Tech workers pledge to never build a database of Muslims | Hacker News Reader

Tech workers pledge to never build a database of Muslims

latimes.com

183 pointsMz294 comments

I just went on Facebook and created an Ad [0] that targets only people "interested in Islam" and living the US, it took 30 seconds.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/NOrGA2N.png

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Edit: Direct link

Interest in Islam ≠ being a Muslim. I'm interested in Islam and not a Muslim. In fact I'd say most Trump supporters, hell most Americans of any political/religious persuasion even, have some amount of interest in Islam. I'm being somewhat facetious, but also not entirely - the point being that I don't think these consumer profiles could easily be converted into Muslim registries.

But it's also all pretty moot - if Trump's anti-muslim policies are implemented, I highly doubt the CBP et al will need resources beyond what the US intelligence community already possesses.

I understand your point. This was just a quick example to show that the data is there. I'm not saying that the FBI is going to start a campaign of Facebook ads.

Facebook data is there, and it could be mined in more advanced ways to extract a database of its Muslim users. This data can extend beyond the "religion" entry in a profile, to analyze posts on religious holidays, vocabulary and idiomatic expressions, images shared, etc..

Fair points. I still find it hard to imagine they would use fuzzy profiling from social media though - if they want to cast a wide net like that, they could just use country of origin - which is (one of) Trump's stated position(s), to shut down/more heavily regulate immigration from particular countries, rather than trying to go on a case by case basis. And they would avoid the bad PR that would come out of people getting to act on this pledge and other things like it.

>>Interest in Islam ≠ being a Muslim.

Sure, but it would be trivial for a nefarious party to pair up "interest in Islam" with actions such as "checked in at local mosque" and other such signals.

There is a big difference between advertising to users interested in Islam and shipping that dataset (or clicks, or people who use certain keywords in messages) to the government.

Drawing a line between intent and danger is a weak barrier, because you cannot dictate the intent of future political groups. There is no reliable test of intentionality.

Also, the nature of information is that once known you can never rely on unknowing it again. If the United States breaks out into a war with China, you cannot unknow a database of asians innocuously collected for alternative reasons. The information itself is dangerous because the information itself is powerful.

Tell that to a FISA court.

FISA courts asking for the same data are also bad. The data asked for by a FISA court must be gathered and shipped by employees and lawyers who have agency. Those employees and lawyers can choose to fight, or not. This is a public pledge that says "we will choose to fight."

Leaking FISA requests to the press, choosing to face jail time, or trying a public battle over a FISA request are other options available to people at these companies, instead of just rolling over.

I don't understand your argument.

If something is harmful, ineffective grandstanding (and then losing a FISA fight) are worthless.

Yes, it is the intent to use it. But clearly such databases already exist.

Well we could all say we were interested in Islam so that people who actually are could be interested without fear of incrimination because of it, at the same time we could educate users about putting their interests online and what it means.

If you limit it to US, I think you'll get more Trump voters than muslims.

It's a lovely gesture, and an important sign of solidarity; however, it'a merely that, just a gesture.

I hope that SV and the tech industry leverages its wealth and technical legal capabilities to fight these sorts of actions in court, unlike their responses to privacy intrusions by the federal government, British intelligence, and other foreign groups.

Gestures aren't nothing, they start a conversation, spark a reframing of priorities, and signal to others that it's OK to concur -- or, as you say, a sign of solidarity.

We focus on decision makers because that's the easiest point of observation. That we are much more limited in observing the chain of gestures and other non-decisive actions that influence decisions doesn't mean that gestures are nothing. More importantly, gestures are a way to be engaged and increase engagement, as you gradually position yourself to be in the right place at the right time to make impact. If everyone waited until they were established/rich enough before they acted at all on their convictions...well, there's a reason why "The establishment" is used as a perjorative.

And as an obvious example, our president-elect made many gestures that he'll be unlikely to fulfill. But that was signal enough to get him to be where he is.

I object to the idea that this is a gesture. These are people pledging their reputations to quit their jobs if their employers don't prevent the data they collect from being abused. It's not just possible but likely that people will quit jobs in the next couple years because of this.

The objection that the pledge doesn't solve the problem is easy to make because it's true: the pledge alone won't solve anything. But make no mistake: this isn't a petition. Whether 10 people or 1,000,000 people sign a petition, the effort fails if the target ignores it. But a single person can sign a pledge and, in honoring their commitment, do something significant in support of their cause. It's not up to the employers; it's about the workers.

I think this kind of bottom-up effort is both promising and overdue. More people should consider signing. What's the threshold we'd need to reach in our profession for a pledge like this to meaningfully impact decisionmaking? I think it's much less than 51%.

A public commitment is not a gesture, but an act. It may be small for your tastes, but it's something.

I certainly hope people fight aggressively in court. But waiting for that encourages a passive, helpless attitude at a time when we can be doing a lot. And it places too much faith in the legal system and rule of law.

Right now the most effective way to make political change happen in our industry is by applying collective pressure from within. Tech employees are expensive and difficult to replace.

Over 1000 people, some of them very prominent, have pledged to quit their jobs if they are asked to do unethical things. How is that "merely a gesture"?

Have they destroyed any of this data yet?

As much fun as it may be to pretend this is a Trump problem, it's a Silicon Valley problem. It's Silicon Valley waking up and realizing that it's all fun and games until someone you don't like gets the data that they have already painstakingly collected, polished, and devoted billions of dollars to processing and extracting features of interest. The existence of people you don't like and the fact that some of them will be someday be in positions of power isn't news, it's a constant fact of life.

I find it a bit disgusting that this is what finally crossed the line when the line should have been considered crossed a long time ago, but I'll take what I can.

Now, what has anyone done about the excessive collection of data, beyond virtue signaling that they don't like Trump? We don't need virtue signaling. We need actions. One of the signs that action has actually been taken would be that some of these companies are going to make less money. If that doesn't happen, this is hot air, so much "it's OK when we do it, but not those guys over there, no way! Now don't you feel better that we said that? BTW, here's a popup that offers you the choice of either giving us everything you have on your phone or being unable to use cell phones. (It's choice.)"

Sure; I signed the pledge. I've asked about companies' privacy policies, data retention and security policies during the course of interviewing. I've told recruiters the reason I am not interested in a company is because of their approach to privacy. I've discussed the implications of data collection and data management with colleagues at companies that collect lots of it.

At the last company I worked at I promoted the use of HTTPS everywhere, when we had more pressing feature work to do. I shamed someone who shared around that a famous customer had signed up, and made it clear internally that we shouldn't be looking at or commenting on that data. I gave company-wide talks on security, phishing, the implications of storing our data in Slack, and realistic and unrealistic security threats.

Not the next coming of Claus von Stauffenberg but I don't think everyone needs to be; just conscious of the choices they make and the consequences.

You're complaining that "we need actions" in response to tech employees actually taking action. That's weird.

I realize you want to see grander, significant results, but what do you think that looks like at the outset? People starting to do something in an industry that has been historically very wary of being "political".

Signing a pledge is not "action". Actually quitting would be action. But there are lots of signatures from people who work at large companies that make even larger databases. Why didn't they quit already? Why didn't they quit years ago? Why are the only issues the pledge talks about things that liberals care about? Why not also pledge to never make a database of gun owners, to make the conservatives feel included?

The industry is wary of being "political" for good reasons - engaging in shallow political campaigns and especially being seen to both biased and powerful is a good way to trash the reputation of the field. Software engineering isn't as respected as medicine, but it's at least better respected than journalism and politics.

The worst case scenario is that this kind of crap becomes widespread and software ends up being like the social sciences: riddled with political extremism (there are basically no conservative social scientists) ... yet unable to see it because all people with opposing viewpoints were systematically shit on and excluded for decades until the point was reached where there were none left.

It's dishonest to put "gun owner registry" and "Muslim registry" on the same moral footing, or to assert that conservatives don't care about creating a tracking database based on a religious test.

People haven't quit already because there is diversity of opinion about what kind of data collection is inherently bad. There are people from Palantir who signed the pledge. I don't pretend to understand it myself.

However, it represents a public commitment, and comes at a personal risk. People are making a very visible public promise at a time when visible people get harassed, and their own management is trying to make nice with the incoming Administration.

Respect.

You find it a bit disgusting that people have pledged to quit their jobs in support of a cause? Are you sure you don't need to recalibrate your definition of "disgusting"?

Because they won't do it.

This pledge is so full of get-out clauses it makes Swiss Cheese look robust. Many of the signers already work for companies that build large databases that could be used in bad ways by governments.

This is the Silicon Valley equivalent of saying "I'll move to Canada".

Then hold them to it when something happens. Personally, I think the people who have publicly signed this, putting them a Google search away from any future employer learning about this, probably thought about it more carefully than you did.

In talking to people about this pledge --- particularly people resistant to the pledge (I have conservative friends), the most notable thing I've learned is that people do this all the time. Almost everyone I've talked to knows someone who quit a job over principle, or did so themselves.

It's time for us to stop acting like this is such a weird thing to say or do, and recognize the market power we can so easily put behind basic principles we all share. Please don't tell me that thousands of people who have --- I am not being hyperbolic --- changed jobs over the quality of the free catered lunch wouldn't do so to avoid being affiliated with mass deportation or a Muslim registry.

You will need a better argument than this to dismiss the effort.

It's impossible to "hold them to it" because it's so easy to get out of.

People changing jobs because they want better lunch isn't comparable. That's a choice they make on their time, at their leisure and having weighed up many other competing factors.

A pledge like this one in theory demands absolutism. Bad behaviour happens, you quit, regardless of how inconvenient or impractical it is for you at that time.

In practice, because the pledge has had absolutely minimal thought put into it, the authors filled it with weasel words to get a big list of signers. If someone was wanting to quit their job for lots of other reasons perhaps they can use this to justify leaving and make themselves out to be super virtuous. But if they didn't actually want to quit their job then they'll just say that they objected internally and were ignored, but that satisfies the pledge. Or that they made some token change that "minimised" the data collected.

Ethics is a deep, complex field of study. This is the opposite: a highly partisan and political document that exists only so people who don't like Trump can show that to the world, which I expect they were loudly doing anyway. It will only increase mistrust amongst conservatives, who will ask awkward questions like "Where were these tech guys when people were talking about databases on issues that matter to us, like gun control?". Why weren't they signing pledges in 2013 when Snowden revealed what the Obama administration was doing; why is this only a big deal now someone we like got into power?

Pledges like this speak for everyone in tech. They shouldn't do that.

Two responses.

First: it does not demand absolutism. The point of the pledge is to exert market pressure on companies that are creating negative externalities. The idea is simply to internalize some of the risk they're creating. That market pressure works just fine whether someone quits the moment they discover malfeasance or whether they take the next job offer they get, 2 months later. From the perspective of engineering management, both outcomes are catastrophic.

Second: the pledge doesn't speak for everyone in tech. It speaks for the people who signed the pledge.

Don't get me wrong, I find the pledge to be a noble gesture, and it's good to see individual tech employees finally publicly take a stance on ethical issues. But have ethical issues ever hurt a company's candidate flow? I can't think of a single company so tainted by some ethical thing that they can't find engineers willing to hold their nose and work for them.

Have you ever been asked on an interview how you handled being assigned to write code that you had serious ethical concerns about, or whether there was any kind of projects you'd object to being assigned to? I haven't. Maybe those questions come AFTER the whiteboard hazing if there's time...

I've in the past objected to an ethically questionable assignment, and the company dealt with by moving me to a different part of the code base and hiring a contractor who had no problem with doing the deed. Had I quit over it they would likely have shrugged and hired someone else.

How many people do you think would need to sign this for it to have a material impact on recruiting and retention for big companies? Let's not be fuzzy about it. Let's see what the goal needs to be, and then talk about how reachable it is.

That would require a high degree of speculation, since I can't think of any example in history in any industry where "employees not willing to work for a company" managed to have a material impact on that company. I think this is uncharted territory.

Ahem.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_action

This is a joke about HN, right?

Hey. I'm getting some mileage out of this on Twitter and you're getting a little jumped on, but: if you're not joking, this is good news. It's kind of great news.

It means all you have to do is learn a bit about the labor movement to see a whole new dimension of possibilities for intervening against a system we're widely concerned about.

Fair enough, labor unions. Brain no longer working, thanks for leading me by the nose to it. So we need to get software engineers, who as a group tend to be openly hostile to the idea of unions, to embrace collective bargaining.

I don't think software engineers were so much hostile as indifferent. And now we're wandering into an area where people want to take a stand against their own management, but are worried about doing it alone for fear of retribution.

This is exactly what labor law is designed to help do, and I can assure you people are interested.

I think it also depends hugely on the country.

I can only talk about Germany, and in general I'd say unions here have limited to moderate power, depending on the field they operate in. (e.g. you always hear news about strikes from the metal-related union (IG Metall) or the train drivers, or pilots/air personnel.)

Now, the thing is that there's also one very broadly defined one for "services" (ver.di) which used to have mostly shop assistants, hairdressers, people with desk jobs, etc.pp. But recently (let's say since the 90s) also more and more IT people and especially software developers. And I can't give you specific details, but I've heard and read so many stories about what they want is quite contrary to what people in these jobs want. Maybe (probably?) because we're better off anyway? Maybe because hardly any people in software here are paid via the regulated union tariffs (is that the correct word I'm using? The rate of pay that the union agreed to with the bigger companies. Often involves politicians, but sometimes only for mediation when there's no progress on talks) but via direct negotiations with your company.

TLDR: can only speak for Germany, but the union seems to be not representative of the people for this field of work

I think we're all reasonably clear that software developers wouldn't collectively bargain for better salaries. But it's silly to suggest that there aren't issues that would motivate even coddled SFBA developers. For instance:

* Work-for-hire and IP assignment rules and how they relate to side projects

* Non-solicitation clauses and pacts between big companies not to hire

* Transparency about equity valuations in job offers

* Exercise periods for options (in fact: an area of current open conflict between VCs and employees!)

* Overtime, on-call requirements, and death-march schedules

There are probably a dozen more things like this, and that's before we get to the true purpose of organizing, which is to make sure that software talent as a bloc can use market pressure to prevent itself from being subverted by unethical government requests.

This is not a crazy weird idea. There are white collar unions, and there are professional organizations (like the AMA) that do many of the things a union does on behalf of their members, without calling themselves that.

No, I absolutely agree. But I do think developers in Germany have it a lot better (from a safety standpoint, work regulations, IP law, etc.pp.) than people in the US - it's just that we get paid less (comparing 60-70k EUR vs 120-140k USD as very rough estimate) and there's no hire & fire. My point is that I think that's why we'd be able to peruse the advantages of a union a lot less. As long as the market is so that we can find a new job near instantly. Maybe I'm also blind to our disadvantages (because I live here, but I think many EU countries are comparable) - but that's why I think the 'typical union advantages' are even less prevalent in the US.

Addendum: I think the job safety thing is bigger, who can predict if this will be a safe job when most of us readers here (assuming age 20-40) are closer to retirement. Then again I'm not sure unions really help against companies not wanting to hire 50+ people for normal (I.e. non-manager) jobs.

The opposite is true. The stronger the employment market, the more market power labor has.

We can easily get new jobs. But we cannot easily find jobs that satisfy all the points I laid out above. Short exercise periods, for instance, are almost universal among tech startups. Companies can get away with doing that because right now, the interest in fixing that is diffuse, and the interest in maintaining the status quo is concentrated.

Straightforward fix: form a professional association, and collectively shun companies that screw over early startup employees with post-vesting clawbacks. We'll see how much longer khaki-clad sweater-bevested VC partners mouth off to the press about disloyal employees when the cost of employing developers for their portfolio companies (and theirs alone) goes up by 40%.

The more I think about unionization, the more I think 2016-2017 is an immense opportunity. A Chicagoan I'm not entirely fond of once memorably said: never let a crisis go to waste.

I'd love to see any numbers on how many "startup employees with stock options" there even are compared to normal salaried employees without any vesting periods.

And then compare that to other countries. Maybe that's my point. I don't see myself disagreeing with anything you wrote, yet you seem to take it that way :)

We don't need to unionize every software developer in the world. If the targets we want to apply pressure to are startups, all we have to unionize are the startups.

Sorry if I sound snippy. That happens a lot. The problem is with message boards: they're weighted heavily towards comments that highlight distinctions in point of view. That doesn't mean, in my case at least, that I'm trying to be dismissive.

Not all unions are about salary and shop rules. Look at the history of Polish Solidarity!

And not all organization is union organization. 5-10% of employees speaking up can have an effect.

In the 1980s, Irish workers in a large supermarket refused to handle South African goods because of apartheid

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/how-11-striking...

Labour unions are backed by force of law, and campaigned primarily to get their members more money or benefits, not stop "unethical" behaviour (they invariably claim they're motivated by safety or conditions or whatever, but in practice it almost never is).

Counter-example: In the 1980s, Irish workers in a large supermarket refused to handle South African goods because of apartheid

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/how-11-striking...

You could regard underpaying employees as unethical behaviour in itself. Not entirely unrelated

You mean besides Polish Solidarity?

Solidarity was by no means a normal trade union comparable to those in the west. It was directly supported by the US Government, not confined to any particular industry, was illegal rather than supported by pro-union laws (as is often the case in the west) and existed in an oppressive dictatorship not a democracy.

Yes: things were much harder for Solidarity, and it not only prevailed but helped break the Iron Curtain.

Are you serious? Do they even teach history in High School now?

Has anybody managed to move your company up the Joel Test[0] by threatening to leave, or management learning they missed a hire? Serious question.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Because there are millions of people in the industry.. Without factoring in any exact data, I'd say it's no less than 20% of those millions voted for Trump and of those I'd be willing to bet a portion would support this initiative. It's "merely a gesture" because it doesn't mean shit and it won't prevent anything.

I do agree with the guy above that said that it'll start a conversation but I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't change anything anyway.

All it takes is a tiny team of people who "need that job".

No, you're misunderstanding the concept of the pledge.

Most of the people who signed the pledge at (for instance) Google[1] are never going to be anywhere near the actual creation of misuse of databases for deportation or religious discrimination. The pledge isn't about denying labor for the actual project.

What it's about is radically altering the cost to companies of having anyone comply. It doesn't matter than you can find 5 random people who need some extra cash to do the scut work of actually abusing the database. When it gets out --- and it will get out --- the company loses team members.

If enough people sign this, the market pressure they're exerting becomes significant, and must influence decision making.

[1]: by the way, more people from Google signed the pledge than from any other company, and hey Facebook there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be able to lap them.

OK, so what you're saying is it boils down to math: N = Number of employees signing the pledge, Q is probability that an employee will quit their otherwise fantastic $300K/yr^ job because someone ELSE at the company is working on MuslimDB, C = average cost to replace and retrain an engineer, P = expected profit from project. If NQC < P, do the project.

Makes sense. I suppose whether it has an effect, then, depends on how many people sign it AND are actually willing to go through with it.

^(the salary commonly quoted on HN about how much the usual Googler makes)

Adding a pre-pledge that commits you to not turning every moral question into a variant of the Drake equation would probably improve the onboarding experience and drive conversion.

I wonder how many more people I could to sign this with a d3.js with sliders.

Perhaps because no matter how prominent you or the company you work for is, there are 1000s of other IT workers who are less scrupulous, less conscious, and more motivated by money than you are. And they would do it.

That being said, who is to say that it would be those people who were asked to do it? Most unlikely. It'd be the grey people, those you don't even know about. Those already doing it.

And finally, it's already done, isn't it? Facebook, Google, et al. I've worked for small companies before that are able to identify demographics of users right down to their likes, dislikes, and ages, even without submitting that information.

You think there isn't already swathes of Island-centric data out there?

It takes a long time to train up a new employee to effectiveness in a company like Google or Facebook, even if the hiring pool is limitless (which I dispute).

Employees acting in concert at those companies are a powerful point of leverage.

This is a really fatalistic and deterministic argument. The tragedy of the Holocaust is that so many people went along with it. In many other scenarios around the world people haven't gone along with unethical requests and things stopped far short of there.

People have agency. The whole point of the pledge is to make people aware that their colleagues aren't going along, and maybe send a signal to management about what employees will and won't accept. Hopefully others who haven't signed the pledge will have a clearer idea about what their colleagues think is unethical.

If you read any of the pieces discussing the late Thomas Schelling's contribution to game theory, you know that making a pledge to do X if Y occurs is a perfectly sound strategy to discourage Y from happening.

Respectfully, I'm interviewing for jobs right now. I did NOT just sign that pledge as a gesture.

I solemnly pledge to do nothing 8)

That's OK. We'll defend your right to do nothing with our own livelihoods. That's how things are supposed to work.

The book IBM and the Holocaust[0] gives an interesting historical perspective on the misuse of databases and database technology. One fascinating point with modern echoes is how often sensitive information (such as having Jewish ancestry) was simply volunteered to officials such as census-takers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Unfortunately, with firearms registration and no-fly lists, Muslim registries are part of the slope we've set precedent for. A citizen should _never_ have to register with the government to exercise a freedom explicitly granted in the constitution.

Flying isn't a constitutionally protected right. Voting is though. Should you be able to vote without registering?

Voter registration is an interesting scenario too, but there's more than what meets the surface: There are multiple rights to protect. We all have the right to vote. We also have the right that your vote is of equal weight to everyone else's vote. We must also be able to ensure that votes are anonymous, to protect people from being persecuted. Finally, we also have the right to a secure election that only allows citizens to vote.

In my opinion, voter registration is a reasonable regulation to protect everything I mentioned above, as long as it does not intimidate, discriminate, inconvenience, or harass citizens.

> as long as it does not intimidate, discriminate, inconvenience, or harass citizens

Historically, this is exactly what voter registration has been used for. You put it somewhere perpetually underfunded (especially in urban areas) like the DMV, and watch the results come in.

I don't disagree with the principle, but the current state of affairs makes it impossible to trust that voter registration laws are passed in good faith.

> We also have the right that your vote is of equal weight to everyone else's vote.

That's clearly not true, when the votes of California residents are worth significantly fewer electoral votes per capita than in any other state. Until the electoral college is replaced with a straight popular vote, we will never have the right to equally-weighted votes.

Flying is an interesting case, per the 5th amendment we have the freedom to travel (liberty). There are too many points to consider for an HN thread, but in general, I would propose flying as a reasonably protected right, but no-fly lists as a violation of that right because of the absolute lack of due process. There is plenty of room for reasonable and effective security measures, as long as they don't intimidate, discriminate, inconvenience, or harass citizens.

Should you be able to vote without registering?

Correct.

The US Govt and many others already maintain a complete list of all persons, living and dead, including useful attributes like citizenship, current address, age (aka eligibility to vote), in real-time.

Maintaining separate, duplicate, opt-in, haphazardly maintained, patchwork voter registration databases is wasteful, error-prone, and only serves the purpose of disenfranchising undesirables.

Maintain a single-unified opt-out, meticulously maintained, centralized voter registration database, is at risk for authoritarian abuse for cataloging and targeting people.

Why should Federal government care who lives in Florida, aside from a population estimate for the Electoral College? That's Florida's business.

> Should you be able to vote without registering?

Maybe. Maybe voter rolls should be some sort of bio-token that proofs your uniqueness and existence, and your approximate location (to determine local eligibility) but uses a pseudonym and is not connected to anything like your taxes, drivers license, etc.

Flying actually falls in a gray area... Considering you are "taxed" in essence for the TSA, to move between states... freedom of movement between states and all...

The TSA is, in principle, something voters have 'chosen' to put into place and could remove if they wished. Also there is no difference in the TSA 'tax' if you fly between states or within a state, so as such in has nothing to do with interstate travel.

Eugene Volokh wrote an excellent and highly-cited paper on this point, summarized here: http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slipperymag.pdf

It's an interesting argument. How could that work for things like driving, where you need to prove competency before you are legally allowed to do something?

Because driving on public roads has never been a right in the US. It has always been a privilege that you are granted.

That's not really accurate. Freedom of assembly is interpreted pretty generously. It's fine to disqualify on not knowing how to drive safely, but any other unrelated qualifier would be struck down as unconstitutional.

Thats a good point. If the US did a "no drive" list, there's no way it would standup in the courts. Counter point would be a "no firearm" list which runs counter to the 2nd amendment and may standup in the courts.

Driving isn't considered a right, but also registration is with the States, not the Fed.

The case law on this is interesting. When driver licensing was challenged in the early 20th century, the courts ruled that motorcars are so dangerous to the public that the state would be justified in banning them entirely; and that therefore, it may restrict their use in any way.

Driving a car isn't a protected right unlike the other things mentioned in the parent comment.

There are people who believe that driver's licenses are a way of stealing the right to freedom of movement. But to the best of my knowledge courts have typically rejected this.

Driving isn't listed as a Constitutional Right though.

I think the important point is that competency doesn't come from religion. It comes from past actions and current environment one is exposed to.

I'd argue "A citizen should _never_ have to register with the government" should really be the entire statement.

Things like aid and whatnot should really be isolated and broken off to prevent mass collection dbs.

Doesn't every birth have to be registered with the government?

"select * from individual where religion = 'muslim'"

You would think it's that easy as the "government knows all". But from working on government databases and systems, it's hardly the case. Disparate systems, competing departments, endless workshops that hold up progress, political spats, etc. And this isn't even in a country like the US that has separate states!

For "social security" benefits. Yes. And look how that's turned out. It's deemed proof of citizenship (and a vital document) despite being just a poor quality piece of paper.

The data is misused in just about every way. From colleges using it as a student id number to people committing crimes with it.

If someone is using a SSN as proof of citizenship, they are blatantly wrong. SSNs can and are issued to aliens.

https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10096.pdf

USCIS lists as common proofs of citizenship: US birth certificate, US passport, certificate of citizenship, or naturalization certificate.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/A4...

I imagine they are thinking of it being a list C document:

https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/acceptable-documents

(an unrestricted SSN is proof of eligibility to work in the US)

Yes, and no less than 3 of my former jobs required a photocopy of the card itself. You can argue legal requirements, or you can shut up and be paid.

Sometimes it's better to be paid than right. (Especially on your first few jobs)

Not even for voting?

You don't have to vote.

equating the purchase of a shotgun to having an ethnic or religious identity is a sad statement.

Why? Both are guaranteed in the Constitution. Picking parts and playing favorites is what has lead us to the current state of affairs.

One is a potentially deadly weapon, bearing a serial number that might be especially useful if found at a crime scene.

The other is a largely inconsequential part of your personal identity, which has routinely been used as justification for persecution throughout human history.

(Personally: I support responsible gun ownership, but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking owners to register their serial numbers.)

There's plenty wrong with asking people to register their serial numbers, especially when you combine these two statements:

> asking owners to register their serial numbers > deadly weapon, bearing a serial number that might be especially useful if found at a crime scene

I'm legitimately curious here... what's the actual problem? I don't see any issue combining those two statements.

The second amendment gives you a right to own a firearm. Nowhere does it say you should be allowed to use it to commit criminal acts with impunity.

I view it like the requirement to have a license plate visible on my car, which seems reasonable given the risks involved in driving.

Because who committed a crime and who owns the firearm are often very different people in reality.

And you only need to have a plate visible on a vehicle if you plan on using it on public roads.

"Picking parts and playing favorites is what has lead us to the current state of affairs."

Citation Needed

Should we not require drivers licenses or car registration?

Is the right to keep and bear arms not an important part of an Americans identity?

Everyone has a culture, even if from your perspective it's normal or even "low".

It's protected by our constitution in the same Bill of Rights that assures US citizens' other freedoms, such as religion. Liberals and conservatives both need to learn that they can't pick and choose, and on one hand hold in reverence the 1st Amendment and on the other hand reject the 2nd, or vice versa.

Libertarians, on the other hand, recognize that all of the amendments are vital and represented a huge step forward for not only the US, but all of mankind. Now, if only we would abide by them at the present time...

Does the second amendment apply to assault weapons, machine guns, bazookas, artillery guns? When it was written, there were only muskets.

Does the first amendment apply to Internet speech? When it was written, there was no Internet.

An interesting, but somewhat depressing argument can be made that subscribing to a specific religion, along with one or two other "flags" is actually far more dangerous than legally purchasing a firearm.

Most reports put between 80%-94% of crimes involving a gun as being committed with an illegally obtained weapon. Which means of the 300k firearm related crimes in 2013 perhaps less than 20k were due to legal gun ownership.

I'm not bringing all this up because I actually believe Muslims are more dangerous than guns, or that Trump was right, or anything along those lines. I'm just trying to highlight how your bias might be more unfounded than you'd imagine.

Sadly, there will always be tech workers willing to do this for the right price. As I get older, I'm starting to wonder if not following my "tech morals" would've brought more success.

I'm playing the devil's advocate here but there are also a lot of tech workers who do not regard building such a database as unethical. A common fallacy on HN is to assume people who hold differing views necessarily do so egoistically, which is sometimes true but not always.

Yeah it's entirely possible that there are a small percentage of tech workers who would fully support this type of move. I too have noticed HN users seem to just assume everyone shares their views.

That's not "HN users", that's a trait that has cropped up repeatedly in 2016: surely that's the lesson of the year, a widespread groupthink that "surely most people are like us and are disgusted by $THING" and then meltdowns when it turns out not to be true.

What makes you think it'd be a small percentage? I didn't notice the NSA having trouble attracting very bright staff, apparently it's the opposite: they were able to get their pick of the best despite uncompetitive salaries. And the NSA has spent years taking part in targeted assassination programs of innocent people who weren't in US jurisdiction, had no charges levied against them and never had any sort of trial. They were just drone striked.

I think we generally assume that the people who sign the pledge (and many others) share our views. I don't know how much more we need to litigate than that.

It's not success if you can't sleep at night.

     01:17:25 -Chris. -I'm all right.
     01:17:32 -They took everything. -Kent's tracking system is gone!
     01:17:39 How could you build that mirror?!
     01:17:50 He lied to us.
     01:17:53 It's easy to lie to you, Mitch.

For people who aren't getting it: Real Genius (1985)

Pretty sure Palantir is already thinking about their bid.

when your biggest shareholder is on the transition team of the most nepotistic administration since warren harding, you betcha.

Of course there will be. So what? If enough people sign, it doesn't matter if you can throw some extra cash at a couple people to do the scut work. When it gets out that it happened --- and it will happen --- an untenable number of people leave the company.

It's about market pressure.

Of course they won't. Any tech worker worth hiring would write a general people database, and define 'muslim' as a query parameter.

(With apologies to Nathaniel Borenstein. Also, it's true)

Are you arguing the 1000 people who've signed the petition are not worth hiring?

No he's making a tongue-in-cheek comment about implementation and how one might sign this and also functionally implement it, because it's a little vague.

I'm distressed at the amount of fatalism and hopelessness in this thread. Every professional has agency and the ability to act ethically. They can choose to stand up for people's rights or not; the best guess is that these ethics will be tested by the next administration. Large scale human rights violations require the complicity of a lot of people who may be uncertain about how to act in the face of moral ambiguity, and a public pledge to not be complicit can help a lot.

People are making a public pledge. Other people who haven't signed the pledge might read it and get encouraged by it, or see a name on there of someone they look up to, and decide that everything isn't hopeless, or decide to act ethically in the face of questionable decisions.

I'm glad this is getting attention, but I urgently need to correct their headline.

What tech workers pledged to do:

1. Not to participate in the creation of these kinds of databases.

2. To use every lawful method available to them to stop the misuse of these databases where they exist.

3. To sever their connections with their employers if efforts to prevent misuse at those employers fails.

Lots of people are reacting to this by saying "the databases already exist". The people who wrote this pledge are aware of that.

This is not a "petition" to convince Google and Facebook to stop building databases. It's not a petition at all. It doesn't demand that companies do anything. It's not up to the companies; it's up to the employees who sign. That's the point of a pledge.

This database essentially already exists as part of Facebook and another companies producing social graph data, and in the nodes and interstices of networked communications.

The authors of the pledge understand that, which is why it's written the way it is.

Doctors adhere to the Hippocratic Oath.

Nevertheless doctors worked in concentration camps, were experimenting on humans, work as executioners currently in the US, work and worked in torture chambers, sell their patients to big pharma for Rolex watches and on and on and on.

This pledge may be a statement but is practically worth nothing.

People take cues and behave based on the norms and behavior of those around them. If I know and like person X, and they exhibit unethical behavior Y, I may conclude that Y can't be that bad because I know X and they are not bad.

On the flip side if leaders in my industry or community are declaring "it's unacceptable to participate in this behavior and I will resign rather than be complicit in it" it's more likely that I'll take an ethical stance. Here are 1000+ people taking a public pledge to quit their jobs if they're asked to do unethical things. That might inspire others who are waffling, or faced with an unethical decision, to find a similar backbone.

The problem is that you only need say 10 people or less out of one million to make it happen.

I respect people giving that pledge, would give it myself, but the practical impact is 0.

Each day I walk by a large Bayer building who bought Monsanto who do ethical questionable things. Still each day hundreds of people enter that building. There is never a shortage of people who will do whatever they are questioned to do if only they can feed their family. There will always be someone who builds that Muslim database. There is always someone who can rationalize their doings.

I think you are underestimating the number of people who need to comply to enable human rights abuses on a large scale.

Agreed, but we need to start somewhere. Some of those pledges that doctors take ended up being part of a law so there is at least some hope. Also, this sort of helps people on the fence some clarity about whether what they are doing is immoral. Even if it affects 1% of them, that's still something.

Doctor here. Never took the Hipp Oath and there's absolutely nothing binding about it. Regardless, most medical schools in the US are using the Declaration of Geneva in place of the Hippocratic Oath, since the former is more reasonable. Also not binding in any way.

Here's the philosophy I follow: do the best I can for the person in the bed and his/her family.

Yes that was the reason I wrote 'adhere' not take - and it's interesting that this fact is not widely known in the public (probably due to TV dramas).

The best thing about the Hippocratic Oath as a social construct is it makes everyone trust doctors (still rank high in every survey on trust) while doctors are just the same as everyone else.

So the cynic in me thinks this is the reason so many people push for something similar in IT.

> work as executioners currently in the US

[citation needed]

Although I'm a fan of 'Google it yourself' here is the first result from Google

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_of_medical_profe...

I'm sure with a little effort you can find better ones should you be interested in that topic.

I've never been quite sure that the ethical question here is as firmly settled as the organizations cited first in that article consider it to be.

Is it ethical to refuse to participate in lethal injection, knowing that the result will be an execution instead performed by electric chair, or gas chamber, or hanging, or firing squad? Each of these methods is employed as an alternative to lethal injection by at least one US state, and I don't think any of them can reasonably be considered equally humane.

Is it ethical to refuse participation knowing that the likely outcome is replacement of lethal injection with a less humane method of execution, as The Atlantic suggests [1] may already be underway?

The gas chamber and the electric chair, in particular, amount to death by torture. Is it ethical to consign someone to such a fate in order to keep one's own hands clean?

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/gas-cham...

Lethal injection is not humane[1]. There's evidence that the person being executed suffers tremendously but can't express it due to the use of paralytics as part of the "cocktail".

I'd rather get the guillotine.

[1] http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/leth...

That sounds at least as much like a reason to replace the (IMO unnecessarily overcomplicated) "cocktail" as it does a reason to replace the method.

I've never particularly understood why they use anything other than a large overdose of some strong opiate like morphine or fentanyl.

For everyone dismissing this as "too late" and "this data already exists" should consider that this appears to be addressed in the pledge.

> to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.

> Responsibly destroy high-risk data sets and backups

Good luck getting Facebook or the US Census to do that. This is a useless gesture that means very little. I guess some people get to feel better about themselves.

The first step would be some reforms in consumer protection laws dealing with privacy and information sharing. Just watch how much certain SV firms spend to opposed those changes.

The US census has robust protections against storing or disseminating personally identifying information. They do it right.

Facebook has hundreds of employees mortified by what their management is walking into (the Trump tower, among other things). They have a lot of influence if they choose to use it.

> The US census has robust protections against storing or disseminating personally identifying information. They do it right.

Can you point to the place where they say they don't store your personal information because that is part of their job. They try very hard not to release that data in an individually identifiable manner, but they have the individual data.

If Facebook's employees are NOW mortified, then they haven't been paying attention for a lot of years. They will just be outsourced or have people who need the job take over.

and, you know, the US Tourist / Student / Work Visa system..

Weak argument. Do better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189009

Ok, so they quit. What does that do to Facebook or the US government? Not much.

If they really want to change things, then you have to enter politics as a group. Ask a Union where it gets its power. This pledge is not a factor in US politics. There is a reason that the US has to have laws to prevent union busting and those specific circumstances are the same for these type of pledges. The difference is the people pledging have no such protection. I can point to a long history of groups entering politics affecting change, can you do the same with a pledge to quit?

So, then, which is it:

1. You don't believe enough people will sign this. What percentage would need to sign it to make it significant?

2. You don't believe people will actually quit their jobs, despite signing something that puts them a single Google query away from revealing this position to any future employer. What would it take for you to believe this specific commitment, without adding additional commitments?

It's got to be one or the other, right? Which is it?

> It's got to be one or the other, right? Which is it?

No, it does not as neither is what I wrote or believe.

The pledge is an empty gesture matched against corporate or government interests. Pledgers do not have the same protections that Unions have now. They will be replaced.

Groups organize and exert political power by playing the same game in DC as every other group that succeeded. The faster tech wakes up and learns from Unions and political action groups the better people will be protected. Influence the politicians, force them to pick favorable judges, do the PR work to scare the shit out of politicians that would oppose your agenda, and then you succeed. Why the heck do you think we have an unfavorable bill every damn session? Heck, the Head Start lobby is better at this then people in technology.

Once again, I can point to a long history of groups entering politics affecting change, can you do the same with a pledge to quit?

I'm not sure how to map this response to my question. It sounds like you're saying, "so few people will sign this that it will be easy for any tech company to make up the loss". How many would have to sign for it to be different?

A significant chunk of all future IT workers, and as olalonde points out[1] some won't because they don't believe its wrong.

How about you answer the question I asked before yours. "I can point to a long history of groups entering politics affecting change, can you do the same with a pledge to quit?"

I find the whole premise of the pledge to be a non-starter in the US. This is why congresspeople fear the NRA but not the EFF.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13188039

I don't understand what the US has to do with this pledge. The people signing it don't need legal defense against their employers. Leaving their jobs is the point.

Are you trying to affect change or just have out of work techs?

I can point to a long history of groups entering politics affecting change, can you do the same with a pledge to quit?

Both!

I guess jokes on me, I should have known from the curtness of your first reply and when you wouldn't answer my question that you were just trolling me.

I'm confused. That was a sincere response.

I think this sort of thing is where unions come from.

That is an interesting headline, when I read it I immediately thought the coda would be, "... but advertising networks offer to share theirs."

There is absolutely technology already out there that, without your voluntary participation, puts you into arbitrarily precise boxes. One need only look at the targeting options on a Facebook ad to realize just how deep that data goes.

Adtech companies have invested billions in ways, legal, sketchy, and sometimes downright illegal to put together databases on everyone who ever connects with the Internet in any way on any platform. They do that because being able to target ads accurately makes them more money.

That's not really true. Look at the ads that are targeted at you, and you'll see that adtech data is really quite inaccurate.

Ad companies collect the data so they can make impressive promises to investors and clients, or just tick a box in a spreadsheet somewhere. Anyone in the industry will tell you that they are bad at using it, and bad at vetting it. Ad company data is nothing like what you could get from Google or Facebook.

Ok. Try this experiment at home. Create a fictitious business and sign up for a Facebook advertising account. Now call your assigned sales rep and say "Hi, our business sells Halal meats for the Muslim community, what parameters should I be using to target my ads to people who would be looking for that?"

It's a ridiculous and naive view of the world.

Of course it already exists. For example on facebook. For example in the mosques.

Everybody was warned, everybody could have seen this coming. But most people didn't give a fuck. Welcome is post privacy. I didn't need have to be that way. We can still turn this into post-post-privacy. But only if we face what we have already done.

Well, to be honest, the title is highly misleading.

Sure, they pledged to refuse to participate in the creation of such database, but that's just one of the things stated in the full pledge. I would emphasize more on the following parts of the pledge:

    * to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.
    * to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.
    * If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.

> * to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.

We already have this, as the foreigners Trump is referring to have to get US Travel Visas. Obviously we know their country of origin. Anyone paying attention at all knows Trump's current plan is keeping a close eye on all visitors and immigrants (allowed in) from countries with large anti-western terrorism contributions - which happens to of course coincide with some Islamic-majority countries.

The whole article and 'pledge' is anti-Trump fluff.

That's his current plan, but some of his previous positions were a bit more draconian / extreme. I think the pledge implies level of drawing a clear line in the sand before it it ever comes to it.

That's all nice, but do they believe they can "scale" back? Like how? If facebook drops the table it won't be gone from all the scrapers and law enforcment and intelligence tools.

>Everybody was warned, everybody could have seen this coming.

There has been nothing coming. Trumps pre-election stuff was BS, nothing will be done. Check back in 4 years.

Besides government agencies obviously already have detailed profiles of such things, going far beyond the religion of a subject.

I'm talking about what is happening right now. If you find yourself in a situation where you regret data having this deeply, you shouldn't have collected them in first place.

The second statement is true, but unrelated. It's like saying you are fine because others are worse.

>The second statement is true, but unrelated. It's like saying you are fine because others are worse.

No, it's like saying "Whether I catch a flu or not is not really worth it to fret about, given that I have a couple terminal illnesses going on anyway".

If you didn't see this coming you only have yourself to blame.

This comment distills into "I told you so".

Facebook has all this data. We're trying to do something about it. What are you doing?

Yes, it does, because I did. I tell people not to use facebook. That's not enough, but everything less is in vain.

No technical solutions for political problems my ass. If politics is unfixable (witch was foreseeable) a technical defence was necessary. It was in plain sight what was going to be possible. Any people where talking about post privacy like it was good thing because they failed to acknowledge this.

The first to undo this is to acknowledge the mistake. Without it we are bound to repeat it.

So your contribution is telling people not to use Facebook?

Thank you for your service.

And teach them to use tor. As said, that's not enough. But nothing can safe a fool, so it's important people don't have to reley too much on other and take at least the basic precaution themselfs. If you have any better (as in working better) ideas I'm open to suggestion. But I'm sceptical.

What did you do? And how did it work? I guess for me it did work out somewhat well.

Right, The database already exists and it is called facebook. It can identify you by information you provide, by people you have relationships with, by your conversations, and by the largest database of photos of the world, many of which contain faces and are automatically tagged by the camera with a location and a time.

Bought firearms with a background check? Thanks, now they know to send in SWAT instead of regular uniforms. You carry your tracking device with you at all times and keep it charged every night right? You've helpfully identified yourself as a subversive by encrypting your communications right? All your finances, communications, and your ability to navigate depends on government controlled networks and institutions right?

- All network connected software is surveillance software

- The reason for creating information is irrelevant to how it is used

- Technology is being used activly by rulers for surveillance, repression, and assassination

Mosques don't keep track of members. You can go into any Mosque and hang out if you wish.

Having never once stepped foot in a mosque, I find that a little difficult to believe unless there is a canonical religious text or other religious law that forbids it. Every Christian church I know of keeps track of members, if only for tracking donations so that a receipt can be issued at year-end. Sure, as with a mosque, one can just show up and anonymously participate, but much more participation than that and your name is going into a roll (list of members) of some sort, if for no other reason than, well, organizations like to put a name on the folks that show up regularly.

What you said is true but active attendees like to formally join the mosque as members so they can vote for and participate on the board or other executive positions. Most mosques are incorporated as non-profit organizations and have the same governing structures and types of membership you would expect from typical NPO's.

While I believe that's true for non regular visitors I bet my ass most manage a donors and members list in google spreadsheets.

How many are willing to get arrested over this? How many CEOs are willing to get their company shut down over this?

I suspect that this is largely posturing, and when push comes to shove people will comply.

1200 people are willing to quit over this. Let's start there.

No. 1200 people said they might (it isn't binding) but only if the conditions of the pledge are violated. The pledge is written in such a way that almost anything could be deemed as not violating it, if the signer wanted that.

This is the direct equivalent of "I'll move to Canada if Foo gets elected". Move-to-Canada declarations are actually much tighter than this pledge as they tend to be triggered by simple, undeniable conditions. But how many people who publicly proclaimed they'd do it actually do?

The solution to "the administration wants to build a database of Muslims" is not to sign worthless pledges. It's to enter politics and put the argument to conservative voters that they're wrong and should change their mind.

It might be more fun (and possibly more effective) to just build a highly dysfunctional one.

(I inevitably invite anyone with a beef against certain database technologies to suggest some possibilities)

Given that these databases already exist, that would be the practical solution.

It's not enough to just vow not to build them; the databases that exist would need to be data-jammed. If everyone is Muslim, then no-one is.

We could collectively all change our religion on FB to Muslim

Then you'd have a registry of Muslims (religion set before event) and dissenters.

It's going to a government contract, so you can count on it already.

There's definitely going to be a database of visa overstayers. The plan to match entries and exits from the US is coming back. It's not like that should be hard.

There has been a database of visa overstayers for a very long time. Today it is based on flight records, it used to be done via paper forms (I-94(W)) [1]

What is being talked about (and has been for years) is biometric identity confirmation of the visitor leaving the country. I remember seeing the kiosks at the airport at one point years ago.

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/international-visitors/i-94-instr...

A database of Muslims is not a special kind of database...You can use any old off the shelf DB software for this. I'm not sure what the point of this pledge is.

It is one thing to say that publicly but real test with be when NSA will come with all their weapons. May be NSA can say give me all your data and we will do something like s/mohammad/target/g.

The bigotry and utter disrespect for the privacy and freedom of own citizens is the larger problem that is not just Tech industry's issue here.

Haven't they already been doing it for > decade? Oh they just want to shield from competition. nice one

Do we not have enough databases built already with enough data points to effect this?

You don't even need a "database", the naming patterns are very distinctive.

All it takes is one developer to dissent and to crowd source the entire data collection effort. The contributors get a promise that they will be compensated at a future date when the government agrees to buy the database. This would be an easy App to write and with good ML you can scrub out bad data and identify malicious contributors.

It took me 30 seconds to come up with that idea and until this very moment, I always thought of crowd-sourcing as a beautiful part of modern society. By mid-2017 I'll likely be a full-blown nihilist.

edit: ++sadness

Too late. There are only 7 billion people. If you don't think every major intelligence service (and a few large companies) has built a database of every person's vital statistics you are naive.

If I was the US government I would be in the process of building a full world family tree using DNA collected from battlefields and attacks. I would want to know when an attacker's cousin is entering a certain country.

Tech workers pledge to never build a database of Muslims yet people willingly add their names to a public Github repo as a LGBTQIA or POC in tech.

Sure, but there's a world of difference between volunteering your name to a public statement (knowing that it's public) and having your data harvested without your consent for purposes actively opposed to your own.

What makes it "your" data? Because it contains information about you? If I observe something about you, do you own that observation?

If you observe something about me, then I made a decision to trust this information to you. I may or may not have been acting under assumption that this information will stay between us. If you observed me doing something in public, then I volunteered this information to be public (BTW, that's why I'm all for public surveillance and CCTV). If I told you something in private and asked to keep it private then you obviously broke my trust.

Do you not see how these two things are different?

I think you can be reasonably certain that they are able to see the difference in intention.

However, can such a database be misused? Yes. And, that's probably their point.

(I agree that it's an edge-lordy comment that seems like it's intended to annoy. But the reason it can annoy people is that there is an element of truth to it.)

Of course I do. But a list, even with good intent, can be used for horrible ends.

I signed, I'm a fan. If in spite of all this, it or something like it does get created, I think a complimentary strategy would be to overwhelm the database and make it useless. For example, if there was a public registry, everyone should register, making swamping the intended signal with noise. Make it impossible to use the thing.

I hope we never get to that stage.

Oh, now suddenly they have a conscience? Where was this when they were building the machines of surveillance capital?

What a joke. As if Google, FB, and Palatir don't have us all in a NSA or CIA database. I'm sure the government has no data on any of us and all of Eric Schmidt's trips to Obama's white house were just for tea.

> As if Google, FB, and Palantir don't have us all in a NSA or CIA database.

They don't.

Cambridge Analytica claims to have profiles of 230 million americans. If you substract babies and people over 70 that's about everybody. And Cambridge Analytica is a shack compared to all the others.

If any of them work for Facebook (et al.) I'm sure it will be quite a laugh.

That's exactly the reason why databases of people including their religious opinions are forbidden under EU Law. And it has been that way in France and in Germany since 1978.

I lived in Germany. They asked my religion and made me pay religion tax (Kirchensteuer). So they already have such a database.

They don't ask for your religion. They ask if you are member in one of a few religious communities. You may say that this is nitpicking but it's really not. They don't care about beliefs but just perform a service for those communities that asked them to do it. That tax is best to be thought of a membership fee that happens to be collected by the state.

If a religious community does not want to participate in that scheme they can. Plenty don't use that service.

Can we pledge never to allow backdoor access for the NSA, et al?

Hundreds of tech worker said they would not do it, but I'm sure that they could find just as many that would do it. A database is pretty simple to build anyways...

It's over 1200 now. But could you find 1200 tech workers to take the other side? Yes, I think you could. 1200 is a tiny number relative to the number of engineers who agree with the pledge, and just haven't seen it yet.

I think you're crazy if you think the profession as a whole is anything close to 50/50 on these issues. The American people aren't close to 50/50 on them: they oppose both mass deportation and Muslim registries by wide margins. The numbers get even starker when you restrict them to people with the educational backgrounds of Silicon Valley engineers.

Facebook are happy to provide a database of black people [0] to advertisers. People don't choose their race, but they can choose their religion. Arguably, allowing one over the other is supremely unfair.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/22/facebooks...

That may be distasteful but there is a wide, wide gap between letting advertisers target ads to groups based on ethnicity, and sending datasets of people with a certain ethnicity/religion to advertisers or to the government. The pledge is mostly focused on the latter.

As if governments would take no as a answer. If the data is there it's accessible.

In fact, they do. The USG was unsuccessful in compelling Apple to provide a "golden key" to decrypt the San Bernardino iPhone, and the USG went along with that.

People can refuse and the government can choose to try to send executives to jail, or issue fines, but that comes with bad PR and companies can and do fight those as well.

Guys, i know article is about not building a muslim database and all, but what about the outlook chats bypassed by nsa?

Given FISA Courts & NSA wiretapping, I'm not sure the government would necessarily need their cooperation.

They already have. It's called Google.

Rayiner, do you think the people who wrote this aren't aware of that?

So, http://neveragain.tech/ will become a database of tech workers who pledged to never build a database of Muslims.

It's a pledge. People put their name on that list by choice. They want it to be on there, and they want it to be publicly visible. The point you are trying to make is not very well thought out.

Do you have a point? I think this is just stating the obvious.

Well you don't need that many of them to do it.

The comments on this thread make me super sad

What about a database of people from countries with high propensity for radicalization, for example Tunisia, or Somalia?

Paradox: Tunisia is perhaps the most progressive of all the M/E Muslim countries, and yet they are the #1 M/E country in terms of Jihadis. They are overwhelmingly the greatest per/capita Jihadi producers in the world. By far. Tunisia is very small. Networks are very small. 95% chance that a young male Tunisian knows someone off to fight Jihad. This is very significant.

Somalia - is a stateless war-zone, people coming from their are massively over-represented in other kinds of crimes. Wherever there is a 'new' Somalian community, the crime (drugs and related) offenses are off the charts with over-representation. In Toronto - a big slice of the 'violent murder' pie is committed by Somalis - and they are near 0% of the actual population. Some social workers have observed that they simply have absolutely no respect for authority - it's meaningless to many of them. There is an overrepresentation among Somalis in terms of 'domestic' (i.e. host nation) violence, that's possibly 'terror' related.

Those are both good examples because it shows you how young men from completely different places, are radicalized for completely different reasons, and are associated with completely different kinds of violent people - and their nationality (read: culture) is definitely a correlating (or even predictive factor).

It's a moot point anyhow. The FBI has a database. You're probably in it. There's a tag on your file that might indicate the likelihood you'll be radicalized.

We have to be really quite careful of this kind of stuff, frankly, I'm more concerned about the 'populist anti-muslim sentiment' that might arise, as opposed to any kind of actual 'database' of muslims.

Anyhow - it's all moot. There will be no DB of Muslims.

As a Tunisian I would like to add a comment:

1- Yes, there is a number of Tunisians that went to Syria. As you have said per/capita it is a large number. There are around 10 Million Tunisians and from 3000 to 8000 fighting in Syria (depending on the source).

2- This is due to several factors: Post-revolution politics, poverty, mistrust in the state institutions and the police, and -most importantly- a previous government that is (allegedly) complicit.

3- There are no official numbers, the Tunisian government said that they have no idea on the exact number. Some Syrian/Turkish parties gave estimates (the numbers you read in the press) but they are not to be trusted to be objective or impartial.

4- If this "database" checks for first and second degree connections, then the entire country would be flagged.

Thanks for your comment.

And to be clear - I'm not 'blaming' anyone, I spent some time in Tunisia a couple of years ago. I'm just indicating that 'cultures' and 'centers of activity' and 'relationships' are important.

So 'I hear you' on that.

Still though - Tunisians tend to be great people, much more open minded and educated than, for example Algerians or Moroccans ... and the Tunisian government is not nearly as bad as others ... so it's still a paradox :)

Though it could actually be literacy, access to information, and basic financing which enables them to head out to war ... ironically. Certainly, Al Queda members were actually quite well educated, way more so than the average street Arab.

I was just adding some details to the valid points you have mentioned.

And indeed, I personally don't understand that paradox as well.

> 4- If this "database" checks for first and second degree connections, then the entire country would be flagged.

And some people would like that - which is sort of the problem with Xenophobia-with-added-statistics.

The trouble with using statistics to discriminate is that it gives people some sort of plausible deniability which they can offload into opaque computer programs ("Did my race give me a higher interest rate? Did my zipcode raise the rates for an educational loan?" ... and we can't know easily).

I'm pondering over how much of "Extreme Vetting" is black boxes like those - whether I'll even know if my code gets used in one.

You can point out the risks in the problem, but you cannot deny the problem.

FYI - the US and every country on the planet discriminates against every other nation by way of visas.

Why do you think Americans can travel to Canada without a visa and Venezuelans and Turks cannot?

Do you think Canada is just going to up and allow Turks to come to Canada without paperwork? No. Why? Because it's Turkey. Very different place than America.

By 'xenophobia' do you actually mean to say 'diversity'? :)

Sadly, HN seems to be not nearly as interested in hearing about things actually going on outside the US. I posted this earlier this morning and it has not a single upvote (at this time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13186741

I do what I can to post international news and I try hard to mot make it just about negative things going on out in the larger world. Sometimes, those stories do get some small attention, but there is a serious diversity issue on many discussion boards in terms of what kinds of topics get attention, if that makes sense.

And I don't know if I am making myself clear, but I mean to say that there is a lot of prejudice, basically, often rooted in ignorance (and that ignorance is to some degree happenstance, but is also to some degree by choice). So thank you for commenting.

Sometimes, those stories do get some small attention, but there is a serious diversity issue on many discussion boards in terms of what kinds of topics get attention, if that makes sense.

Well, it is called "Hacker News," after all. Perhaps this just isn't the right venue for discussion of that particular story. If so, that's OK. There are plenty of others.

Original full comment that I was replying to before the substantial edit by CamperBob2: Well, it is called "Hacker News," after all.

That's true. But it is not called "American Hacker News." I do try to post international tech news when I can find a good article on the subject. They tend to get not anywhere near as much attention as American subjects.

Please don't try to justify this to me. The number three guy on the leaderboard is Dutch. The number four guy is Australian and lives in Great Britain. The number two guy is an American living in Japan. (And I think the current lead mod is Canadian in origin and Paul Graham himself is an immigrant from England.)

Programming does not only happen in the U.S. There is absolutely no justification whatsoever for the degree of bias on this forum in terms of what people are willing to read and discuss.

> I'm more concerned about the 'populist anti-muslim sentiment' that might arise,

"...that might arise"? What have we been seeing the last year, when the winning presidential candidate proposed banning Muslims from entry to the US, and as recently as a few weeks ago (and well after the election) said with respect to a Muslim registry that "he would implement that [a registry], absolutely" [1].

Meanwhile, various of his surrogates have in recent days (all after the election) floated the idea that the Japanese internment supreme court decision (never struck down!) could be used to justify this registry.

And go check out his core followers at any of the usual hangouts, like Reddit and Breibart, and you'll hear much, much more extreme views on this issue.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/20/donal...

> proposed banning Muslims from entry to the US

I was actually at the rally when he announced this. Trump wants a freeze on immigration from countries that are actively producing a large number of jihadis which, surprise, happens to be predominantly Muslim countries. The premise being, they need more scrutiny and we need time to implement such. Of course I'm sure this whole time he's just been pulling from George W's playbook, acting like an "every guy" who doesn't use big words and wants to appeal to populism.

This is just classic FUD. The probability of being harmed in a terrorist attack is tiny and the probability of any given immigrant being a part of a terrorist attack is also tiny.

This is a mountain out of a mole hill. You'd be better off eating less junk food and paying more attention while driving rather than concern yourself with these edge cases.

I mean, Europe has been having issues with migrants. It's not unreasonable to avoid a known issue. America has been running quota and limits anyway.

You're right, excepting WMD, it is not about the relatively small numbers who die in terrorist attacks.

The problem is that terrorism leads to sectarianism, and sectarianism leads to civil war. Northern Ireland is an excellent example of this paradigm and it has been replicated in Syria.

Many people believe the same threat exists in Europe esp. France.

"Some social workers have observed that they simply have absolutely no respect for authority - it's meaningless to many of them"

Sounds like a bunch of Richard Feynmans.

Indeed, not to mention Richard's penchant for organized crime.

Unfortunately, cause this is the internet, I cant tell if your joking. If not, source?

Surely, he's joking about Mr. Feynman. (context: https://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Cha...)

He had a hobby of cracking safes. Not as a thief I think.

Could you please provide links to official Toronto murder statistics that back up your claim?

It would be illegal to collect that data.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/08/17/a-thorny-history...

>Fantino, then head of 31 Division, told North York’s committee on community, race and ethnic relations that, while blacks made up 6 per cent of the Jane-Finch population, they accounted for 82 per cent of robberies and muggings, 55 per cent of purse-snatchings and 51 per cent of drug offences in the previous year.

>The Star’s Royson James was apparently the only reporter present. He duly filed a story that appeared on the next day’s front page. All hell broke loose.

>Police in Ontario were forbidden to compile race-based crime statistics. Solicitor-General Joan Smith, responsible for law enforcement in the province, castigated Fantino for collecting and releasing data that “accomplishes nothing useful.” Black activist groups and social agencies condemned Fantino for fueling existing prejudices. Police chief Jack Marks insisted the force did not keep race stats.

There are some legal and political difficulties around the topic.

But the Police are very aware of who is up to what.

Cops in Toronto work with various groups all day, every day, they know what is going on. They know when it's 'Asian gang' vs. 'Bikers' vs. 'Somalis' vs. 'Mafia' etc..

Somalis have formed an ad-hoc kind of organized crime syndicate, maybe somewhat similar to the Sicilian folks, but with totally different attitude towards violence, different operating methods. I don't think they control a lot of turf directly, but they coordinate across the country.

These things are evident even to many local residents. My folks live (lived) in Woodbridge, Ontario, which is the Italian area of Toronto, the cafe I used to go to was obviously a hangout and probably money laundering front for the Mafia. Networks are small you only have to know a few people and you get the notion pretty quick. I never felt afraid. Nor would if I were in in a similar situation owned by an Asian gang. But Somalis - I wouldn't go near a place like that.

Different cultures = different behaviour. That's actually what 'diversity' is :)

Finally ... I'm ashamed to say my 'source' on much of this is a 'distant relative', who is currently in jail, and 'very close' to organized crime.

Why do the police explain all this stuff to your 'distant relative'?

Or rather, do you also know what the police think from some source other than your 'distant relative'? Or is the 'distant relative' the only source you have?

(I'm not sure what noun to use for your source there so I have stuck to matching your usage, my repeatedly using the quotes isn't sarcastic or anything like that)

The police did not 'explain' this to my distant relative, rather, people in organized crime know a lot about criminality and police. And no, it wasn't he that explained to me how cops keep a tab, so much. I meet RCMP every once and a while. Moreover, I was well aware of how 'the case' went against my distant relative from the RCMP's perspective, it was all rather well laid out.

Organized crime is very well understood by law enforcement.

"Does the organized crime in Toronto have some sort of heroic devotion to statistics? If not, it seems we are discussing a third hand anecdote."

Do you need 'statistics' to understand the difference between Google and Facebook culture?

Tunisian and Somali culture?

Or maybe if you visit and know Googlers and FBers, or if you visit Tunisia and/or know a lot of Somalis, you start to get the idea?

People in organized crime have jobs, just like those at Facebook. Their cultures are distinct, and generally known to those in the business, like cops, just as you would be familiar with FB culture if you visited or even knew just a few of them. There are no secrets there.

Are HN readers so completely socially inept that they have no grasp of the cultural attributes of our society? I don't think so :)

None of what I said is news to anybody.

Hint: organized crime is usually run something like this - the Italian Mafia imports most of the hard drugs, they sell it to the Bikers who have regional networks, and the Bikers push it into the street gangs and small time dealer networks. That would be East Coast mostly. West Coast, I'm less familiar because it's Asian cartels and I don't know if they use their own networks or bikers or both. This is Canada mind you.

Distribution territories for drugs are very tightly controlled, by various entities, and everybody in the business (including cops) knows who runs which territory, usually.

The Somalis don't have any of these layers sorted out, yet there is heavy involvement in drugs, I think they bring it in and distribute themselves, to specific communities. Which probably causes tension & violence. I'm not sure. But I am sure wherever they go, whatever layer they are at, they are facing 'competition' from an incumbent, and disputes are settled through violence or the credible threat of it, and sometimes a buyout/payoff between more 'friendly' parties, I don't think the Somalis fit into the nicely tuned Mafia/Biker relationships. They don't do 'sit downs', as it were, in the classical sense.

Again, this is all common knowledge in that line of work.

Right, that's a really nice anecdote.

If you want to say stuff like Wherever there is a 'new' Somalian community, the crime (drugs and related) offenses are off the charts with over-representation. In Toronto - a big slice of the 'violent murder' pie is committed by Somalis - and they are near 0% of the actual population. in association with building a database of undesirables, maybe don't be stunned when people ask you to back up your anecdote with some data.

That it might be illegal to gather such data in Canada doesn't change the nature of your anecdote though.

Does the organized crime in Toronto have some sort of heroic devotion to statistics?

If not, it seems we are discussing a third hand anecdote.

It's surreal, the reality of the situation is blatantly obvious, yet anyone in any sort of an official position that is privy to the facts would be well advised to keep their mouth shut if they'd like to keep their job. And simultaneously, most people simply can't fathom why "Trump supporters" tend to believe their government is not being truthful with citizens.

Probably not the previous poster's source, but seemingly reliable articles agree:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-so-many-som...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/somali-canadian-s-dea...

Tunisia might be the most progressive country in the MENA region -- guaranteeing gender equality and women's rights -- but all that happened under the former president, Habib Bourguiba. The ousted president, Ben Ali, did very little for progressivism; under his reign, he enacted neoliberal economic reforms that while may have made the country wealthier as a whole, lessened living standards for the average Tunisian. Economic growth masks the fact that buying food is an issue, the education system is inept, and unemployment levels are at all time highs. The people's discontent with the secular government can be seen in the political polarization of the country: in recent elections, the Ennahada party -- Islamist in belief -- captured half of Parliamentary seats; their voter base all came from the rural inner region of Tunisia. When you have a group of disillusioned youth, combined with a pervalent Islam sentiment in the country, I don't think the popularity of jihad would be a paradox.

Tunisia is not in the Middle-East.

It's de-facto a M/E country. The North African countries are Arabic, Muslim, and are geopolitically part of the Arabic sphere of influence which is de-facto the same thing as middle east.

'North Africa' I find to be not descriptive.

The best term would be 'Maghreb' - but nobody knows what that means.

M/E is an appropriate geopolitical designation.

If you don't say Maghreb when you mean Maghreb, how are people ever going to learn what Maghreb means?

It's not a word used in the Anglo-sphere and likely never will be.

> The North African countries are Arabic

Wrong my friend. Morocco and Algeria for example have more than 50% ethnic berbers [0]. Saying it's part of the middle east show your lack of knowledge of the region and its distinct culture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers

Morocco and Algeria are definitely Arabic countries.

They speak Arabic officially, they belong to the 'Arab league', they are Muslim (because of Arabic colonialization).

I'm 100% aware of what the Berbers are, save your insults for Reddit.

They were colonized by Arabs 1000 years ago, and they fit quite fundamentally into the Arab sphere of influence.

Obviously, they are all different, and 'more different' the further you get from the Gulf ... but most Arab countries are in fact, quite different as well.

Geopolitically - they are basically M/E countries. Our approach to them has nothing to do with 'the rest of Africa' and everything to do with the status of other M/E countries.

No it is not. At all. Tunisia has much common things with Italy than with Oman.

> The FBI has a database. You're probably in it.

The question someone might ask here next is, "Sure, but who built it?"

If software engineers had a guild, we could, if this were deemed such an egregious offense (not saying it is, just following the logic of the submission), kick those people out of the guild.

> What about a database of people from countries with high propensity for radicalization, for example Tunisia, or Somalia?

What about another for states and counties? Where was Dylann Roof radicalized?

Why wouldn't there be a database of Muslims? It's so rational for any powerful group to have a massive database. It's just that instead of having a DB of Muslims, you'd have a DB of citizens, of which Islam would be one of many fields. Perhaps this is what you meant by the FBI database.

Also, having a database of many kinds of information is rational because it doesn't have the same fear factor as a database of Jews, and yet it has that same power -- if the political winds should ever blow in that direction.

You're making the mistake of trying to ground the discussion in reality. This has nothing to do with any actual real world outcomes. The point is that if I pretend that there could be a Muslim database, I can feel self-righteous in opposing it.

The ignorance here is stunning.

Every background check system is a database.

If it includes religion, it's a query without being a "database of Muslims." It works much the same (not as accurate) if you have country of origin instead.

See "religion": https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/use...

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