This is a good article. I disagree with its implications. I would agree that the average us citizen is much too far removed from the defense industrial complex and that creates these situations where a Google engineer (not necessarily this guy) is perfectly willing to help destroy American society with his advertising tech but balks at automating image tagging for the dod's big data lake because would rather have another 9/11 than be responsible for a false positive in the ME.
How is cell phone tracking going to prevent another 9/11? And looking at the historical track record, the DoD has done a lot of killing and very little 9/11 prevention in the past 24 years.
The heuristic is that DoD doesn’t do counterterrorism. I don’t expect DoD to prevent terror attacks just like I don’t expect the FBI to blow up bunkers in Iran. We don’t need numbers to be able to confidently estimate that the number of Iranian bunkers blown up by the FBI is approximately zero.
