3 ms·

We could then talk about the ethics of the engineers working for the NSA whom are engaging in massive surveillance of the country and world. They may not be opp

We could then talk about the ethics of the engineers working for the NSA whom are engaging in massive surveillance of the country and world. They may not be opportunistic like bankers, but they definitely have moral failings grounded in their delusion that they are making the world a safer place.

zzzeek 11y ago
it has to do with who is deciding the activities to take vs. who is implementing them. Everything a bank does is via software as well. Software is just the infrastructure. It is the leadership that takes the steps to do things that are unethical. The NSA and perhaps Facebook have the special caveats that there are developers there who can see that what they are being told to do is unethical. So the large bunch of them that go along anyway, you can make an argument. But that's not the majority of developers and also re: the NSA, the most famous software person of them all is Ed Snowden and he's a symbol of opposition to what the NSA is doing. People aren't blaming programmers for the crimes of the banks, the NSA, or Facebook. The programmers are fully the ones executing the tasks for all three, but they aren't in general the ones making the decisions; to the degree that there are programmers who are making those decisions, they are considered to be a "banker / NSA goon / Facebook executive who also codes".
- ryandrake 11y ago
  You can't just say, "Oh, well, I'm not the _decider_, so my hands are clean". When you decide to put fingers to keyboard and go along with implementing something unethical, you become just as culpable. And no, I don't feel sorry for the construction contractors who bought it when the Death Star blew up.
afarrell 11y ago
What about writing open source software which you strongly suspect will be used by the NSA?
- tomjen3 11y ago
  That depends, NSA almost certainly use GPG or PGP, OpenSSL or something like that (with their own patches) - yet the world would be drastically worse of if these technologies didn't exist.

zzzeek 11y ago

it has to do with who is deciding the activities to take vs. who is implementing them. Everything a bank does is via software as well. Software is just the infrastructure. It is the leadership that takes the steps to do things that are unethical. The NSA and perhaps Facebook have the special caveats that there are developers there who can see that what they are being told to do is unethical. So the large bunch of them that go along anyway, you can make an argument. But that's not the majority of developers and also re: the NSA, the most famous software person of them all is Ed Snowden and he's a symbol of opposition to what the NSA is doing. People aren't blaming programmers for the crimes of the banks, the NSA, or Facebook. The programmers are fully the ones executing the tasks for all three, but they aren't in general the ones making the decisions; to the degree that there are programmers who are making those decisions, they are considered to be a "banker / NSA goon / Facebook executive who also codes".

ryandrake 11y ago
You can't just say, "Oh, well, I'm not the _decider_, so my hands are clean". When you decide to put fingers to keyboard and go along with implementing something unethical, you become just as culpable. And no, I don't feel sorry for the construction contractors who bought it when the Death Star blew up.

afarrell 11y ago

What about writing open source software which you strongly suspect will be used by the NSA?

tomjen3 11y ago
That depends, NSA almost certainly use GPG or PGP, OpenSSL or something like that (with their own patches) - yet the world would be drastically worse of if these technologies didn't exist.