terror of the cold war and nuclear annihilation we’ve forgotten. I’

The fact that any association with the NSA and CIA is considered evil shows how much of the terror of the cold war and nuclear annihilation we’ve forgotten. I’m highly skeptical of US intelligence agencies and think they are and have been corrupt, but I also understand the realities involved in maintaining a relatively peaceful global trade network in a world with billions of people, a collapsed soviet empire, and nuclear weapons. I also think it’s worth remembering what the KGB and soviet intelligence and surveillance state was like. Maybe Brin and Page were secretly evil lizard people that wanted to turn the globe into North Korea, but I think the more likely explanation was that they were like most high level academic researchers: obsessively interested in seeing how far they could take their ideas, and overly optimistic about their positive impact and view of the military/intelligence as the good guys. Another fantastic example of that starry eyed optimism paired with dangerous government involvement was Project Orion. What was originally envisioned by its creators as a nuclear propelled rocket to propel humanity to the stars was corrupted by the cold war push for military dominance that funded it. In that case the potential for misuse was so great (one potential design was a battleship that was basically like a real life death star) that they scrapped it, but the scientists involved weren’t interested in building a death star. They were interested in building a nuclear space ship more powerful and with a greater launch capacity than anything we’ve ever designed before or since, and getting funding for it. I personally believe everything possible should be done to make centralized surveillance impossible, because we’d need to repeal the fourth amendment to allow it if we’re serious about true and not “approximate” rule of law, and the dangers are too great, but I recognize that there was an argument to be made to justify involvement with intelligence agencies, and that a researcher salivating for funding and propelling their idea into the positive future the envision would think it’d be controllable and worth the risk.