Comment by hbt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbt | Hacker News Reader

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This is why we (as a community/industry) need to have the equivalent of a prison/death threat.

The government wins by making it personal, by threatening prison and death for your obedience. It's not an abstract threat. It is directed to a specific person not a company or security team.

The people who comply can quit those companies but they don't. I'm not referring to the ones down the chain (e.g the security team who was unaware) but the ones who obeyed and pushed something they believed was wrong.

Whether it is public shaming or having a permanent stain on their reputation next time they go job hunting, we need a way to retaliate.

Right now, they can fuck us and get away with it and what's their excuse? "the government told me to do it. Just doing my job. I had no choice."

There are no societal consequences to cooperating with the government even when we believe it's wrong.

Create a climate of "snitches get stitches" and maybe they will think twice before selling out the lives of a billion people. The same way these government officials hide behind patriotism when they mean blind obedience to my authority.

> Create a climate of "snitches get stitches" and maybe they will think twice before selling out the lives of a billion people.

Committing crimes against people who defect is obviously not going to work. They'll just arrest you for it.

But suppose we create a certification. To get certified all you have to do is promise not to work on a specific list of things: Mass surveillance, backdoors, etc. To lose certification forever all you have to do is work on one of those things.

Then we can have companies offer to put it in their contracts with their international customers that they'll only hire employees and contractors with that certification. Any companies that aren't actually working on mass surveillance etc. are happy to do this because it gives their customers more confidence that they aren't, and if it becomes popular then any companies that don't will become suspicious and lose business.

Then all employees at all companies will have to think twice before working on such things, because it would mean giving up any possibility to work at any of the companies who won't hire such people, which with success will constitute most of the industry.

> To lose certification forever all you have to do is work on one of those things and get caught.

There, fixed that for you. That small detail is why your attractive idea wouldn't work in real life. How many years it took for the car industry scandal about tampering with emission tests to be revealed? And it only got to ruin the the reputations of the few engineers involved in the forgery.

> There, fixed that for you. That small detail is why your attractive idea wouldn't work in real life. How many years it took for the car industry scandal about tampering with emission tests to be revealed? And it only got to ruin the the reputations of the few engineers involved in the forgery.

The same goes for theft and graft and murder. You don't get punished if you don't get caught. But you could get caught, and you don't know ahead of time whether you will or not.

CanaryCertified (TM).

> But suppose we create a certification. To get certified all you have to do is promise not to work on a specific list of things: Mass surveillance, backdoors, etc. To lose certification forever all you have to do is work on one of those things.

I fear you may be making a potentially dangerous assumption about how engineering works in a compartmentalized environment. Engineers do not always know the purpose of the systems on which they work.

Once upon a time in Texas I spent several years working on a system to run a binary sample through a series of plugins that produced analysis of the binary sample. I was told that this was to help detect malware - and it could certainly do that.

Did I know that for certain? No. Were there other possible uses, such as to determine how detectable a given piece of experimental malware was? Yes. Did I have any way, shape, form, manner, or means of finding out what 100% of uses were? No.

A lot of software has more than one possible use.

You don't prohibit making or having knives, you prohibit stabbing people.

The problem with the certification model proposed is that it seeks to prohibit stabbings, but works on people who make knives.

Wow. This is probably the worst comment I've ever seen on HN. You're suggesting that people who follow the law, which you disagree with, get blacklisted, following the model of criminals killing other criminals who follow the law.

If you want to change the government, there are far better ways than retaliating against citizens unwilling to risk life and limb for your ideology. I think you need to learn to direct your anger. Not everyone is in so privileged of a position to be taking your specific moral high ground over their own well being.

So now, quitting your job (because you're asked to do something unethical) is the equivalent of losing your life and limbs?

Let me guess, you believe all government actions are lawful. All lawful actions are righteous and justified. The only permissible way to change the system is through the system. Did I get the gist of your morality?

In which case, keep voting and I'm sure you will see the changes you want reflected in legislation just so they can be ignored in by secret courts and intelligence services.

In the real world, people respond to threats (e.g prison). That's what the government uses. Why are we expected to behave differently?

> So now, quitting your job (because you're asked to do something unethical) is the equivalent of losing your life and limbs?

It's an expression. How about "Losing your livelyhood." It's a real thing for some people.

> Let me guess, you believe all government actions are lawful. All lawful actions are righteous and justified. The only permissible way to change the system is through the system. Did I get the gist of your morality?

You're way off on my morality. It's more centered on not causing harm to others, which is what you're suggesting people do, to others that don't fit your sense of morality.

> In which case, keep voting and I'm sure you will see the changes you want reflected in legislation just so they can be ignored in by secret courts and intelligence services. In the real world, people respond to threats (e.g prison). That's what the government uses. Why are we expected to behave differently?

Do you really think voting or threats are the only two methods to enact change? Neither work particularly well. What does work well is changing the opinion of the majority, and until you do that, you must question whether your minority opinion is actually the correct one, and provide reasons for others to change their opinion of you believe it to be so. Taking the low road and suggesting punishing people who aren't the cause will get you nothing but negative comments on hackernews.

> So now, quitting your job (because you're asked to do something unethical) is the equivalent of losing your life and limbs?

In a capitalist system, where your alternatives are "work or stave", yes.

Only if you can't get another job. That's not likely to be a problem for most people faced with this particular situation.

You don't seem to understand Nash equilibrium, game theory, and the Prisoner's Dilemma.

It is legal, and perhaps moral, to refuse to work with unethical people who follow immoral/illegitimate orders. While the mention of "snitches get stitches" set things down the wrong path, the core idea is not unjust.

While I do think the concept of community ostracision is impractical (because there is never only one tech community to start with) - "I just followed the law" is never a moral free pass. Given that what law means actually is daily debated in courtrooms it's not only morally hollow, it's uncomputable to an individual in the general sense.

"I just did what the authority figure told me to" is one the oldest excuses in the book.

To be clear - I am not suggesting that everything on the books should be followed, I am suggesting that punishing people who are following these specific laws in question, which are following NSA letters and gag orders, does not fit what I think is the commonly accepted way we treat each other.

Yes. I agree with this sentiment fully.

The main connotation which invoked my response was equalling the resentment of following the law unilaterally to the mindset of a criminal organization.

1/ For the most part, this is not the "law". We're talking about instructions that have not been legally challenged, that are issued by a government agency, ie civil servants that are not responsible to the people.

2/ In any case "the law" is only the result of a very imperfect process; it's not the word of God: it can be changed (it often is) and it doesn't have any special moral value. Your moral code is yours, it's dictated by your conscience and should not be taken whole from texts written by other people.

In the 20th century, many crimes have been committed by people following the law, and not just in Nazi Germany. French Jews were arrested and delivered to the German authorities by members of the French police who were simply following orders. The ones giving the orders have indeed been tried after the war, but not the ones following them; in fact they never had to suffer any consequence for their actions. But the truth is, had there been no cops willing to participate, there would have been no deportations.

"I'm just doing my job" or "I was just following orders" is NOT a valid excuse. It's a cop out (pun intended).

Not everyone is in so privileged of a position to be taking your specific moral high ground over their own well being.

"Privilege" doesn't enter into it. Everybody has the option to do the right thing, if they're willing to accept the consequences. Not everybody will of course, but there's nothing truly preventing one from doing so.

The difference is that for some people the "consequence" for doing the right thing is that they'll have to get a new, but similar, job while for other people it's watching their family being tortured to death. Saying that these two people are facing the same or even similar options is disingenuous to say the least.

Saying that these two people are facing the same or even similar options is disingenuous to say the least.

I didn't see anybody say that, so I'm not sure what your point is.

At the end of the day, sometimes doing "the right thing" has horrific consequences. Some people can and will accept that, some can't or won't. But the choice is always available.

Consider that the Founding Fathers of the US had "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" as a rallying cry, not "Give me Liberty, or erm, well no more than minor inconvenience". Sometimes you have to be willing to accept death, imprisonment, etc. for a cause you believe in. Look at Edward Snowden, who did what he though to be "the right thing" even though he knew the most likely consequence involved death, imprisonment or torture (or some combination of all of the above).

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