In the past six months, we have been approached with interesting client, distribution channel, and partner engagements at the highest levels of governments around the world. This has been humbling as the outreach is often from people we read about in the news everyday, people we personally admire and have looked up to as leaders in the security space. For us, these inquiries are a testament to the hard work and results of our team: senior decision makers in various industries, from a broad ideological spectrum, in the U.S. and abroad heard good things about Omelas and want to explore the application of our Symphony platform for their needs.
With all of this good news and validation of our work also comes the need to navigate through a complex web of relationships, to think beyond the immediate opportunity to longer-term, strategic implications for our growth. With each opportunity we have to ask ourselves: are there potential ethical, legal or public relations risks that may not be obvious? While many inquiries come from the noble intention of countering violent extremism/ counter-terrorism, others may have a more political objective. Our well-known, pioneering work in the information operations space — a critical, but unfortunately highly politicized topic — coupled with our high-value networks means that some of the requests coming our way may be from less than savory actors.
Omelas was founded on the fundamental value of doing good by reducing violent extremism in the world. And by “doing good” we are not just saying, “don’t do evil”. The opposite of good is more than just evil; it also includes indifference and negligence. We want to make this world less violent in the long-run for everyone. This is — and will continue to be — our “north star”, driving our direction forward and the decisions we make.
But the gray area we operate in is increasing. As we continue to grow, we have gained a new degree of scrutiny of who we are as individuals, as pioneers in the industry, and, collectively, as a company. We expect our clients and partners to do the same due diligence of us that we do of them: our personnel, our personal networks and connections, our policy perspectives and public statements. Furthermore, as experts in machine learning/artificial intelligence and automation, a space that is relatively new, nebulously defined, and not well-understood by those outside of the tech community, we need to work with policymakers and decision-makers in government, academia, and private sector to ensure that appropriate regulations, resources, and priorities are given to this topic. Being a part of the first wave of teams working at the intersection of AI/ML and the online information environment, we also bear the responsibility of helping to set the ethical guidelines and necessary regulations for the good of society as a whole. In fact, we see ourselves as a leader in this dialogue and subsequent implementation. This is a critical mission and one that comes with additional scrutiny.
To accomplish our vision of doing good by decreasing violent extremism, we first need to make sure that we are square internally. If we are to be a leader in the space, we need to lead by example. This was made clear to us after receiving a plurality of left-of-field requests. After speaking with numerous lawyers, mentors, and ethics experts and reflecting on our company culture and who we want to become, we came to a firm conclusion three weeks ago. Our stance remains that at Omelas we expect the company and the team to do everything above the board by a lot. While many folks go to legal and lobbying firms to skirt around regulations and see how much they can get away with, we are taking the opposite approach. We need double assurances that everything we do is according to the law and without even a whiff of suspicion and/or unnecessary secrecy. The litmus test we hold ourselves to is to smoothly pass a Congressional confirmation hearing.
To abide by the Above the Board principle, two weeks ago, we turned down lucrative engagements that could have lengthened our financial runway by at least six months with maximum spending, with the potential of more contracts upon performance. Not going to lie, it stung in the beginning. It could have saved us from raising another round of funding. But we have longer-term, more strategic milestones and initiatives. So we turned them down.
The media is full of ethical scandals, ranging from Facebook’s data privacy fiasco with Cambridge Analytica to the results of Special Prosecutor Mueller’s investigations. Taking the politics out of it, we are not going to fall on the wrong side of ethics. We are to be Above the Board.
