Thread by @WholePicture_

Thread about #Government and the #relationship with the #Military and #technology #Companies:

The Pentagon was once the most important client for American tech companies, but today relations with Silicon Valley are strained.
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Startups that want to cooperate with the military are moving away.

Today, the military equipment business is no longer in vogue. Also because of Edward Snowden's revelations, employees and entrepreneurs at tech companies and startups are critical of the security authorities.

But there are also companies that consciously choose the military as their client. They often move away from Silicon Valley.

In other countries such as Israel or China, startups work hand in hand with the military. But in the US, many startups refuse to share their innovations with the defense industry.

Numerous venture capitalists also do not want to invest in companies whose products could contribute to people being injured.

I think that's a very positive development that shows that people in democracies tend to think ethically and are critical.

Seed capital from the CIA

After the Second World War, the American government gave research grants to universities that researched new types of weapon technologies.

The CIA foreign intelligence service and the National Security Agency, the eavesdropping agency, also financed tech startups with venture capital.

The software company Oracle, founded in 1977, even named itself after the code name of the first project it carried out for the CIA. For the semiconductor company Intel, the Pentagon was the most important customer for many years.

With the increasing commercialization of hardware and software and the end of the Cold War, however, the Pentagon lost its importance in the customer base of many tech companies.

In addition, the government began allowing pension funds to invest in venture capital in the 1970s. New private investors also opened their offices in Silicon Valley.

In 2013, the relationship between the tech industry and Washington suddenly deteriorated with the revelations of Edward Snowden.

For years, the government had backdoors built into software and hardware in order to be able to monitor users.

The affected companies suffered massive reputational damage and broke many times with the law enforcement authorities. There was a showdown in 2015 when Apple refused to help the Federal Police, the FBI, crack the iPhone of a killed terrorist.

The FBI ultimately got help from an Israeli startup. Apple continues to take the position that it does not weaken its encryption for American law enforcement officers.

If Apple cracked its own smartphones, they would lose all of their credibility and brand. So it was the right decision for Apple.

To this day, cooperation with the defense industry poses a reputational risk for the technology companies - also internally. When it became known in the spring of 2018 that Google was cooperating with the Pentagon in the field of drones, it sparked an outcry among the workforce.

Google should help the Pentagon through its cloud division so that military drones can use artificial intelligence to better recognize objects. The group finally bowed to the demands and did not extend its cooperation with the Pentagon.

In Washington we know that the real innovation forges today are the tech companies that are poaching entire chairs from universities. In 2015, the Pentagon opened an outpost in Silicon Valley, a good three kilometers from Google's headquarters in Mountain View.

In 2016, the Pentagon also convened the Defense Innovation Board, which also includes former Google boss Eric Schmidt. It advises the Pentagon on technological innovations.

But not all tech companies resist cooperation - also because the military is still an enormously wealthy client. Last year Microsoft landed an order from the Pentagon in cloud computing worth at least 10 billion dollars.

Amazon, Intel, Oracle and IBM had competed for the bid in the project called Jedi (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure). Google withdrew its offer after renewed protests from its employees.

The data analysis company Palantir has also been working with Washington for years. However, she is repeatedly criticized for this, for example because her products are used by the ICE immigration police, among other things for deportations.

Last year, Palantir announced that it would relocate its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver - because the "monoculture" in Silicon Valley was no longer bearable, said CEO Alex Karp.

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