Marine General Joseph Dunford, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had a few words about the recent happenings over at Google. Over the year, Google has been taking a step away from the U.S. military in a number of ways. Google was once in the running for a $10 billion dollar cloud computing contract alongside Microsoft and Amazon, but eventually dropped out of the field. Google also decided to not review the contract on the defense program known as Project Maven. Much of this was due to many Google employees being vehemently against Google technology being involved in warfare.
Where General Dunford’s vocal disapproval, as well as huge amounts of backlash from other tech companies, human rights activists, and the general public comes from is Google’s decision to create censored technology in compliance with Chinese law in order to break into the Chinese market. The project, called Dragonfly, has not been well received, and many are demanding that it be cancelled. Many find it wrong that Google is against working with the U.S. military due to ethical conflicts, yet has no problem engaging in creator censored technology in China, a country with a well-documented history of censorship and human rights violations.
General Dunford had this to say: “This is not about doing something that’s unethical, illegal or immoral. This is about ensuring that we collectively can defend the values for which we stand. I have a hard time with companies that are working very hard to engage in the market inside China then don’t want to work with the U.S. military. We are the good guys.”
It would appear that pro-Dragonfly Google employees are viewing the benefits purely from a bottom line standpoint. Google is largely a non-presence in the Chinese market, and they believe that Dragonfly will help them crack into it in a big way. However, this decision may be a near-sighted one that turns out to be a big mistake.
