Important note of Jul 10, 2021: this article was originally published in 2017. The grammatical errors are intentionally left unfixed, and the article itself is republished for historical reasons.
The governmental interests is, and was about keeping the army strong, and the people humble and compliant. With the exception of unviable philosophy-focused eastern zen states, that ancient rule firstly defined by Plato was in some different ways applied to any of the existed and existing states, including the modern ones. Anciently, the modern technologies were belonged to someone who got the power. Firstly it was the clergy with their early reading and writing the chronicles, when there were no people able to read and to write, and afterwards it were the kings, rich placemen, and the nobility.
Nowadays, the business blurred that inequality, but it still remains. Despite of the rich modern businessmen who are even able to launch their own space program, the governments are still has the taxpayers’ money, and it’s enough to keep the ancient rule up to date: there are scientific research laboratories and institutes working for military purposes, developing new materials and weapons. Of course, the politics and modern ways of warfare like the enemy opposition sponsorship are important for the modern governments, but that topic is a bit off this essay.
The ancient rule works for the software too, because the software itself is just another modern technology. Then the modern technology appear, the governments are asking just one question: “How can we use it against our enemies?” The computer technology was not something special at this point. Enigma, the encrypting and decrypting machine, has been developed in the twentieth for military purposes. The digital computer technology reached its modern highest level because of military needs, too. The software and the technology revolution happened during the cold war, because of intense confrontation of two giants: USA and USSR.
Incessant international surveillance and espionage, the space race, the moon race, and the nuclear competition were the hard problems to keep up with. Both two states used their top-notch scientists, researchers, and their full potential to face each other, and the computer technology was the perfect thing to use then. The ENIAC, the Mark-I, the soviet MESM, BESM, the Project Lincoln, the Cape Cod System and other complicated things were developed with a lot of money, the most intelligent scientists and the special equipment and electronic parts: there was not cheap chinese parts to buy, the secrecy should have been keeped. The new jet fighters, the submarines, and the battleships were equipped with modern radars and the other espionage equipment, and that’s were of great importance for keeping the secrets secure.
Of course, the cold war pushed the science, and the software security upwards. There is even a special term to describe the usage of the software at the cold war era: “The Crypto Wars”. Briefly, that situation was more of politics that of science, but there were new security standard established: any governmental document should be stored encrypted, the government should have access to the data of any person, no matter if he were a citizen or not.
The surveillance technologies is the today’s main focus of the governmental usage of software. After the eleventh of September, 2001, american government have aimed to prevent the further acts of terrorism, and literally put people under surveillance. The most illustrative example is the Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the NSA mass surveillance program in 2013. Formally, USA is still waging war with the global terrorism, and this fact is used as an excuse.
What about Russia, the soviet legacy is still taking place. Just like the Chinese Golden Shield Project situation, there are no true surveillance-free internet space because the internet providers are legally used to collect and disclose the users’ personal data to the russian federal security agency. As an example, Pavel Durov, the founder of Vkontakte, the most popular russian social network (380 million users at 2017) refugee to Berlin for not sharing the fate of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician assassinated in 2015. Russia as the heavily militarized country even has its own GOST (governmental standard) for encryption algorithms. In a conclusion, it’s obviously that the things are not going to change right now.
Thesis: the governments did their job in software research during the cold war. Nowadays, their interest is all about surveillance.
