One of my least favorite phrases in history is geopolitical ouroboros – everyone was enabling everyone else in a circle that eventually came back to bite them all.
Specifically American pursuit of short-term profits and tactical advantages created strategic nightmares that lasted decades.
Massive federal funding to develop radar technology in WWII, which birthed Silicon Valley, is a perfect analogy of how to understand the latest news about surveillance technology transfer to China: Americans seem to literally arm their future enemies with the tools to attack allies and even themselves.
The system apparently continues to run on a fundamentally compromised culture where national security product engineers aren’t measured on safety but instead how insulated they can become from dangerous consequences of their own extreme isolation and wealth; the Stanford recruitment system seems tuned to artificially transfer costs using a “break things for someone else to clean up” mindset.
Historians Produce Pattern Recognition
The Associated Press investigation into Silicon Valley’s role in building China’s surveillance state reads like an old 1940s playbook. The birth of Silicon Valley was unlimited federal funding to develop radar technology for Allied forces. Eventually the results threatened American planes over Korea in a devastating turnabout. The cultural shock resuled in a “Top Gun” project that only escalated the cycles. This context matters greatly when considering tech giants like IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Intel spending over two decades essentially building the world’s most sophisticated digital prisons and handing the keys to America’s most obvious geopolitical rival.
The scale of stupidity is sobering. American companies sold billions of dollars in surveillance technology to Chinese police and government agencies, as if emboldened by repeated Congressional warnings that these tools were being used to crush dissent and target minorities.
Can you imagine a CEO at a tech firm giving an executive team presentation that “these elected politicians are telling us if we get rich helping China we also can destroy democracy and instrument racism globally, hell yeah!”
As one public example, researchers exposed an unauthenticated MongoDB instance in China was “regularly being updated” with nearly 7 million GPS coordinates every 24 hours. It was the surveillance backend for cameras in mosques, hotels, police stations, internet cafés, and restaurants. You know, everywhere a certain ethnic group were being monitored… without basic database authentication enabled.
It was during this context the CEO allegedly told the company “our tech doesn’t matter, I don’t care if we were making dishwashers, I would still sell the shit out of it.”
That’s perhaps how to think about IBM working directly with Chinese defense contractors to build national intelligence systems, not unlike the $1 billion/year operation IGLOO WHITE of 1968 for the Vietnam War. And consider Nvidia and Intel have partnered with China’s biggest surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to camera networks. Dell, HP, and Microsoft likewise provided the software backbone that powers systems tracking tens of millions of people or more.
Moral Relativism
What makes this particularly galling is the moral hypocrisy being baked into deals. We know from history how amoral technology transfer cycles work. Take the Israel-South Africa nuclear partnership of the 1970s and 1980s. I mean Holocaust survivors literally worked with a regime led by former Nazi sympathizers, sharing nuclear technology in exchange for uranium and testing facilities. That same South African regime then used related missile technology to arm Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with billions of dollars in weapons.
The stupid result?
Iraqi missiles were fired at Israeli cities during the Gulf War with components allegedly derived from Israeli collaborations. American companies had enabled South Africa’s missile program through deliberate sanctions-busting, creating a circular nightmare where everyone was simultaneously arming and being threatened by everyone else.
Mirrors Made in China
The China surveillance story follows this old arms deal pattern, just with digital rather than kinetic weapons. American tech companies built the technological foundation for what became a system that:
- Tracks tens of thousands of political dissidents, restricting their movement and preemptively detaining them, just like President Nixon wanted in America
- Powered the mass detention of over a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang
- Created “predictive policing” systems that flag people for crimes they haven’t committed
- Established the world’s most comprehensive digital surveillance apparatus
And now?
China has become what some are calling the “surveillance superpower,” selling refined versions of American-developed technologies to Iran, Russia, and other adversaries. It reminds me of President Reagan removing solar technology from the White House and giving it to China, which now dominates the global industry that President Carter accurately predicted.
Reagan eliminated tax credits and federal support for renewable energy that Carter had established, making it economically impossible for American solar companies to compete domestically. This forced them to either die or move manufacturing to China where costs were viable.
In other words, Chinese innovations in solar powered surveillance systems are being deployed domestically now in the United States for “predictive” political detention and worse, as a result of extremist domestic political strategy.
Silicon Valley Blindness
Tech companies consistently claim they only care about the dollars and aren’t responsible for how products are used. However, internal marketing materials show this is disingenuous at best and they care, in the wrong way.
Dell boasted about helping Chinese internet police “crack down on rumormongers.” Seagate marketed hard drives “tailor made” for Chinese police to “control key persons.” IBM, Cisco, and others directly pitched their technology using specific political oppression terminology about “stability maintenance” and controlling “abnormal gatherings.”
This wasn’t accidental dual-use technology marketing it was deliberate and tailored sales pitches to attract authoritarian buyers, often in direct violation of the spirit if not the letter of export controls.
Inevitable Blowback
Historians see the patterns that predict where this leads. Just as radar technology proliferated globally and eventually threatened its creators, surveillance technology is already boomeranging back to its source. China’s refined surveillance capabilities are being used for espionage against American targets. The “predictive policing” concepts pioneered for China are now being deployed against American citizens. Technologies sold to track Uyghurs are being adapted to monitor other populations worldwide.
The geopolitical ouroboros completes its circle once again: American companies created the tools, sold them to a rival power, watched that power refine and weaponize them, and now face the consequences as those same technologies are deployed against supposed American democratic interests and values.
A Culture of Cooked Cage Matches
Here’s the real tragedy of fight club fetishism: there’s little evidence anyone in the tech industry cared when Nixon announced he would pivot the flawed Igloo White surveillance technology of the Vietnam War into domestic use. How many Americans recall how wartime sensors were placed under the White House lawn and in the yards of President Nixon’s other homes in San Clemente, California, and Key Biscayne, Florida?
Nixon had believed so strongly in the new surveillance technology, despite it failing miserably in the field, that he had the same sensors deployed to his lawns and the border with Mexico complete with drones flying overhead.
The engineers who built billion-dollar-a-year surveillance systems in the 1960s were building a money hungry engineering culture. The same culture that today measures success in Silicon Valley’s nearly $1.1 trillion in aggregate household wealth, where less than 1% of the Valley’s population held 36% of the wealth. A culture measured in SF mansions valued at tens of millions, snow parties at Tahoe chalets, and yachts racing across the Pacific.
At their Carmel compound, Palantir execs threw weddings, AI founders did cold plunges, and a collector played host to generations of tech’s war-builders. The same moral detachment that allowed decades of engineers to shrug at their technology being turned on American protesters to deny Civil Rights now drives AI researchers to build surveillance systems for authoritarian regimes while retreating to $30 million-$50 million mansions in gated communities.
The problem expands beyond corporate structure or regulatory capture into a culture that sells out the technical-minded while insulating them from the consequences of their work through payouts. A father and son recently drove to the Mojave Desert in their airstream trailer to watch the Sequoia-backed startup Mach Industries test new high-tech missiles in the sweltering sands. It’s all just tinker toys for big booms, divorced from human consequences by layers of stock options and luxury real estate.
When I used to watch howitzers practice on retired machinery down range, I never thought decades later it would be something used for corporate meetups around beers and campfires.
Breaking Cycles of Detachment
The Silicon Valley surveillance subculture is of course corporate greed and regulatory failure, yet it’s also about a fundamental cultural inability to learn from history.
The same shortsighted thinking that led to nuclear proliferation, missile technology transfers, and arms dealing debacles has now been applied to the digital realm, but this time with a culture that’s even more divorced from consequences.
Despite being a high-priced technological failure for the US military, Igloo White was pivoted into the bedrock of border surveillance that’s ongoing today. The engineers who built were simply building expensive technology they hoped would make them wealthy, measured by their ability to afford 13,421-square-foot mansions with six bedrooms and guest cottages.
The pattern is depressingly familiar: develop technology for security purposes, sell it to the highest bidder regardless of consequences, use the profits to insulate yourself from those consequences, express shock when it’s used against you, then repeat the cycle by pitching sales for the next generation of weapons.
Until we acknowledge surveillance technology is like weapons, and that the culture building it is fundamentally compromised by incentives misaligned, we’ll keep feeding this ouroboros. The radar engineers of WWII probably never calculated themselves in the formula that would threaten Allied aircraft. Today’s AI researchers, safely ensconced in their Atherton compounds, should take note: the surveillance state they’re building, will be monitoring them tomorrow, and sending their family into detention the day after.
“Everything was built on American tech,” said Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations who studied the use of U.S. tech by Chinese police. “China’s capability was close to zero.”
Imagine reading that the Taliban, after being empowered and armed by the U.S. military, are shooting down American military aircraft. Oh, wait…
But will they ever care as their plumped stock options are vesting and the Tahoe chalet reports a bluebird chowder day?