Google’s revolving door with the U.S. government just took a major spin with the temporary departure of the firm’s head of spam-blocking to the Department of Defense.
Software engineer Matt Cutts, at Google since 2000, announced he’ll be taking a leave for “a few months” to work at the new Defense Digital Service at the Pentagon.
What? A highly placed employee of the company famed for its “Don’t Be Evil” motto going to work for the government’s war department? Ho hum. He’s not the first.
According to Google’s transparency report, there have been 28 “revolving door moves between Google and government positions involving national security, intelligence or the Department of Defense.” However, the flow has been mostly in the direction opposite from Cutts’. Seven former national security and intelligence officials, and 18 from the Pentagon have come to Google, but only three Google executives had gone to the defense department.
Cutts blogged in his temporary-departure announcement that in the past couple years he’d watched “more and more people in technology trying to make government work better,” and he wanted to see if he could help.
Cutts, who wrote the first version of Google’s “SafeSearch” pornography-blocker for families, didn’t make clear what he’d be doing for the Pentagon.
A defense department spokesperson told tech website FCW that new Defense Digital Service experts are usually assigned to a team based on issues the department needs to address, although Cutts may have a specific issue he wants to pursue.
The service, launched eight months ago to revamp the Pentagon’s IT systems, relies on private-sector experts such as Cutts to power its work. “The team is now seriously involved in projects ranging from the Pentagon’s collection and reporting of data on sexual assault to the control systems that will manage the next generation of GPS to a cloud-based overhaul of the long-maligned Defense Travel System,” Federal News Radio reported this month.
The service’s director, entrepreneur Chris Lynch, earlier this month called the program “a tour of duty for nerds.”
“The magic starts to happen within the digital services when the people who are experts in writing code and developing products — not 20 years ago, but right now — are paired with the people who understand the mission,” Lynch said.
In April and May, the service helped run “Hack the Pentagon,” the federal government’s first bug bounty program, that drew 1,400 hackers and resulted in payment of 138 bounties for identifying IT vulnerabilities in the defense department.
Photo: The Pentagon (Department of Defense/Tech. Sgt. Angela Stafford, U.S. Air Force)
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