Behind a lot of the technology we take for granted in our lives—the satellite mapping behind Google Maps, or the voice recognition software behind your iPhone’s Siri—lie not just inventive tech companies, but the sclerotic old federal government. Across the country, Washington funds a network of advanced—sometimes secret, often underappreciated—government laboratories dedicated to blue-sky, “what-the-hell” research at the frontiers of science and technology.
Delaney is part of a 27-person unit that comprises the Defense Digital Service, a sort of tech SWAT team within the Department of Defense. Engineers and data experts from across the country leave their jobs at companies like Netflix, IDEO, Palantir, and, yes, Dropbox and join DDS for tours of duty that typically last about two years. They spend that time revamping and often completely reinventing the “tools and practices that lag far behind private sector standards,” as the Pentagon itself puts it.
Orwell could not see that with the dawn of the Information Age several decades later, efficiency would become far less economically significant than innovation and adaptiveness. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and myriad other late-twentieth-century companies did not offer faster typewriters. They created entirely new products, such as handheld computers and applications for them.
A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable.
If President Trump’s rhetoric really is pushing companies to alter their practices, it wouldn’t be the first time he has used the bully pulpit to literally bully businesses into change. In that way, H-1B reform may be playing out in a way not unlike the deal president-elect Trump struck with Carrier, a manufacturer that was planning on shutting down an Indiana plant and moving its production to Mexico.
Over the past decade or more, autocratic regimes—and illiberal elected governments with authoritarian ambitions—have deterred independent reporting and online criticism through familiar tools like physical intimidation, censorship on moral or religious grounds, and prosecution under draconian laws on defamation or national security.
Cyber capabilities cannot be detached from other domains of warfare, such as electromagnetic, air, land, sea, and space. The future holds two potential battlefields that overlap: one fought between high-tech adversary militaries, and another, between highly specialised military units and insurgent forces in population-dense urban environments. In both situations, cyber capabilities must be integrated into all other domains of warfare.
Chinese enterprises are going global, venturing overseas to acquire foreign companies, know-how, and technologies. While most of these activities reflect simple business decisions, others carefully and deliberately advance China’s strategic interests, perhaps against the interests of its trading partners.
Especially with the recent violent attacks against a Sikh man in Washington, an Indian immigrant in South Carolina, and two Indian engineers in Kansas, Indian Americans have found themselves jolted out of this comfortable liminal space.
China’s role and influence in global markets is a big lure to Saudi Arabia. It is the world’s largest energy consumer and the second-biggest importer of crude, after the U.S. Just like the Japanese, China is driven by its need to secure sources of energy. That gives Saudi Arabia an opportunity to solidify its market presence in Asia amid rising competition from Russia.
