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Opinion: The NSA and the Corrosion of Silicon Valley - by Michael Dearing
Very OT, but unless this article was written for The Onion as sarcasm, it is a fine example of the hubris that surrounds the Silicon Valley and how some people here view themselves and their technologies in a distortion field. This article reeks of it. One of the reader comments on the valley companies doing far worse than NSA in compromising privacy and undermining trust as a business model is spot on.
And the author talks about trust in existing technology?
Here is a hilarious news item from today on what this trustworthy technology can do
The mention of Noyce and Moore in the context of company integrity (trust) couldn't help but bring to mind the way their company, Intel, handled the Pentium floating point bug - based on business profits, not trust: http://www.willamette.edu/~mjaneba/pentprob.html
Intel's policy, when it first publicly admitted the problem around November 28 of 1994, was to replace Pentium chips only for those who could explain their need of high accuracy in complex calculations.
Perhaps tech companies did have more integrity decades earlier, as exemplified by how Dave Packard addressed a somewhat similar issue with the HP35: http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm
In a meeting, Dave Packard asked what they were going to do about the units already in the field and someone in the crowd said "Don't tell?" At this Packard's pencil snapped and he said: "Who said that? We're going to tell everyone and offer them, a replacement. It would be better to never make a dime of profit than to have a product out there with a problem".
(See also http://www.jacques-laporte.org/: "HP had sold some 25000 units and elegantly offered a replacement. Around 5000 machines were returned to have their ROMs exchanged. ")
I did not see this post as way off topic. I believe a valuable underlying component of fund investing is understanding the industries in which they invest. Were the author commenting on issues confronting the mining industry or autos or real estate, I assume those would be considered topical?
The reason Dearing's forebodings and warnings may appear vague or diffuse is that there are stringent restrictions against workers in the technology-telecommunications industry revealing details about the nature and extent of government involvement, interference, and eavesdropping. Google, for example, has long complained they cannot even reveal the number of government subpoenas they receive every day for user data. Any breech of NSA secrecy rules would result in stringent punitive measures including imprisonment. So - vague and undocumented this opinion piece from a Silicon Valley insider will remain.
Back to the piece's central point: Dearing believes, rightly or wrongly, that the NSA has become a pervasive influence in the technology industry in which he works and that the involvement has reached a point where it is harming innovation, drawing talent away to non-productive endeavors and stifling future growth of the industry. The editorial originally appeared in "All Things Digital", a consumer-oriented technology blog operated for many years by the Wall Street Journal and which counted the highly respected Walt Mossberg among its regulars. (The blog ceased operation Dec. 31.) Regards
I think you're drawing your own conclusions from the piece. Dearing's thesis, as he laid out in his opening paragraphs, is that "product integrity and trust" are being compromised. Not that innovation is harmed, not that growth is stifled.
Dearing is a VC, so I reasonably surmise that his interest, like that of people here, is in making money. Further, that his ability to make money is being adversely affected by revelations about NSA actions - his argument being that the companies he backs lose customer trust and thus business.
Customer behavior (presumably based on trust) and product integrity are actually two different matters.
The Googles, the AT&Ts, etc. have been "spying" on people for years. People didn't care. They gladly gave away personal information, and as they found out more was taken from them by these businesses surreptitiously, their reaction was muted. Hey, that's American business.
But fervor was strummed up because it was "the government" invading privacy. (I'm not going to make light of the qualitative difference - I feel it is real and significant, but not the point here. The point is that the magnitude of the public reaction changed.) Only then did Dearing complain about product integrity being compromised. What changed was that the customers now cared.
That's not standing on principle. That's taking a business position. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not cloak it in moral superiority.
It's still all about making money. Each company stakes out its own turf:
Reply to @hank: I am very aware of ATD. It hasn't ceased operations but has spun off from WSJ as an independent entity with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
The reference to Onion is to say that this article would be valid as a parody, not otherwise. The objection is not about the validity or not of NSA activity but the self-serving drivel in this post that spins the valley Technorati as some innocent, high minded romantics that are being blackened and impeded by NSA activities. Nothing can be further from reality. While the vast majority of individual employees in the valley may be innocent and in search of technical brilliance, the companies themselves have been using them for a long time for much less than honorable purposes, especially as it regards to compromising privacy and trust of its users.
Companies like SnapChat don't get billions of dollars of valuation because they have come up with some brilliant technology innovation. They are valued for their potential in analyzing the communications their users do and arriving at a composite profile of their user's needs, wants, likes, desires, insecurities, etc and monetizing that by providing that information to marketeers to effectively target them. Your children will grow up using these services with marketeers knowing more about them than you as a parent ever will. Unfortunately, this has become the business model for a great number of emerging companies especially in social media. All of this has been done with users not fully aware of the privacy aspects of these services because they have been intentionally obfuscated.
The NSA revelations jeopardize all of that by drawing attention to the privacy aspects that may suddenly start people being more aware of who knows what about them, including the companies themselves. The author has a self interest in that industry and is trying to spin the image of the industry as innocent sheep exploited by NSA than as wolf in sheep's clothing whose cover is being blown by publicity around NSA activity.
The tech industry is brutal and is becoming as bad as the financial industry in lack of ethics or morality. Zynga designing their products to fool youngsters into making purchases without their knowledge and trying go keep them addicted to the games rivals the tactics of tobacco companies. The tactics from Yelp on some businesses would make Chicago mobsters proud. That is the reality of Silicon Valley, not the romanticized fiction in this self-serving piece.
Reply to @cman: I'm with you all the way on this one. I'd trust the NSA over Google without a second thought. Some of the suggestions regarding the NSA ("let private companies keep all of the data and make the NSA get a court order") are ludicrously scary.
Let's see now... what commercial entity would I trust to safely store all that data... I know!! How about Target???
OK, I can see that it might make sense to query the metadata base if a government security agency gets interested in a particular person, phone number, or email address. Why not simply divide the data acquisition functions of the NSA from those security agencies desiring the data, and require a court ordered search warrant before the data can be accessed?
Reply to @msf: "The Googles, the AT&Ts, etc. have been "spying" on people for years. People didn't care. They gladly gave away personal information, and as they found out more was taken from them by these businesses surreptitiously, their reaction was muted. Hey, that's American business."
I think the idea that companies were spying on people has always been a "thing", but I think what the whole Snowden/NSA thing changed was that it highlighted the depth and detail and effort that is put into it.
And I still think people don't care. The average person will keep going on using their phones. Hey, I have a Google Nexus phone (great phone, btw.)
I DO think that companies may start to lose business from foreign entities because you are seeing lack of trust. The Ciscos and other such companies may lose business from foreign buyers who believe that their products may be used for spying purposes. Maybe a buyer in Asia goes with Huawei instead of Cisco for an order. Who knows.
Comments
And the author talks about trust in existing technology?
Here is a hilarious news item from today on what this trustworthy technology can do
Google+ invitation lands man in jail for one night
http://www.willamette.edu/~mjaneba/pentprob.htmlPerhaps tech companies did have more integrity decades earlier, as exemplified by how Dave Packard addressed a somewhat similar issue with the HP35:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp35.htm (See also http://www.jacques-laporte.org/: "HP had sold some 25000 units and elegantly offered a replacement. Around 5000 machines were returned to have their ROMs exchanged. ")
The reason Dearing's forebodings and warnings may appear vague or diffuse is that there are stringent restrictions against workers in the technology-telecommunications industry revealing details about the nature and extent of government involvement, interference, and eavesdropping. Google, for example, has long complained they cannot even reveal the number of government subpoenas they receive every day for user data. Any breech of NSA secrecy rules would result in stringent punitive measures including imprisonment. So - vague and undocumented this opinion piece from a Silicon Valley insider will remain.
Back to the piece's central point: Dearing believes, rightly or wrongly, that the NSA has become a pervasive influence in the technology industry in which he works and that the involvement has reached a point where it is harming innovation, drawing talent away to non-productive endeavors and stifling future growth of the industry. The editorial originally appeared in "All Things Digital", a consumer-oriented technology blog operated for many years by the Wall Street Journal and which counted the highly respected Walt Mossberg among its regulars. (The blog ceased operation Dec. 31.) Regards
Dearing is a VC, so I reasonably surmise that his interest, like that of people here, is in making money. Further, that his ability to make money is being adversely affected by revelations about NSA actions - his argument being that the companies he backs lose customer trust and thus business.
Customer behavior (presumably based on trust) and product integrity are actually two different matters.
The Googles, the AT&Ts, etc. have been "spying" on people for years. People didn't care. They gladly gave away personal information, and as they found out more was taken from them by these businesses surreptitiously, their reaction was muted. Hey, that's American business.
But fervor was strummed up because it was "the government" invading privacy. (I'm not going to make light of the qualitative difference - I feel it is real and significant, but not the point here. The point is that the magnitude of the public reaction changed.) Only then did Dearing complain about product integrity being compromised. What changed was that the customers now cared.
That's not standing on principle. That's taking a business position. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not cloak it in moral superiority.
It's still all about making money. Each company stakes out its own turf:
"The first phone company to publish a transparency report isn’t AT&T or Verizon. ... instead of coming from industry mainstays such as Verizon or AT&T, the disclosure comes from a little-known, left-leaning service known as CREDO Mobile."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/09/the-first-phone-company-to-publish-a-transparency-report-isnt-att-or-verizon/
The reference to Onion is to say that this article would be valid as a parody, not otherwise. The objection is not about the validity or not of NSA activity but the self-serving drivel in this post that spins the valley Technorati as some innocent, high minded romantics that are being blackened and impeded by NSA activities. Nothing can be further from reality. While the vast majority of individual employees in the valley may be innocent and in search of technical brilliance, the companies themselves have been using them for a long time for much less than honorable purposes, especially as it regards to compromising privacy and trust of its users.
Companies like SnapChat don't get billions of dollars of valuation because they have come up with some brilliant technology innovation. They are valued for their potential in analyzing the communications their users do and arriving at a composite profile of their user's needs, wants, likes, desires, insecurities, etc and monetizing that by providing that information to marketeers to effectively target them. Your children will grow up using these services with marketeers knowing more about them than you as a parent ever will. Unfortunately, this has become the business model for a great number of emerging companies especially in social media. All of this has been done with users not fully aware of the privacy aspects of these services because they have been intentionally obfuscated.
The NSA revelations jeopardize all of that by drawing attention to the privacy aspects that may suddenly start people being more aware of who knows what about them, including the companies themselves. The author has a self interest in that industry and is trying to spin the image of the industry as innocent sheep exploited by NSA than as wolf in sheep's clothing whose cover is being blown by publicity around NSA activity.
The tech industry is brutal and is becoming as bad as the financial industry in lack of ethics or morality. Zynga designing their products to fool youngsters into making purchases without their knowledge and trying go keep them addicted to the games rivals the tactics of tobacco companies. The tactics from Yelp on some businesses would make Chicago mobsters proud. That is the reality of Silicon Valley, not the romanticized fiction in this self-serving piece.
Let's see now... what commercial entity would I trust to safely store all that data... I know!! How about Target???
OK, I can see that it might make sense to query the metadata base if a government security agency gets interested in a particular person, phone number, or email address. Why not simply divide the data acquisition functions of the NSA from those security agencies desiring the data, and require a court ordered search warrant before the data can be accessed?
I think the idea that companies were spying on people has always been a "thing", but I think what the whole Snowden/NSA thing changed was that it highlighted the depth and detail and effort that is put into it.
And I still think people don't care. The average person will keep going on using their phones. Hey, I have a Google Nexus phone (great phone, btw.)
I DO think that companies may start to lose business from foreign entities because you are seeing lack of trust. The Ciscos and other such companies may lose business from foreign buyers who believe that their products may be used for spying purposes. Maybe a buyer in Asia goes with Huawei instead of Cisco for an order. Who knows.