The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

The post-Snowden opposition to cooperating with the military broke out anew in the early spring of 2018 on the Google campus, just blocks from the DIUx headquarters. News of Google’s plans to participate in “Project Maven,” a pilot Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence techniques to process “wide area motion imagery” that detects moving vehicles and moving weapons systems, sparked an internal uprising. As word spread through the company, thousands of Google’s employees signed a letter that opened with this declaration: “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.” The letter rejected the company’s assurances that its work was not helping the Pentagon “operate or fly drones” or launch weapons. Google employees rightly saw those assurances as a dodge—the project might not be aiding current weapons, but clearly the Pentagon intended for the results to be incorporated into future weapons.