Serious question: who else takes for granted that Zuck gets a daily summary of all high-level federal governmental communications, as harvested via backdoors or simply from non-end-to-end encrypted traffic on any Meta property?
I assume he does. I assume moreover that most people aware of this at Meta consider this due diligence in defending shareholder value. What's that line from Dune 2, a wise hunter climbs the tallest hill? _You need to see._
he U.S. Army is establishing Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation. On June 13, 2025, the Army will officially swear in four tech leaders.
Det. 201 is an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors. In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems. By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal.
The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are
Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir;
Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta;
Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and
Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.
So yes, Meta's CTO is now a high ranking army officer
What would Meta get out of spying on their own government? That's a "life in secret jail" kind of risk for a sickeningly rich CEO with a private island. We haven't even found any evidence of backdoors used against foreign governments, they'd be pretty stupid to attack the American government.
Plus, when it comes to important communications, the weird, hacked, Israeli Signal fork already has access to these documents anyway, even when they don't accidentally add a journalist to the group chat.
If we're talking summaries of government communications, that's more Microsoft territory, who don't even bother adding proprietary E2EE implementations to their chat software.
It isn't without risk, but when is the last time a US billionaire faced real legal repercussions for anything? US law is 90% based upon being able to outspend your opposition, and if you lose despite outspending them, it mostly involves paying some money, which they already have plenty of by the fact that they outspent their opponent. Even if you are fighting the US government, they government isn't willing to spend endless amounts of money for prosecution. Only if you can't afford the legal costs to keep trying will you face jail time, like the poor.
I assume he does. I assume moreover that most people aware of this at Meta consider this due diligence in defending shareholder value. What's that line from Dune 2, a wise hunter climbs the tallest hill? _You need to see._