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If you work in research like that - how can you sleep at night? This is a real question - I haven't been able to ask someone directly involved in unmasking use

• nhf 11y ago
  From the perspective of a current CMU student: the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) here is the responsible party here. Note that they are separate from the main ("academic") school of CS. They are a federally-funded research and development center, essentially a computing-focused contractor and consultant for the DoD (see more here: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/organization/workingwithanFFRDC.cfm http://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/organization/workingwithanFFRDC...). So, in short, the people at the SEI sleep as well as the people at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin that build the drones, or the folks at Alcatel-Lucent who helped the NSA way back, or maybe even the guys way back at Los Alamos. It's not like some grad students or CS professor got strong-armed into doing this. It's literally their job to do this kind of work for the DoD and other government offices. While the ethics of this line of work are certainly up for debate, they knew exactly what they were getting into.
• thrillgore 11y ago
  The subject of ethics in computer science is mostly unstudied, and broadly ignored. When I studied it, it basically boiled down to the arguments about patents. We never discussed IBM's involvement with the Gestapo, or the Apartheid South Africa Government.