Government and Tech/Semi Sector Collide

[Arthur Hanson]

We are currently witnessing the collision between the tech sector and the government colliding with possible disastrous results. The tech sector is dynamic, flexible and fast moving while looking forward. Our government is firmly rooted in the past as the military is looking at fighting the last war and not the war of the future. Osama Bin Laden invented the decentralized, autonomous stateless military with the stated aim of winning either militarily or economically. Even though he is now dead Al Qaeda is winning on both counts. Our military has shown they don't know how to fight a conceptual strategic war with no state and with a flexible and autonomous command structure. This is what John McAfee clearly stated on CNBC about our ability to fight a cyber war. Our government has a rigid labor structure with a powerful unions/professional societies influence that has given us an ineffective, inefficient and wasteful structure that squanders our human and financial resources in almost every thing it touches from education, medical, infrastructure and even war, especially cyber war. Many of the people we need to fight future cyber wars don't want to work for the government and the government doesn't want them and has been demonstrated repeatedly. As John McAfee has stated, we are almost totally unprepared for a cyber war that could yield significant destruction in the matter of just a few days. Sadly just like Al Qaeda has had and currently has autonomous units operating in the US, so have many powers of many types that have code ready and some already installed just waiting to be activated and much being currently used to try and steal our future. Our best defense is a vibrant flexible forward looking cost and time efficient ongoing educational system. Sadly government culture, unions and professional organizations have given us primary and secondary education that rates highest in cost and 35th in quality with a college system that is inefficient, costly and time consuming. An educated, insightful education is the key to our future for only an educated population can even see the challenges and seek creative, cost and time effective solutions. Our justice system has also failed making a crime of human nature largely enforced against the poor giving us the largest, most expensive imprisoned population on earth. This is just not my view, but 75% of the American people who feel our government is corrupt (Gallup poll 9/15) and increasingly feel the government no longer serves them, but preys upon them.

It is now up to the educated, insightful and flexible people of which the SemiWiki community is a part, to be part of the solution. People like Tim Cook and John McAfee although very different, both represent not only seeing the problem, but providing solutions. SemiWiki itself is becoming one of set of powerful educational tools in its own right that I have no doubt will grow, evolve and flex with the fast advancing, changing times. Semi/mems technologies and the culture that goes with them must play a key part in building the future if we are to have one of promise.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/19/john-mcafee-fbi-should-let-me-hack-iphone.html