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re In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2018 13:44:16 +0900
Begin forwarded message:
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com> Date: October 15, 2018 13:40:51 JST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] re In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI Please don't try the Trump garbage on me. I have enormous respect for the military. And among the many military folks I know, there is widespread disgust with the kinds of missions to which they're put, how they're so often treated as disposable meat to put pushed into a grinder for political purposes. JEDI is specifically described as an effort to "increase lethality." Last time I looked it up, lethality meant death, and killing human beings on purpose is murder. JEDI is a murder machine. Now, there's a separate argument about when murder is justified in national defense arenas. But you're talking to someone from the Vietnam War era who knew many military who came back with their lives ruined and who were treated atrociously by our own government. The military technology argument almost always reads along the lines of: "With this technology we can make individual soldiers more effective and save more of their lives." The problem is that these systems inevitably entice civilian leadership (that is, the politicos) into more and more unwise military ventures, which often end up killing even more of our fine military volunteers than before. The underlying problem we're dealing with here is that the U.S. military is attempting to expand their traditional military-industrial complex from the traditional defense contractors -- whose employees know full well what they're signing up for when they join -- to firms like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft -- whose employees we can bet by and large did not sign on expecting their code to be used to help kill people, even in ostensibly defensive postures. This is at the heart of the current rebellion in these spheres inside these companies. --Lauren--On 10/15 13:11, Dave Farber wrote: Begin forwarded message:From: Sidney Karin <skarin () ucsd edu> Date: October 15, 2018 12:29:18 JST To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI Dave, (For IP if you choose.) The U.S. Military is not a murder machine. Lauren’s comment is highly insulting to a very large number of people and is way out of line. Of course Lauren is on the sidelines. The Microsoft employees are in the game, their position is at least equally insulting, to the military and to the nation. …….Sid P.S. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the U.S. (or any other) military, however I have consulted to some units of the U.S. military.On Oct 14, 2018, at 5:45 PM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:Begin forwarded message: From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com> Subject: [ NNSquad ] In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI Date: October 15, 2018 0:57:14 JST To: nnsquad () nnsquad org In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/10/14/1359239/in-an-open-letter-microsoft-employees-urge-the-company-to-not-bid-on-the-us-militarys-project-jedi On Tuesday, Microsoft expressed its intent to bid on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract -- a contract that represents a $10 billion project to build cloud services for the Department of Defense. The contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what technologies Microsoft would be building for the Department of Defense. At an industry day for JEDI, DoD Chief Management Officer John H. Gibson II explained the program's impact, saying, "We need to be very clear. This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our department." - - - When you've been urging your employees to be ethical, it can be tricky to get them working on murder machines.Archives | Modify Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sidney Karin Ph.D., P.E. skarin () ucsd edu 858-534-5075 Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Director Emeritus, San Diego Supercomputer Center University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0505-------------------------------------------
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Current thread:
- re In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI Dave Farber (Oct 14)
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- re In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI Dave Farber (Oct 14)
- re In an Open Letter, Microsoft Employees Urge the Company To Not Bid on the US Military's Project JEDI Dave Farber (Oct 15)