> But suppose we create a certification. To get certified all you have to do is promise not to work on a specific list of things: Mass surveillance, backdoors,

> But suppose we create a certification. To get certified all you have to do is promise not to work on a specific list of things: Mass surveillance, backdoors, etc. To lose certification forever all you have to do is work on one of those things. I fear you may be making a potentially dangerous assumption about how engineering works in a compartmentalized environment. Engineers do not always know the purpose of the systems on which they work. Once upon a time in Texas I spent several years working on a system to run a binary sample through a series of plugins that produced analysis of the binary sample. I was told that this was to help detect malware - and it could certainly do that. Did I know that for certain? No. Were there other possible uses, such as to determine how detectable a given piece of experimental malware was? Yes. Did I have any way, shape, form, manner, or means of finding out what 100% of uses were? No. A lot of software has more than one possible use.