SigINT10: Hackers in Government
By Nick Farr (@Nickf4rr)
Nick’s talk is about the fundamental and radical shift that would happen if one day, all of a sudden, hackers in stead of politicians ran politics.
There are a few assumptions that are the basis for his talk:
- Government is a complex discrete system led by politicians who guide bureaucrats
- Hackers have a wide range of political beliefs
- Critique of current political state
- NOT a “HOWTO” for hacker government
- NOT a critique of hackers currently taking part in government
Politicians vs. hackers:
- How do I keep my job vs. How do I fix a broken system
- Experts in polite lies vs. experts in telling impolite truth
- Easily influenced by powerful interest vs. openly confront powerful interest
- Do not understand complex systems vs. intrinsically understand complex systems
- In some way a political system is like a large network. There are agencies that provide services, these services stick to protocols (laws), there is predictable resource allocations (budgets), there is some centralization and there is a high degree of interdependencies.
So what would the hackers do if they where all of a suddenly in charge?
They would state problems as they are, however unpleasant it may be and start to study the problems until it is well understood. They would have the imagination to come up with cretive solutions that address the root of the problem. Ultimately they would have the guts to implement these solutions even if these solutions may be “unpleasant”. Hackers seem to be immune to the kiss up/kick down paradigm.
Nick has showd us some examples. The first example is Defense Spending.
The largest discretionary budget in the US Federal Government is Defense. The largest portion of this spending is in highly complex technical weapons systems, which are never going to be used. This spending is useless because warfare has changed from the cold war symmetrical warfare and moved to asymmetrical decentralized guerilla warfare. Space exploration (e.g. the Apollo program) is still turning up value today, whereas if a bomb explodes its value is gone.
His second example is economics. The greatest period of economics growth in the us coincided with the most heavily graduated Income Tax system. The tax system in the US today seems to be geared towards letting the richest people the least percentage of taxes. Government borrowing is another area where hackers would tell inconvenient truths. Goverment are currently acting as teenagers with a credit card.
Climate change is the third example. Why are we subsidizing carbon heavy transport?