Talk:Anduril Industries

Page Cleanup

It looks like this draft page has gotten quite long in the last year since it was rejected for being too short. There is no shortage of news about Anduril now, but still no public Wikipedia page. In order to create something which would be reasonable to publish, I will be moving many standalone quotes and references from the main page to the talk page, so that they will be available for people to re-insert properly over time. Thanks. Zerim (talk) 17:45, 14 May 2022 (UTC) Also, if any errors (e.g. regarding reference links) are found from this effort, please reference the page as it existed before my edits. Zerim (talk) 18:25, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Background

"For the past five years, top military brass and successive secretaries of defense have coveted the tech industry’s software skills and tried to lure companies more aligned with Silicon Valley than the Capital Beltway."

"Kevin Ryan, a retired brigadier general and a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says the military is interested in small drones, because they can gather the same intelligence as a satellite or a large, conventional drone more cheaply, quickly, and independently. However, Ryan, who previously worked at iRobot, a company that used to make military systems as well as robot vacuum cleaners, says it remains unclear just how intelligent and how useful such systems will actually be. “Everybody understands that AI is gonna be able to do these fantastic things down the road, Ryan says. “What we don't know is how soon.”"

The Pentagon has also "poured resources into new programs, creating opportunities for West Coast technology companies that don’t usually do business with the government. Anduril is trying to break into a market that is dominated by a handful of “traditional” manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Those companies have dominated the U.S. military supply chain for close to a century by churning out expensive jets, submarines, missiles and other hardware while locked into decades-long program deals. But over the past decade, the Pentagon has expressed a desire to work more closely with Silicon Valley’s commercial-facing tech companies, which lead the country’s development of artificial intelligence. Anduril’s military work so far appears to be relatively small and limited to a handful of software-intensive programs. The federal spending database USASpending.gov shows roughly $28 million in contract awards for Anduril, a pittance for all but the smallest defense contractors. The database does not include classified contracts, however."

"Silicon Valley has a long history of supplying the Pentagon, but the two have drifted apart over the past 50 years. Today the Department of Defense relies mostly on a few traditional suppliers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. It’s had little use for startups. Commercial tech companies haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about government work, either, and the antipathy has increased since the election of Donald Trump." (Employee protests at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir for employers to cancel military contracts, arguing that "technologists shouldn't build products without regard for the way they're used")

"The military and intelligence communities have a long history with research labs and tech companies in Silicon Valley. ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, was funded by the Defense Department. David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, served as deputy secretary of defense under President Richard Nixon. Oracle, one of the biggest software companies, got its start writing computer code for the Central Intelligence Agency. But the idea of autonomous weapons has been controversial in Silicon Valley, and in recent years some in the tech industry have developed a new distrust of government work. That distrust swelled in 2013 when the former defense contractor Edward J. Snowden leaked documents that revealed the breadth of spying on Americans by intelligence services, including monitoring the users of large internet companies. In 2018, Google pulled out of a Defense Department effort to develop artificial intelligence technology after sustained protests from company workers. Parts of the Valley firmly draw the line at weaponization of their creations... But a growing array of venture capital firms see things differently. Anduril is backed by several notable ones, including Founders Fund, created by the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Andreessen Horowitz; and General Catalyst."

"In the drone business, however, [Luckey] is not alone. A host of start-ups are building similar technology for the military. Shield AI, founded by a former member of the Navy SEALs, is in San Diego, not far from Anduril. Teal Drones, whose founder emerged from Mr. Thiel’s internship program, is in Salt Lake City. The Defense Department is hungry for small drones that will track objects and fly into buildings, combat zones and other dangerous areas with little help from remote pilots."

"The timing of Anduril’s founding was fortuitous in many ways. Under the Obama administration, the government had begun massive efforts to swiftly incorporate commercial technology into its security efforts." DOD and DHS opened Silicon Valley offices in 2015; "In 2017, as part of an initiative that had begun the previous year, the Defense Department also unveiled the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, known as Project Maven, to harness the latest artificial intelligence research into battlefield technology, starting with a project to improve image recognition for drones operating in the Middle East." The Intercept says this environment "provided a unique entry point for Anduril"; Luckey credits people like Raj Shah for enabling commercial/military relations like this

"In their opposition to Trump’s physical border barrier, many Democrats have promoted “smart” border technology as a more effective and cheaper alternative to the $15 billion concrete-and-steel version Trump is racing to install and which he is promoting on the campaign trail."

"From the beginning of Trump’s presidency, CBP officials embraced, and modified, his original vision for a Great Wall-style edifice along the border, resulting in the see-through steel bollard design now under construction. CBP officials say the barrier is the physical anchor of a broader “wall system” that includes layers of surveillance technology, including cameras and sensors. The Anduril system can be deployed in steep, mountainous areas where barrier construction is not feasible, or as a secondary layer with a panoramic view of new border fence... CBP officials for years have been eager to develop more-advanced surveillance systems, and they credit higher interdiction rates in recent years with improvements in their detection abilities, or “situational awareness.”"

"Large physical barriers are considered most effective in more urban areas of the border, where agents have less time to interdict someone and prevent them from getting into a vehicle. In more remote areas where agents are sparse, smugglers and border crossers can breach or climb over barriers to advance northward, but the nearest road may be several miles away, giving Border Patrol a time advantage. Their biggest challenge is detection." [Boeing contract cancellation] "CBP officials say the government pulled the plug amid frustrations that agents were flooded with raw data and sensor input that didn’t mesh with their existing enforcement tools and techniques."

"“Virtual walls” or “smart walls” along the southwest border are increasingly being billed as an alternative to the proposed concrete and steel barriers that have so sharply divided public opinion. An electronic fence is not about preventing intrusion as much as it is about detecting intrusions and then intercepting them. While even the strongest proponents for such a technological solution admit physical barriers are likely best in urban areas such as San Diego and El Paso, they see a virtual wall as a cheaper and more effective way to police much of the rest of the 2,000-mile southwest border."

• "The Trump administration has argued that the border wall is a necessary deterrent to drug smugglers and immigrants seeking to enter the country unlawfully. It says unchecked immigration is a national security crisis, and one that needs to be addressed. Critics, meanwhile, argue that the wall is a wildly expensive, ineffective, and misdirected effort. The actual crisis, they say, is a humanitarian one worsened by Trump’s restrictive immigration policies — about refugees seeking lawful entry into the US to flee violence and poverty in their home countries."

"An electronic fence is not a new idea. It is one that the federal government has actually failed to implement widescale at least three times in the past few decades. From 1997 to 2005, the government spent about $429 million on two border technology programs deemed unsuccessful, according to congressional reports. The third, most recent iteration was known as SBInet, a massive project started in 2006. Boeing was contracted to build a network of surveillance towers and ground sensors that would detect intrusions and relay the information back to command posts where agents would decide how to react. It was rolled out first along the Arizona border, but expansion was halted in 2010 due to serious concerns with its feasibility. The Government Accountability Office faulted SBInet for being poorly managed, overrun with costs and missed deadlines. The technology was also troubled, pulled off the shelves rather than custom-designed for the border environment and job at hand. The program was killed in 2011, at a price tag of more than $1 billion. “I terminated it when I was commissioner. It was a failure,” Alan Bersin recalled in an interview last week with the Union-Tribune. Bersin, a former U.S. attorney in San Diego, served as a so-called “border czar” under two presidents and was appointed CBP commissioner from 2010 to 2011. Part of the problem, Bersin said, was pursuing a one-size-fits-all approach to the border. “Instead of one technology system borderwide, we now follow a system customized to the particular conditions on the border,” Bersin said. “The setting up of an electronic fence in the Sonoran Arizona desert is far different than doing so around San Diego’s urban area.”"

"The towers are part of a web of surveillance that blankets the frontier with Mexico, a decades-old U.S. government effort to fortify the southern border whose origins can be traced to the jungles of Vietnam... This matrix of technology stretches the border from California to Texas as part of a U.S. attempt to curb illegal immigration... The steady march toward a smart border has lavished private companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts and earned the support of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Among those at the forefront of the “smart” approach to border policing is President Joe Biden, who, despite ceasing funding for Donald Trump’s physical border wall in his administration’s proposed 2022 budget, is asking for more than $1 billion in funding for “border infrastructure” and “investments in modern border security technology and assets.”"

• The U.S. government’s use of surveillance technology in the border zone has military roots. As Boyce, whose research focuses on the evolution of U.S. border enforcement strategy, explained, the system’s origins can be traced back to technological tools, including acoustic and heat sensors, used during the Vietnam War to track the Viet Cong.
• After the war ended in 1975, the government installed 177 of the Pentagon’s Vietnam-era ground sensors along the U.S.-Mexico border, laying the foundation for “the germinal elements of what’s become a virtual fence,” he said. By 2012, the number of ground sensors had expanded to 12,000 across the southern border. Today, there are some 20,000 ground sensors across the southwest border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
• The investment in smart border technology continued under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and accelerated under Bill Clinton. In the early stages of Clinton’s presidency, the government launched an automated biometric identification system that collected migrants’ fingerprints, photographs, biographical data, and arrest records. Beginning in 1997, two surveillance programs were rolled out that placed cameras and ground sensors in urban border crossings in San Diego, Arizona, and Texas.
• The U.S. has since expanded its efforts to monitor the border. From 2006 to 2011, the government appropriated roughly $1.5 billion to establish a surveillance system made up of towers and ground sensors. The Department of Homeland Security nixed the program in 2011, pointing to its cost and problems with the technology, including ground sensors unable to distinguish between the footsteps of animals and humans. But just a few years later in 2014, the Obama administration awarded the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems — which built smart wall systems in Gaza and the West Bank in 2002 — a $145 million contract with CBP to build a network of 50 surveillance towers across southern Arizona.
• The U.S. government has directed hundreds of millions of dollars into this project in the past few years alone. From 2017 to 2020, Congress appropriated more than $743 million to CBP to fund border security technology, according to a February 2021 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

"But proponents of renewed investment in tech at the border argue that technology has come a long way since the mid-2000s — particularly in AI-backed image detection. Tech companies are taking advantage of this political opportunity, saying that their products could be a game changer for border security... Because of the newness of some of these projects, relatively little about their scope is known. Their potential to expand depends in large part on political support — and funding — as well as their ability to prove their effectiveness over existing technologies."

"But while drones work well for targeted surveillance, they aren’t as well-suited to monitoring wide stretches of land for a long period of time. For that, Customs and Border Protection uses integrated fixed towers (IFTs). These are 80- to 140-feet-tall metal structures, similar to radio towers, laced with day and night sensors and radars. The most common type of IFT used can surveil up to a radius of around 6 miles from where they’re stationed. They’ve been deployed along remote sections of the southern border to fill in gaps of areas not regularly covered by agents. They work in concert with ground sensors and some other types of mobile and surveillance equipment."

History

"Over meals at the Canadian eco-resort, Luckey and Stephens bonded over a shared passion for defense tech. Luckey had once worked on a program that used VR to treat PTSD, which led him to think about how military tech worked—and how it didn’t. During his Oculus years, he had read up on projects like the troubled F-35 fighter, which had a problematic head-up display, and realized that applying lessons from the consumer world could improve its design and lower costs. After the Sonora Island trip, Luckey and Stephens kept in touch, and in 2016 the pair began speculating about starting a company together. They threw around a lot of ideas, some of them straight out of comic books—What if we built a force field? As that year ended, Stephens was making regular trips to Washington, DC, from San Francisco. Donald Trump was the president-elect, and Thiel, who was on the presidential transition team, brought Stephens on to focus on the Department of Defense. It was a useful post for someone thinking about a defense business. Meanwhile, Luckey’s political activities had made him the object of tech-press scorn. News reports claimed that Luckey was involved in an alt-right group called Nimble America, paying for billboards ripping Hillary Clinton as “Too Big to Jail” and allegedly penning vicious Reddit posts for the group. On his public Facebook page, he denied many of the allegations but confirmed that he donated $10,000 to Nimble America because he “thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters.” He apologized for “negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.” When asked about this now, the normally buoyant Luckey drops his smile and chooses his words carefully, claiming that his politics are misunderstood. “The alt-right, as it exists, as it’s defined, I do not support, never have,” he says. He describes himself as “fiscally conservative, pro-freedom, little-L libertarian, and big-R Republican. On the last day of March 2017, Luckey was ousted from Facebook. Neither party is sharing the details of his exit. (The issue even came up at Zuckerberg’s April 2018 Senate hearing, when Republican senator Ted Cruz, who has received $5,400 in political donations from Luckey, demanded, “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?” Zuckerberg said only that it wasn’t because of his politics.) And what did Luckey learn from his experience at Facebook and Oculus? “Be careful who you trust,” he says. “Be careful who has control.” On his first day as a free agent, Luckey connected with Stephens, ready to start building the company they’d discussed. Stephens didn’t hesitate. Their guiding vision was something like Stark Industries—the mind-blowing font of matériel in the Iron Man movies. (Luckey is a voracious consumer of popcorn flicks; one of his favorites is Pacific Rim.) And it would probably involve VR."

"Luckey secured warehouse space in an industrial area of Orange County. When the team approached Founders Fund, Brian Singerman, a partner who was also the first Oculus investor, agreed to lead the fund’s $17.5 million seed round... (This May [2018], Founders Fund led a $41 million Series A round.)"

"But tiny Anduril—with no experience or history—couldn’t just barge into the Pentagon and demand to build battlefield tech. “We needed a quick win,” Schimpf says." The company ended up creating "a surveillance tower using off-the-shelf sensors and cameras, connect them in a network... By using AI, the system would identify what data was important." Stephens was interested in FOBs, while Luckey thought to market along the lines of Mexican border security; "A system to monitor America's southern perimeter would require components similar to those in a combat awareness platform"

• Anduril received a $13.5M contract with the Marine Corps on July 15, 2019 for "autonomous surveillance counter-intrusion capabilities" for four Marine bases: "two in Japan, one in Hawaii, and one near the US-Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona." According to Latinx activism organization Mijente, FOIA documents indicate "Anduril will be providing surveillance “capability as a service” — which means it will be shipping, installing, and maintaining its own technology as well as training government personnel in using it." Anduril will be providing Lattice and Lattice-linked surveillance towers; "It’s supposed to be fully phased in by September 20th and run for a one-year period with an option to extend." The system is called an Autonomous Surveillance Counter Intrusion Capability (ASCIC); Marine Corps Installation Command had previously been looking for a ASCIC system with around-the-clock autonomous detection and tracking capabilities, which they detailed in March 2019. "According to MCICOM, Anduril is currently the only vendor on the market capable of offering this kind of unified system, inducing the command to fast-track the Anduril award without the standard competition from other defense firms given installation force protection's explicit status as a “top priority.”" "Mijente also published documents showing two contracts with Customs and Border Patrol — one $4.8 million contract for “border surveillance equipment” including towers, and a $203,000 contract for a “small unmanned aerial system”"
  • "Marine Corps Base Camp Smedley D. Butler in Okinanawa, Japan; the Marine Corps Base Hawaii on the island of Oahu; the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona; and the Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan."
  • Mijente released the documents as part of their ongoing campaign "against companies selling technology to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement"

"In July [2020], the Department of Homeland Security awarded Anduril a contract for as much as $250 million to expand its virtual border wall program, which links a series of electronics-packed sensor towers and lightweight drones along the U.S.-Mexico border via powerful artificial intelligence software that simplifies surveillance. The company landed an even larger contract with the Air Force, for as much as $950 million, in September, after demonstrating that the company’s software could use sensors and drones to autonomously detect and react to a simulated threat."

"The CBP contract announced Thursday [July 2, 2020] designates the Anduril system as a “program of record,” meaning a technology so essential it will be a dedicated item in the homeland security budget. While it does not specify a dollar amount, Anduril executives said the agreement is worth several hundred million dollars. CBP said in a statement Thursday that it plans to deploy 200 “Autonomous Surveillance Towers” by 2022. It says agents can set up an individual such system at a location along the border in just two hours." "(CBP said Thursday it was graduating the program from pilot stage, aiming to add 140 towers by fiscal 2022 to the 60 already in operation)." "CBP piloted the towers in early 2018 with four towers along the San Diego border and has since procured 56 additional towers. CBP said it plans to procure and deploy 140 additional towers in fiscal years 2021 and 2022."

Products

"uses ground- and autonomous helicopter drone-based sensors to provide a three-dimensional view of terrain. The technology is designed to provide a virtual view of the front lines to soldiers, including the ability to identify potential targets and direct unmanned military vehicles into combat. The first phase of the research has been completed [as of March 2019], according to the documents reviewed by The Intercept, with initial plans to deploy virtual reality battlefield-management systems for the war in Afghanistan." Luckey says (2018 conference): “Then we take that data and run predictive analytics on it, and tag everything with metadata, find what’s relevant, then push it to people who are out in the field.”

"Border security experts and Anduril executives say the Lattice system is a breakthrough in border technology. The company claims the artificial-intelligence software is capable of distinguishing between an animal and a human with 97 percent accuracy, reducing the number of times agents respond to sensors triggered by cattle, deer, peccary and other large mammals wandering the borderlands. The system does not use facial recognition or other personal-identification technology, minimizing the privacy concerns typically associated with the deployment of powerful government surveillance equipment across large open spaces. It is designed primarily for use in remote border regions with few people, not urban areas with more crossings, to provide agents with what the company calls “wide area understanding.”" "It’s hard to judge whether that’s true. There are over 200 companies hawking counter-drone systems, a number of which make similar claims to fuse sensors and automate threat detection, including Black Sage Technologies and Airspace Systems. While the DoD and other countries’ militaries have tested many, the results aren’t being made public. Anduril says its border surveillance towers have a 97% accuracy rate in classifying what it detects; the company says it’s still gathering data on the effectiveness of its counter-drone systems."

"Agents there typically spend a large amount of their shifts investigating alerts from seismic sensors tripped by potential intruders. Problem is, the sensors are also tripped by rabbits, deer, the rain, other agents. A sensor in a remote canyon could take a two-hour hike, only to discover fresh mountain lion tracks nearby. Anduril’s system, called Lattice, uses hundreds or even thousands of sensors, then lets artificial intelligence scan the environment five times per second and interpret the results. Only meaningful results will be transmitted to an agent in the field, on a smartphone or tablet, in the form of a cropped image of the form. The agent can then decide how to respond. The system takes out the middle man — the agent who has to sit at a bank of computer monitors in a darkened room and interpret the sensor results in real time. The network uses different types of sensors to create a more complete image of the environment, and each sensor is able to interpret its own data — brand new technology known as edge computation that is still in its infancy."

"Anduril’s border work was previously limited to a CBP pilot near San Diego and some unofficial testing at a private ranch outside of El Paso. The San Diego program began with only four towers in the agency’s San Diego Sector and expanded over time to 14. Now, with the pilot program successfully ended, those 14 towers remain operational. The company has also turned its unofficial deployment in Texas into a formal relationship. The agency recently bought [August 2019 article] 18 additional Anduril-made towers and plans to deploy them later this year. That installation is not part of a pilot program."

"Underlying them all is an AI and machine learning system called Lattice that the company says fuses together data from radar, optical, thermal and RF sensors to provide a unified picture of the surroundings, and that can effectively classify targets (drone, bird, car) and automatically alert operators, freeing them from staring at a screen 24/7 – something Anduril says separates the company from the competition."

"Anduril’s main showing at last month’s exercises was Lattice, the software developed to control its equipment for border or base surveillance, but now aimed at linking up anything."

"Anduril’s border control technology includes towers with cameras and infrared sensors that use artificial intelligence to track movement. It’s been deployed in Texas and Southern California." "Anduril has been the subject of significant controversy since its launch, primarily for its enthusiastic support of federal border control projects. The company’s main product, called Lattice, is a computer vision system designed to identify migrants as they cross the border between the United States and Mexico. The system reportedly identified 55 people over the course of a 10-week trial in 2018."

"That dovetails with Pentagon goals. Anduril has won roughly $21 million in contracts to build technology for the Air Force’s Advanced Battlefield Management System project, which seeks to tie together weapons systems and sensors in a data-sharing command and control network."

Corporate Affairs

"Two months later [January 2019], Anduril formally joined the National Armaments Consortium, a nonprofit that facilitates bids by traditional defense contracting firms for business with the military."

"In previous interviews, Luckey has sharply criticized traditional defense contracting, noting that the iPhone and other commercial technology innovations were developed with massive incentives, rather than the “cost-plus” model preferred by the Pentagon. That approach has seen the Defense Department negotiate with contractors to provide a fixed price for expenses and profits, one that, in Luckey’s telling, has limited the military’s ability to encourage the kind of breakthrough technologies needed for the future of war. In a white paper filed with the Defense Department’s National AI Strategic Plan last year, Anduril urged officials to consider the ambitious approach by the government in China with regard to AI technology. China, an Anduril employee wrote in the paper, has provided a “multibillion-dollar national investment initiative to support ‘moonshot’ projects, start-ups and academic research in A.I.”"

Unlike contracts like Boeing's: "Anduril, like both Palantir and SpaceX, seeks to avoid some common pitfalls. Instead of selling technology to the government for a huge up-front fee, it plans to own the system and lease it, with the data it collects belonging to whatever agency issues the contract. This arrangement, Stephens says, creates an incentive to keep development costs low."

"Working with the Department of Defense has been Anduril’s endgame from day one. The company opened that door through key hires, picking up contracts with Customs and Border Protection and the Marine Corps, and building out its small-scale proof of concept: a modular web of hardware and software that could talk to itself and operate autonomously."

"As Luckey and his team see it, Lattice will become not just a system for securing the border but a general platform for geographic near-omniscience. With the aid of artificial intelligence, it aims to synthesize data from potentially thousands of sensors and local databases, displaying the most relevant data in phone apps, on laptop screens, and in mixed-reality headsets. Anduril’s goal is to become a major tech startup that builds hardware and software specifically for the defense industry, a venture-capital-infused outsider challenging the likes of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman with their multibillion-dollar government contracts and strong establishment ties."

"the company has said it seeks to remake the defense contracting industry by incorporating the latest innovations of Silicon Valley into warfighting technology."

"Steckman, who previously worked for Pentagon contractor Palantir, said Anduril’s broader goal is to compete in the larger, more lucrative defense contracting market."

"It’s self-funding its R&D rather than waiting for government contracts, making the confident wager that the artificial intelligence-laced surveillance and counter-drone systems it’s developing are going to be snapped up by a Pentagon hungry to tap more Silicon Valley tech."

"Anduril’s success so far in bringing a Silicon Valley approach to defense, which has come as DoD has moved to issue more small-dollar contracts to early stage startups, has encouraged more nascent “deep tech” companies to try to work with DoD, as well as VC firms, says Boyle [partner at General Catalyst]."

"Putting the secret sauce in the software rather than the hardware allows Anduril to build systems from relatively inexpensive, commercial-grade sensors and quickly deploy them into the field."

"Under pressure from employees uncomfortable with defense work, many big consumer tech companies like Google have shied away from security contracts in recent years. Anduril was founded in 2017 to fill that gap"

"Anduril describes itself as a company that “invents and builds technology to secure America and its interests.”"

"In the three years since its founding, Anduril has made a name for itself as the Department of Homeland Security’s preferred vendor for the “virtual wall” along the U.S. southern border. Its core product is a portable surveillance tower that continuously scans the landscape for suspicious activity and notifies border agents. But executives have made clear that their broader ambitions are with the Defense Department."

"Though parts of Silicon Valley have kept the Pentagon at arm’s length in recent years, Mr. Luckey’s company, based 400 miles to the south in Irvine, is aggressively courting business from government agencies and the military. It is one of a number of young tech companies, many of them far from Silicon Valley, that are shrugging off the concerns about the potential militarization of their creations that in recent years have stirred employee revolts at industry giants like Google and Microsoft."

"Anduril is unusual among today’s startups for embracing the defense business. In the Valley, many believe that “if you do defense you must be an evil person,” says Joe Lonsdale, an Anduril investor and Palantir cofounder. But that wasn’t always the case. California’s tech sector was once a virtual branch of the military. “Literally 100 percent of the early microchips went to defense use,” says Leslie Berlin, project historian for Stanford’s Silicon Valley archives. In the 1950s and ’60s, “working for the defense effort meant working for the good guys,” Berlin says. After Vietnam, that changed. “Many people in Silicon Valley today don’t feel that way.” The most recent evidence came in April, when The New York Times reported that more than 3,100 Google employees had protested the company’s work on a Pentagon-backed AI effort called Project Maven. Lonsdale and Luckey argue that building cheaper, more efficient systems is a virtuous pursuit, saving taxpayer dollars... Anduril’s leaders tread lightly on the subject of deadly force—traditionally the purview of defense companies" but don't answer it directly

"In an opinion column for the Washington Post, Luckey and Stephens sharply criticized Google for abandoning the U.S. government by rejecting Project Maven. “We understand that tech workers want to build things used to help, not harm,” the pair wrote. “We feel the same way. But ostracizing the U.S. military could have the opposite effect of what these protesters intend: If tech companies want to promote peace, they should stand with, not against, the United States’ defense community.”... In interviews and public appearances, Luckey slammed engineers for protesting government work, arguing that those claiming conscious opposition to military work are among a “vocal minority” that empowers American adversaries abroad. Moreover, he said that the Defense Department has failed to connect with top tech talent because many engineers are “stuck in Silicon Valley at companies that don’t want to work on national security.”... In Anduril, Luckey is presenting a company that is unapologetic about its work capturing immigrants or killing people on the battlefield. The U.S., Luckey argued in a previous interviews, “has a really strong record of protecting human rights” and should be trusted to use AI without any ethical constraints. “The biggest threats are not going to be Western democracies abusing these technologies,” he told the audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon. The real enemies are China and Russia, both of which have invested in AI military technology. China is not only investing in AI, but has unfair advantages to develop the technology using its entire population as a data training set through use of mass surveillance to run experiments. In contrast, Luckey told Defense and Aerospace Report, the U.S. can train its AI software “in industry, in enterprise, in national security.” The U.S., Luckey went on, could test AI “using our current military advantage to train future AI developments and we need to start using our current military advantage.” He called for employing these technologies in ongoing “large-scale conflicts” around the world."

"[Oculus] money that [Luckey] was prepared to sink into Anduril, but which he hasn’t had to because of ample venture capital support, says Schimpf."

"Publicly filed lobbying disclosures show that Anduril paid $290,000 last year [in 2018] to Invariant, a lobbying firm founded by Heather Podesta, a Democratic fundraiser known for her extensive relationships in Washington, D.C., including with Hillary Clinton. The lobbying effort focused on shaping the border security appropriations issued by Congress, as well as on educating lawmakers on “artificial intelligence and autonomous systems and their application to military force protection,” according to the filings."

Criticism and controversies

"Anduril has attracted scrutiny for its willingness to work with the U.S. government, while other tech giants such as Google have wavered on doing so." Some critics (e.g. Meredith Whittaker) have criticized the close connections between industry and military, specifically because of its unreliability and lack of public information or oversight or accountability. Some tech execs have backed company-selling to government (Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos)

"Anduril’s first contract, awarded in 2017, was to provide electronic surveillance technology to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for the U.S.-Mexico border. Luckey was a strong proponent of the work—a logical way, he says, to demonstrate Anduril’s technical vision. Of course it also made Anduril instantly controversial by tying it to the Trump administration’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric and policies... Luckey at times has seemed to embrace this connection. Almost immediately after his departure from Facebook, he traveled to Washington to advocate for digital border security alongside Chuck Johnson, a right-wing internet provocateur... Critics described Anduril as either a technological manifestation of Trumpism, an amoral profiteer, or both." (developed an initial reputation as the border security company)

"Anduril executives are quick to point out that many Democrats have supported electronic border surveillance as a more humane alternative to a physical border wall. On the other hand, immigration rights advocates say companies that work with law enforcement agencies can’t ignore how those agencies treat the people being apprehended." "Luckey pointed out that Anduril’s border system doesn’t use facial recognition or other biometrics to specifically identify individuals or store their identity, although he also admitted that there was nothing intrinsic in what he had built that would keep a military or government client from feeding images captured by his system through its own facial recognition system."

Militarized autonomous systems: 'Pandora's box' of options opened up "The Interceptor in its current form doesn’t target humans and requires explicit permission from a human operator before each attack, but it’s conceivable that those controls could be changed in the future."

BBC professor interview: "There has been a call to prohibit [autonomous weapons systems that can select and attack their own targets] at the [united nations] UN by thousands of scientists and [artificial-intelligence] AI companies, the director general of the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and 31 nation states and 186 [non-governmental organisations] NGOs from around the world."

"But it raises concerns that artificial intelligence systems, used in tandem with weapons, could erode the role of human decision-making in combat."

WIRED muses about technocratic solutions to societal problems: "Though tech companies have been taking their knocks lately, even the ones now under the most scrutiny were launched in a glow of idealism. We once dreamed that an era of ultraconnected and infinitely empowering tech would solve the kinds of problems that lead people to flee their own countries or that propel terrorists or nations to attack. Those problems didn’t end. It now seems obvious that tech was never going to make us better human beings; we are still our flawed selves. Instead, those same technologies that once seemed full of promise are finding their way into all-too-human clashes—led by a company named after an avenging sword."

"The Google flap and the wider military drive to adopt commercial artificial intelligence technology unleashed a fierce debate among tech companies about their role in society and ethics around advanced computing."

"As the military worked to bring in leading Silicon Valley firms as contractors, the resulting relationships have sparked massive resistance from workers, many of whom have argued that they became engineers to make the world a better place, not a more violent one... After The Intercept and other media outlets revealed that Google had been quietly tapped to work on Project Maven, applying its AI technology to help analysts identify drone targets on the battlefield, thousands of workers protested the contract. The uprising led Google to announce that it would not renew its contract with the military on the initiative. Microsoft, too, faced internal opposition as the company prepared work on a $480 million contract with the Army to develop augmented reality headsets for soldiers. The ethical debates that have rocked large technology companies — Amazon, Salesforce, and others have similarly faced worker protests over contracts on immigration enforcement — have presented Anduril with an opportunity."

"Ethics experts have criticized the development of AI-based weapons, noting that the lethal autonomous weapons could be hijacked by hackers, kill without clear explanation, or lead to catastrophic accidental conflict if weapons are used as escalation in response to an incident that appears to be an act of war. Moreover, as humans are removed from face-to-face combat, the dehumanization of lethal decisions could lead to more killing. Luckey hasn’t proffered any direct answers to the questions being raised over the use of artificial intelligence in warfighting. Anduril, however, has stated that it will not sell to Russia or China, but would be willing to sell its products to U.S. allies. A request for comment about whether the company would sell to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or other undemocratic U.S. allies was not returned."

"But the increased focus on smart walls is deepening concern about a growing Big-Brother-is-watching network, and civil liberties organizations have asked lawmakers to proceed with caution. “Warrantless use of these technologies comes at an unacceptably high cost,” Neema Singh Guliani and Michelle Fraling, officials with the American Civil Liberties Union, said last month. “They allow the government to track, surveil, and monitor individuals indiscriminately and with precise detail. Individuals in the border zone should not be subject to near-constant surveillance that intrudes on the most intimate aspects of their lives.”"

"The tide of public opinion has turned against the tech industry in recent years. After the revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and a concurrent wave of heightened sensitivity for privacy, the sector is no longer viewed as an optimistic hub filling the near-future with consequence-free innovation. That shift in public perception coupled with new activist energy within the tech workforce means that tech companies are facing a new level of scrutiny on their government defense deals, when previously they might have guiltlessly enjoyed federal cash infusions. Those deals have also grown out of the government’s increased comfort with maturing tech companies capable of handling sensitive contracts and jumping through certification hoops."

In These Times:

• Critcizes Biden's choice to continue 'deterrence' policy at the border using autonomous surveillance towers, continue/increase border funding
  • "No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid organization, contends that Joel, whose name is a pseudonym, was a victim of a CBP policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence. Adopted in 1994, the policy closed off common points of entry, nominally dissuading migrants from entering the United States but actually just pushing them into remote and often deadly corridors."
  • "To avoid the towers, migrants often take circuitous (and dangerous) routes." citing a 2019 study, "These technologies, Chambers found, create a ​“funnel effect” that channels border crossers into deadly routes."
• Towers are 33 feet high
• "The administration is similarly honoring an up-to- $250-million agreement with another leading manufacturer of border surveillance towers, Anduril Industries, founded by Palmer Luckey, a billionaire, Trump donor and co-founder of the virtual reality technology company Oculus. That deal extends until 2025. The administration also appears to be honoring a $36.9 million contract with Anduril that expires in 2022."
  • "Since CBP debuted four of these structures in San Diego County in early 2018, the agency has commissioned 56 more with plans to install another 140 by October 2022."
• "The new budget requests and contract renewals also align with the administration’s immigration reform plan, introduced in January, which calls for ​“smart border controls” that rely on ​“flexible solutions and technologies that expand the ability to detect illicit activity, evaluate the effectiveness of border security operations, and be easily relocated.” That neatly describes Anduril’s mobile towers, which function in tandem with autonomous drones across the border. "
• "Hoping to ​“educate” Congress about the need to expand its autonomous surveillance tower program, Anduril spent $260,000 in lobbying during the first quarter of 2021 — roughly half of what it spent the entire 2020 fiscal year. Of the 17 lobbyists the company hired, 12 are former government officials, according to OpenSecrets. This revolving door between the public and private sectors has created what investigative journalist Todd Miller calls a ​“border-industrial complex” that gives companies like Anduril ​“tremendous influence” over the government’s short- and long-term strategies. The 13 top Department of Defense contractors working at the border contributed nearly three times as much to the Biden campaign ($5,364,994) as they did to Trump ($1,730,435)."
• "In an open letter published February 25, a coalition of 40 border community, immigrant rights and civil liberties organizations (including Mijente, Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, Rio Grande Valley No Border Wall Coalition, Southern Border Communities Coalition and Just Futures Law, among others) took aim at the Biden administration’s pursuit of a ​“smart border.” “This ​‘smart border’ surveillance technology is a continuation of the Trump administration’s racist border policies,” the letter reads, ​“not a break from it.”"

Coda Story:

• César Ortigoza of "Armadillos Ni Un Migrante Menos": "“This technology is killing them,” he told me. “It’s pushing them to find their own death, forcing them to go through these remote places, with no way back.”"
• "Civil rights experts say there is no way to escape the surveillance dragnet. Shaw Drake, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Border Rights Center, told me about his attempt to opt out of being screened by facial recognition technology at a pedestrian border crossing in Texas in the fall of 2019. “When I asked to be exempted, the agent was like, ‘Why? We have all your information anyway,’” he told me. Drake’s experience was backed up by a 2020 report by the federal watchdog Government Accountability Office, which found that CBP has provided “limited information on how to request to opt out of facial recognition.”"
  • "In addition to endangering the lives of migrants, privacy advocates and civil liberties groups argue that the kinds of surveillance that have enveloped life in the borderlands can violate the civil liberties of millions of U.S. citizens living along the border... They also warn that the surveillance technologies deployed in the region threaten the rights of people living far outside the borderlands." [George Floyd protests]
• "The web of surveillance technologies in Arivaca has a deep psychological effect on some residents. For Lewis, a member of the migrant aid and advocacy group People Helping People, who moved to the town a decade ago to volunteer with a humanitarian organization, the towers contribute to the sensation of being in a “panopticon” — under persistent surveillance in a community at the edge of a humanitarian crisis."
• "The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has cast doubts on the CBP’s drone program, referring to the devices as “dubious achievers” that cost $12,255 an hour to operate, while delivering fewer than 2% of all border apprehensions. “We see no evidence that the drones contribute to a more secure border,” the report concluded."
• "Julie Mao, deputy director of the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which specializes in the intersection of technology and immigration, predicted a future where immigrants and U.S. citizens alike are subjected to “constant, real-time surveillance” by the Department of Homeland Security. “I think that this administration is actually expanding the power of tech-based surveillance, and then it’s handing over the keys of that surveillance apparatus to what will potentially be coming down the line, a more authoritarian administration that will be really able to deploy that mass surveillance for their purposes,” she said."

"Critics of Anduril don’t share Luckey’s rosy view of American power. Mijente, the immigrant rights advocacy group, published a statement Wednesday along with details of Anduril’s contracts with Customs and Border Protection and the Marines, calling it part of “a surveillance apparatus where algorithms are trained to implement racist and xenophobic policies.” “Anduril’s business model is predicated on contracts targeting immigrant communities — however we know what happens at the border very quickly comes into the interior. Anyone in this country who cares about human rights should join us in calling for an end to this dangerous surveillance,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, Mijente senior campaign organizer, in a statement."

"The vision, as laid out by its bipartisan political supporters, is to build an ocean-to-ocean technological barrier made up of a patchwork of tools like drones and sensors to help surveil and identify unauthorized individuals crossing the border, specifically in remote stretches of land between established ports of entry. Many have lobbed serious ethical and human rights objections to building this virtual wall. Some research has suggested that the last major effort to increase technology at the border may have contributed to an increase in the number of deaths of migrants crossing the border, because they were forced into taking more treacherous routes to avoid detection. And then there are the privacy concerns. Major civil liberty and digital privacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Fight for the Future have argued that a hypothetical virtual wall integrating technology — like facial recognition and drones — could propel a state of perpetual surveillance that would infringe on the human rights of immigrants and US citizens alike. These groups’ worries are understandable, particularly given the recent series of revelations showing how tech is already being used to enforce controversial immigration policies. Despite the company’s previous assurances to the contrary, it was recently revealed by the organization Mijente that Palantir, the data analytics firm founded by Peter Thiel, contracted software to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that reportedly helped target and arrest parents and other relatives of unaccompanied minors crossing the US-Mexico border. The Palantir case is just one revelation, but there are many more contracts between major tech companies and immigration agencies that remain under scrutiny and whose details are relatively unknown... Nevertheless, the idea of bolstering a technological wall has backing from key politicians on both sides of the aisle. Those supporters include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Reps. Will Hurd (R-TX), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA); and Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)... Politicians who control the purse for security spending find a smart wall’s cost-effectiveness appealing over extending a physical wall that could cost millions of dollars per mile."

"The smart wall may be appealing to politicians who think it’s a superior alternative to a physical wall, but some civil liberties advocates argue that from a privacy perspective, it’s actually worse. “People throw out the idea of a smart wall as if it’s harm-free, and that’s generally not the case,” said Guliani, who co-authored a blog post for the ACLU raising objections to increasing funding for a smart wall. Under the Fourth Amendment, US citizens are protected from random and arbitrary stops and searches. However, under federal law, those protections are somewhat limited in the border zone — defined as a 100-mile radius from any US border. More than 200 million Americans, or nearly two-thirds of the US population, technically live in a border zone, according to the ACLU’s estimates. Some states are entirely encompassed within one — including ones you probably wouldn’t think of, like Maine. So technology used at the border in Arizona could set precedent for what kinds of surveillance the government can use toward someone living on the other side of the country. Privacy advocates worry that this could have dangerous implications for CBP to potentially spy on US residents in their daily lives. “Surveillance at the border doesn’t stay at the border,” said Mana Azarmi, policy counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology, who specializes in security technology legal issues. She said she worries that sophisticated new surveillance tools will be used to surveil the lives of US citizens: “People living in these areas shouldn’t feel like they’re being monitored every time they go to their doctor or place of worship.” While there’s currently no evidence that CBP is doing that, there are several examples of other law enforcement agencies using surveillance technologies beyond their intended use, such as police departments using drones to surveil underserved communities and political activists... Critics fear that the increasing video and images taken at the US-Mexico border could similarly be used beyond their stated purpose of monitoring illegal border crossings. CBP policy currently states that data captured from drones should only be stored for five years. After that, the information is supposed to be destroyed."

"However, privacy advocates are concerned that data CBP collects could be improperly shared — willingly or unwillingly — with outside sources. A privacy audit from DHS’s Office of the Inspector General from last year cast doubt on how well some data collected from UAS drones is being protected. The report found that CBP had “not ensured safeguards” around the privacy of photos and videos of individuals at the border. The report concluded that this information is “at increased risk of compromise by trusted insiders and external sources” due to “security deficiencies.”"

"Many academics in the field see a border wall as a distraction from the systemic issues at hand. They point out that one of Border Patrol’s chief concerns, drug smuggling, primarily happens by cartels hiding narcotics in cargo vehicles going through established checkpoints, not through rugged terrain in isolated areas where transport is more difficult. According to US Customs and Border Protection statistics, between 80 and 90 percent of narcotics such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl seized across the border in the first 11 months of the 2018 fiscal year was caught at legal points of entry, a.k.a. official crossings. These experts also say that, as with a physical wall, tech alone won’t address the underlying causes of mass immigration or drug smuggling. No matter how sophisticated the technology is, they say, there are always workarounds such as bribes and tunnels. “In the end, there are many studies that show that walls don’t work where the demand to get past them is very strong,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University. “Whether digital or physical, walls are always porous.”"

An op-ed by David Ignatius in the Washington Post praised systems like Anduril's: "Welcome to the rapidly advancing world of autonomous weapons — the cheap, highly effective systems that are revolutionizing militaries around the world. These new unmanned platforms can make U.S. forces much safer, at far lower cost than aircraft carriers and fighter jets. But beware: They’re being deployed by our potential adversaries faster than the Pentagon can keep up, and they increase the risk of conflict by making it easier and less bloody for the attacker... Wars of the future may look like video games, as operators control faraway swarms of autonomous systems, but the lethality on the ground will be devastating. What’s encouraging is that people like Tseng and Brose are taking their frustration with the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and turning that knowledge into new systems that will keep U.S. troops safer, at lower cost — even as they combat future adversaries."

References