Discussion:
[IP] Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
Dave Farber
2018-06-24 01:09:19 UTC
Permalink
Keio University Distinguished Professor
Tokyo Japan Cell +81 ‭‭70 4490 7275‬‬
Date: June 24, 2018 at 00:05:46 GMT+9
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/google-engineers-refused-to-build-security-tool-to-win-military-contracts
Earlier this year, a group of influential software engineers in
Google's cloud division surprised their superiors by refusing to
work on a cutting-edge security feature. Known as "air gap," the
technology would have helped Google win sensitive military
contracts. The coders weren't persuaded their employer should be
using its technological might to help the government wage war,
according to four current and former employees. After hearing
the engineers' objections, Urs Holzle, Google's top technical
executive, said the air gap feature would be postponed, one of
the people said. Another person familiar with the situation said
the group was able to reduce the scope of the feature. The act
of rebellion ricocheted around the company, fueling a growing
resistance among employees with a dim view of Google's yen for
multi-million-dollar government contracts. The engineers became
known as the "Group of Nine" and were lionized by like-minded
staff. The current and former employees say the engineers' work
boycott was a catalyst for larger protests that convulsed the
company's Mountain View, California, campus and ultimately
forced executives to let a lucrative Pentagon contract called
Project Maven expire without renewal. They declined to name the
engineers and requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.
- - -
One of the side-effects of cultivating an ethical corporate culture, is
that you tend to attract ethical employees -- which isn't always
"convenient" down the line.
--Lauren--
Lauren
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Dave Farber
2018-06-24 02:01:10 UTC
Permalink
Keio University Distinguished Professor
Tokyo Japan Cell +81 ‭‭70 4490 7275‬‬
Date: June 24, 2018 at 10:39:15 GMT+9
Subject: Re: [IP] Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
This reads a little weird. In that world (my former world), an "air gap" is essentially the act of not connecting two systems.
I left a bit after the Intelligence Community started to elevate "open source intelligence" as a thing, hence wanted much more ingestion of outside stuff, and there was a lot of focus on things like A/B switches, where an analyst could have a classified network connection to their desktop, alongside an unclassified one, and manually switch from one to the other, but you'd have to purge the workstation's memory before going from the classified to the unclassified connection.
Lots of attention paid also (then and certainly now) to "cross-domain" solutions, for moving information from a system at one level of classification, to another at a different one. Less of a problem bringing less sensitive information into a more sensitive system (down to, say, writing a diskette on your workstation connected to the Internet, walking it across the "air gap" via "sneaker net," flipping the write-protect tab, and reading it on your classified workstation); far greater difficulties in going the other direction, and getting anyone to sign off on a solution that could automatically screen information for release.
So something dubbed an "air gap" technology is puzzling...
Related, there was an interesting SBIR topic this past fall: the Air Force was looking for solutions to more cheaply digitize tons of paper whose contents would need to be reviewed for potential declassification and release: https://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/1319143
I know of a clever hack to address a lot of this, piggybacking on an existing company in the (unclassified, not working with the IC) space, and may get around to pitching it some day.
Ross
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
Albany, CA
Post by Dave Farber
Keio University Distinguished Professor
Tokyo Japan Cell +81 ‭‭70 4490 7275‬‬
Date: June 24, 2018 at 00:05:46 GMT+9
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/google-engineers-refused-to-build-security-tool-to-win-military-contracts
Earlier this year, a group of influential software engineers in
Google's cloud division surprised their superiors by refusing to
work on a cutting-edge security feature. Known as "air gap," the
technology would have helped Google win sensitive military
contracts.
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