Corporate welfare.

[Matthew X]

Uncle Sam the sole institutional investor behind a dedicated “national 
security” fund, run by a dream team of VC heavyweights recruited from 
venture capital’s epicenter, Sand Hill Road. (Bush White House Science 
adviser Floyd Kvamme, a senior partner at legendary Kleiner, Perkins would 
be an obvious choice for coach.) The CIA has already in effect done this 
with In-Q-Tel, the Silicon Valley venture shop it opened last year.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/inqtel/
Keeping the web safe
http://www.safeweb.com/pr_inqtel.html
.” Really out-there work often stays in-house, at Sandia or Livermore or 
one of the other industrial-strength National Laboratories left over from 
the Cold War. But more typically, a complex set of specs gets jobbed out to 
one of the remaining handful of defense megacontractors, who undertake 
delivery of a very tightly specified black box or aircraft or weapons 
system, for some version of cost-plus. If all this sounds vaguely 
Industrial Age and socialist, it is—R&D by Five-Year Plan. But virtually 
all the high-tech weaponry now being tossed at Afghanistan was developed 
this way. This is also the system that gives you the $400 toilet seat.