In 2011, the rise of tech began when the CIA and the US military also jointly launched a drone strike, with the agreement of President Barack Obama. The attack reportedly resulted in the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim religious fanatic of American origin, in Yemen. Those responsible for the attack relied on Awlaki’s geographic location data, monitored by the National Security Agency as part of its surveillance monitoring program. A CIA drone strike two weeks later, using the same type of information, killed another US citizen: al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
Five years later, if US forces intentionally killed al-Awlaki, drones have accidentally killed the remaining US citizens and thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and other regions of Central Asia and the Middle East. These cases portend an important outcome in the latest affliction of automated warfare device mismatch and wide error tolerances at the highest levels of even the most advanced military payload equipment. However, in their most evolved form, artificial intelligence and machine learning automate automation tools, which may soon have fully autonomous capabilities.
The Cost of Staying Centralized
Internet-enabled mobile digital devices make millions of people in every corner of the world into valuable data-generating machines, contributing data to hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of algorithms daily. Although we have quickly assimilated smartphones and tablets into our lives, we rarely question how the data we record or transmit through these devices can be easily organized militarily. For example, recent reports reveal that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, affiliated with the Department of Defense (DoD), commonly has access to text-based geolocation data from commercial files collected from individual mobile phones, sometimes without a legal warrant.
Weapons and intelligence agencies will accept them and, in addition to spying, can use this data to reconstruct social networks and even prepare fatal attacks against individuals. Drones, geolocation programs, spyware, and other tools of this kind are the epitome of a new alliance between Big Tech and Big Defense. For the past two decades, the Department of Defense and 17 US federal agencies, collectively known as the US Intelligence Community, have been squandering interest in capturing tech innovation at its origins: Silicon Valley.
The Future Is Local and Global
Military and intelligence agencies have achieved this by establishing outposts along the West Coast; creating a high-level advisory council that defers to the Pentagon from giant tech companies; hosting summits, forums, and meetings of influential investors and business executives; and speaking directly to the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs, engineers, computer scientists, and researchers who are often skeptical of government bureaucrats In many ways, we cannot understand the US military today without an understanding of its close connections to the technology industry.
The interconnection between the fields of network technology and defense dates back more than 50 years. For example, beginning in the early 1960s, the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) played a pivotal role in funding the computer science research that led to the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet and its entire infrastructure today. Silicon Valley’s initial boom was funded primarily with money from defense and intelligence agencies, and the Pentagon invested heavily throughout the Cold War. Obviously, virtual warfare is something for everyone.
Established Tech Hubs in the U.S.
There is no agreed-upon definition, which allows the term to be defined broadly, holistically, and anthropologically. I’m focusing on a hyper-expanded vision, multiplying four distinct components: robotic and autonomous weapons systems; high-tech versions of psychological or accountable operations; predictive modeling and simulation software, sometimes called computational counterinsurgency and cyberwarfare, as the attack on critical infrastructure defenses. These technologies and techniques are based on the production, existence, and analysis of large data sets often surveillance archives obtained from drones, satellites, cameras, cell phones, electronic transactions, social networks, email messages, and other Internet sources.
We should view this as algorithmic warfare. Announcing today a synergy Mountain View nestles comfortably between the rugged Santa Cruz Mountains and the southern edge of San Francisco Bay. For the first half of the last century, it was a peaceful village of beautiful cattle farms, fruit orchards, and rugged downtown streets. But after a team of scientists led by William Shockley invented the semiconductor there in 1956, it grew exponentially, like the rest of Silicon Valley. Today, it’s a resinous, bustling suburban neighborhood with more than 80,000 residents.
Conclusion
From the outside, it looks like an unusual place where military and intelligence agencies would have wanted to set up their headquarters. Mountain View is almost 2,500 miles from the Pentagon. Direct flights from San Francisco to Honolulu are faster than flights to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon and Silicon Valley aren’t just geographically divided; there are other differences. The Department of Defense sees itself as an incombustible, non-paradisiacal bureaucracy, a girdle of infundiaries and emissaries, with patriarchal unionism and rigid organizational hierarchies.
On the contrary, Mountain View’s first employer is Alphabet, the parent company of Google, one of the most valuable corporations in the world. You can find on its 26-acre campus, known as the Googleplex, more than 30 restaurants, free food and drinks for employees, gyms, and swimming pools. A life-size iron Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, which Google employees painfully call Stan, sits demonstrably outdoors in a main building. Despite these differences indeed, because of all of them Secretary of Defense Ash Carter set up a Pentagon outpost less than two miles from the Googleplex.
