"Humanity: Where Conspiracies Come To Die"
by Alex Krainer
Excerpt: "Conspiracies do exist; they arise in pursuit of specific objectives. Usually, the greater the objective, the more people must be organized to carry out the plan. The organization will shape up in some form of command and control hierarchy. People at the top of that hierarchy, those who originated and planned the conspiracy are usually the only ones who know what the plan is about. Lower rungs of the hierarchy must include individuals who may not know what the plan is about, but whose competence and operational capabilities are essential to the plan's success. In addition to competence however, these individuals must be willing to carry out the tasks necessary for the plan's execution. To make sure that they’re willing, conspirators regularly deceive them.
Competence trumps obedience: But this is where conspiracies run into unpredictable headwinds and often fail. In my experience, the more capable an individual is, the more difficult it is to deceive them. They tend to be engaged in their occupations and have a good understanding of the purpose and importance of their work. They also tend to have a high degree of personal and professional integrity and usually care about the quality of their work. If they're asked to work toward potentially nefarious ends, they may refuse to carry out their tasks, perform them poorly, sabotage them or even quit their positions. It is often exactly the most capable individuals who have those choices because their service could be in high demand elsewhere.
Google’s Project Maven: For example, when the US Department of Defense launched its drone assassinations program under the Bush-Cheney administration, the pilots they trained did not like the idea of killing unknown people around the world for unknown reasons. The pilots started quitting in large numbers or reporting incapacity due to moral injury, conflict of conscience or depression. Their superiors tried simply commanding them to follow orders, but this couldn’t reverse their unwillingness. The DOD sought to overcome the problem by resorting to artificial intelligence (AI). In April 2017, Google launched "Project Maven," or Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT). The idea was to develop AI targeting software and replace the unwilling human pilots. But as it turned out, Google's engineers weren't keen on the idea of killing people either. Many were outraged and about a dozen of their top engineers quit.
In the process, they compiled a master document of personal accounts detailing their decisions to leave, prompting nearly 4,000 employees to sign a petition opposing the company's involvement in the program. The company management tried to salvage the project by claiming that their AI won't be used to actually kill anyone, but apparently this reassurance wasn't sufficient. In addition to the petition circulating inside Google, the Tech Workers Coalition launched a petition in April 2018 demanding that Google abandon its work on Maven and that other tech companies, including IBM and Amazon refuse to work with the US DOD: "We can no longer ignore our industry's and our technologies' harmful biases, large-scale breaches of trust, and lack of ethical safeguards. These are life and death stakes," the petition read. Who knew? It turns out that trust and ethical safeguards are important to people.
The brightest and the best leaving the NSA: The National Security Agency (NSA) was about to learn that same lesson. In a January 2, 2018 article, The Washington Post reported that "NSA is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy agency's leadership... Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists..." Apparently, WaPo wrote, "the potential impact on national security is significant." "Some synonym of the word 'EPIDEMIC' is the best way to describe it," said one Ellison Anne Williams, former senior researcher at the NSA: "The agency is losing an amazing amount of its strongest technical talent, and to lose your best and brightest staff is a huge hit." Some groups within the NSA have lost almost half of their staff, another former official stated.
It is important to recognize how real and how powerful dissent and noncompliance can be. Often, only a small handful of dissenters armed with nothing more than truth and courage, can bring down colossal conspiracies of the world’s most powerful people. Theranos was the perfect example of this."
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