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0 pointsfiatmoney13y ago0 comments

Realizing that someone might have sympathies towards people they worked with in the past, and might look forward to future employment with them, and that this might affect their decisionmaking when they're asked to do something ethically borderline, is a far cry from "Area 51".

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4 comments · 1 top-level

tptacek13y ago· 3 in thread

Don't let me get in the way of you casting aspersions on people you've never met and know basically nothing about. I concede the high ground to you.

_delirium13y ago

Are you at all worried about a revolving door between the defense/security bureaucracy and industry, the way someone like Eisenhower was? Or is that a non-issue?

That's the kind of discussion I'd rather have anyway. I don't have any particular reason to believe any specific person is compromised or dishonest. But I am skeptical of the stability and reliability of an employment structure that has regular back-and-forth personnel moves between the private sector and the state-security sector.

If I had to pick specific places to start, I'll admit, ex-Facebook staff would be much lower on my list than a whole host of private-sector (tempted to say "nominally private-sector") defense contractors.

dfc13y ago

Whenever I read a discussion about "the revolving door problem" I never see any serious discussion of an alternative. Would you prefer an enormous monoculture inside of the government because they cannot hire people from the private sector? Any system that enforced a waiting period between government IT job to private sector IT job would essentially end someone's career.

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rayiner13y ago

In the grand scheme of things, you've got three crappy choices:

1) No regulation. I.e. the moneyed corporations do whatever they want.

2) Regulation, staffed by professional bureaucrats. Less conflict of interest, but that results in a bureaucracy that has no idea what industry needs. This describes a lot of European countries before the liberalizations of the 1980's and 1990's.

3) Regulation, staffed by people from industry. Creates conflicts of interest, but you have people who actually know what they're doing.

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