Those are my classmates! I took the Hacking for Defense class with them this past Spring at Stanford. I found that fundamentally the class trains students to apply the iterative, quick-moving, need-based approach to product development often found in startups to military problems that have traditionally had lots of bureaucratic overhead. We were exposed to a ton of different people through our interviews and were constantly asked to create and improve our minimum viable product as we learned more about our problem space. Overall, I would highly recommend the class.
Israel already does this, both offense and defense. They have university initiatives that teach "cyber" (I hate that term).
It would probably be difficult to get DoD brass to care about this. They're used to their defense products being physical items (warheads, tanks, drones, etc) that are harder to steal. Sure, you can steal the schematics and such, but then you can track purchases of restricted components and guess who's building what.
With software, the schematic/code is the weapon. You don't really have to put it together, but perhaps do some poking around to understand it. This is why it's so devastating when the NSA's arsenal gets scooped up by foreign belligerents.
I think we are in the process of re-appropriating the word actually. One of my best purchases this year was a roll of yellow tape with 'cyber' printed in black. It presumably provides great cyber defense if one covers a computer with it. And I think that is fantastic social commentary on the word.
While I agree that this is the way that the DoD will probably look at this program, the better way would be to invest in educating people and spectacular problem solvers and looking at the software as a secondary benefit.
Focusing on a piece of software will get you a piece of software.
Focusing on programmers for the DoD, starting at the middle school or high school level, with broadly available classes and moving into scholarships at the college level will get you people who can continually solve the problems at hand and write the necessary software.
The difference is, you go to serve in intelligence first, and go to uni afterwards. Half of my junior colleagues in Israeli IT were kids in their early 20s, just out of 8200, and planning to get into uni a bit later.
Still to be charged at the full rate to the student, of course. This is just to get them started.
I have to say, out of all the things the DoD pays for with its massive budget, things like paying the NFL to fly F16s over stadiums, or TV ads, or sponsoring college courses are what really grinds my gears.
>things like paying the NFL to fly F16s over stadiums
Actually those are training flights that pilots volunteer to move to coincide with the event. The net cost to the tax payer is zero as those flights would of simply happened on another day. If you have an event you can request a fly over yourself.
I have no problem with them sponsoring college courses. Nobody is forcing anybody to take those courses, and if a particular subject domain is important for national defense purposes, it makes sense for the military to subsidize its study.
A big theme in the class was the importance of understanding the real experiences of potential beneficiaries. The specific team in the picture wanted to understand what it was like to be in SEAL training since their project specifically dealt with that problem area.
I'm guessing a photo op? I mean, if they were using the systems they were building (or building replacements for) in that training exercise, there could be some value. It's hard to build something well if you've never been a user or worked closely with the user to gather feedback.
Hacking for defense? Is that like how the Department of Defense is now more like the Department of War? Will "preemptive hacking" happen a lot, too?
EDIT: Also, this sounds a lot like propaganda to me:
"Don't worry - just because we hack into other nations, doesn't mean we are the bad guys. We're the good guys hacking for our preemptive defense!"
The US gov has had a hard time trying to lure talent for the NSA and such after the Snowden leaks (and for good reason, people finally learned the truth about what they were actually doing), so now they're trying to turn this on its head and trick young people who are already interested in hacking to work for the government "for a good purpose". And then they can pick the really good ones and try to convince them to actually do some of the more obviously nasty and morally questionable stuff.
I can't say it's a terrible plan, but to me the motives seem quite obviously. For the more impressionable 18 year olds, perhaps they won't be, unfortunately.
I'd like to politely disagree. I took the Hacking for Defense class at my school and had a completely different experience from the one you worry about. I think the most important misunderstanding to clear up is that the hacking in the class is not about hacking in the NSA/cybersecurity sense but rather the process of building something. Just like at a hackathon, students aren't all trying to hack the school's wifi etc., this class is about using a different approach to tackling military problems.
I've attached a link to our class website which contains a superset of the problems that my classmates and I tackled throughout the quarter. Hopefully you'll find it informative.
> this class is about using a different approach to tackling military problems.
The real problem is the amount of money and human life that are squandered on perceived "military problems" in the US. There are plenty of other hackathons to go to, IMO attending these events and accepting their material support is legitimizing US Department of Defense sponsored terrorism.
This is exactly what is going on. This is a thinly veiled propaganda/recruitment effort trying to capitalize on students' new-found, Mr. Robot-driven curiosity regarding "hacking".
To be clear, "hacking" in this context doesn't mean breaking into other people's computer systems. It means solving a problem using technology in a quick, iterative manner.
This is not new: the mission of the DoD (and mostly all agencies) is to protect the interests of the US, morality aside. This includes questionable stuff like foreign industrial espionage, media manipulation/propaganda, and even false flags operations (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods).
