Sunday, April 17, 2016

Technocracy- The Security-Digital Complex


The interface [between public agencies and the private sector] is in fact more like a revolving door: Facebook’s head of security joined the NSA in 2010; Regina Dugan, former director of DARPA, is currently a vice-president at Google; and Mark Penn, a former State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton is now responsible for strategy at Microsoft. Condoleezza Rice is on the Dropbox board; she was also provost of Stanford University, the institution with the closest links to Silicon Valley (Google and Cisco were created there), before she became George W Bush’s secretary of state. Rice was the main witness at the marriage between the (public) defence sector and the (private) technology one. This alliance was consecrated in March by the defence secretary, who was “so grateful” to Eric Schmidt for agreeing to head the Pentagon’s new Defence Innovation Advisory Board: being chairman of Google, he was “the perfect chairman for this.” The digital giants, which have the largest stock market capitalisations in the world, spend ever-growing sums on lobbying the US government and the EU.

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