5 ms·

It's worth mentioning that this really isn't programming-specific, or even engineering-specific, at all. The exact same story applies to the guy doing finance,

It's worth mentioning that this really isn't programming-specific, or even engineering-specific, at all. The exact same story applies to the guy doing finance, or marketing, or project management, or legal work, or whatever. This is basically a reminder that your role as a cog in the wheel is to make the wheel move, and you shouldn't forget what the wheel is doing. That said, working for a US military contractor while not being supportive of the US military mission is kind of a silly thing to do.

nemomarx 2y ago
I think it's fair that you might think mostly about the military work overseas and not about it being licensed to local police or used to track citizens or so on. Wasn't a lot of the Snowden stuff that tools intended to be used on foreign enemies would be used at home?
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  From my understanding (with no special access or insider info), it's unclear how much it was used "at home" (against US citizens). Certainly the collection infrastructure was in place, but there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge. It's interesting to me that many people who work for giant tech companies that carry out indiscriminate data collection feel confident in their employer's internal processes and controls, but don't extend that same optimism when it's the government that pinky-swears they aren't going to peek at anything they shouldn't.
  - wutwutwat 2y ago
    > there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge. Nope > The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic. > An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional. > The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. > A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di... The kicker to me: > it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans The courts told them to watch themselves and to self incriminate if they do crimez. An honor system. Which naturally, they did not snitch on themselves to the courts, because why would they. Also let's not forget that they can make all the illegal surveillance legal in an instant just by labeling any person a "terrorist"
    - ForHackernews 2y ago
      Sure this is a great example. You're extremely suspicious of the NSA's willingness or ability to police themselves, but you trust Amazon? Google? Facebook? Why? https://www.vice.com/en/article/google-fired-dozens-for-data-misuse/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/google-fired-dozens-for-data... https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/amazon-ring-camera-spying-alexa-b2349827.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/amazon-ring-camera-spying...
      - sneak 2y ago
        Google staffers can't jail or torture or assassinate you. The CIA can and does.
        ForHackernews 2y ago
        There are very few cases of the CIA torturing or killing US citizens (foreigners, yes) There is legal and congressional oversight over the CIA, intelligence agencies can be held accountable by American voters through the democratic process. There is no similar venue for oversight and accountability over the tech industry, which almost certainly holds more sensitive data on the American public.
        wutwutwat 2y ago
        The CIA wouldn't really be good at what they do if the assasinations or other illegal things they do were well documented and available to the public. There's a reason the things they do are done in places where US laws don't apply... > CIA black sites systematically employed torture in the form of "enhanced interrogation techniques" of detainees, most of whom had been illegally abducted and forcibly transferred. Known locations included Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites Then there's GITMO
        sneak 2y ago
        There is zero meaningful congressional oversight of the CIA. They broke major laws and tortured people, hacked the computers of the congressional oversight group to delete evidence, got caught hacking, lied about it, and nothing happened anyway. The mental model you have where the CIA is in any way constrained by the law is an utter fiction. They would summarily execute Snowden in a millisecond if they could.
  - NoGravitas 2y ago
    > there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge. You never read about LOVEINT?
    - ForHackernews 2y ago
      Yeah, this is an example of the kind of misbehavior those controls are meant to prevent. This kind of thing is routine in the tech world, too: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/09/elite_google_engineer_used_goo.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/09/elite_google_enginee...
taneq 2y ago
> That said, working for a US military contractor while not being supportive of the US military mission is kind of a silly thing to do. In my youth I applied for a defense force job in my country. I was turned down because I didn't have recent experience in the exact skill set they wanted for the first project (iirc it was Visual Basic front-end UI coding, lols. My employer at the time said they'd made a stupid mistake, I should have appreciated this statement more at the time) but it made me think. I never went for another job in defense. Honestly I don't have a problem making machines that might kill (such things are, sadly, often necessary) but on reflection, I sure do have a problem with killing someone that I don't agree should be killed. This one time I did help a friend fix a machine that was cleaning the defense force's boats, but that's another story.
mtgentry 2y ago
It’s wild how little The-Bad-Thing even gets mentioned in work settings, if at all.
ricksunny 2y ago
The throughline is that we get caught up in long-arc status games ('did i do a good job learning all those things they taught us in school, do i look smart in front of my tribe / in front of all these other seemingly impressive engineers around me, am I demonstrating to my outside friends, family, future romantic interests that I'm a stable & effective member of society?') that fool us into blinding ourselves from looking at the bigger picture effect of our work.
- sneak 2y ago
  The genius of the George C Scott scene in Dr Strangelove when he is talking about the B52's ability to evade radar is the canonical example of this. He is literally cheering the end of the world because he is proud of the skill of "his boys".
sneak 2y ago
The problem is that the stated mission of the US military and the actual mission of the US military are not remotely the same thing. Many reasonable people support the stated mission. But that shit ain't the truth.
- disqard 2y ago
  "Any sufficiently large organization's stated mission is unrecognizably different from its actual mission". (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke)

nemomarx 2y ago

I think it's fair that you might think mostly about the military work overseas and not about it being licensed to local police or used to track citizens or so on. Wasn't a lot of the Snowden stuff that tools intended to be used on foreign enemies would be used at home?

ForHackernews 2y ago
From my understanding (with no special access or insider info), it's unclear how much it was used "at home" (against US citizens). Certainly the collection infrastructure was in place, but there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge. It's interesting to me that many people who work for giant tech companies that carry out indiscriminate data collection feel confident in their employer's internal processes and controls, but don't extend that same optimism when it's the government that pinky-swears they aren't going to peek at anything they shouldn't.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  > there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge. Nope > The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic. > An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional. > The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. > A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di... The kicker to me: > it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans The courts told them to watch themselves and to self incriminate if they do crimez. An honor system. Which naturally, they did not snitch on themselves to the courts, because why would they. Also let's not forget that they can make all the illegal surveillance legal in an instant just by labeling any person a "terrorist"
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    Sure this is a great example. You're extremely suspicious of the NSA's willingness or ability to police themselves, but you trust Amazon? Google? Facebook? Why? https://www.vice.com/en/article/google-fired-dozens-for-data-misuse/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/google-fired-dozens-for-data... https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/amazon-ring-camera-spying-alexa-b2349827.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/amazon-ring-camera-spying...
    - sneak 2y ago
      Google staffers can't jail or torture or assassinate you. The CIA can and does.
      - ForHackernews 2y ago
        There are very few cases of the CIA torturing or killing US citizens (foreigners, yes) There is legal and congressional oversight over the CIA, intelligence agencies can be held accountable by American voters through the democratic process. There is no similar venue for oversight and accountability over the tech industry, which almost certainly holds more sensitive data on the American public.
        wutwutwat 2y ago
        The CIA wouldn't really be good at what they do if the assasinations or other illegal things they do were well documented and available to the public. There's a reason the things they do are done in places where US laws don't apply... > CIA black sites systematically employed torture in the form of "enhanced interrogation techniques" of detainees, most of whom had been illegally abducted and forcibly transferred. Known locations included Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites Then there's GITMO
        sneak 2y ago
        There is zero meaningful congressional oversight of the CIA. They broke major laws and tortured people, hacked the computers of the congressional oversight group to delete evidence, got caught hacking, lied about it, and nothing happened anyway. The mental model you have where the CIA is in any way constrained by the law is an utter fiction. They would summarily execute Snowden in a millisecond if they could.
- NoGravitas 2y ago
  > there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge. You never read about LOVEINT?
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    Yeah, this is an example of the kind of misbehavior those controls are meant to prevent. This kind of thing is routine in the tech world, too: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/09/elite_google_engineer_used_goo.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/09/elite_google_enginee...

taneq 2y ago

> That said, working for a US military contractor while not being supportive of the US military mission is kind of a silly thing to do. In my youth I applied for a defense force job in my country. I was turned down because I didn't have recent experience in the exact skill set they wanted for the first project (iirc it was Visual Basic front-end UI coding, lols. My employer at the time said they'd made a stupid mistake, I should have appreciated this statement more at the time) but it made me think. I never went for another job in defense. Honestly I don't have a problem making machines that might kill (such things are, sadly, often necessary) but on reflection, I sure do have a problem with killing someone that I don't agree should be killed. This one time I did help a friend fix a machine that was cleaning the defense force's boats, but that's another story.

mtgentry 2y ago

It’s wild how little The-Bad-Thing even gets mentioned in work settings, if at all.

ricksunny 2y ago

The throughline is that we get caught up in long-arc status games ('did i do a good job learning all those things they taught us in school, do i look smart in front of my tribe / in front of all these other seemingly impressive engineers around me, am I demonstrating to my outside friends, family, future romantic interests that I'm a stable & effective member of society?') that fool us into blinding ourselves from looking at the bigger picture effect of our work.

sneak 2y ago
The genius of the George C Scott scene in Dr Strangelove when he is talking about the B52's ability to evade radar is the canonical example of this. He is literally cheering the end of the world because he is proud of the skill of "his boys".

sneak 2y ago

The problem is that the stated mission of the US military and the actual mission of the US military are not remotely the same thing. Many reasonable people support the stated mission. But that shit ain't the truth.

disqard 2y ago
"Any sufficiently large organization's stated mission is unrecognizably different from its actual mission". (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke)