Google employee protest of Pentagon drones misguided: ex-Army officer
A former U.S. Army intelligence officer said on Thursday that the protests by thousands of Google employees over the search engine company’s involvement in a Pentagon drone program is misguided.
Project Maven is a joint venture between Google and the Defense Department to use the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to analyze drone footage.
“These engineers in Google have absolutely lost their mind,” Brett Velicovich, author of “Drone Warrior,” told FOX Business’ Liz MacDonald. “They have absolutely no idea the threats that we face as a nation.”
The former Army intelligence officer said the video imagery generated by the drones allows analysts to dissect anomalies and make the most precise decisions.
“The whole intent of this project is to make that manual process a lot easier,” Velicovich said. “It’s meant to save lives.”
More than 3,000 Google employees have signed an open letter asking the company to pull out of the drone program.
“Now what we have are these engineers who believe they have this … legal authority or this moral obligation to tell us ethically what we should be doing at the U.S. government and how we should operate this technology,” Velicovich said.
Google’s corporate motto used to be “Don't be evil” until the company restructured it to “Do the right thing” under the Alphabet umbrella in 2015.
Velicovich argues that more and more companies in Silicon Valley have a misconception when it comes to providing its technology to support the U.S. military.
“99% of the time, a drone is up in the air protecting our soldiers, providing them intelligence so they can come home safely,” he said. “Instead, we got these guys who are misinformed.”