Silicon Valley Execs Join the Army As Officers (gizmodo.com) 43
The U.S. Army Reserve has directly commissioned four top Silicon Valley executives as lieutenant colonels under a new initiative, Detachment 201, aimed at accelerating tech integration into military operations. While these part-time roles are intended to bring private-sector innovation to defense modernization, the move is pretty unusual. Gizmodo reports: The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI. The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army's Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won't need to complete the Army Fitness Test.
The Army didn't respond to questions emailed Tuesday but said in a statement published on its website that, "Their swearing-in is just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers, showing the next generation how to make a difference in uniform." Their role in the Army Reserve is to "work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems," as the Army puts it. The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They'll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it's not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won't be sharing information with their companies or "participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain," according to the Journal.
Silicon Valley has always benefited greatly from ties to the U.S. military. Silicon Valley companies were bringing in $5 billion annually from defense contracts during the Reagan administration, something that the average person may not remember about the 1980s. But it's always been an uneasy alliance for consumer-facing tech companies, especially over recent decades. That's all changing, according to many folks who align more with President Donald Trump, who was once considered a shameful person to represent in polite company. As Andrew Bosworth, the CTO at Meta, who is joining the Army Reserves, told the Wall Street Journal, "There's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley."
The Army didn't respond to questions emailed Tuesday but said in a statement published on its website that, "Their swearing-in is just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers, showing the next generation how to make a difference in uniform." Their role in the Army Reserve is to "work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems," as the Army puts it. The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They'll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it's not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won't be sharing information with their companies or "participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain," according to the Journal.
Silicon Valley has always benefited greatly from ties to the U.S. military. Silicon Valley companies were bringing in $5 billion annually from defense contracts during the Reagan administration, something that the average person may not remember about the 1980s. But it's always been an uneasy alliance for consumer-facing tech companies, especially over recent decades. That's all changing, according to many folks who align more with President Donald Trump, who was once considered a shameful person to represent in polite company. As Andrew Bosworth, the CTO at Meta, who is joining the Army Reserves, told the Wall Street Journal, "There's a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley."
Repost. (Score:5, Funny)
Also, send them to the front lines like in Edge of Tomorrow..
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Can't. Bone spurs all around.
Re: Repost. (Score:2)
From the sound of things, they're not even trained for combat. Even if they were, they're not branched for it. While it's plausible they'd be deployed along with their unit, that doesn't mean they'd be placed anywhere near a combat zone.
The main advantage for the Army here is they've got whatever expertise they apparently need from them on retainer. Also, I wouldn't think too much of them starting as O-5 given this is the reserves we're talking about, where it's common to see inflated ranks.
Re: Repost. (Score:5, Informative)
From the sound of things, they're not even trained for combat.
They are not line officers [wikipedia.org], so they would not command combat units.
I met a medical officer who'd been directly commissioned as a full-bird O-6. He'd run a civilian hospital, but had no military experience.
These tech guys are being commissioned as O-5's so that everyone knows how much authority they have just by looking at their collars. It keeps things simple.
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These tech guys are being commissioned as O-5's so that everyone knows how much authority they have just by looking at their collars. It keeps things simple.
Yep. As I pointed out on the previous iteration of this, direct input officers have been a thing forever.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's just send them into combat anyhow and UCMJ anyone who refuses.
Re: (Score:2)
they sent mash doctors to the combat zones and they had like no combat training.
Re: Repost. (Score:2)
All hail our new technocratic oligarchy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?
This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.
It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.
The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
Left out of Google’s story The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.
Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.
Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.
The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google. To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The intelligence community’s enduring legacy within Silicon Valley Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.
Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. “Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet,” says the ACLU. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.”
When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies—from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.
But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests. In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.
https://qz.com/1145669/googles... [qz.com]
Or if they take it down: https://archive.is/YvwgX [archive.is]
May as well just call Microsoft a military company
July 27, 1998 The industry is facing a year-end deadline to add a government-approved back door into network gear. Vendors that don't provide this access risk losing export privileges.
Cruising up and down Silicon Valley, NSA spooks from the agency's Fort Meade headquarters have been making pit stops at companies ranging from industry leaders Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems, Inc. to start-ups such as VPNet Technologies, Inc. in order to get a peek at products still on the drawing board.
The NSA wants software vendors to make sure that any product with strong encryption have some way for the government to tap into the data. And because practically every commercial network application, router or switch these days includes encryption or an option for it, almost every vendor now has to answer to the NSA if it wants to export. Hot line to the NSA
It's gotten to the point where no vendor hip to the NSA's power will even start building products without checking in with Fort Meade first. This includes even that supposed ruler of the software universe, Microsoft Corp. "It's inevitable that you design products with specific [encryption] algorithms and key lengths in mind," said Ira Rubenstein, Microsoft attorney and a top lieutenant to Bill Gates. By his own account, Rubenstein acts as a "filter" between the NSA and Microsoft's design teams in Redmond, Wash. "Any time that you're developing a new product, you will be working closely with the NSA," he noted.
But the Clinton administration a year and a half ago said it would allow the export of products with stronger encryption keys by any vendor that agreed to add a "key-recovery" feature to its products by year-end - giving the government access to encrypted data without the end user's knowledge.
According to Bill Reinsche, Department of Commerce undersecretary for the Bureau of Export Controls, about 50 vendors have submitted plans for government-approved key-recovery, also called data-recovery. These companies, which include IBM, were rewarded with Key Management Infrastructure (KMI) export licenses to export products with 56-bit or stronger encryption until year-end.
But some companies are discovering that dealing with the Commerce Department for a KMI license means more involvement with the NSA.
The Bureau of Export Control is actually just a front for the NSA, said Alison Giacomelli, director of export compliance at VPNet Technologies, Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based vendor of IP-based encryption gateways. "The NSA has sign-off authority on these KMI licenses," Giacomelli said. In return for the KMI license, VPNet opened itself up for an NSA audit.
"They've already come out once, and they'll be coming out again," Giacomelli said. VPNet remains committed to meeting the deadline for adding key-recovery to its product but has one major problem: uncertainty about what the NSA really wants. The confusion means "there's a lot of risk . . . in terms of engineering and resources," Giacomelli said.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/comput... [cnn.com]
Good luck with that link though, CNN memory holed it. Might be able to find it at https://archive.is/yasds [archive.is]
Re: All hail our new technocratic oligarchy (Score:1)
"the Clinton administration a year and a half ago" likely in much deeper now ðY
Give me a break (Score:5, Insightful)
"In theory". I mean, give me a freakin' break. Everything these tech bros do has heavily favored profits over ethics... what sort of idiot doesn't see exactly what will be coming here?
Re: (Score:3)
"In Theory"
it's like when they just paint speed bumps and there are no actual bumps
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Musk already had the bro-club pilfer all government information into his systems. I'd imagine it wouldn't take much, a few dollars shuffled here or there, to get him to open that pilfered data up to the rest of the tech-bro crowd. Face it, we're well past the moment where we need to worry about whether or not government and military data is in the hands of big tech. Trump's election guaranteed that even the mostly false sheen of a separation between government and tech is gone. Now we're witnessing the medi
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Face it, we're well past the moment where we need to worry about whether or not government and military data is in the hands of big tech.
It's really whether or not government is in control of corporations, and of course the answer is yes. And that's where the "both sides" argument becomes non-fallacious: both Democrats and Republicans are united on giving them that control, and capital doesn't maintain the commons. It only wants to exploit it.
Granted, there were always ties between government and tech, we're just busting down the myth that those ties didn't exist, and giving much fuller integration rights to the tech elite.
Indeed: The military-industrial complex has been the home of technology since time was time. Many technological developments have come out of military research. The space program is also essentially mil
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And what they're doing is basically short-circuiting the procurement process. Being a military contractor is basically impossible - the existing military contractors have locked it up because everyone knows how much pork there is in military acquisitions.
So this is basically a way for techbros to get an in on the lucrative military contracts.
Good idea (Score:3)
This is actually a really good idea and I can’t believe nobody thought of it before.
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woosh!
Gimmick (Score:2)
That's just a PR stunt clearly. As tempting as it would be to imagine these men being made to clean latrines with toothbrushes or moving their middle aged overweight posteriors through a military obstacle course, the ranks are obviously purely symbolic. They're not going to give up any of their work or golf time to this supposed military role.
As to what the purpose of this PR stunt is, I'm not completely sure. The stated goal is
a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers
If the Army is hoping this will inspire tech graduates to enlist, they may mis
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Their reputation is only bad with a disaffected minority that like to fuss online. The vast majority of the people who work with, for, or in their industry admire them.
The absolutely will be either inspired to join or willing to do so thinking adding reservist to the CV might be a good career choice.
Second these companies and the governments ability to coordinate them in the event of a major conflict will be important. Having so familiarity with how the pentagon communicates, experience with the chain of c
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That's just a PR stunt clearly. As tempting as it would be to imagine these men being made to clean latrines with toothbrushes or moving their middle aged overweight posteriors through a military obstacle course, the ranks are obviously purely symbolic. They're not going to give up any of their work or golf time to this supposed military role.
As to what the purpose of this PR stunt is, I'm not completely sure. The stated goal is
a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers
If the Army is hoping this will inspire tech graduates to enlist, they may misunderstand the reputation these execs have. The effect of this may be very different from what they were hoping for. But pehaps the real goal is to build more of a relationship with the Silicon Valley, with a view of giving them more military contracts, something I'm sure the firms in question would be very happy with.
We need to look at some history to see what is going on. These people are not rank and file soldiers. They are not "line officers". They are not conscripted. They are people with a skillset that is needed, and they'll never clean a toilet - at least not unless they want to.
In the past - let's use WW2 as an example. Cryptologists, doctors, various materiel designers were often called into service. Their service was doing what they do for a living, only doing it as a non-line officer. Some end up in dange
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They are people with a skillset that is needed
Which is what, exactly?
Enhancing shareholder value?
Securing second-round VC financing?
Bribing Trump via "donations" or "sponsorships"?
https://slate.com/technology/2... [slate.com]
I can see that (Score:5, Funny)
Silicon Valley officers, fresh from their LinkedIn bios and skipping boot camp, take command of a recon drone unit.
Captain Elonson insists on managing the unit via Slack.
Troop alerts go unread because someone accidentally muted the “combat-updates” channel.
The platoon’s position is compromised when Lieutenant Zuckstein checks Facebook from the field, triggering geolocation metadata. Hamas thanks him in the comments.
Meanwhile, their cybersecurity officer deploys an AI that auto-optimizes comms by summarizing encrypted orders as “TL;DR: Go west?” The unit goes east.
Their supply request for ammo is sent via a Jira ticket. It’s marked “low priority” by a Google intern in logistics.
They initiate a drone strike by voice command, but Siri misunderstands “engage target” as “update Target”, and a shipment of smart toasters is delivered to enemy coordinates.
Final report:
“Operation failed due to cloud sync errors, poor UI, and an unfortunate TikTok livestream entitled ‘Drone Squad Goes Brrr.’”
The NeoReactionary Dark Enlightenment continues (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems like part of what Gil Duran is warning about... as well as the continued evolution of a neo-military-industrial complex. See Gil Duran's talk with Heather Cox Richardson about Tech Fascism [theframelab.org].
#broligarchy #techbros #NerdReich #DarkEnlightenment #NeoReactionary #TechFascism
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This seems like part of what Gil Duran is warning about... as well as the continued evolution of a neo-military-industrial complex. See Gil Duran's talk with Heather Cox Richardson about Tech Fascism [theframelab.org].
#broligarchy #techbros #NerdReich #DarkEnlightenment #NeoReactionary #TechFascism
It is nothing new, so Duran needs to study some history, and if they are correct, we've been locked into Tech fascism since the early part of the 1900's.
Y'all are so politically polarized it is hilarious - at least as long as you don't start killing each other again. Tell us how WW2 US was a fascist government. Or is everything fascist these days?
Great! (Score:3)
Let's draft them into the exec-ution squad.
Mixing government, military and private industry (Score:1)
is a hallmark of fascism.
This is literally just fascism (Score:3)
War? (Score:2)
Does this make them legitimate targets in a war, under the Geneva conventions?
the reserves (Score:2)
According to the article they have have joined the Army Reserve, not the regular army and "will serve for about 120 hours a year". I'm not familiar with the structure of the Reserve or the obligations, or if this gives them any authority to order soldiers around. But it may give the Army the right to order THEM around seeing as how they now report to some senior officers. And they might could be called up to serve in some military capacity.
I'm curious to know if their contract is for 8 years or some lesser
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and the courts have ruled that governors have control over the guard
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from Task & Purpose blog it looks like none of them will do training or service. The titles are entirely for show, so they can say they're members of the military. They're military fetishists, chickenhawks and are just there for the bonafides and being able to say "I served". This is just my opinion based on the extreme military fetishism at Palantir. They even call their consultants "Deltas" ffs. And they believe they're more special than consultants because they're told so, and given titles like FDSE
Hypothetically (Score:2)
They now would have to "follow orders", wouldn't they?
Embed spyware!
Disseminate propaganda!
Create & share detailed personal profiles!
Acquire my nephew's startup!
Next stage of Fascism (Score:3)
This is additional evidence of a fascist takeover of our government.
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
By drafting the capitalists into the military, the government ensures control and execution of their belligerent nationalism and racist agenda.