WASHINGTON — With malware joining missiles among the threats to America’s security, leading technology innovators such as Apple and Google are being recruited to join traditional defense contractors on the frontlines.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is visiting Silicon Valley on Friday as part of a continuing effort to bridge the divide between the Pentagon and a tech community wary of excessive surveillance and privacy violations.
Carter plans to meet with executives of LinkedIn Corp. and initiate an official Defense Department page on the professional networking website, as well as addressing a technology community audience, according to a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis.
Today’s top defense challenges include U.S. computer-network vulnerabilities exposed by foreign hacking, the development of unbreakable encryption, the evolution of information-age warfare and the skilled exploitation of social-media platforms by Islamic State and other extremist groups.
Yet the days are gone when government spending fueled technological innovations that benefited both the Pentagon and defense contractors.
Technology has “really reversed from the old days,” from “trickling down from the warlords to bubbling up from the 15- year-olds,” said Paul Saffo, a consulting associate professor at Stanford University.
Carter seeks to bring together traditional aerospace and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing and technology companies because “the U.S. military cannot hope to regain its technological superiority without this happening,” said MacKenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.
Silicon Valley innovators, venture capitalists and the defense industry will all be watching for signs during Carter’s California visit that he and company executives can get “beyond the ‘meet and greet’ phase and begin discussions about what needs to change for more commercial technology company participation in defense,” said Byron Callan, a defense analyst with Capital Alpha Partners in Washington.
Carter is a natural emissary to Silicon Valley. His background as a physicist makes him the first scientist since Harold Brown in the late 1970s to serve as defense chief.
“He talks their talk, he understands a lot of their issues and he’s trying to forge a stronger relationship with the tech community,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters Tuesday.
But the federal government’s relationship with Silicon Valley is complicated by disputes over privacy and encryption, and particularly by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. government surveillance activities.
“They were completely irate at the fact that the government was siphoning off data from data centers that are being run by the big tech companies,” said Al Hilwa, an analyst at the research firm IDC.
The FBI, NSA and other national security agencies are matching Carter’s outreach efforts. They’re looking to Silicon Valley for help countering cyberthreats and adapting new commercial technology for defense applications — and looking for potential employees with advanced computer knowledge.
