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Hackers vs. suits: Why nerds become leakers

200 points by Libertatea 13y ago

w_t_payne 13y ago
Software developers generally occupy positions of considerable (if unacknowledged) power and trust within their organizations. The practice of software development necessarily involves dealing with minutiae in large quantities; in making making dozens of mostly small (but consequential) decisions each day. In aggregate, the effect of these decisions can be (and often is) of enormous import to the business or organization that employs the developer. The number of decisions that a software developer must make, in general, precludes effective scrutiny by the traditional authority structures of the organization (the bandwidth required to communicate the context and consequences of each decisions would increase the time taken to make the decision by two or three (base 10) orders of magnitude). As a result, organizations are forced to place a large amount of trust in individual developers, effectively granting them carte-blanche for their actions. As a result, software developers are often in positions that confer considerable power and authority, with little of the visibility or accountability (or remuneration) that normally comes with such positions. Furthermore, the interaction between developers and the traditional management hierarchy is typically pretty dysfunctional. Most organizations management structures are staffed with individuals who tend to emphasise and practice "soft skills" centred around sales, communication and persuasion, rather than attention to detail, patience and persistence. As a result, rather a lot of what developers do all day tends to slip under the radar. Is it any wonder that the politics of the software development community tends to be oriented towards decentralisation, individualism, and (borderline) anarchism? This is the world that most software developers inhabit in their workplaces already. The superiority of decentralised decision making over centralised decision making is manifest to all of us - we see the evidence every day.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  >>Most organizations management structures are staffed with individuals who tend to emphasise and practice...communication and persuasion If only. More like "do it this way cause I say." Looking back at some of the places I've worked, it would be a pleasure if this were more true.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Well, that happens a lot too.
  - btilly 13y ago
    Emphasize and practice does not mean emphasize and practice effective methods.
    - w_t_payne 13y ago
      I was attempting to say that typical management stereotypes create an image of a person who either deals primarily in perceptions and impressions and only secondarily in facts and truths; or of a person who is so concerned with either being busy, or appearing to be busy, that only superficial communication and (mis)understanding is possible. This is not necessarily an assertion about the extent to which particular individuals act out these stereotypes, or even a criticism of those who do: the situations that people are put in are often very difficult, and it is not obvious how one might ease the systematic dysfunctions of our institutions and organisations. Furthermore, to say that the systems that we inhabit are imperfect and dysfunctional is to state the obvious: utterly uninformative without some sort of exploration or discussion of the whys, hows and wherefores. Fortunately, we have several models that we can apply to the analysis: Any attempt to route significant information flows through a lossy and bandwidth constrained channel such as the human brain is bound to suffer distortion and loss. The dysfunction is with the system; indeed, any system that attempts to move the power to make decisions any sort of distance away from the sources of information which that very decision making process requires, without making adequate alternative arrangements. Indeed, if you look at Hayek's take on the free market economy, the main magic is in how prices signal the imbalance between supply and demand, and, indeed, we see analogous attempts to summarise key information through statistics where stereotypical and long-lasting information flows exist. However, it is less obvious how to summarise and/or compress idiosyncratic and short-lived information in rapidly changing and evolving circumstances. How to fix this? Software and Information Technology is supposed to be a major part of the solution, but I have seen little that promises the paradigm shift that (more than likely) will be required to achieve the orders-of-magnitude improvements that we seek.
- penguindev 13y ago
  That was a great post, thanks. I'd like to add another point - one may need paranoia [the common, not medical, interpretation] to make all that power work without bugs. You know the quote about a good programmer needing laziness, impatience, and hubris? I disagree, for many systems it should be laziness, impatience, and _paranoia_. Paranoia puts in asserts and assumes any untrusted input is just that, and puts in documentation for the future 'you' on the project to consult. Because as you say, nobody has your back or will review your trickiest code (on the average funded project with one smart guy doing most of the work), and frankly, hackers _are_ out to get your code. So when we don't have an explicit check against something, the behavior is undefined. And when there is no check against power , we know where the road leads.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    Well, one of the nice things (I think) about being a software developer (and one-time "scientist") is that you get to measure your mettle with nature - to test your ideas out in the real world - to see if your preconceptions hold, or if your ideas are only so much hot air ... and all too often, they are. My initial ideas are always wrong (well, most of the time), and I pretty much always need several rounds of testing against reality to refine my designs into something workable. Getting the right answer is hard. Really hard. I never understood how some people could go through life and avoid ever being wrong; dancing around responsibilities, never taking the blame, being driven by a (frankly irresponsible) culture that demands perfection. For me, my failures are lessons; mistakes marking a path of learning and progress. Good will; systematic persistence; humility and humour - all recipes for learning and improvement: Flashy self-aggrandisement, an emphasis on performance and (self-proclaimed) brilliance: all recipes for deceit, lies and failure.
jenius 13y ago
I've gotta agree with Appelbaum - this thesis is ridiculous and unsupported. There are tons of activists in many different fields, and there's nothing about being a computer programmer that makes you more likely to be an activist. Just because this guy cited a couple of activists who were also computer programmers is just not support enough -- if he really wanted a balanced review, he would have talked about any activists in any other fields as well for comparison. The reason it was easy for him to make this connection between digital rights activism and programmers is because it's easy to find activists within a field they work in. So if you're talking about digital rights and internet openness, of course the champions of this are going to be people who work with computers for a living. If you look at something else like politics, or civil rights, or helping out poor people or people in war-torn countries, you'll find a whole lot less programmers stepping up to the plate on these issues, and for a totally sensible reason - it's not as relevant to them. I'd like to propose an alternate thesis: Within any field, there will be a certain small number of people who have strong morals and are willing to disobey authority to champion what they think is right. At the current moment, there is a particularly high rate of activism within the "digital rights" field because the internet is comparatively young and people are still trying to figure out what rights you have.
- JamisonM 13y ago
  What you wrote here is exactly what sprung to my mind upon reading the headline, never mind the story itself. But then after reading it I got to thinking of all the developers that I have met that are absolutely resolute in their belief that, for example, the whole project was done wrong from that start and needs to be written despite the fact that I think it is clear that the risk-reward for such a thing is a terrible trade off. And then there is the over-representation that I perceive in libertarian-types in the tech business. I don't know, maybe there is something to the idea that spending most of your time engaged in total control over a virtual environment that executes pure logic turns people into activist-types or attracts them. I think the most important thing to being an activist is to be sure you are right and I have met no shortage of hackers that are sure they are right (often no matter how wrong they actually are).
  - 13y ago
jmduke 13y ago
A nice quote from Jefferson that I spotted in the comments: "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
- vadman 13y ago
  The quote is nice but it's a great justification for illegal/unconstitutional actions. Those in power can do a lot of harm while abusing this idea.
  - JamisonM 13y ago
    The warped mind of Timothy McVeigh as well.
swombat 13y ago
Very light article, with a half-assed counterpoint... shame. Could have been more. I'd love for there to be a strong correlation between technical skills and opposition to authoritarianism... that would certainly help us in the battle against technologically-driven dystopias.
- prollyignored 13y ago
  NSA hires the best nerds. DoD hires all the scientists. The ones who don't get hired, go to pharmaceuticals (which have an excellent track record of morally dubious acts). Nerds that I have have met or seen in mailing lists, have a strong co-relation with totalitarianism aka evil sysadmins. I would like to call a distinction b/w Aron who is first and foremost a philosophy-geek, something that all idealists have in common.
  - milhous 13y ago
    >> NSA hires the best nerds. I'm skeptical of this. In a hypothetical programming/engineering competition, I'd bet Apple and/or Google could clean the clocks of any government agency or defense contractor, sans building planes and weapons. >> Nerds that I have have met or seen in mailing lists, have a strong co-relation with totalitarianism aka evil sysadmins. Sad. That's what assimilation and institutionalization does to you. Hope that never happens to me.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      From what I have seen of the NSA's campus recruiting, I am skeptical of that as well. It is possible that they get most of their talent elsewhere, but at the very least they are missing a large source of it. It is probably more accurate to say that they hire the best math guys that only have a single degree. They certainly aren't getting those who go on to be quants.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
The article misses a rather large point: We (meaning the tech elite) are the first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for. Hear me out. Those of us over the age of 30 are mostly digital immigrants. We remember a world without CallerID, a PC in every office, and a global network interconnecting all the things. If you were "That Computer Guy/Gal" you were a pioneer along the Oregon Trail that helped pave the way for the common person to have access to the breadth of human knowledge. While the government spun (and continues to spin) its wheels on how to legislate, tax, and control this virtual landscape, many of us were forced to develop of our code of ethics; many times in complete isolation from one another. A select few had the worlds biggest glass up against the world's biggest door; and most of us chose (choose) to honor that responsibility by respecting the privacy of one another. There are some that are corrupted by this power and choose to monitor everything they can about everyone they can but by and large the majority of us drew the line on privacy issues a long time ago. Most of us know how easy it would be to fire up email archives, chat logs, and remote screenshot tools but we've made a conscious decision to not do so outside the context of our daily responsibilities. Even more so, I do not stand alone in my past decisions to inform company users of any changes in the assumed privacy of their workspace instead of merely turning on a new fizzbuzz feature that ends them up in my office. We developed our own morality in a vacuum where historically the opposite has been done. Nietzsche would be having a field day with this. The "We Watch Everything" concept pisses us off because it's old thinking. Just because you can doesn't mean you should and the technical elite community has proven that absolute power does not have to corrupt absolutely. We can self-govern while respecting the right to privacy of the individual. That, in a nutshell, is why I think so many of us are appalled at PRISM and the other programs we all assumed existed.
- dalke 13y ago
  "first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for" That sounds incredible egocentric. Under what standard do you exclude all suffragettes and all abolitionists from this category?
Buzaga 13y ago
hierarchy positions are much more political than technical ones, so hackers are picked by skill and quality instead of 'political reasons', in any strict hierarchical organization, the 'rebels' or 'dissidents' or 'opinionated' are gonna be weeded out of positions of power early on, and this serves to maintain, in the upper levels, only people who have the same exact vision and mindset as the people who are already there, be it because they are really strong followers of the institution credo or because they let themselves be molded by it. Academia, military, corporations all are like this, I believe.
deleted 13y ago
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kraemate 13y ago
Too bad most "nerds" these days work for firms whose sole purpose is to gather user data and violate privacy in general.
theboywho 13y ago
This article is prone to the "Availability Bias" We tend to believe something is true when examples confirming it are easily available to fetch from our memories. This has been exploited for example by telling people to think about 12 situations where they were rude. People end up believing they are rude when they can easily come up with example situations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
lettergram 13y ago
I don't exactly agree with the author, but I will say that he might have something. Having the ability and constantly programming I have noticed that I have trouble understanding why people do the things that they do. I LOVE the feeling of making a dot move across the screen, or changing the font, or really anything that manipulates something on the screen. I love the feeling of achievement the ability to construct something out of nothing. Most businessmen, politicians, managers, their world is built around getting other people to do their work for them by any means necessary. I don't disagree with them that its a good idea, but their goal is to get the job done, half the time they don't even know nor care if it is done "right." The point is that people who get to build, manipulate, the movers of a society, they usually don't deal with politics, manager, or try to explore. They just want to keep building, they enjoy it, they (including me) love to build and wouldn't sacrifice it to manage someone else. All of that being said, yes programmers (including me) in general don't like a centralized government/management because in their eyes it is something that takes away from their ability to achieve. Perhaps I am speaking to generally, but from the people I have met they seem to rather live by building than by trying to manipulate the builders. So to me (and others I have met) it is disgusting to be watched and manipulated, we all want to be free to build and taking that away (or threatening to take that way via surveillance or manipulation by the government) is a sin.
- GFischer 13y ago
  Something of the sort is expressed on many Ayn Rand books - yes, her books are full of cartoonish cliches, one-dimensional characters and straw man attacks, but I get the same spirit from this comment than from the descriptions in The Fountainhead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead
chris_mahan 13y ago
"In the long tail of history just following orders is wrong." dang that is a nice quote.
- gyom 13y ago
  It sounds nice, but when I think about what exactly is meant by "long tail" I can't come up with an answer that would be compatible with the idea of the "long tail" in statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail). It does sounds better than just "in the long run, throughout history, just following orders is wrong". It seems like it's referring to people who are outliers and through which all the change is happening, but technically it's not really saying that. No ?
  - ISL 13y ago
    "In the long tale of history..." may resolve your concerns?
    - gyom 13y ago
      Oh, wow, I'm sorry. I should have seen that one. I guess I liked "long tail" and the alternative didn't occur to me. =)
  - louthy 13y ago
    Perhaps, an alternative: "In the long tale of history just following orders is wrong."
rayiner 13y ago
Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money, doing often thankless work. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went to intern for the EPA which doesn't have much of a budget for anything, and rarely hires anyone after graduation. Now, I've got an office with views of Manhattan, and she's waitressing on the side to make ends meet while looking for that rare opportunity to get a job at an environmental non-profit. How many hackers do you know that would turn down a job at Google or Facebook and instead try to break into the (often insanely competitive) job market of public service? I'm not judging the people who wouldn't go down that road. I think they're like me and most people: personally moral, but not willing to put a larger moral cause ahead of their own self-interest. That's fine, and the way it should be. But it's ridiculous to be that way then get self-congratulatory just because you write some scathing internet screeds complaining about the man. I'd estimate that about 10-12% of Stanford Law's graduating class each year goes into public interest work or government work. Can you imagine what the political landscape would look like if 10-12% of Stanford UG's engineering graduates each year went into public interest jobs or into government (to change policy from the inside?)
- lmm 13y ago
  >In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went to intern for the EPA which rarely hires anyone after graduation. Now, I've got an office with views of Manhattan, and she's waitressing on the side to make ends meet while looking for that rare opportunity to get a job at an environmental non-profit. Inputs are much less important than outputs. Sure, a greater proportion non-hackers make conspicuous lifestyle changes in the name of their chosen cause. But how much real difference has your friend made except to her waitressing patrons? By contrast someone who figured out how to save 1% of the electricity used at facebook has made a huge contribution to the environment, which is in no way diminished by the fact that they were well paid for doing so.
cynest 13y ago
I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series right now, and I'm struck by the comparisons he makes between Soviet and Nazi military doctrines. Essentially, the former is controlled by individuals too paranoid to allow for any initiative on the part of individuals under their command, while the latter actively encourages initiative on the part of commanders and dog-faces (grunts). One side effect of this is that German soldiers get away with much less deferential behavior. The result are seen both in previous battles between the two, and with the conflict against the Lizards (invaders from another planet with a much more restrictive bent than even the USSR) where the Nazis generally perform much better given their technology. I wonder if a similar level of encouraging initiative exists in technology due to the fact that there's a low ceiling on how far you can pass most decisions up before running into nontechnical persons. Looking at it from another side, technical careers might allow for more initiative simply by the ability to enter the market via unconventional means. Unconnected to the above, it seems to me that these sort of leaks are easier to perform versus a lot of political actions especially with the technical skills of leakers. Leaks' effect per unit of time to follow through surpasses most anything else I can think of. The only real downside is the resultant criminal penalties. Infodumps like Swartz's are similarly relatively easy to perform.
yason 13y ago
Is this hacker related at all or is it that hackers end up with (loads of) this sort of information more often? If I had in my possession delicate information about government, military, or public sector misbehaviour I would need a really, really good reason to keep it secret. And I would assume that most people would face the same dilemma, regardless of hackerdom. They might, as well as many hackers, choose to do so because they want to keep their jobs and feed their kids but they still couldn't get over the issue. Young people are more likely to leak because they have less to lose. There are Stallmans of non-hacker origin, too. These are people who see a problem in society and set out to fix it. Civil rights groups, civil liberties groups, charity organizations. Stallman just happened to be a hacker so what he saw was a social problem in his own domain. I do recognize the libertarian sentiment among hackers and I subscribe to that myself, too. Just wondering if it's really hacker specific.
mixmastamyk 13y ago
I've known quite a few twenty-something hackers (including my younger self) that are absolutists about things... everything black and white. From the preliminary details though, it looks like the government has significantly overstepped its bounds. This is the kind of thing that absolutists won't tolerate, and for that I am grateful that they exist.
- mpyne 13y ago
  That's very key. Kind of ironically, in my case, the reason I'm not nearly as worried about NSA overreach is because we have people like Sen. Wyden and the EFF and ACLU to strenuously push back against government overstepping their boundaries. Even where I disagree on a given particular issue I know that they are doing good work, and that enables me to trust the government more.
jorgeleo 13y ago
I think that the article is misleading. The question is not "Who these pesky hackers think they are that they can dismiss social niceties, establish law, and office smoothness". This misleads because it assumes that normal people should just accept authority, and questioning authority is dysfunctional. The real question is "What makes people recognize authority?", and for this question there is a spectrum of answers that goes from Pure Label to Pure Proof. Pure label would be the people that recognize authority because there is a piece of paper that say that you are authority, and you can inflict pain, so I should obey you, if not by recognition, then by fear. (The lion is not scary if it doesn't have teeth) Pure proof would be the people that put others to test before acknowledging labels. You are authority because you ACTUALLY know the domain where you claim authority, you are authority because you care about the consequences of your decisions on the all people affected by them. I obey because I saw that you actually are better than me in the context, and pain has nothing to do with it. Pure label people look at pure proof people as disorderly, rebellious, dis adjusted, and they don't comply but hack their way around. The sense of comfort for pure label people comes from a well known establish order, and they feel that without authority society will spiral into chaos. Order is more important than people. I think they are correct. Pure Proof people look at pure label people as sheep, drones, overly compliant people that are too lazy to try understand what actually works. The sense of comfort for pure proof people comes from objectively understanding the context, see how it is supposed to work regardless of the current implementation, and once an appropriate solution is found, then passionately support it. They feel that with excessive authority society will be for a few, hence just another form of chaos. People is more important than Order). I think they are correct. (I know that for a dualistic mind agreeing with both is non sense... you will have to stretch your brain if you want to understand how this is possible and is OK) This is an spectrum, so most people is in neither pole, but somewhere in between. I believe that the truth in this case, is in the balance. And society to progress needs both. Our current society implementation massively favors Pure label people for historically or manipulative reasons, and to the point of almost looking at pure proof people as pathological. Since the situation is out of balance, our current implementation of society 3.0 is faulty. But this is not a hackers problem, actually, more hackers would be the solution to restore the balance.
scotty79 13y ago
You wear a suit to blend in. You hack and stick out. It's as simple as that. Hackers are just the people who don't care much for blending in but they are not stupid enough to be bums.
alekseyk 13y ago
Both suits and hackers leak information, the difference is suits leak it to private parties that they can benefit from and hackers do it publicly.
iguana 13y ago
“In the long tail of history just following orders is wrong. That’s the key thing that really matters.” Jacob Appelbaum hit the nail on the head.
- DanBC 13y ago
  And, as customers, we're just letting them have access because it's easy. I use facebook because it's easier than any alternative, even though I don't like the privacy stuff. I'm just following the crowd. I use gmail because, woah! 1 GB storage and they're reliable! And so I just follow the crowd. I don't bother with encryption because it's slow and clunky and most of the people I communicate with can only just use a web browser, they have no hope of using GPG. I'm quick to blame the big corps for rolling over and giving my data away, but I've done a lot to help them do it.
trust-me 13y ago
Because nerd's will inevitably outcompete suits in a perfectly fair environment. So it makes sense to work towards one.

200 points by Libertatea 13y ago

Software developers generally occupy positions of considerable (if unacknowledged) power and trust within their organizations. The practice of software development necessarily involves dealing with minutiae in large quantities; in making making dozens of mostly small (but consequential) decisions each day. In aggregate, the effect of these decisions can be (and often is) of enormous import to the business or organization that employs the developer. The number of decisions that a software developer must make, in general, precludes effective scrutiny by the traditional authority structures of the organization (the bandwidth required to communicate the context and consequences of each decisions would increase the time taken to make the decision by two or three (base 10) orders of magnitude). As a result, organizations are forced to place a large amount of trust in individual developers, effectively granting them carte-blanche for their actions. As a result, software developers are often in positions that confer considerable power and authority, with little of the visibility or accountability (or remuneration) that normally comes with such positions. Furthermore, the interaction between developers and the traditional management hierarchy is typically pretty dysfunctional. Most organizations management structures are staffed with individuals who tend to emphasise and practice "soft skills" centred around sales, communication and persuasion, rather than attention to detail, patience and persistence. As a result, rather a lot of what developers do all day tends to slip under the radar. Is it any wonder that the politics of the software development community tends to be oriented towards decentralisation, individualism, and (borderline) anarchism? This is the world that most software developers inhabit in their workplaces already. The superiority of decentralised decision making over centralised decision making is manifest to all of us - we see the evidence every day.

wavefunction 13y ago
>>Most organizations management structures are staffed with individuals who tend to emphasise and practice...communication and persuasion If only. More like "do it this way cause I say." Looking back at some of the places I've worked, it would be a pleasure if this were more true.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Well, that happens a lot too.
- btilly 13y ago
  Emphasize and practice does not mean emphasize and practice effective methods.
  - w_t_payne 13y ago
    I was attempting to say that typical management stereotypes create an image of a person who either deals primarily in perceptions and impressions and only secondarily in facts and truths; or of a person who is so concerned with either being busy, or appearing to be busy, that only superficial communication and (mis)understanding is possible. This is not necessarily an assertion about the extent to which particular individuals act out these stereotypes, or even a criticism of those who do: the situations that people are put in are often very difficult, and it is not obvious how one might ease the systematic dysfunctions of our institutions and organisations. Furthermore, to say that the systems that we inhabit are imperfect and dysfunctional is to state the obvious: utterly uninformative without some sort of exploration or discussion of the whys, hows and wherefores. Fortunately, we have several models that we can apply to the analysis: Any attempt to route significant information flows through a lossy and bandwidth constrained channel such as the human brain is bound to suffer distortion and loss. The dysfunction is with the system; indeed, any system that attempts to move the power to make decisions any sort of distance away from the sources of information which that very decision making process requires, without making adequate alternative arrangements. Indeed, if you look at Hayek's take on the free market economy, the main magic is in how prices signal the imbalance between supply and demand, and, indeed, we see analogous attempts to summarise key information through statistics where stereotypical and long-lasting information flows exist. However, it is less obvious how to summarise and/or compress idiosyncratic and short-lived information in rapidly changing and evolving circumstances. How to fix this? Software and Information Technology is supposed to be a major part of the solution, but I have seen little that promises the paradigm shift that (more than likely) will be required to achieve the orders-of-magnitude improvements that we seek.
penguindev 13y ago
That was a great post, thanks. I'd like to add another point - one may need paranoia [the common, not medical, interpretation] to make all that power work without bugs. You know the quote about a good programmer needing laziness, impatience, and hubris? I disagree, for many systems it should be laziness, impatience, and _paranoia_. Paranoia puts in asserts and assumes any untrusted input is just that, and puts in documentation for the future 'you' on the project to consult. Because as you say, nobody has your back or will review your trickiest code (on the average funded project with one smart guy doing most of the work), and frankly, hackers _are_ out to get your code. So when we don't have an explicit check against something, the behavior is undefined. And when there is no check against power , we know where the road leads.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Well, one of the nice things (I think) about being a software developer (and one-time "scientist") is that you get to measure your mettle with nature - to test your ideas out in the real world - to see if your preconceptions hold, or if your ideas are only so much hot air ... and all too often, they are. My initial ideas are always wrong (well, most of the time), and I pretty much always need several rounds of testing against reality to refine my designs into something workable. Getting the right answer is hard. Really hard. I never understood how some people could go through life and avoid ever being wrong; dancing around responsibilities, never taking the blame, being driven by a (frankly irresponsible) culture that demands perfection. For me, my failures are lessons; mistakes marking a path of learning and progress. Good will; systematic persistence; humility and humour - all recipes for learning and improvement: Flashy self-aggrandisement, an emphasis on performance and (self-proclaimed) brilliance: all recipes for deceit, lies and failure.

jenius 13y ago

I've gotta agree with Appelbaum - this thesis is ridiculous and unsupported. There are tons of activists in many different fields, and there's nothing about being a computer programmer that makes you more likely to be an activist. Just because this guy cited a couple of activists who were also computer programmers is just not support enough -- if he really wanted a balanced review, he would have talked about any activists in any other fields as well for comparison. The reason it was easy for him to make this connection between digital rights activism and programmers is because it's easy to find activists within a field they work in. So if you're talking about digital rights and internet openness, of course the champions of this are going to be people who work with computers for a living. If you look at something else like politics, or civil rights, or helping out poor people or people in war-torn countries, you'll find a whole lot less programmers stepping up to the plate on these issues, and for a totally sensible reason - it's not as relevant to them. I'd like to propose an alternate thesis: Within any field, there will be a certain small number of people who have strong morals and are willing to disobey authority to champion what they think is right. At the current moment, there is a particularly high rate of activism within the "digital rights" field because the internet is comparatively young and people are still trying to figure out what rights you have.

JamisonM 13y ago
What you wrote here is exactly what sprung to my mind upon reading the headline, never mind the story itself. But then after reading it I got to thinking of all the developers that I have met that are absolutely resolute in their belief that, for example, the whole project was done wrong from that start and needs to be written despite the fact that I think it is clear that the risk-reward for such a thing is a terrible trade off. And then there is the over-representation that I perceive in libertarian-types in the tech business. I don't know, maybe there is something to the idea that spending most of your time engaged in total control over a virtual environment that executes pure logic turns people into activist-types or attracts them. I think the most important thing to being an activist is to be sure you are right and I have met no shortage of hackers that are sure they are right (often no matter how wrong they actually are).
- 13y ago

jmduke 13y ago

A nice quote from Jefferson that I spotted in the comments: "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."

vadman 13y ago
The quote is nice but it's a great justification for illegal/unconstitutional actions. Those in power can do a lot of harm while abusing this idea.
- JamisonM 13y ago
  The warped mind of Timothy McVeigh as well.

swombat 13y ago

Very light article, with a half-assed counterpoint... shame. Could have been more. I'd love for there to be a strong correlation between technical skills and opposition to authoritarianism... that would certainly help us in the battle against technologically-driven dystopias.

prollyignored 13y ago
NSA hires the best nerds. DoD hires all the scientists. The ones who don't get hired, go to pharmaceuticals (which have an excellent track record of morally dubious acts). Nerds that I have have met or seen in mailing lists, have a strong co-relation with totalitarianism aka evil sysadmins. I would like to call a distinction b/w Aron who is first and foremost a philosophy-geek, something that all idealists have in common.
- milhous 13y ago
  >> NSA hires the best nerds. I'm skeptical of this. In a hypothetical programming/engineering competition, I'd bet Apple and/or Google could clean the clocks of any government agency or defense contractor, sans building planes and weapons. >> Nerds that I have have met or seen in mailing lists, have a strong co-relation with totalitarianism aka evil sysadmins. Sad. That's what assimilation and institutionalization does to you. Hope that never happens to me.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    From what I have seen of the NSA's campus recruiting, I am skeptical of that as well. It is possible that they get most of their talent elsewhere, but at the very least they are missing a large source of it. It is probably more accurate to say that they hire the best math guys that only have a single degree. They certainly aren't getting those who go on to be quants.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

The article misses a rather large point: We (meaning the tech elite) are the first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for. Hear me out. Those of us over the age of 30 are mostly digital immigrants. We remember a world without CallerID, a PC in every office, and a global network interconnecting all the things. If you were "That Computer Guy/Gal" you were a pioneer along the Oregon Trail that helped pave the way for the common person to have access to the breadth of human knowledge. While the government spun (and continues to spin) its wheels on how to legislate, tax, and control this virtual landscape, many of us were forced to develop of our code of ethics; many times in complete isolation from one another. A select few had the worlds biggest glass up against the world's biggest door; and most of us chose (choose) to honor that responsibility by respecting the privacy of one another. There are some that are corrupted by this power and choose to monitor everything they can about everyone they can but by and large the majority of us drew the line on privacy issues a long time ago. Most of us know how easy it would be to fire up email archives, chat logs, and remote screenshot tools but we've made a conscious decision to not do so outside the context of our daily responsibilities. Even more so, I do not stand alone in my past decisions to inform company users of any changes in the assumed privacy of their workspace instead of merely turning on a new fizzbuzz feature that ends them up in my office. We developed our own morality in a vacuum where historically the opposite has been done. Nietzsche would be having a field day with this. The "We Watch Everything" concept pisses us off because it's old thinking. Just because you can doesn't mean you should and the technical elite community has proven that absolute power does not have to corrupt absolutely. We can self-govern while respecting the right to privacy of the individual. That, in a nutshell, is why I think so many of us are appalled at PRISM and the other programs we all assumed existed.

dalke 13y ago
"first army in human history to be less concerned with the acquisition of power and control and more about giving that empowerment to the individuals we fight for" That sounds incredible egocentric. Under what standard do you exclude all suffragettes and all abolitionists from this category?

Buzaga 13y ago

hierarchy positions are much more political than technical ones, so hackers are picked by skill and quality instead of 'political reasons', in any strict hierarchical organization, the 'rebels' or 'dissidents' or 'opinionated' are gonna be weeded out of positions of power early on, and this serves to maintain, in the upper levels, only people who have the same exact vision and mindset as the people who are already there, be it because they are really strong followers of the institution credo or because they let themselves be molded by it. Academia, military, corporations all are like this, I believe.

deleted 13y ago

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kraemate 13y ago

Too bad most "nerds" these days work for firms whose sole purpose is to gather user data and violate privacy in general.

theboywho 13y ago

This article is prone to the "Availability Bias" We tend to believe something is true when examples confirming it are easily available to fetch from our memories. This has been exploited for example by telling people to think about 12 situations where they were rude. People end up believing they are rude when they can easily come up with example situations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

lettergram 13y ago

I don't exactly agree with the author, but I will say that he might have something. Having the ability and constantly programming I have noticed that I have trouble understanding why people do the things that they do. I LOVE the feeling of making a dot move across the screen, or changing the font, or really anything that manipulates something on the screen. I love the feeling of achievement the ability to construct something out of nothing. Most businessmen, politicians, managers, their world is built around getting other people to do their work for them by any means necessary. I don't disagree with them that its a good idea, but their goal is to get the job done, half the time they don't even know nor care if it is done "right." The point is that people who get to build, manipulate, the movers of a society, they usually don't deal with politics, manager, or try to explore. They just want to keep building, they enjoy it, they (including me) love to build and wouldn't sacrifice it to manage someone else. All of that being said, yes programmers (including me) in general don't like a centralized government/management because in their eyes it is something that takes away from their ability to achieve. Perhaps I am speaking to generally, but from the people I have met they seem to rather live by building than by trying to manipulate the builders. So to me (and others I have met) it is disgusting to be watched and manipulated, we all want to be free to build and taking that away (or threatening to take that way via surveillance or manipulation by the government) is a sin.

GFischer 13y ago
Something of the sort is expressed on many Ayn Rand books - yes, her books are full of cartoonish cliches, one-dimensional characters and straw man attacks, but I get the same spirit from this comment than from the descriptions in The Fountainhead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead

chris_mahan 13y ago

"In the long tail of history just following orders is wrong." dang that is a nice quote.

gyom 13y ago
It sounds nice, but when I think about what exactly is meant by "long tail" I can't come up with an answer that would be compatible with the idea of the "long tail" in statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail). It does sounds better than just "in the long run, throughout history, just following orders is wrong". It seems like it's referring to people who are outliers and through which all the change is happening, but technically it's not really saying that. No ?
- ISL 13y ago
  "In the long tale of history..." may resolve your concerns?
  - gyom 13y ago
    Oh, wow, I'm sorry. I should have seen that one. I guess I liked "long tail" and the alternative didn't occur to me. =)
- louthy 13y ago
  Perhaps, an alternative: "In the long tale of history just following orders is wrong."

rayiner 13y ago

Hackers tend to be passive, arm-chair, activists. Twittering on the internet and feeding outrage to each other, but never actually getting engaged to solve real issues. How many hackers do you know that have dedicated their entire careers to causes in the public service? In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money, doing often thankless work. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went to intern for the EPA which doesn't have much of a budget for anything, and rarely hires anyone after graduation. Now, I've got an office with views of Manhattan, and she's waitressing on the side to make ends meet while looking for that rare opportunity to get a job at an environmental non-profit. How many hackers do you know that would turn down a job at Google or Facebook and instead try to break into the (often insanely competitive) job market of public service? I'm not judging the people who wouldn't go down that road. I think they're like me and most people: personally moral, but not willing to put a larger moral cause ahead of their own self-interest. That's fine, and the way it should be. But it's ridiculous to be that way then get self-congratulatory just because you write some scathing internet screeds complaining about the man. I'd estimate that about 10-12% of Stanford Law's graduating class each year goes into public interest work or government work. Can you imagine what the political landscape would look like if 10-12% of Stanford UG's engineering graduates each year went into public interest jobs or into government (to change policy from the inside?)

lmm 13y ago
>In comparison, I look around at my friends who majored in liberal arts. I know a double-digit number of people who turned down six figure jobs to go into public service for a fraction of the money. One of my best friends wants to save the environment. The summer after our second year of school, I went to go intern at a firm, which gave me a $1k/month lunch budget and a guaranteed job after graduation, while she went to intern for the EPA which rarely hires anyone after graduation. Now, I've got an office with views of Manhattan, and she's waitressing on the side to make ends meet while looking for that rare opportunity to get a job at an environmental non-profit. Inputs are much less important than outputs. Sure, a greater proportion non-hackers make conspicuous lifestyle changes in the name of their chosen cause. But how much real difference has your friend made except to her waitressing patrons? By contrast someone who figured out how to save 1% of the electricity used at facebook has made a huge contribution to the environment, which is in no way diminished by the fact that they were well paid for doing so.

cynest 13y ago

I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series right now, and I'm struck by the comparisons he makes between Soviet and Nazi military doctrines. Essentially, the former is controlled by individuals too paranoid to allow for any initiative on the part of individuals under their command, while the latter actively encourages initiative on the part of commanders and dog-faces (grunts). One side effect of this is that German soldiers get away with much less deferential behavior. The result are seen both in previous battles between the two, and with the conflict against the Lizards (invaders from another planet with a much more restrictive bent than even the USSR) where the Nazis generally perform much better given their technology. I wonder if a similar level of encouraging initiative exists in technology due to the fact that there's a low ceiling on how far you can pass most decisions up before running into nontechnical persons. Looking at it from another side, technical careers might allow for more initiative simply by the ability to enter the market via unconventional means. Unconnected to the above, it seems to me that these sort of leaks are easier to perform versus a lot of political actions especially with the technical skills of leakers. Leaks' effect per unit of time to follow through surpasses most anything else I can think of. The only real downside is the resultant criminal penalties. Infodumps like Swartz's are similarly relatively easy to perform.

yason 13y ago

Is this hacker related at all or is it that hackers end up with (loads of) this sort of information more often? If I had in my possession delicate information about government, military, or public sector misbehaviour I would need a really, really good reason to keep it secret. And I would assume that most people would face the same dilemma, regardless of hackerdom. They might, as well as many hackers, choose to do so because they want to keep their jobs and feed their kids but they still couldn't get over the issue. Young people are more likely to leak because they have less to lose. There are Stallmans of non-hacker origin, too. These are people who see a problem in society and set out to fix it. Civil rights groups, civil liberties groups, charity organizations. Stallman just happened to be a hacker so what he saw was a social problem in his own domain. I do recognize the libertarian sentiment among hackers and I subscribe to that myself, too. Just wondering if it's really hacker specific.

mixmastamyk 13y ago

I've known quite a few twenty-something hackers (including my younger self) that are absolutists about things... everything black and white. From the preliminary details though, it looks like the government has significantly overstepped its bounds. This is the kind of thing that absolutists won't tolerate, and for that I am grateful that they exist.

mpyne 13y ago
That's very key. Kind of ironically, in my case, the reason I'm not nearly as worried about NSA overreach is because we have people like Sen. Wyden and the EFF and ACLU to strenuously push back against government overstepping their boundaries. Even where I disagree on a given particular issue I know that they are doing good work, and that enables me to trust the government more.

jorgeleo 13y ago

I think that the article is misleading. The question is not "Who these pesky hackers think they are that they can dismiss social niceties, establish law, and office smoothness". This misleads because it assumes that normal people should just accept authority, and questioning authority is dysfunctional. The real question is "What makes people recognize authority?", and for this question there is a spectrum of answers that goes from Pure Label to Pure Proof. Pure label would be the people that recognize authority because there is a piece of paper that say that you are authority, and you can inflict pain, so I should obey you, if not by recognition, then by fear. (The lion is not scary if it doesn't have teeth) Pure proof would be the people that put others to test before acknowledging labels. You are authority because you ACTUALLY know the domain where you claim authority, you are authority because you care about the consequences of your decisions on the all people affected by them. I obey because I saw that you actually are better than me in the context, and pain has nothing to do with it. Pure label people look at pure proof people as disorderly, rebellious, dis adjusted, and they don't comply but hack their way around. The sense of comfort for pure label people comes from a well known establish order, and they feel that without authority society will spiral into chaos. Order is more important than people. I think they are correct. Pure Proof people look at pure label people as sheep, drones, overly compliant people that are too lazy to try understand what actually works. The sense of comfort for pure proof people comes from objectively understanding the context, see how it is supposed to work regardless of the current implementation, and once an appropriate solution is found, then passionately support it. They feel that with excessive authority society will be for a few, hence just another form of chaos. People is more important than Order). I think they are correct. (I know that for a dualistic mind agreeing with both is non sense... you will have to stretch your brain if you want to understand how this is possible and is OK) This is an spectrum, so most people is in neither pole, but somewhere in between. I believe that the truth in this case, is in the balance. And society to progress needs both. Our current society implementation massively favors Pure label people for historically or manipulative reasons, and to the point of almost looking at pure proof people as pathological. Since the situation is out of balance, our current implementation of society 3.0 is faulty. But this is not a hackers problem, actually, more hackers would be the solution to restore the balance.

scotty79 13y ago

You wear a suit to blend in. You hack and stick out. It's as simple as that. Hackers are just the people who don't care much for blending in but they are not stupid enough to be bums.

alekseyk 13y ago

Both suits and hackers leak information, the difference is suits leak it to private parties that they can benefit from and hackers do it publicly.

iguana 13y ago

“In the long tail of history just following orders is wrong. That’s the key thing that really matters.” Jacob Appelbaum hit the nail on the head.

DanBC 13y ago
And, as customers, we're just letting them have access because it's easy. I use facebook because it's easier than any alternative, even though I don't like the privacy stuff. I'm just following the crowd. I use gmail because, woah! 1 GB storage and they're reliable! And so I just follow the crowd. I don't bother with encryption because it's slow and clunky and most of the people I communicate with can only just use a web browser, they have no hope of using GPG. I'm quick to blame the big corps for rolling over and giving my data away, but I've done a lot to help them do it.

trust-me 13y ago

Because nerd's will inevitably outcompete suits in a perfectly fair environment. So it makes sense to work towards one.