2 ms·

I don't really understand why we keep being told that these insiders who got rich at surveillance-tech companies are the ones we now have to rely on to fix the

• makeitdouble 5y ago
  I think their viewpoint is that the battle is already lost and expecting the situation to be fixed by regular means is unrealistic. Whistleblowers become these little Prometheuses bringing out some fire to fight the giants. I deeply disagree but can empathize with the pessimism, given how dire the situation has got.
• Mtinie 5y ago
  A lot? I personally don’t remember a major whistleblower—in the legal usage of the term—who asked to be the sole savior who can fix the problem they identified. It’s quite easy to lose sight of the whole picture while you are siloed working on a portion of the whole. I commend anyone who makes the public aware of bad corporate or governmental actors, even if it took them a while to come around to making their decision. That they may have profited in the past is immaterial. That’s an ethical dilemma they will need to resolve on their own.
• rsynnott 5y ago
  I mean, if a company is doing bad things, and particularly if it's breaking the law, it is not usually going to announce the fact to the world. Whistleblowing is very often how the truth gets out; how many more people would have had junk medical results if not for the Theranos whistleblowers, say? Perhaps in an ideal world, the government would have perfect clarity on the bad things that companies were doing through regulatory oversight. But in practice we're not in that world and a nefarious company can quite effectively hide all sorts of wrongdoing for a long time.