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I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance. We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics an

by tobbyb 11y ago

I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance. We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically. Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences. What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden. That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate. The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.

Sir_Substance 11y ago
I'm inclined to agree. I'd like to see more active ostracisation against software developers that have worked for organisations like the NSA and GCHQ. If we can make it a career ending job, it will dramatically reduce their ability to recruit. However, I'd also like to see general software development think more closely about the role it has in normalising these things. Next time you start to create an account system for your project, ask yourself whether you really need it. Could you engineer around it, perhaps by letting the user store their data, or using a stored key to identify them? Let's go beyond don't store what you can't protect, and aim for don't store what you don't strictly need.
- rhino369 11y ago
  How is Google or Facebook any better? They are spy agencies for advertising purposes instead of national security. Or companies that deploy ad sense or otherwise depend on companies like Google or Facebook.
  - Cakez0r 11y ago
    People have a choice (at least to some extent) about the data they share with Google and Facebook. There is no such choice about the information that governments scoop up.
  - blub 11y ago
    Exactly. Between themselves, Google & Facebook have access to a disturbingly large amount of the private information and the thoughts of billions of persons. Pictures, emails, messages, social graphs, you name it. And now Microsoft decided they also want a piece of the pie. The kicker? I see people still defend Google all the time, nowadays with bullshit arguments like "I am tired of this you are the product meme" and still excuse Facebook because they need it to keep in touch with others. And they found startups based on advertising and tracking, they work for them and generally support analytics as an inalienable right of software development.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    Because one problem at a time. Instead of throwing up ones hands because some other thing is bad, too.
    - Sir_Substance 11y ago
      >Because one problem at a time. Pretty much. I don't use Facebook at all, and give in to Google only on technical searches (Which DDG still isn't good at), mapping and when forced to by work (GCE etc.), so you're preaching to the choir, but lets not try for an overnight coup here.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  But... NSA, GCHQ, BSI/BND, etc. aren't the "bad guy" in theory. It's within a nation's interest to, within the extent of law and respect for human rights, try as thoroughly has it can to know what's going on in the world. Electronic intelligence is part of that, and a growing part. In practice, the permissive reactions many/most/all governments have to allegations (or proof) that a comms intel agency has broken the law, that's what the trouble is. That these groups have been allowed to break the law or ghostwrite laws that allow them to violate what would generally not be approved by a citizenry, that needs to be addressed. I'm not sure how ruining the careers of software developers and computer scientists who've worked for these organizations does anything other than remove from circulation some brilliant members of our community. Ostracize the middle managers, bureaucrats, politicians that allow the trampling of our rights. But don't arrest the guy designing the home theater system for El Chapo's vacation house and tell me you've taken down the Mexican drug cartel.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    In reality, the software engineers that work for the above are the goons of the bad guys, and we cannot allow them to continue their work as it is detrimental to our interests. Any amount of perspective informs them that what they are doing is not supportive of a democratic state, yet they continue anyway. Why must we accommodate their subservience? Following orders is no excuse.
  - Sir_Substance 11y ago
    >NSA, GCHQ, BSI/BND, etc. aren't the "bad guy" in theory. Theory is not really relevant when the practical reality is monstrous. The five eyes are not redeemable.
    - mattlutze 11y ago
      Theory is of course relevant when the implementation of it, and the environment that it's implemented in, is what is poisoned. It's easy for us to sit at our desks and churn out our work and be mad. And there's things to be mad about for sure. The wanton disregard for civil liberty and protection is simply irredeemable. And to be sure, I've been a fan of your country's very public responses over the last few years to personal privacy. I hope the US legislature can learn a thing or two. But It's not the "five eyes". It's the entire world. Any country with an interest in protecting their sovereignty also has some form of information gathering operation. When that operation gets big and exposes itself, folks get upset because, yeah, being spied on isn't a comfortable thing. Do some countries go about gathering this information more morally than others? Something tells me we'd have to be in the secret inner sanctums of the biggest opponents to really know, and I think the answer would be "a spade is a spade." Does it help our countries protect themselves? I honestly don't know. But I do know that "grey hatting" in the general development community doesn't garner this sort of bile and venom. I don't know why being a grey hat for a government should be treated differently.
- assocguilt 11y ago
  Are you giving the green light to guilt via association? Just because someone worked at GCHQ that does not mean they have done something unethical. Said person could have in fact done something very important for their country. Who are you associated with that I (or society) doesn't like? Maybe your career should be ended for working with an organisation that has done something unethical whether you were involved or not? Freedom of association is one of the cornerstones of a free society. You need to think long and hard about your opinions my friend. I also had myopic opinions when I was fresh out of college though - filed under shithnsays
  - Sir_Substance 11y ago
    >Are you giving the green light to guilt via association? Just because someone worked at GCHQ that does not mean they have done something unethical. If the NSA would like to declassify it's employees job history in a credible and verifiable fashion, I'd be keen to take this on a case by case basis. It is possible that the NSA is hiring engineers for benign reasons. If that's the case, I assume they are not classifying that work. After all, the government should not be withholding information from the public without cause. As it stands, it is reasonable, in light of the revelations of the last several years, to suppose that any engineer who cannot reveal their work history with an intelligence agency has performed unethical work. This is what's known as "preponderance of evidence". >Who are you associated with that I (or society) doesn't like? What a fascinating question. So many insights to your character. I'm entitled to associate with whom I like, and your seedy, toad-like implication that for even suggesting such a thing as personal accountability, I must be a state enemy has the delicious tang of a low quality KGB-centric TV serial. You know, the kind in which the plucky all-american hero fights back against the oppression of a totalitarian russian government. It would be funny if global law enforcement wasn't looking towards digitally predicted thought crime as a genuine goal. So speculate freely, because the real answer is terribly dull: I'm a normal citizen, posting my opinions on an internet forum and associating with you.
    - assocguilt 11y ago
      That question provides zero insight into my character but it does shed some light on your lack of intelligence. I don't actually care who you associate with - it was a thought game - you are saying that you are for guilt via association (or at least I assumed you were) which I was I tried to throw that principle back in your face. Jeez, do you need jokes explaining to you too? The fact you think my inability to talk about some secret work I have done means that I've done something unethical is ridiculous.
laughinghan 11y ago
Have you seen the Idle Words talk, "Haunted by Data"? http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm Pretty compelling talk, culminating in: I believe there should be a law that limits behavioral data collection to 90 days, not because I want to ruin Christmas for your children, but because I think it will give us all better data while clawing back some semblance of privacy.
rhino369 11y ago
One thing people seem particularly blind about is that private companies holding data from their own purposes is the huge point of failure for privacy. The government can get your gmail, facebook, verizon, amazon data because those companies keep that data about you. The NSA doesn't need to spy on you, google already does. I don't think the NSA is reading my email, but I know Google is. Not to mention that when all these tech companies are spying on your for profit, your privacy is already destroyed.
- chishaku 11y ago
  A lot of people are not blind about this at all. They understand fully that their data is collected and they expect nothing less than the top result of their Google, Amazon, and Facebook queries to match exactly what they are looking for.
  - blub 11y ago
    A lot of people have an abstract idea that information is being collected, yes. I suspect that few people realize or know what the amount of information is, who has access to it, what purposes they use it for. Does anyone remember that angry email they sent 5 years ago where they were criticizing their boss? Google does. What kind of profile can you build from thousands and thousands of such emails, messages and queries, and location data and pictures, videos, actions on social networks? I think some companies have a better idea about who some people are than those people themselves.
    - caskance 11y ago
      And thanks to this technology, people can understand themselves better, if they choose to. It's truly bizzare that some people instead take away that the right way to "correct" this discrepancy is for companies to know less.
      - nitrogen 11y ago
        Why do you find that bizarre? Given the asymmetry of resources and conflicting interests between people and the companies who know so much about them, it seems perfectly reasonable to want companies to know less. The vast majority of that knowledge is used to take from the consumer, not to give.
hueving 11y ago
Doctors have classes that teach them ethics early on in school/training because the vast majority of professional doctors agree on what is ethical. On the other hand, you can't even get many university professors to agree that something like collecting metadata is unethical. The idea that we could get the majority of the industry to agree on ethics is pretty far-fetched when a large portion think surveillance is making their country safe.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  I have found that as an individual software worker, with no union or professional association with the muscle to back me up, any ethical objections I may have are meaningless, as the only thing I can do to object is lose all my household income and be replaced by someone more pliant. For instance, I find a user control that prevents the user from changing focus whenever the input is invalid to be unethical, or at least severely impolite. It's the equivalent of grabbing someone's face while you're talking to them. Me: "The control you propose is hostile to the user." Customer: "Do it the way we want, or your company loses the contract." As it turns out, the customer would love to grab someone's face, not just while they talk, but also as they yell, with a light rain of spittle falling gently onto the target's visage. That's because they assume everyone is a complete idiot, whose only salvation is absolute obedience to those officially certified as more capable. They fervently believe that you can order someone to not make mistakes. So it should be no surprise that my ethical objection was meaningless to them. The people paying for software and hardware enabling Panopticon-style universal surveillance have a completely alien system of ethics, and more than enough money to ignore your personal morality. There will always be someone around in desperate enough financial straits that they will quash their own opinions and take the paycheck. A cartel enforcer for software workers is the only way to significantly slow down technologies (you can't actually stop progress) that the majority of those workers find to be unethical. That enforcer has to be able to tell its members that they cannot do such work, no matter how well it pays, because otherwise, the buyers, for whom budget size is no obstacle, simply pay the higher price to those who need cash now more than self-respect later. As long as there are mouths to feed and rent to be paid, the guy with deep pockets will be able to pay another to do his dirty work. It isn't the ethical training that makes the difference in medicine, but the ethical enforcement. Doctors and lawyers can be decertified by their peers and elders, such that they cannot be rehired as a member of that profession. That means that an employer cannot demand unethical behavior, unless it is willing to compensate to the tune of all the money those people could theoretically make over all the remaining years of their careers. I would hope that enough software workers could agree that it is unethical to casually collect and retain information from anyone without their fully informed consent, which is diligently confirmed, and revocable on demand. I further hope that we could agree that it is unethical to gather information to support any criminal investigation without reasonable suspicion that the target has actually committed a crime. Those people who believe that adding more hay to the stack makes the needles easier to find can form their own cartel. I happen to believe that ethically-limited surveillance is more efficient and effective than the heavy-handed dragnet approach. I also think it is unethical to use an O(N^3) brute-force algorithm when an O(N log N) alternative is available. But most customers only care whether something works, and is delivered on time and under budget. They won't ever care about our opinions regarding quality, ethics, or best practices until after we are capable of making them pay dearly for not caring.
blub 11y ago
Large parts of the tech crowd are making big money from advertising and tracking people. Unsurprisingly, it seems these developers and entrepreneurs have a hard time understanding why their source of income has negative effects on society.
- nsns 11y ago
  I can't help but be reminded of a sentence by Theodor Adorno: Keineswegs weiß man bestimmt, wie die Fetischisierung der Technik in der individuellen Psychologie der einzelnen Menschen sich durchsetzt, wo die Schwelle ist zwischen einem rationalen Verhältnis zu ihr und jener Überwertung, die schließlich dazu führt, daß einer, der ein Zugsystem ausklügelt, das die Opfer möglichst schnell und reibungslos nach Auschwitz bringt, darüber vergißt, was in Auschwitz mit ihnen geschieht.[0] In short: the fetishization of technology makes its creators forget for which purposes their wonderfully efficient tools will finally be put to use. [0] Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, S. 91
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I think you missed an important bit in your translation. "We do not know how to determine how the technology fetish in individual people leads to the point at which a rational relationship changes into one of over-valuing, which eventually leads to someone designing a train system to get the victims as fast and smooth as possible to their destination in Auschwitz, but who forgets what it is that happens to them once they arrive there"
    - tombrossman 11y ago
      This is a good time to remind readers of this Upton Sinclair quote, too: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
      - nsns 11y ago
        Well, I actually feel it concerns much more than simply money. The avant-garde - be it technological, artistic or intellectual - has always shown a tendency to join forces with the darkest of regimes during the early stages.
chongli 11y ago
Doctors are actually professional. They have rigorous certifications, they have a professional board that administers examinations and issues licenses, they have a defined structure for reporting ethics violations with a code of ethics dating back centuries. Programmers are just a loosely-defined group of tinkerers, labourers, and the odd scientist or engineer. How do you expect to impose a structure on that? A teenager can tinker around with software in his bedroom and nobody gives a damn. If he were to conduct medical experiments on his little sister, on the other hand, he'd go to jail. That is the difference.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Doctors (as a profession) have a professional regulatory board and are educated on the ethical proceedings, but doctors (as an individual) can be just as corrupt as anyone else. The difference is accountability within the profession. If a doctor starts doling out tons of prescription opiates, an auditing system is in place (Many levels in fact - either within the state, nationally via the DEA, by someone arrested who will rat the doctor out in exchange for lenient terms, or by a pharmacist who has seen one too many "Oxycodone 30 take as needed" pass through his shop.) Programmers (as individuals) can't be ethically audited, but what we can do is regulate the data which is allowed to be collected. You regulate it like any other industry. Sigma-Aldrich is a corporate company that sells pharmaceutical grade precusors. I was dating a girl who was doing a post-doc in o-chem, in her office waiting to finish up something, and flipped through their catalog. I saw a precursor that was heavily flagged by the DEA which could be used to synthesize massive amounts of a recreational drug. Curious, I asked her the procedure for procurement, and she delineated it. In short, she could get it with a sign-off from the PI and a few other things fairly easily [she would never do that, she's far too ethical - but her PI was famous enough that a request on his letterhead with "Veritas" on it would have been enough] but there's a chain of custody and auditing system in that just like there is with doctors who are issued DEA numbers. If I call up S-A and ask for the same chemical not only would I be laughed off the phone, but they'd likely submit my information to the DEA to flag me for further investigation. What am I getting at? You can't regulate people, but you can regulate systems. If that precursor was ordered and that drug happened to pop-up, the DEA could easily call up any of the suppliers of those precursors and figure out when it was dispensed fairly easily. We need to regulate any institution that collects data in the same way. When it's at a point where the institution is large enough to collect information at a level like that, issue compliance terms. In the same way publicly traded companies have to release financial information to the SEC and comply with numerous reporting terms (look at EDGAR to see how extensive it is), open up another branch of the government that is in charge of regulating the companies that collect data. That way, your engineer with loosely-defined morals who is capable of doing whatever will be prosecuted just like amoral doctors.
codeshaman 11y ago
Great words. But I think it's already too late. The genie is out of the bottle and it's already doing it's darker things in many parts of the world. One of the great things about technology, is that it knows no boundaries. But that is also it's biggest danger. Because powerful technology in the hands of weak people can lead to disaster. Intelligence is the ability to create something from nothing, while Wisdom is the ability to choose (wisely) how to apply intelligence to reality - what to create and what not to create. If intelligence is the engine, then wisdom is the driver. We have trained lots of engines but very few drivers. And that is what worries me most..
rms_returns 11y ago
Second this. The Dell customer base "hack" we heard about yesterday is an example of this. It was not as if some extraordinary unethical programmers hacked their database, but inside technicians who were supposed to guard that data turned out to be unethical. Its high time we give the same importance to ethics of tech personnel that we extend to doctors, lawyers, etc.
- macns 11y ago
  Perhaps large corps like dell should face charges for leaking personal data.
karmacondon 11y ago
Not everyone agrees with you that the tech sector is contributing to the building of a surveillance society or police state. There are a lot of people who have carefully considered the issue and come to the conclusion that facebook knowing what posts you liked or ad networks knowing which pages your IP address has visited is not a Bad Thing. It's clear that you don't agree and all debate is welcome, but I caution you not to trip in your rush to claim the moral high ground. I don't think there's any need to rehash the debate here. Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo. I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing. It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs. If you don't like what the tech sector is doing, please by all means continue to advocate. Shout it from the mountain tops, go to work for the EFF. But don't discount people that legitimately disagree with you as being irresponsible. At least some of us have made the effort to understand your point of view. The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  Privacy is similar to property rights in this guise. Facebook is like your backyard or even your home for many, you don't mind people you invite in see the pictures on the mantle, wall, or whatnot. You would mind if they start rummaging through the house though. So in regards to privacy we treat it like property. Governments which don't support good property rights are not going to care one whit about privacy and those who come after privacy will eventually tread on property rights. People need to understand it as something to be protected just as you would your physical stuff and work towards having it treated similarly in government.
- blub 11y ago
  Your whole post is written in bad faith and frankly revolting. Which sector is building startup after startup for data mining, tracking, building profiles? This in addition to the already established companies. Then you're trying to downplay the issue to trivial actions such Facebook likes or tracking of IP addresses, a toy version of the state of the art. Finally, the sarcasm, showing how reasonable you are and putting the OP in a bad light for not being "more understanding". It's quite simple: the topic of privacy is central to a free society and it's enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the past, we have seen a rich history of abuses, lies and deceit from huge organizations with massive resources at their disposal. Private or not. The majority of people go on with their lives without caring, as long as they have their basic needs met. The very few that take a stand, pay the price. Otherwise, some criticism of the behavior of these organizations can be found online, but not much because of: 1) Chilling effects. Funny how I had to think before posting this message, living comfortably in a democratic country, with freedom of thought and freedom of speech. 2) "Helpful people", quick to jump to the defense of said organizations, explaining away abuses, making up excuses, muddying the waters, asking for fairness and understanding their point of view. So thanks for keeping the balance karmacondon. They might have mountains of money, lawyers, shills, PR people and most resources imaginable really, BUT we wouldn't want to unfairly hurt their feelings. I do apologize for that.
amelius 11y ago
> We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. Yes, I believe we should have an "Hippocratic Oath" ([1]) for technology workers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
deleted 11y ago
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iamthepieman 11y ago
I left the intelligence community because of exactly this. Took a 40% pay cut (probably more like 50 if you count benefits) but I don't regret it. I couldn't in good conscience believe in freedom and privacy while working for a government actively working against those things.
jerf 11y ago
"Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences." No, we don't. We have probably a few hundred doing hard-core surveillance. We have another few thousand functioning as enablers by making social media and ad networks really attractive. We have a whole lot of non-engineers insisting on placing ads and tracking on their websites. And then there's the mass bulk of software engineers that have nothing to do with it, and nothing they do will stop it. 50% of doctors decide to stop doing something, and it gets noticed. 99% of software engineers decide to take enormously strong stands against surveillance even at great personnel cost, and surveillance continues on as if nothing happened, except maybe those who work on it get paid a bit more to make up for decreased supply. It may, in that weird 20th/21st century fashionable-self-loathing way, feel really good to blame the group you're a part of, but basically what you're proposing won't do anything at all. You're imputing to "software engineers" in general abilities they don't collectively have. You've got to attack it at the demand level, you will never be able to control the supply. This also matters because if you waste your energy with that approach, you might decide you've done something about the problem and stop trying when in fact you've done nothing.
- ap22213 11y ago
  You're really low-balling. Work in the greater D.C. area. Within a 150-200 mile radius, there are literally tens of thousands of developers working directly on surveillance. Probably even more. How do I know this? From random sampling. Go to any tech event, talk to any program manager at any government contractor. The work and money is in surveillance. And, that's just government surveillance. All that tech is then spilling over into corporate surveillance. Location and behavioral tracking is big money. How do I know this? Because, sadly, that's how I have to make my money. The problem is that there's always another grunt like me willing to create the systems that enable this. The solution: Use all of this surveillance tech and data to expose all of the VIPs. Publicly post where they are and where they've been, who they've been with, what they read, and what they buy. You do this and laws will be created pretty quickly.
  - delinka 11y ago
marcosdumay 11y ago
> What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. You know, this is not coming from software developers. There's a group of people out there whose living is made by manipulating the public perception and speech. This group is not the software developers.
vocatus_gate 11y ago
I left the NSA a few months ago largely for these reasons. While I knew I personally couldn't do much (if anything) to stem the onslaught against human rights, I knew at the very least I didn't want my life's work contributing to it. So I left, leaving behind a very secure sysadmin position with good salary, six weeks of paid vacation and incredible health benefits. Now I'm a 1099 independent contractor for a financial services company with zero job security. But the freedom of burden on my conscience has been worth it.
- effie 11y ago
  You probably had some serious inner battle about this. I applaud you for taking a stand, these kinds of decisions aren't easy. It gives me hope that there are still people out there who care more about doing the right thing than tapping to a source of money. Tangentially, I read somewhere months ago there was an effort by a group of activist people who built a tent near the NSA building and invited the people working there to come and discuss their job and its issues. I'm wondering how successful was this effort? How was it received by the employees?
  - vocatus_gate 11y ago
    I didn't interact with any of the people you're referring to, so I can't comment on that situation. Thanks, it was a difficult decision and took me a while to come to, but I knew I couldn't continue working there in good conscience.
- tobbyb 11y ago
  I applaud your courage! This is so great to hear. It's only when people stand up for what they believe, and nearly always at great personal cost that meaningful change begins to look possible. It's so important to have activism and structures in place to protect whistle blowers and others not comfortable with our current direction to take this difficult path. Respect!

by tobbyb 11y ago

Sir_Substance 11y ago

I'm inclined to agree. I'd like to see more active ostracisation against software developers that have worked for organisations like the NSA and GCHQ. If we can make it a career ending job, it will dramatically reduce their ability to recruit. However, I'd also like to see general software development think more closely about the role it has in normalising these things. Next time you start to create an account system for your project, ask yourself whether you really need it. Could you engineer around it, perhaps by letting the user store their data, or using a stored key to identify them? Let's go beyond don't store what you can't protect, and aim for don't store what you don't strictly need.

rhino369 11y ago
How is Google or Facebook any better? They are spy agencies for advertising purposes instead of national security. Or companies that deploy ad sense or otherwise depend on companies like Google or Facebook.
- Cakez0r 11y ago
  People have a choice (at least to some extent) about the data they share with Google and Facebook. There is no such choice about the information that governments scoop up.
- blub 11y ago
  Exactly. Between themselves, Google & Facebook have access to a disturbingly large amount of the private information and the thoughts of billions of persons. Pictures, emails, messages, social graphs, you name it. And now Microsoft decided they also want a piece of the pie. The kicker? I see people still defend Google all the time, nowadays with bullshit arguments like "I am tired of this you are the product meme" and still excuse Facebook because they need it to keep in touch with others. And they found startups based on advertising and tracking, they work for them and generally support analytics as an inalienable right of software development.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Because one problem at a time. Instead of throwing up ones hands because some other thing is bad, too.
  - Sir_Substance 11y ago
    >Because one problem at a time. Pretty much. I don't use Facebook at all, and give in to Google only on technical searches (Which DDG still isn't good at), mapping and when forced to by work (GCE etc.), so you're preaching to the choir, but lets not try for an overnight coup here.
mattlutze 11y ago
But... NSA, GCHQ, BSI/BND, etc. aren't the "bad guy" in theory. It's within a nation's interest to, within the extent of law and respect for human rights, try as thoroughly has it can to know what's going on in the world. Electronic intelligence is part of that, and a growing part. In practice, the permissive reactions many/most/all governments have to allegations (or proof) that a comms intel agency has broken the law, that's what the trouble is. That these groups have been allowed to break the law or ghostwrite laws that allow them to violate what would generally not be approved by a citizenry, that needs to be addressed. I'm not sure how ruining the careers of software developers and computer scientists who've worked for these organizations does anything other than remove from circulation some brilliant members of our community. Ostracize the middle managers, bureaucrats, politicians that allow the trampling of our rights. But don't arrest the guy designing the home theater system for El Chapo's vacation house and tell me you've taken down the Mexican drug cartel.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cryoshon 11y ago
  In reality, the software engineers that work for the above are the goons of the bad guys, and we cannot allow them to continue their work as it is detrimental to our interests. Any amount of perspective informs them that what they are doing is not supportive of a democratic state, yet they continue anyway. Why must we accommodate their subservience? Following orders is no excuse.
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  >NSA, GCHQ, BSI/BND, etc. aren't the "bad guy" in theory. Theory is not really relevant when the practical reality is monstrous. The five eyes are not redeemable.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    Theory is of course relevant when the implementation of it, and the environment that it's implemented in, is what is poisoned. It's easy for us to sit at our desks and churn out our work and be mad. And there's things to be mad about for sure. The wanton disregard for civil liberty and protection is simply irredeemable. And to be sure, I've been a fan of your country's very public responses over the last few years to personal privacy. I hope the US legislature can learn a thing or two. But It's not the "five eyes". It's the entire world. Any country with an interest in protecting their sovereignty also has some form of information gathering operation. When that operation gets big and exposes itself, folks get upset because, yeah, being spied on isn't a comfortable thing. Do some countries go about gathering this information more morally than others? Something tells me we'd have to be in the secret inner sanctums of the biggest opponents to really know, and I think the answer would be "a spade is a spade." Does it help our countries protect themselves? I honestly don't know. But I do know that "grey hatting" in the general development community doesn't garner this sort of bile and venom. I don't know why being a grey hat for a government should be treated differently.
assocguilt 11y ago
Are you giving the green light to guilt via association? Just because someone worked at GCHQ that does not mean they have done something unethical. Said person could have in fact done something very important for their country. Who are you associated with that I (or society) doesn't like? Maybe your career should be ended for working with an organisation that has done something unethical whether you were involved or not? Freedom of association is one of the cornerstones of a free society. You need to think long and hard about your opinions my friend. I also had myopic opinions when I was fresh out of college though - filed under shithnsays
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  >Are you giving the green light to guilt via association? Just because someone worked at GCHQ that does not mean they have done something unethical. If the NSA would like to declassify it's employees job history in a credible and verifiable fashion, I'd be keen to take this on a case by case basis. It is possible that the NSA is hiring engineers for benign reasons. If that's the case, I assume they are not classifying that work. After all, the government should not be withholding information from the public without cause. As it stands, it is reasonable, in light of the revelations of the last several years, to suppose that any engineer who cannot reveal their work history with an intelligence agency has performed unethical work. This is what's known as "preponderance of evidence". >Who are you associated with that I (or society) doesn't like? What a fascinating question. So many insights to your character. I'm entitled to associate with whom I like, and your seedy, toad-like implication that for even suggesting such a thing as personal accountability, I must be a state enemy has the delicious tang of a low quality KGB-centric TV serial. You know, the kind in which the plucky all-american hero fights back against the oppression of a totalitarian russian government. It would be funny if global law enforcement wasn't looking towards digitally predicted thought crime as a genuine goal. So speculate freely, because the real answer is terribly dull: I'm a normal citizen, posting my opinions on an internet forum and associating with you.
  - assocguilt 11y ago
    That question provides zero insight into my character but it does shed some light on your lack of intelligence. I don't actually care who you associate with - it was a thought game - you are saying that you are for guilt via association (or at least I assumed you were) which I was I tried to throw that principle back in your face. Jeez, do you need jokes explaining to you too? The fact you think my inability to talk about some secret work I have done means that I've done something unethical is ridiculous.

laughinghan 11y ago

Have you seen the Idle Words talk, "Haunted by Data"? http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm Pretty compelling talk, culminating in: I believe there should be a law that limits behavioral data collection to 90 days, not because I want to ruin Christmas for your children, but because I think it will give us all better data while clawing back some semblance of privacy.

rhino369 11y ago

One thing people seem particularly blind about is that private companies holding data from their own purposes is the huge point of failure for privacy. The government can get your gmail, facebook, verizon, amazon data because those companies keep that data about you. The NSA doesn't need to spy on you, google already does. I don't think the NSA is reading my email, but I know Google is. Not to mention that when all these tech companies are spying on your for profit, your privacy is already destroyed.

chishaku 11y ago
A lot of people are not blind about this at all. They understand fully that their data is collected and they expect nothing less than the top result of their Google, Amazon, and Facebook queries to match exactly what they are looking for.
- blub 11y ago
  A lot of people have an abstract idea that information is being collected, yes. I suspect that few people realize or know what the amount of information is, who has access to it, what purposes they use it for. Does anyone remember that angry email they sent 5 years ago where they were criticizing their boss? Google does. What kind of profile can you build from thousands and thousands of such emails, messages and queries, and location data and pictures, videos, actions on social networks? I think some companies have a better idea about who some people are than those people themselves.
  - caskance 11y ago
    And thanks to this technology, people can understand themselves better, if they choose to. It's truly bizzare that some people instead take away that the right way to "correct" this discrepancy is for companies to know less.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Why do you find that bizarre? Given the asymmetry of resources and conflicting interests between people and the companies who know so much about them, it seems perfectly reasonable to want companies to know less. The vast majority of that knowledge is used to take from the consumer, not to give.

hueving 11y ago

Doctors have classes that teach them ethics early on in school/training because the vast majority of professional doctors agree on what is ethical. On the other hand, you can't even get many university professors to agree that something like collecting metadata is unethical. The idea that we could get the majority of the industry to agree on ethics is pretty far-fetched when a large portion think surveillance is making their country safe.

logfromblammo 11y ago
I have found that as an individual software worker, with no union or professional association with the muscle to back me up, any ethical objections I may have are meaningless, as the only thing I can do to object is lose all my household income and be replaced by someone more pliant. For instance, I find a user control that prevents the user from changing focus whenever the input is invalid to be unethical, or at least severely impolite. It's the equivalent of grabbing someone's face while you're talking to them. Me: "The control you propose is hostile to the user." Customer: "Do it the way we want, or your company loses the contract." As it turns out, the customer would love to grab someone's face, not just while they talk, but also as they yell, with a light rain of spittle falling gently onto the target's visage. That's because they assume everyone is a complete idiot, whose only salvation is absolute obedience to those officially certified as more capable. They fervently believe that you can order someone to not make mistakes. So it should be no surprise that my ethical objection was meaningless to them. The people paying for software and hardware enabling Panopticon-style universal surveillance have a completely alien system of ethics, and more than enough money to ignore your personal morality. There will always be someone around in desperate enough financial straits that they will quash their own opinions and take the paycheck. A cartel enforcer for software workers is the only way to significantly slow down technologies (you can't actually stop progress) that the majority of those workers find to be unethical. That enforcer has to be able to tell its members that they cannot do such work, no matter how well it pays, because otherwise, the buyers, for whom budget size is no obstacle, simply pay the higher price to those who need cash now more than self-respect later. As long as there are mouths to feed and rent to be paid, the guy with deep pockets will be able to pay another to do his dirty work. It isn't the ethical training that makes the difference in medicine, but the ethical enforcement. Doctors and lawyers can be decertified by their peers and elders, such that they cannot be rehired as a member of that profession. That means that an employer cannot demand unethical behavior, unless it is willing to compensate to the tune of all the money those people could theoretically make over all the remaining years of their careers. I would hope that enough software workers could agree that it is unethical to casually collect and retain information from anyone without their fully informed consent, which is diligently confirmed, and revocable on demand. I further hope that we could agree that it is unethical to gather information to support any criminal investigation without reasonable suspicion that the target has actually committed a crime. Those people who believe that adding more hay to the stack makes the needles easier to find can form their own cartel. I happen to believe that ethically-limited surveillance is more efficient and effective than the heavy-handed dragnet approach. I also think it is unethical to use an O(N^3) brute-force algorithm when an O(N log N) alternative is available. But most customers only care whether something works, and is delivered on time and under budget. They won't ever care about our opinions regarding quality, ethics, or best practices until after we are capable of making them pay dearly for not caring.

blub 11y ago

Large parts of the tech crowd are making big money from advertising and tracking people. Unsurprisingly, it seems these developers and entrepreneurs have a hard time understanding why their source of income has negative effects on society.

nsns 11y ago
I can't help but be reminded of a sentence by Theodor Adorno: Keineswegs weiß man bestimmt, wie die Fetischisierung der Technik in der individuellen Psychologie der einzelnen Menschen sich durchsetzt, wo die Schwelle ist zwischen einem rationalen Verhältnis zu ihr und jener Überwertung, die schließlich dazu führt, daß einer, der ein Zugsystem ausklügelt, das die Opfer möglichst schnell und reibungslos nach Auschwitz bringt, darüber vergißt, was in Auschwitz mit ihnen geschieht.[0] In short: the fetishization of technology makes its creators forget for which purposes their wonderfully efficient tools will finally be put to use. [0] Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, S. 91
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I think you missed an important bit in your translation. "We do not know how to determine how the technology fetish in individual people leads to the point at which a rational relationship changes into one of over-valuing, which eventually leads to someone designing a train system to get the victims as fast and smooth as possible to their destination in Auschwitz, but who forgets what it is that happens to them once they arrive there"
  - tombrossman 11y ago
    This is a good time to remind readers of this Upton Sinclair quote, too: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
    - nsns 11y ago
      Well, I actually feel it concerns much more than simply money. The avant-garde - be it technological, artistic or intellectual - has always shown a tendency to join forces with the darkest of regimes during the early stages.

chongli 11y ago

Doctors are actually professional. They have rigorous certifications, they have a professional board that administers examinations and issues licenses, they have a defined structure for reporting ethics violations with a code of ethics dating back centuries. Programmers are just a loosely-defined group of tinkerers, labourers, and the odd scientist or engineer. How do you expect to impose a structure on that? A teenager can tinker around with software in his bedroom and nobody gives a damn. If he were to conduct medical experiments on his little sister, on the other hand, he'd go to jail. That is the difference.

iheartmemcache 11y ago
Doctors (as a profession) have a professional regulatory board and are educated on the ethical proceedings, but doctors (as an individual) can be just as corrupt as anyone else. The difference is accountability within the profession. If a doctor starts doling out tons of prescription opiates, an auditing system is in place (Many levels in fact - either within the state, nationally via the DEA, by someone arrested who will rat the doctor out in exchange for lenient terms, or by a pharmacist who has seen one too many "Oxycodone 30 take as needed" pass through his shop.) Programmers (as individuals) can't be ethically audited, but what we can do is regulate the data which is allowed to be collected. You regulate it like any other industry. Sigma-Aldrich is a corporate company that sells pharmaceutical grade precusors. I was dating a girl who was doing a post-doc in o-chem, in her office waiting to finish up something, and flipped through their catalog. I saw a precursor that was heavily flagged by the DEA which could be used to synthesize massive amounts of a recreational drug. Curious, I asked her the procedure for procurement, and she delineated it. In short, she could get it with a sign-off from the PI and a few other things fairly easily [she would never do that, she's far too ethical - but her PI was famous enough that a request on his letterhead with "Veritas" on it would have been enough] but there's a chain of custody and auditing system in that just like there is with doctors who are issued DEA numbers. If I call up S-A and ask for the same chemical not only would I be laughed off the phone, but they'd likely submit my information to the DEA to flag me for further investigation. What am I getting at? You can't regulate people, but you can regulate systems. If that precursor was ordered and that drug happened to pop-up, the DEA could easily call up any of the suppliers of those precursors and figure out when it was dispensed fairly easily. We need to regulate any institution that collects data in the same way. When it's at a point where the institution is large enough to collect information at a level like that, issue compliance terms. In the same way publicly traded companies have to release financial information to the SEC and comply with numerous reporting terms (look at EDGAR to see how extensive it is), open up another branch of the government that is in charge of regulating the companies that collect data. That way, your engineer with loosely-defined morals who is capable of doing whatever will be prosecuted just like amoral doctors.

codeshaman 11y ago

Great words. But I think it's already too late. The genie is out of the bottle and it's already doing it's darker things in many parts of the world. One of the great things about technology, is that it knows no boundaries. But that is also it's biggest danger. Because powerful technology in the hands of weak people can lead to disaster. Intelligence is the ability to create something from nothing, while Wisdom is the ability to choose (wisely) how to apply intelligence to reality - what to create and what not to create. If intelligence is the engine, then wisdom is the driver. We have trained lots of engines but very few drivers. And that is what worries me most..

rms_returns 11y ago

Second this. The Dell customer base "hack" we heard about yesterday is an example of this. It was not as if some extraordinary unethical programmers hacked their database, but inside technicians who were supposed to guard that data turned out to be unethical. Its high time we give the same importance to ethics of tech personnel that we extend to doctors, lawyers, etc.

macns 11y ago
Perhaps large corps like dell should face charges for leaking personal data.

karmacondon 11y ago

Not everyone agrees with you that the tech sector is contributing to the building of a surveillance society or police state. There are a lot of people who have carefully considered the issue and come to the conclusion that facebook knowing what posts you liked or ad networks knowing which pages your IP address has visited is not a Bad Thing. It's clear that you don't agree and all debate is welcome, but I caution you not to trip in your rush to claim the moral high ground. I don't think there's any need to rehash the debate here. Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo. I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing. It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs. If you don't like what the tech sector is doing, please by all means continue to advocate. Shout it from the mountain tops, go to work for the EFF. But don't discount people that legitimately disagree with you as being irresponsible. At least some of us have made the effort to understand your point of view. The least you could do is to try to understand ours.

Shivetya 11y ago
Privacy is similar to property rights in this guise. Facebook is like your backyard or even your home for many, you don't mind people you invite in see the pictures on the mantle, wall, or whatnot. You would mind if they start rummaging through the house though. So in regards to privacy we treat it like property. Governments which don't support good property rights are not going to care one whit about privacy and those who come after privacy will eventually tread on property rights. People need to understand it as something to be protected just as you would your physical stuff and work towards having it treated similarly in government.
blub 11y ago
Your whole post is written in bad faith and frankly revolting. Which sector is building startup after startup for data mining, tracking, building profiles? This in addition to the already established companies. Then you're trying to downplay the issue to trivial actions such Facebook likes or tracking of IP addresses, a toy version of the state of the art. Finally, the sarcasm, showing how reasonable you are and putting the OP in a bad light for not being "more understanding". It's quite simple: the topic of privacy is central to a free society and it's enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the past, we have seen a rich history of abuses, lies and deceit from huge organizations with massive resources at their disposal. Private or not. The majority of people go on with their lives without caring, as long as they have their basic needs met. The very few that take a stand, pay the price. Otherwise, some criticism of the behavior of these organizations can be found online, but not much because of: 1) Chilling effects. Funny how I had to think before posting this message, living comfortably in a democratic country, with freedom of thought and freedom of speech. 2) "Helpful people", quick to jump to the defense of said organizations, explaining away abuses, making up excuses, muddying the waters, asking for fairness and understanding their point of view. So thanks for keeping the balance karmacondon. They might have mountains of money, lawyers, shills, PR people and most resources imaginable really, BUT we wouldn't want to unfairly hurt their feelings. I do apologize for that.

amelius 11y ago

> We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. Yes, I believe we should have an "Hippocratic Oath" ([1]) for technology workers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

deleted 11y ago

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iamthepieman 11y ago

I left the intelligence community because of exactly this. Took a 40% pay cut (probably more like 50 if you count benefits) but I don't regret it. I couldn't in good conscience believe in freedom and privacy while working for a government actively working against those things.

jerf 11y ago

"Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences." No, we don't. We have probably a few hundred doing hard-core surveillance. We have another few thousand functioning as enablers by making social media and ad networks really attractive. We have a whole lot of non-engineers insisting on placing ads and tracking on their websites. And then there's the mass bulk of software engineers that have nothing to do with it, and nothing they do will stop it. 50% of doctors decide to stop doing something, and it gets noticed. 99% of software engineers decide to take enormously strong stands against surveillance even at great personnel cost, and surveillance continues on as if nothing happened, except maybe those who work on it get paid a bit more to make up for decreased supply. It may, in that weird 20th/21st century fashionable-self-loathing way, feel really good to blame the group you're a part of, but basically what you're proposing won't do anything at all. You're imputing to "software engineers" in general abilities they don't collectively have. You've got to attack it at the demand level, you will never be able to control the supply. This also matters because if you waste your energy with that approach, you might decide you've done something about the problem and stop trying when in fact you've done nothing.

ap22213 11y ago
You're really low-balling. Work in the greater D.C. area. Within a 150-200 mile radius, there are literally tens of thousands of developers working directly on surveillance. Probably even more. How do I know this? From random sampling. Go to any tech event, talk to any program manager at any government contractor. The work and money is in surveillance. And, that's just government surveillance. All that tech is then spilling over into corporate surveillance. Location and behavioral tracking is big money. How do I know this? Because, sadly, that's how I have to make my money. The problem is that there's always another grunt like me willing to create the systems that enable this. The solution: Use all of this surveillance tech and data to expose all of the VIPs. Publicly post where they are and where they've been, who they've been with, what they read, and what they buy. You do this and laws will be created pretty quickly.
- delinka 11y ago

marcosdumay 11y ago

> What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. You know, this is not coming from software developers. There's a group of people out there whose living is made by manipulating the public perception and speech. This group is not the software developers.

vocatus_gate 11y ago

I left the NSA a few months ago largely for these reasons. While I knew I personally couldn't do much (if anything) to stem the onslaught against human rights, I knew at the very least I didn't want my life's work contributing to it. So I left, leaving behind a very secure sysadmin position with good salary, six weeks of paid vacation and incredible health benefits. Now I'm a 1099 independent contractor for a financial services company with zero job security. But the freedom of burden on my conscience has been worth it.

effie 11y ago
You probably had some serious inner battle about this. I applaud you for taking a stand, these kinds of decisions aren't easy. It gives me hope that there are still people out there who care more about doing the right thing than tapping to a source of money. Tangentially, I read somewhere months ago there was an effort by a group of activist people who built a tent near the NSA building and invited the people working there to come and discuss their job and its issues. I'm wondering how successful was this effort? How was it received by the employees?
- vocatus_gate 11y ago
  I didn't interact with any of the people you're referring to, so I can't comment on that situation. Thanks, it was a difficult decision and took me a while to come to, but I knew I couldn't continue working there in good conscience.
tobbyb 11y ago
I applaud your courage! This is so great to hear. It's only when people stand up for what they believe, and nearly always at great personal cost that meaningful change begins to look possible. It's so important to have activism and structures in place to protect whistle blowers and others not comfortable with our current direction to take this difficult path. Respect!