9 ms·

I do not want to sound shockingly naive, but I wonder how these people can sleep at night. You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in

• FLUX-YOU 11y ago
  Because they're disconnected from the consequences of their actions. I really doubt they're getting back business case studies talking about how they tracked down some dude and tortured him thanks to the information gleaned from their products (but now we can find out if they did get these).
• a3n 11y ago
  > I wonder how these people can sleep at night. These people are not you. They don't care. We should be mindful that there is a large fraction of people who care only about their own well being, regardless of consequences.
  • astrodust 11y ago
    A lot of people fail to understand what sociopaths are like. They do not, can not care in the way that most people do. The best they can do is pretend to care.
    • JabavuAdams 11y ago
      We should be very careful about labeling selfish people as sociopaths. It's easier to believe that there are incurable monsters among us, because this lets us be self-righteous in containing and punishing them. IMHO simply realizing that there is a scale of selfishness that extends way beyond where you think the limits are is more predictive and actionable.
• alltakendamned 11y ago
  Greed.
• chinathrow 11y ago
  You know, this is what I keep asking myself about all the fine folks in defense, developing the newest fucking weapons/plane/gun/drone/whatever which _will_ be used people in other countries. We should introduce a "walk away from your job"-kickstarter thing to encourage leaving those positions.
  • kisil_reboot 11y ago
    There's a wide range of moral gray area there. Imagine, e.g., a US contractor who builds converters that make dumb bombs into smart bombs. The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
    • chinathrow 11y ago
      > The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way. This has been used as a talking point pro smart bombs for some time now - and yet we have still bombings of weddings with a civilian hit rate of nearly 100%. Killing is is still killing, no matter how smart the weapon is.
      • dempseye 11y ago
        They are aiming for the weddings.
      • jessedhillon 11y ago
        I think you should check out how bombing was conducted before the introduction of the smart bomb. We used to intentionally and systematically destroy entire civilian populations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
        • chinathrow 11y ago
          Supporting/defending bombs because they are better than older bombs? Really? Not supporting/definding bombs: the right way.
• pakled_engineer 11y ago
  Even if these outfits only sell to "good" countries there's no guarantee those countries won't give access to shady regimes like Egypt or Saudi Arabia to round up and torture political dissidents as these are supposedly allies of the West.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• caskance 11y ago
  One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.
• anc84 11y ago
  People who join the US army should be forced to watch videos of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture, they should be forced to watch testimonies of people in drone-bombed municipalities. But I am afraid that for many the "we good, they bad" mentality would justify those atrocities. Like another commenter said, who is bad and who is good really depends on your viewpoint.
  • tptacek 11y ago
    People who say things like this make it much easier for people who work at places like Gamma and Hacking Team to rationalize what they do.
    • tyho 11y ago
      How so?
    • caskance 11y ago
      Good.
  • 542458 11y ago
    I think that's a little bit of an excessively simple viewpoint. The US army does much more than Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and drones (in fact, a lot of what you just described is probably managed by agents outside the army such as the CIA). To flip this around, should every employee of a Silicon Valley company be shamed for rising property values in the area that have left many homeless? Should every Google employee be shamed for the illegal wifi capture done by Streetview vans?
    • wmt 11y ago
      Rising property values doesn't sound that bad compared to actively helping repressive governments to hunt, torture and murder the people speaking against them.
    • discardorama 11y ago
      > should every employee of a Silicon Valley company be shamed for rising property values in the area that have left many homeless? Property values have nothing to do with homelessness. The roots of homelessness lie in the closure of mental-health facilities all across the US and California. These people need mental health counseling more than anything else.
• Ntrails 11y ago
  You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in the world, who will use your technology to track down and brutally torture incredibly brave human rights activists. You make so many assumptions about the viewpoint of the other person and then state that you cannot understand how they behave like this. Of course you cannot, you've phrased the question in a way which doesn't necessarily even make sense from their point of view.
  • dempseye 11y ago
    Care to illuminate their point of view for us?
  • dsmithatx 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure they understand his point of view. Why else would they vehemently deny selling this software to such governments like Sudan then?
  • Fede_V 11y ago
    It's very possible that I've made some unfair assumptions. Could you give me a more fair representation of what goes into the mind of someone selling surveillance software to Sudan or Omar?
    • MichaelGG 11y ago
      I actually have software that'd be a decent fit for this use case. I'm working on bringing it to market for VoIP companies to use in troubleshooting networks. (Hint: It's super effective. At one place we cut ticket response times down by an enormous factor.) And one benefit I'm planning on adding is lawful intercept. A lot of VoIP companies are sitting at risk of getting a valid warrant and having no way to respond. Some companies sell technical insurance (pay monthly, they'll overnight an intercept box if you get a warrant) for this exact reason and it's not cheap. Only problem is CALEA has this dumbass weird format to provide the data in. But hey, that's worth like $100K a year per company or so... But it'd also be rather well suited for a government wanting to monitor connections. Just some scaling issues. My thought process is currently going "Well I could definitely use the money. And that'd put me in a better position to compete. Otherwise another competitor will do it. Or worse, an open source version will step up to the scale." I'm not sure it's much different than selling general services to the public. A lot of irrational people are going to buy your product and perhaps that might propel them to success. Taken to its conclusion, I'd have a super limited market as most people are idiots so given a choice, I'd only want to help a very limited range of people. I just have to put my personal feelings aside if I'm to deal with anyone in the real world.
• digitalneal 11y ago
  On high thread count sheets, with imported feather pillows in mansions that overlook federally protected ocean coves. As the famed hip hop scholar Rocko once said "Umma Do Me". That is how they sleep at night.
• filoeleven 11y ago
  Another reply mentioned how the same questions can be asked of people joining the US military. And I'll add the examples of buying clothing made in sweatshops, hi-tech devices made in sweatshops, blood diamonds, bottled water, and even factory-farmed meat if your concern for suffering extends beyond human suffering. It's easy to ignore the consequences of your choices when they do not directly impact you or the people you know and care about. I am not crying 'hypocrisy!' here--I take part in these systems too--only pointing to things that many of us do that can be viewed with equal abhorrence by those who pay attention to them. And I think that is the answer to your question: it's all in what you pay attention to.
• sspiff 11y ago
  One mans freedom fighter or activist is another mans terrorist. Besides, it is human nature to be morally flexible. Many people don't really register atrocities of any scale as long as they don't affect their daily lives. That's not to say this isn't terrible or shameful behaviour. It's just common terrible, shameful behaviour.
• belorn 11y ago
  They are very similar to military contractors and weapon manufacturers, except that their industry has so far no regulations that prevents them for selling their product to anyone that has money to spend. Government could start defining this kind of tools as weapons but that prevent them for using it on their own population, and weapon trade is a very high profit industry.
• JabavuAdams 11y ago
  Profit + No personal consequences = WIN
• JabavuAdams 11y ago
  There is a relatively seductive and possibly correct argument that stability and predictability trumps human rights. It's the reason Russians can be nostalgic for Stalin, etc. Revolution is messy. If the activists who were pressuring Assad for reforms had known that his reaction and the counter-reaction would lead to 250k+ deaths and the destruction of their country, would they have pushed as hard? Would they have been content with a phased approach, even though that would mean continued violations of their human rights?
• shenberg 11y ago
  I've asked people who work in these fields those same questions. Answers were along the lines of "someone else will do it if I don't" or "it's less violent than the actual violence the government would use otherwise." The reality of it is that you have to stop caring about the effects of your actions at some point: all the stuff we use daily is a product of exploitation and suffering of others with a dash of ruining the planet for future generations, yet we don't have a problem looking ourselves at the mirror.
• MichaelGG 11y ago
  Someone's gonna do it anyways? So the choice is whether you do something and profit off it (and possibly use the money to accomplish good things) or if you let someone else do it and make the money and perhaps do bad things. Pretty easy choice for me. In fact, I've written software to analyze VoIP networks (troubleshooting) at scale, and now I'm wondering if I can retarget that and sell to larger entities for much more money. I hadn't really though of it before, but I guess some of these shittier countries wouldn't be able to simply do the engineering themselves even if it's really not that hard. On a separate note, we should be free to pursue scientific and engineering knowledge without having to deal with consequences of idiots that misuse such things. At least in this branch, imagine if all physicists last century had avoided furthering physics over nuclear weapons concerns. Now it's nowhere near as cool, but the challenge of indexing multiple 40G+ connections at linerate? It'll be fun at a minimum.
  • kartan 11y ago
    > Someone's gonna do it anyways? You can apply this reasoning to justify for absolutely anything that you want to do. And it is false. > On a separate note, we should be free to pursue scientific and engineering knowledge without having to deal with consequences of idiots that misuse such things. Completely agree. But this people are the "idiots" that are taking the scientific research of others and putting it in bad hands. And what they are doing should be punishable by law.
• lubesGordi 11y ago
  On a pile of money with many beautiful ladies.
• cronjobber 11y ago
  How do you know their customers didn't just want spyware for better ad targeting? Because, you know, that makes it good.