9 ms·

This is what so sad about tech, it gives those in power unprecedented abilities to control the population. Essentially heading back to slavery through technolog

This is what so sad about tech, it gives those in power unprecedented abilities to control the population. Essentially heading back to slavery through technology with no way out for the slaves anymore.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
It also gives tech workers unprecedented abilities to fight it. Software engineers need to take social responsibility for what they create.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  But you know they won't. There is a lot of money to be made in going along. Heck, I probably wouldn't refuse big money from google for a few years. Maybe after having enough money I would eventually turn into a freedom activist, but who knows?
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Would you have helped to build Auschwitz if you got paid enough money?
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I am from Germany and a lot of people did help. They were ordinary citizens before 1933, then they supported mass murder until 1945, then they became citizens of a democratic country. History has shown repeatedly that most people will follow brutal dictatorships and only a few will resist. I don't know what I would do and neither do most of us without being in that situation.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      There's a quote by Polish nobelist Wiesława Szymborska: "Tyle wiemy o sobie, ile nas sprawdzono" Which translates roughly to: "We only know as much about ourselves, as we've been tried" During WW2 there was a lot of atrocities committed by people against their own. Not just Nazis against Poles or Jews, but Poles against Poles, Jews against Jews, Ukrainians against Ukrainians....etc etc. People who were given a choice to either hunt and kill their own, or have their families killed. Nazis frequently got the native population to do the most evil stuff(for the promise of being left alone in exchange), even documenting it on film and photos to show it back in Germany as "look at those barbarians killing each other". Basically we don't know what we would do in case of extreme adversity until we actually face it. I personally wish with all my being that my test will never come.
    - dTal 8y ago
      Funnily enough, this isn't some outlandish hypothetical. American IT workers literally helped build Auschwitz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II
      - NikkiA 8y ago
        And they haven't stopped, they just recently built the surveillance system for Duterte that would identify 'drug users' to allow them to be targeted for extra-judicial killings.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  I don't think new feats in society are accomplished by holding groups of individuals to task and making each one play by the rules. We need new ideas and new government structures to fight the tide or get ahead of it and inspire people with smart and informed leadership. Shaming ambiguous highly paid developers doesn't do anything, because you are criticizing a job role, a "slot" in society, when you think you are criticizing a person. If you get one software engineer to "take responsibility," another will simply step into place and gladly accept the high paying salary to code without ethics. We need government regulation.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I do agree we need government regulation[1], but as perhaps a bit of defense in depth, I absolutely think we need to be instilling engineers with ethics. Would your point make any sense if we were talking about doctors, instead of engineers? We teach "first, do no harm" from day one in that field, and we wouldn't assume for any act a doctor would refuse to do, one that would is readily available. We need the same for software engineers. We need to teach people that their mere paycheck job could incite a genocide on the other side of the world. I also dislike the "someone else will take their place" logic. While a large number of jobs are, indeed, trivially replaceable, many are not, and many developers have significantly above average skill. Some believe they act ethically, and some do not care. If we can remove those who wish to act ethically from working at unethical companies, we significantly shrink the job pool for them. They'll have less options, and likely have to fight harder and pay more to get them. This means that unethical companies may be paying more (i.e. lower profit margins) and be getting worse talent. If we can get more of the most talented developers working at more ethical companies, the more ethical solutions will be better, and they will win in the market. [1] I am a big proponent of GDPR and a desire for a US version of it. Though ultimately, particularly in terms of government surveillance, I feel we need a Constitutional Amendment defining a right to privacy. Something far more lasting and enshrined into our future legal framework that recognizes that privacy is a fundamental human right.
    - Benjammer 8y ago
      I would definitely support a digital privacy amendment.
- BrandonMarc 8y ago
  Tell that to the Google. Their employees scoffed about working with the Pentagon and dropped the contract, but happily helped China build an authoritarian social-punishment system. Then denied it ... and then more details kept coming out showing Google continued working on it, just more quietly.
  - opportune 8y ago
    Pretty sure Google wasn't working on a social punishment system (ie the Chinese "credit score" that's based on social factors), but a censored search engine, which is still pretty shitty but not nearly as bad as what you claim, unless I missed some big piece of news and am myself mistaken
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      Dragonfly allegedly is designed to associate searches with a user's phone number, which can be tied to their identity. Since China would have access to this system, it's likely searches for banned topics would be able to impact your social credit, or potentially get you disappeared in the middle of the night. https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-links-searches-to-phone-numbers/ https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...
      - opportune 8y ago
        I didn't know that, thanks
      - qwerty456127 8y ago
        BTW although having searches on political topics banned explicitly tracked doesn't sound too scary from a pragmatic point of view I doubt they will stop at this point. They probably will analyse whole search histories of people to produce their social portraits so a person interested in whatever unorthodox kind stuff can get penalized too.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Many Googlers have already left Google on ethical grounds, and many more likely will in the near future. There are multiple organized groups of employees trying to enact change internally, but some who previously did that have already recognized that as futile and left, so presumably more will eventually. Google is already an extremely large company, and I think that many are only just now realizing the problems that they were contributing to. It may take a while for employee actions (both protests and resignations) to have a visible impact due to it's size, but I think they're making progress. As per my thoughts I expounded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  Agreed. The narrative is frequently, "Tech company X's CEO was running secret, morally-questionable project. Rest of the company's engineers upset to find out about it." So far that dissatisfaction has been mostly inert, unfortunately. But I like to think that the typical engineer's morals haven't been as corroded by money as the typical CEO, and that we'll eventually reach a breaking point where things will get so bad that the engineers will finally take a stand. Tech puts power in the hands of the few, but that tech can't be built without lots of engineers. The sooner they see past the utopian narratives peddled by their bosses and set aside their comfy lives, the better.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Jobs are not easily replaceable for them to be able to take a stand. This means that even highly skilled and highly specialized engineers can't afford to have a problem working on censorship and surveillance tech, they probably find it exciting given all that cutting edge high performance packet processing or massive neural networks for face recognition. On top of that a bit of propaganda always helps to justify all this inhumane stuff, just like it helps to push lots of people to join the military. So, my point is, it can't come from individual employees taking responsibility, it doesn't work like that at all. Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence.
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      > Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks. Maybe it won't always be that way, but being a programmer right now feels like being the prettiest girl at the ball. That's a good climate in which to quit your job out of principle. > Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence. It sounds like you've just succumbed to general defeatism, which to me seems like a waste of time and energy.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  Exactly. The people directly designing and coding these surveillance systems are: other software developers! Our peers in the profession. Many of whom probably read (and even post to) HN. If you know someone working on such a system and you disagree ethically, it’s kind of your business to get in their face and challenge them on it. And if you are such a person: The tech hiring market is still pretty strong and robust. There are thousands of other projects out there for you that don’t involve mass-surveilling innocent people. You have options! I’ve quit jobs in the past over ethical concerns with the project. It is a valid reason, and it just takes courage.
- flattone 8y ago
  problem is all kind of people (values types) can eng
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  > Software engineers need to take social responsibility for what they create. They won't. 99% of people hate to take responsibilities and will never take any voluntarily without being well-paid for this or believing success is guaranteed. Expecting them to is ignoring a fact, may we like it or not. And they are not broken, it's not their job. Taking responsibilities is a job of politicians we elect yet they want power over everything. In the EU, however, a reasonable part of politicians seems doing the job so we have GDPR and Google/Facebook/etc fined billions every now and then. But they could certainly do better so we wouldn't have the fascist copyright reform.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  1. Yes 2. I walk everyday by a large Bayer building, a company that sells chemicals that create cancer and sells chemicals that heal cancer. Hundreds of people enter the building every day and I think you just need to pay enough money, and you will always find people doing your work.
- snarf21 8y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate: Have you removed FAANG companies from your retirement portfolio? Including all indexes? Do you use zero FAANG products and/or services unless required by your job? ........ People need to take social responsibility for the companies they patron, support and benefit from. (It is really hard to be this black and white. Also, there are tons of evil companies like Nestle and Montesanto and ...)
tmh79 8y ago
On the other hand, people of color are currently living in a world of extremely corrupt police (see https://www.baltimoresun.com/year-in-review/bs-md-yir-baltimore-police-1231-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/year-in-review/bs-md-yir-baltim...) and general danger, and these cameras will help keep the police and other criminals accountable.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  How naive. We may not lose battles that were won a long time ago (so the state may not be as racist as it were) but don't believe that the next battle will be easier to win with so much power in the hands of the few.
- jjgreen 8y ago
  As with the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in London, you may well find that the cameras turn out to be "broken".
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
Tech is also a way we can all protect ourselves. The DIY cybernetics movement will one day become as necessary as the makers movement. Cody Wilson spoke up, and the political establishment went after him. His sacrifice was not in vain. Today, you can print an assault rifle receiver or 9mm receiver. Everyone should learn how to assemble a weapon. Everyone should also learn how to break into a server, using Kali Linux. Government and corporate IT types are stooges. It is a Constitutional duty that we all share in, as a check against government and corporate Tyranny.
mschuster91 8y ago
> Essentially heading back to slavery through technology with no way out for the slaves anymore. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Not with the many weapons circulating in the US. Just look at what the French can do with basically stones and molotovs as weapons. No matter how brutal the French police act, the population is not afraid of telling their leadership how much they suck in terms that they can understand. Now imagine a France Gilets Jaunes-level protest wave in the US, just with the demonstrators armed with AR15, proper bombs and a boatload of protective armor. That would be a bloodshed. Aside from "mowing down protesters" being very bad PR even for the most conservative media outlets, I doubt that the US government would risk something like that to happen. Other countries with an unarmed population not used to protests that go beyond holding up signs like Germany, however, they're a different game. And it shows. Our politicians implement one authoritarian measure after another and the only thing people went on to the streets to protest is Article 13.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  This often goes missed when gun owners are criticised for saying that guns are useful in a revolt. The point isn't to win against a tyrannical government, it's to force said regime's hand into a position where they either give up or commit an atrocity that hastens their demise and weakens their mandate. Vietnam and Iraq are two standout examples of weapons being useful to resist a powerful occupier. They never actually defeated the US, they were just a huge pain in the ass until the US finally gave up and left.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

It also gives tech workers unprecedented abilities to fight it. Software engineers need to take social responsibility for what they create.

maxxxxx 8y ago
But you know they won't. There is a lot of money to be made in going along. Heck, I probably wouldn't refuse big money from google for a few years. Maybe after having enough money I would eventually turn into a freedom activist, but who knows?
- ams6110 8y ago
  Would you have helped to build Auschwitz if you got paid enough money?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I am from Germany and a lot of people did help. They were ordinary citizens before 1933, then they supported mass murder until 1945, then they became citizens of a democratic country. History has shown repeatedly that most people will follow brutal dictatorships and only a few will resist. I don't know what I would do and neither do most of us without being in that situation.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    There's a quote by Polish nobelist Wiesława Szymborska: "Tyle wiemy o sobie, ile nas sprawdzono" Which translates roughly to: "We only know as much about ourselves, as we've been tried" During WW2 there was a lot of atrocities committed by people against their own. Not just Nazis against Poles or Jews, but Poles against Poles, Jews against Jews, Ukrainians against Ukrainians....etc etc. People who were given a choice to either hunt and kill their own, or have their families killed. Nazis frequently got the native population to do the most evil stuff(for the promise of being left alone in exchange), even documenting it on film and photos to show it back in Germany as "look at those barbarians killing each other". Basically we don't know what we would do in case of extreme adversity until we actually face it. I personally wish with all my being that my test will never come.
  - dTal 8y ago
    Funnily enough, this isn't some outlandish hypothetical. American IT workers literally helped build Auschwitz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II
    - NikkiA 8y ago
      And they haven't stopped, they just recently built the surveillance system for Duterte that would identify 'drug users' to allow them to be targeted for extra-judicial killings.
Benjammer 8y ago
I don't think new feats in society are accomplished by holding groups of individuals to task and making each one play by the rules. We need new ideas and new government structures to fight the tide or get ahead of it and inspire people with smart and informed leadership. Shaming ambiguous highly paid developers doesn't do anything, because you are criticizing a job role, a "slot" in society, when you think you are criticizing a person. If you get one software engineer to "take responsibility," another will simply step into place and gladly accept the high paying salary to code without ethics. We need government regulation.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I do agree we need government regulation[1], but as perhaps a bit of defense in depth, I absolutely think we need to be instilling engineers with ethics. Would your point make any sense if we were talking about doctors, instead of engineers? We teach "first, do no harm" from day one in that field, and we wouldn't assume for any act a doctor would refuse to do, one that would is readily available. We need the same for software engineers. We need to teach people that their mere paycheck job could incite a genocide on the other side of the world. I also dislike the "someone else will take their place" logic. While a large number of jobs are, indeed, trivially replaceable, many are not, and many developers have significantly above average skill. Some believe they act ethically, and some do not care. If we can remove those who wish to act ethically from working at unethical companies, we significantly shrink the job pool for them. They'll have less options, and likely have to fight harder and pay more to get them. This means that unethical companies may be paying more (i.e. lower profit margins) and be getting worse talent. If we can get more of the most talented developers working at more ethical companies, the more ethical solutions will be better, and they will win in the market. [1] I am a big proponent of GDPR and a desire for a US version of it. Though ultimately, particularly in terms of government surveillance, I feel we need a Constitutional Amendment defining a right to privacy. Something far more lasting and enshrined into our future legal framework that recognizes that privacy is a fundamental human right.
  - Benjammer 8y ago
    I would definitely support a digital privacy amendment.
BrandonMarc 8y ago
Tell that to the Google. Their employees scoffed about working with the Pentagon and dropped the contract, but happily helped China build an authoritarian social-punishment system. Then denied it ... and then more details kept coming out showing Google continued working on it, just more quietly.
- opportune 8y ago
  Pretty sure Google wasn't working on a social punishment system (ie the Chinese "credit score" that's based on social factors), but a censored search engine, which is still pretty shitty but not nearly as bad as what you claim, unless I missed some big piece of news and am myself mistaken
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Dragonfly allegedly is designed to associate searches with a user's phone number, which can be tied to their identity. Since China would have access to this system, it's likely searches for banned topics would be able to impact your social credit, or potentially get you disappeared in the middle of the night. https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-links-searches-to-phone-numbers/ https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...
    - opportune 8y ago
      I didn't know that, thanks
    - qwerty456127 8y ago
      BTW although having searches on political topics banned explicitly tracked doesn't sound too scary from a pragmatic point of view I doubt they will stop at this point. They probably will analyse whole search histories of people to produce their social portraits so a person interested in whatever unorthodox kind stuff can get penalized too.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Many Googlers have already left Google on ethical grounds, and many more likely will in the near future. There are multiple organized groups of employees trying to enact change internally, but some who previously did that have already recognized that as futile and left, so presumably more will eventually. Google is already an extremely large company, and I think that many are only just now realizing the problems that they were contributing to. It may take a while for employee actions (both protests and resignations) to have a visible impact due to it's size, but I think they're making progress. As per my thoughts I expounded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.
_bxg1 8y ago
Agreed. The narrative is frequently, "Tech company X's CEO was running secret, morally-questionable project. Rest of the company's engineers upset to find out about it." So far that dissatisfaction has been mostly inert, unfortunately. But I like to think that the typical engineer's morals haven't been as corroded by money as the typical CEO, and that we'll eventually reach a breaking point where things will get so bad that the engineers will finally take a stand. Tech puts power in the hands of the few, but that tech can't be built without lots of engineers. The sooner they see past the utopian narratives peddled by their bosses and set aside their comfy lives, the better.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Jobs are not easily replaceable for them to be able to take a stand. This means that even highly skilled and highly specialized engineers can't afford to have a problem working on censorship and surveillance tech, they probably find it exciting given all that cutting edge high performance packet processing or massive neural networks for face recognition. On top of that a bit of propaganda always helps to justify all this inhumane stuff, just like it helps to push lots of people to join the military. So, my point is, it can't come from individual employees taking responsibility, it doesn't work like that at all. Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    > Engineers, like almost all employees, have to work for a living and will build whatever they have to build. Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks. Maybe it won't always be that way, but being a programmer right now feels like being the prettiest girl at the ball. That's a good climate in which to quit your job out of principle. > Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence. It sounds like you've just succumbed to general defeatism, which to me seems like a waste of time and energy.
ryandrake 8y ago
Exactly. The people directly designing and coding these surveillance systems are: other software developers! Our peers in the profession. Many of whom probably read (and even post to) HN. If you know someone working on such a system and you disagree ethically, it’s kind of your business to get in their face and challenge them on it. And if you are such a person: The tech hiring market is still pretty strong and robust. There are thousands of other projects out there for you that don’t involve mass-surveilling innocent people. You have options! I’ve quit jobs in the past over ethical concerns with the project. It is a valid reason, and it just takes courage.
flattone 8y ago
problem is all kind of people (values types) can eng
qwerty456127 8y ago
> Software engineers need to take social responsibility for what they create. They won't. 99% of people hate to take responsibilities and will never take any voluntarily without being well-paid for this or believing success is guaranteed. Expecting them to is ignoring a fact, may we like it or not. And they are not broken, it's not their job. Taking responsibilities is a job of politicians we elect yet they want power over everything. In the EU, however, a reasonable part of politicians seems doing the job so we have GDPR and Google/Facebook/etc fined billions every now and then. But they could certainly do better so we wouldn't have the fascist copyright reform.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
1. Yes 2. I walk everyday by a large Bayer building, a company that sells chemicals that create cancer and sells chemicals that heal cancer. Hundreds of people enter the building every day and I think you just need to pay enough money, and you will always find people doing your work.
snarf21 8y ago
Just to play devil's advocate: Have you removed FAANG companies from your retirement portfolio? Including all indexes? Do you use zero FAANG products and/or services unless required by your job? ........ People need to take social responsibility for the companies they patron, support and benefit from. (It is really hard to be this black and white. Also, there are tons of evil companies like Nestle and Montesanto and ...)

tmh79 8y ago

On the other hand, people of color are currently living in a world of extremely corrupt police (see https://www.baltimoresun.com/year-in-review/bs-md-yir-baltimore-police-1231-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/year-in-review/bs-md-yir-baltim...) and general danger, and these cameras will help keep the police and other criminals accountable.

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
How naive. We may not lose battles that were won a long time ago (so the state may not be as racist as it were) but don't believe that the next battle will be easier to win with so much power in the hands of the few.
jjgreen 8y ago
As with the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in London, you may well find that the cameras turn out to be "broken".

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

Tech is also a way we can all protect ourselves. The DIY cybernetics movement will one day become as necessary as the makers movement. Cody Wilson spoke up, and the political establishment went after him. His sacrifice was not in vain. Today, you can print an assault rifle receiver or 9mm receiver. Everyone should learn how to assemble a weapon. Everyone should also learn how to break into a server, using Kali Linux. Government and corporate IT types are stooges. It is a Constitutional duty that we all share in, as a check against government and corporate Tyranny.

mschuster91 8y ago

> Essentially heading back to slavery through technology with no way out for the slaves anymore. I wouldn't be so sure about that. Not with the many weapons circulating in the US. Just look at what the French can do with basically stones and molotovs as weapons. No matter how brutal the French police act, the population is not afraid of telling their leadership how much they suck in terms that they can understand. Now imagine a France Gilets Jaunes-level protest wave in the US, just with the demonstrators armed with AR15, proper bombs and a boatload of protective armor. That would be a bloodshed. Aside from "mowing down protesters" being very bad PR even for the most conservative media outlets, I doubt that the US government would risk something like that to happen. Other countries with an unarmed population not used to protests that go beyond holding up signs like Germany, however, they're a different game. And it shows. Our politicians implement one authoritarian measure after another and the only thing people went on to the streets to protest is Article 13.

ashleyn 8y ago
This often goes missed when gun owners are criticised for saying that guns are useful in a revolt. The point isn't to win against a tyrannical government, it's to force said regime's hand into a position where they either give up or commit an atrocity that hastens their demise and weakens their mandate. Vietnam and Iraq are two standout examples of weapons being useful to resist a powerful occupier. They never actually defeated the US, they were just a huge pain in the ass until the US finally gave up and left.