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Comment by chrismcb | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. You are saying you don't want to make a database that the US can abuse(but it is OK for other countries?) but then you concede that the US probably already has the best database, but, wink-wink, they won't abuse it?

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No. The pledge acknowledges that abusable databases exist. It doesn't ask that people leave companies that maintain those databases. What it demands is that signatories commit to resist abuse, and, ultimately, to sever ties with employers that abuse those databases.

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.

> The pledge acknowledges that abusable databases exist. It doesn't ask that people leave companies that maintain those databases. What it demands is that signatories commit to resist abuse, and, ultimately, to sever ties with employers that abuse those databases.

In practice, developers work on those databases in Google and Facebook. They'll be "ok" because they don't know they are abused. Other engineers in those companies will work on giving the government access to it (as Snowden documented), and they too will not see any abuse so they are ok. The government gets that information and does what it wants with it. It might be abusing it right now. (There have been many deportations under Obama, for example, with little uproar; it's possible tech databases helped in those.)

The pledge is toothless. To be actually effective, it should have called on people to not work at Google and Facebook.

The pledge commits them to resign from Facebook or Google should either comply with a USG mass deportation program. That's not "toothless".

As I said, Google/Facebook data may already have been used in Obama's deportations. No one knows either way. So the pledge can have zero effect.

The real problem is the existence of the databases, and government access to them. Both of those things are facts right now. The pledge ignores that.

That the pledge doesn't instantaneously solve all problems does not imply that the pledge is "toothless".

Isn't the petition itself a kind of database, naming and identifying specific individuals?

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

That's the point of the petition: to publicly name people who had committed to the pledge. If you're worried about being publicly identified as a signatory, don't sign it.

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