Is Off-Shoring a National Security Threat?

An anonymous reader writes "Should the U.S. government hold developers more responsible for the quality of their code? One top cyber security analyst says more regulations would be a mistake. 'Any attempt to regulate software quality and security simply drives the software industry off-shore for good,' he says. 'Similarly, requiring trusted on-shore production ensures two things: (1) falling behind world progress as we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority, and (2) costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'"

Comments

Re:Quite right. And the corollary applies

[vlm]

Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.

Naah, study your history. That was an effect along the way, but hardly the cause.

The cause was the rich people had all the money land and power. Read your Gibbon, near the end all the land in the empire was owned by only a thousand landlords and everyone else was dirt poor. Kind of like where the USA is headed. When Rome was more egalitarian, Rome the city produced 25K fighting men, which means a total army size in those days of about 75K. Back then individuals paid for their own gear when they volunteered for service...

Once only the rich had money, the poor couldn't even volunteer to be the equivalent of cannon fodder, and the rich had to hire foreign mercenaries, at ripoff prices. Toward the end, the average Roman was so poor that the empire could barely raise 100K fighting men. You'd think an empire could raise more than 4x just one city, but they had economically destroyed themselves, so...

Re:Offshoring IS a threat

[Kjella]

In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.

It's what most of that first world is built on, getting ridiculously cheap labor intensive imports from abroad while exporting expensive high tech and processed products back. Except the world isn't stupid and the world isn't standing still. As the rest of the world gets civilized, they do get educated. They too understand high tech. Americans aren't magical just because they're born in the US, the rest of the world is catching up. You can close off the borders, but that market isn't coming back. Then it'd just be the US economy, no almighty dollar which is worth so much around the world. That dollar was - is - worth so much because there's valuable things to be bought for dollars. Close off trade, take that away and you might find yourself with a third world currency bringing US wages down to match the rest of the world all the same. Either way they're starting to match the US and you can't just stick your head in the sand about that.