Tech worker resistance is crucial to preventing human rights abuses in the U.S

I struggle with the same issues here in the UK, where the professional body for tech, the British Computing Society (BCS) is not just toothless, but in my eyes, actively harmful (for example, chose to vote _in favour_ of NSA-like practices at GCHQ - including giving evidence (in the form of an expert statement) to the government).

I think what is important to realise is that something approximating the majority of people do actually go against the values typically espoused by the people who visit HN, not just in the wider public but also within tech. And even discounting those, how many people are quite happy to just do as told? How do we work to distill the concept of professional ethics in tech from these people, and then instill it?

* That we be mindful of the difficulty of our craft and not work on systems where failures can harm others when we're uncertain of our ability to execute reliably. For instance: that we not work on projects that seem likely to produce another Therac-25 disaster.

* That we be mindful of the outsized impact technology can have, especially when put to unexpected use, and thus be obligated to design systems with all reasonable safeguards against misuse. For instance: that we not work on projects that are benign when used as designed, but that are easily turned into instruments of mass surveillance --- like: a big chunk of the network security product market.

* That we design and build systems that ordinary users can reliably use safely and, where applicable, securely. For instance: that we don't repeat the mistakes of Adobe Flash.

What would you add to that "code of ethics"? Should I be banned from "build software" if my library is used in non-ethical (in someone's opinion) project? Is working for institutions in countries that violate human rights (UAE?) should be considered "unethical"?

Just take your witch hunt ideas and leave us alone.

A code cannot have teeth without being backed up by some organization to do the biting, as it were, meaning some sort of union or professional association whose bylaws enshrine these ethical standards. Otherwise the 21st century equivalent of 'I was only following orders' will be 'that's above my pay grade.'

Since you went there, we also need a Union to protect our rights and prevent overtime abuse (esp. at Startups).

You can't stop a metaphorical mass database of Muslims at a time when there's sufficient political support to do so -- and there's plenty at the moment. A lot of people see <it's just information, what do you have to hide if you're righteous> as a good enough reason, enough to generate broad acceptance.

There's also enough political support to build illegal mass surveillance machinery, and then lie to Congress about it. The aggregate of the US is okay with that, just like how the aggregate of the UK is okay with even more in-your-face surveillance. Likewise, you cannot stop the documented abuses of psychiatry when there's all too much political support for it.

There are useful reasons for a union, and I hope it so for the health of the technology community, but I don't think it can dent the issues which people mean by this "never again" political speech (big databases of people -> risk to vulnerable minorities).

We need a code of ethics for directors, with actual teeth (violating it means you can't commercially direct films any more).

This is fun!

Trying to create a government-appointed organization to oppose a government policy is simply foolish. It's not going to happen.

This pledge is US-centric and should be US-centric, because that's the jurisdiction these enormous sets of user data live under.

As far as who people can whistleblow to, there are any number of tech journalists and public figures with a well-earned reputation for integrity.

Many countries actually put strict restrictions on the data that can be gathered in a national census, for just that reason of fear of being used for repression and division. See: France.

Not that that strategy has been particularly successful in France's case.

That's obtuse to the point of nonsense. 'Your proposal fails to encompass all imaginable situations and is therefore invalid' is such an obvious fallacy that it moves me to doubt your honesty.

by the way, it wasn't the government of Bosnia that launched a policy of genocidal ethnic cleansing; rather they were the victims of Serbian violence.

I am so sick of this bullshit meme. The price of all the privilege and power of being President is that you take responsibility for what you say and how people could interpret it, because your actions have potentially life-changing consequences for people and so people have a strong interest in knowing (through your speech) what sort of actions you intend to take. If Trump can't or won't control his own speech, why should we assume that his actions are rooted in competence? You're basically saying that the concept of honesty is irrelevant when it comes to politics, which is an invitation to the worst sorts of corruption.

It also overlooks two things: one, that it's incredibly disrespectful of people who are victimized by his casual remarks to say that the anxiety and fear stimulated from his position of power don't matter and thus (implicitly) that it's OK to provoke anger and fear in other people - in a word, bullying. Two, that many of Trump's supporters do take him literally - about building a wall, or how to treat Muslims, or about it being OK to grab women by the pussy, and Trump is empowering them while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility for their actions.

I can't believe I even need to explain what a steaming pile of bullshit that position is.

No, as Hannah Arendt and many others have shown, large-scale human rights abuses often do not involve lots of people consciously doing evil. Instead, they usually think there are good reasons for what they do.

You mean like in the opening sentences of your comment?

People are absolutely freaking out about Google and Facebook collecting this data. I don't know why you think this (almost) isn't happening.

This is a good point. A lot of things that might have seemed sort-of reasonable under president Obama/Bush/Clinton are scarier under president Trump, and those things that were built in the past during different presidents remain in existence. So, when considering whether it's a good idea to build such tools, it's important to consider future worst-case scenarios, rather than freak out about what we've already built when it's too late.

I think a good test to apply is: "what would the House Un-American Activities Committee have done with this tool" and if the answer is scary, then that tool probably shouldn't be built. (I realize that Facebook would definitely fall into the category of "really scary tools", and yet I still grudgingly use Facebook because it's convenient for some things.)

Once you're seriously talking about uprooting millions of people, including breaking up families that have lived in the United States for decades, you create a destabilizing set of conditions you may not be able to control.

Those people need to be housed, fed, moved, put on planes or ships to wherever they're being sent. The potential for abuse and tragedy is there at every step in this process.

So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation?

Tell that to the Japanese people we interned in World War II.

Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust. Did you know that if you are taken into custody for an immigration violation, you may not be entitled to any sort of hearing for as long as 6 months? Did you know that there have been many cases involving illegal abuses of people in immigration detention? Did you know that American citizens have been wrongly reported? Also, the process of determining who is deportable is nowhere near as simple as you suggest. Not everyone who comes here illegally is deportable even under a narrow reading of the law.

It is precisely your sort of poorly-informed complacency that enables human-rights abuses to occur in the first place. Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated, in which case further conversation is pointless.

Yes, but once you're a citizen you certainly shouldn't have your original national origin tracked. Or that of your parents.

> To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best.

No it is really not. Genocides almost invariable start with deportation.

Nothing in this article is about illegal immigration. For one thing, it's a wholly separate issue than the proposed Muslim database—the vast majority of Muslim-Americans are here legally.

* For many Latino immigrants, the wait list for permanent residency is over 20 years long. The wait isn't that long because we want to restrict immigration; we broadly agree that if we drastically reduced the immigrant population in the US, the economy would suffer, because those people are staffing the meat packing plants, cleaning the hotels, working the line at practically every high-end restaurant, harvesting crops, laying bricks, and putting up tile. Rather: the 20 year wait list is simple bureaucratic cruelty: there are loud constituencies who are uneasy about formally allowing people to stay here while being totally content with allowing them to work here undocumented, so long as they're kept second-class.

* That's bad enough, but not dispositive. The real problem is that we've created the expectation that people can work here for years and years without obtaining permanent residency, and so people put down roots and then have children here. Children born in America are American citizens, full stop. We are idiosyncratic in having a Constitution that guarantees birthright citizenship, but we do, and we are a nation of laws. To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly. We owe our fellow citizens better.

* A huge number (pretty much everyone agrees it's a plurality) of undocumented workers are undocumented not because they've done something wrong, but because they've somehow fallen off their visa track --- which the law makes incredibly easy to do! We put them on an untenable 20 year legal obstacle course that really requires professional representation to complete. They spend that time working and raising children. Then we punish their children for technicalities, while quietly replacing them with other Latino immigrants.

* The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming. More than 70% of deportation cases in which the subject is represented by an immigration attorney fail --- the immigrant isn't deported. But the overwhelming majority of deportees aren't represented, because we don't guarantee counsel to people in immigration court. All we give them is a translator. If I sued you on some bogus libel charge for pissing me off on HN, how well do you think you'd do if you were denied a lawyer?

I am ultimately ambivalent about immigration enforcement. I recognize that we are in many ways more lenient than much of Europe. My objection to the big dumb wall isn't moral, it's just that it's a big dumb waste of money.

I am not ambivalent about pointlessly tearing up, or, worse, forcibly relocating families that include American citizens. There are hundreds of thousands of those. I would absolutely quit a job, refuse investment from a firm that supported, or sever ties with a client that participated in a mass deportation program that forced children to choose between their parents and their country.

1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them. Do you recognize the truth of this statement?

2) Is it bad and oppressive to target a stigmatized minority religious group for government surveillance and policing?

3) Are software engineers morally obligated to not implement oppressive policies? Or is whatever they do justified, so long as it came as an order from above?

The fundamental idea is that if enough people sign, management at tech companies will have to make decisions to comply with unethical government orders knowing that the discovery of their compliance (which is inevitable) might cause significant retention problems.

What if the petition itself is abused as a source of information?