Rogue One – An Engineering Ethics Story | Hacker News Reader

Rogue One – An Engineering Ethics Story

scifipolicy.com

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From the movie "Flash of Genius" about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper:

"I can't think of a job or a career where the understanding of ethics is more important than engineering," Dr. Kearns continues. "Who designed the artificial aortic heart valve? An engineer did that. Who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz? An engineer did that, too. One man was responsible for helping save tens of thousands of lives. Another man helped kill millions."

"Now, I don't know what any of you are going to end up doing in your lives," Dr. Kearns says, "but I can guarantee you that there will come a day when you have a decision to make. And it won't be as easy as deciding between a heart valve and a gas chamber."

Yes, from the movie. From the source I found (linked below), this is a line Greg Kinnear spoke, that was written by the screen writers. Is there any evidence the real Robert Kearns said this?

http://www.preachingtoday.com/illustrations/2009/april/60420...

Furthermore, how does the first part of the quote make sense. Shouldnt he be saying that ethics trumps engineering, not the other way around?

He's not saying ethics trumps engineering. He was saying that in other careers, ethics are not as critically important as they are in engineering.

I find it bit weird to derive any ethics from Star Wars.

All characters change sides way too often (first rebels, then republic/empire, then again rebels, then again republic...). Dart Vader commits genecide and destroys a few planets (including Leia's homeworld), but there is happy family reunion with Leia and Luck at the end... Jedis are good guys, but they never bother to send someone for Anakins mother, who is a slave...

I would not be surprised if Death Star construction was initiated during the Old Republic. The same way Clone Army was created by some Jedi guy.

I find it weird to derive ethics from fictional examples at all. The reason is “ex falso quod libet”, i.e. that one can derive any statement from a false (in this case, fictional) proposition.

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

Fictional is not always "wrong" or "false" as you claim.

There are so many fictional books which have so much to teach.

You can think of Star Wars how you like, but condemning fictional stories as bad only because they are no "true" stories -- is very short-sighted in my eyes. (and in my opinion a totally wrong understanding of the principles of logic).

There are also so many "true" stories, where you can draw the wrong ethics from!! (newest events included!)

The problem of course is that even if some fictional stories contain the right moral lessons, the ones that would work out in the real world, you can't tell them from the ones that are 'wrong' and 'false'. At best you can find stories that tell lessons you already agree with.

And while 'real' stories might still be doctored by the writer to send a particular message and mislead you to a conclusion, at least they're constrained by the facts.

Even, when you have a totally true and unbiased report of a true story, will it always lead to the right ethics?

I very much doubt so.

There where to many people living, that brought suffering to others without ever been punished. Many people that slaughtered others, where living a wealthy life till their end. And others, that did good, ended in poverty.

No, "true" life sometimes teaches the wrong ethics. Or should we find our ethics in slaughtering each others?

Just because something is abhorrent doesn't make it "false".

Bad people get away with terrible things all the time. No amount of moralizing changes this true fact.

I don't know, which kind of ethics you would prefer.

The one that doesn't lie to me?

Just because it is possible to get away with bad things, doesn't mean you should do them.

A good ethics system should address this.

I don't think the point is to actually derive ethics from fiction. It's the other way around. We express our ethics, morals and associated conundrums through fiction as a way of explaining them. This is especially important when those ethical problems are not always encountered directly or knowingly by the people who face them, in this case, by engineers who aren't fully aware of the societal impact of their work.

By the same line of reasoning it should be impossible to derive ethics from thought experiments.

The purpose is not to have a fictional work as some basis for deriving morals. Rather, it is to test our moral sense in extreme conditions, to see how it reacts, and to see whether the theory we have still holds up.

As an example, consider theft. As a society, we have a strong aversion to theft. This aversion is enshrined in our laws, our religions, and even our grammar (e.g. "my pen" as opposed to "your pen"). So, we would consider "Do not steal." as a general moral guideline, functional in all scenarios.

But we haven't tested it in all scenarios. Let's consider somebody who steals for the purpose of helping another, commits no other crimes, and dedicates his life to helping others, even when it harms himself. Would we still consider the theft to be immoral? I would say no, and showing such a case is the primary purpose of "Les Miserables". We have pushed our general "Do not steal." outside of usual usage, and have found that it does not apply at extreme cases.

Similarly, the author of the article is saying that Rogue One is a good test of the existing moral principle "Do not build intentionally flawed buildings." This moral principle works in most day-to-day cases. However, in the case of building a Death Star for an oppressive regime, this moral principle may not hold.

The true dilemmas of life, ethical or otherwise, can't be expressed as inductive or deductive arguments. At best, you can put together an abductive argument that ends up looking like a pros and cons list - and even still it's a judgement call, and not one that's readily communicable to contemporaries or posterity.

Buddha, Jesus, Plato/Socrates, Swift, Nietzsche - seriously, if you throw a dart at a random distribution of centuries, the greatest moral thinker from that century used fictional constructs of some kind to illustrate their point. The 21st century is not going to be any different.

But there's an even bigger problem here that borders on illiteracy. Believing that ideas fleshed out in fiction serve no practical purpose completely ignores the history of all ideas, not just moral ones. Great fiction thinks.

If you want to learn about love, read Shakespeare. Texts on the mating habits of higher primates are not going to help your romantic life. If you want to learn about friendship, The Lord of the Rings is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote. If you want to learn about government, Homer or Jonathan Swift can teach you more about the machinations of power than Machiavelli or John Locke.

I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra.

> I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra.

Well said.

> ___ is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote.

You could replace that with "A Bucket of Clams" and the sentence is still true.

Ha! Have an upvote.

But seriously, if you can't make friends with a bucket of clams, you're just not trying.

What are you even talking about? Humans have always looked to fiction to derive morality. The ancient Greek Mythologies, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran . . . literally everything that most people value as presenting foundation for ethics and morality is completely fictional.

And even if you take one or more of those documents to be literally true and a source of historical fact, even Jesus used parables--fiction--to explain moral principles.

This is really one of the strangest appeals to logic I've ever encountered.

I think you're subtly contradicting yourself here. While humans have, for millennia, used fiction to enshrine and explain morality, I don't think a sensible case can be made for suggesting we use it to derive or define morality. Unless, as in the case of holy scriptures, one argues that adherents derive morality from that which has been enshrined in the fictional source. But still, the fiction itself enshrines the moral teachings, and readers derive whatever they do from it (and even then, inconsistently at best).

The Old Republic seems to be totally cool with the idea of slavery, Anakin's mother as you say, droids seem to be self-aware with personalities etc but are mere property, and so on. The Jedi were intent on preserving the status quo and not rocking the boat. Overthrowing it was absolutely the right thing to do.

It is the difference between RIGHT and WRONG vs right and wrong.

Relativistic morality? (Its ok to kill this race because we are better than them)

if you think of the self aware droids as cattle then its kind of a choie about what you like more. Cows are really nice animals in taste and temperament. Its about where you draw the line, and I guess in a way the jedi were being all realpolitik with how they deal with the galaxy.

In earth scale I would say they best examples is States Rights vs Human Rights. At what point do we get involved with a country for their human rights abuses? I'm Australian and I would happily see a few of my politicians dragged off to the Hague to be hung for their treatment of refugees. so what do we do with, American and its spying and DPRK, the philipines, burma, iran etc etc.

The interesting thing about the Star wars films is that the build up of arms by forces in the galaxy is allowed. I know in other series of sci fi (DUNE) there was a repression of technology past a point, if only to add some normal level to the battle field. If you start to develop capability eventually the end result is the use of it, Im supprised the empire could get away with the build up in secret.

Anyway. Rouge one was a lot like the thin red line. so tip of the hat to the star wars people for making a wholly depressing and sad war film.

-Also something i noticed, the UI and control systems engeneers in the empire a crap. its like a jobs for the boys kind of operation where everyone gets to do something. why is the antenna sighting control seperate from the transmission control. they are so tightly related. and also. The antenna is for space communications, visual sight of the dish isn't really needed as your not pointing at anything.

Other than that everything was super realistic with the fish people and faster that light travel etc. :P

The manual controls for the library were the funniest thing ever. Oh yeah, the software can highlight the thing you want with a light. But moving a servo there is too hard, here, use these handles.

I imagined it as intentionally needing manual control, so that a computer security breach would not result in leaking sensitive documents. Somebody who gains remote access could highlight the document that they want to steal, but could not upload it to a remote server, without the help of a person nearby.

Granted, the same effect could be achieved by having the storage system deposit the hard drive in a box, to be picked up by hand, but I can't come up with any explanation about that.

I was shocked that the Empire's reaction to having their central secret military archive compromised was (spoiler ahead) to blow the whole base from space; more so when it is hinted that this was their only copy.

Watching the Death Star operating at low power was cool though, as well as knowing that it had undergone some "preliminary tests" before Episode IV.

>Watching the Death Star operating at low power was cool though

Oh yeah the slomo nuke that's literally outran by the characters. ಠ_ಠ

Given that they were a large distance away from the site of the explosion, it isn't unreasonable. From orbit, we see that the shockwave has covered a large proportion of Jedha's circumference, easily visible from space, at the time of the jump to hyperspace. Estimating the diameter at 5% of the planet's circumference, the shockwave traveled about 600 miles, which would take about 45 minutes for the shockwave to reach, assuming similar size and atmospheric density as Earth (reasonable, since humans can comfortably live there).

Clearly, the stronghold is not 600 miles from the city, as the shockwave was traveling faster than the rockwave, but it gives a good sense of timing. Note that the characters were not able to outrun the rockwave without the jump to hyperspace.

It looked to me like they're literally running out of the building as the shockwave was travelling through it, and then running to the ship and getting there before it gets to them. It didn't look like they were far from the site at all. Without seeing the scene again I guess it's hard to check.

Good point. I've only seen it once so far, so I will keep an eye out for it the next time. My interpretation was that the initial shockwave had hit the building, and was causing all the structural damage that we saw as they were leaving the building. The shockwave passed, at which point they were trying to get to the ship and leave before the larger danger of "the horizon is missing" reached them.

My feelings on it were that the building was shaking due to seismic activity at a low level on the outskirts of the rock wave. The sheer size of the rock wave might make it seem closer than it was. The problem is that we have little indication how far away the base was from the initial blast point. My thought it was quite a distance away since they had X-Wings parked out front in the open.

I saw it less as a rational move on the part of the Empire, and more as a rational move on the part of Tarkin. With the Death Star functional, Krennic would be gaining more status. Tarkin wanted to take as much credit as possible, as seen earlier in the film. Given an excuse to remove a political rival with the excuse of securing the plans to prevent any additional transmissions, he took it.

Also, I had recently read this fanfiction [1] about a project manager working on the second Death Star, complaining about how much of the institutional knowledge from the first Death Star had been lost, making the second Death Star be quite rushed. The loss of the original plans made the fanfiction fit in even better.

[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11685932/1/Instruments-of-Destr...

The whole affair was a real shitshow. Blowing everything and everyone up is good bureaucratic response when your boss has a habit of strangling people.

Logging and access control. Even today some "special collections" are not stored and provided access as easily as technologically possible in order to intentionally restrict access. The humans in the certified birth certificate process could be replaced by a very small shell script technologically, but legally their slowing things down paradoxically provide a useful service by getting in the way.

If I were retcon-ing the data silo design they're worried about a terror attack methodically destroying trillions of dollars of stored design data, or being too easy and fast to use, resulting in the wrong people putting together the wrong collection of ideas and figuring out the overall plan. You can do a lot of interesting compartmentalized grunt work engineering. So here's the static and dynamic loads gimmie a minimal mass truss design for those loads with a factor of safety of 9 but you don't have to be told thats the death star's laser cannon support thingy and it would be bad if enough people put 2 and 2 together.

Star Wars gotta have 70s sci-fi technology, it can't keep pace with advances in sci-fi!

Relativistic morality? (Its ok to kill this race because we are better than them)

Nitpick, but this isn't what relativistic morality means; it means that there's no One True morality. Racial supremacism doesn't really have anything to do with it.

you're correct. I was just moving quickly on a tangent and genocides based on religion, race etc came quickest to my mind as an example. But its a big galaxy and there are lots of normal.

I did not comment on some abstract fight, but on idea of leaving close relative alone in harsh conditions. Just send some money, buy her freedom, and do your jedi stuff after that.

It is like fighting for social justice, while your children are starving.

If this is about Anakin's personal morality, he was a kid when he left. And by joining the Jedi order, he was supposed to shed his familial attachments. And then in Episode II, he violated those principles to rush to her side when he sensed she was in mortal danger.

You're not the first to notice this: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-case-for-the-empire/articl...

Tatooine is beyond the Republic's sphere of influence. Droids only develope personalities after going a long period of time without a memory wipe (a quirk of their programming?) R2, 3PO, Chopper, and K-2 are the only canonical droids we see with personalities.

Is a memory wipe any better than slavery? In a world with the technology to wipe human minds, you could say the same about us.

Hence the 4-year lifespan in Blade Runner.

Because Killing your slaves somehow justifies slavery?

At the risk of introducing a contentious topic into polite discussion: there's an obvious parallel with abortion. It's seen as pragmatic, and maybe even kind, to terminate an entity's existence before it can achieve the intelligence and sentience that grant it moral rights.

If you're OK owning and operating a robotic arm, and not OK with owning and operating a sentient AI, then what to do with robotic arms that develop sentience over time?

Depends on if you view killing them before they develop into what is considered a being with rights I guess. It's honestly the exact same debate as abortion. I agree with you, for what it's worth.

It's not the same as abortion at all. A droid can be given or sold to someone else who wants to let it grow into a sentient being. Fetal or placenta transplants simply doesn't exist. These two scenarios are simply not the same.

The way the phenomenon of them developing personalities is presented, I would say yes it's better than slavery. Memory wipes are a part of routine maintenance (and security protocol in case of government or military use), and prolonged skipping of that maintenance can result in a personality beyond the one programmed into the droid. Their personalities are little more than a glitch in an old system that needs a wipe.

Now if the actual intention of the wipes is to keep your droid in check and keep it subservient, yes that's absolutely slavery. But I've never seen it presented that way.

These kinds of things are difficult to discuss because they're not explored in the way they are in harder scifi like Star Trek. With Star Wars you're expected to take everything at face value and technology is hardly ever explained in-canon.

HK-47 will always be canon in my heart. Even if he'd prefer us all dead.

IG-88? He had enough personality to go rogue and become a bounty hunter, and is canonical.

Oh true, and presumably 4-LOM as well.

It doesn't seem that any particular ethics are being "derived" from Star Wars in the article. The author looks instead to be using the story as a jumping-off point for discussion of various issues and tradeoffs in the ethical space.

In any case, the site is called "Sci-Fi Policy" which leads me to believe this kind of exegesis is their bread and butter. Perhaps they aren't usually making airtight arguments in their posts but I think the discussion is still useful and fun.

Star Wars is unusual in that it's an explicitly Manichean universe. The "light" and "dark" sides of the force are equated with good and evil, and assigned in a way that's clear both in and out of universe. It's not a universe of grey areas.

(There's a lot of people trying to reinvent ethics and metaethics from the ground up in this thread, badly..)

The entire meta-ethical point of the first six films is that the dark and light side are both in error and Skywalker brings balance to the force by being the first grey Jedi. So I wouldn't be so quick to judge.

Sadly Disney seemly want to make it pure manicheism again, probably easier for kids to understand and sell toys...

I wish some of the movies would get stories inspired by Kotor series, where the author really wanted to make the wars in star wars resemble real ones, with no obvious good and evil sides.

I'm personally hoping that with the success of these star wars stories that maybe they'll do what they let Marvel do with Daredevil/Punisher/Jessica Jones etc. and perhaps make a more serious (pure opinion here, btw) version of things in these universes like they have with their Netflix Collab originals. IMO they're the best thing in not just TV but all of the marvel universe right now (and arguably some of the best entertainment of this sort period, in my not humble opinion ;). Star wars could benefit sincerely from this treatment.

Well, wasn't Rogue One exactly that treatment? It was a visceral and brutal experience (especially when one compares it to fable tales of SW). I left the cinema quite unsettled by how gray everything was, the sacrifices and commitment to the cause.

I'd really love SW movies to be more like that, less bland and mentally lazy (AND NO MORE DEATHSTARS FFS)

> NO MORE DEATHSTARS FFS

Oh God yes. I was so pissed when the Force Awakens culminated with yet another, bigger Death Star.

Even if you feel the need to stick with the super weapon trope, the Empire has PLENTY of other nasty machines sitting around.

I'm unsure it is possible to translate the Netflix-Marvel series' success to non-Earth stories, let alone to Star Wars. To have the deep stories that you enjoyed they need enough screen time to tell the stories. The 4 individual stories + 1 miniseries of the Defenders is supposed to be about $200 million [1]. That comes out to 26 + 13 + 13 + 13 + 7? = 72, which is $2.7 million per episode. This uses mostly existing sets and straightforward special effects. Star Wars in particular is commonly set aboard complex spaceships or vastly different alien worlds in the company of aliens and robots. Therefore the investment required to initiate this seems like it would be significantly higher.

Game of Thrones, for context of a series with both well known actors and amazing sets and effects, is about $10 million per episode. If we assume that a Star Wars series would cost about the same and it would take approximately a similar number of episodes to tell such a story, that would be $720 million. I might be wrong, but I don't think such an investment in film has never been done before.

I think it will depend greatly on both the continued success of the Marvel TV shows + how the remaining Star Wars films perform.

1: [Marvel’s Netflix Bound TV Shows To Cost A Whopping $200 Million](http://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/marvels-netflix-bound-tv...)

They kind of had to. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 were really bad and to convey a subtle message like that good and evil aren't always clear requires nuance and skill to convey.

Like another commenter said, it's post-Christmas, time to get pedantic about Star Wars.

I find it hard to buy the idea that the climax of RotJ supports this idea. At the end of RotJ all is portrayed as having worked out as well as they possibly could have, and all because Luke has made the extremely deontological choice to not fight his father.

Does Episode III contain the phrase "Only a Sith believes in absolutes"? Yes, and that's why everyone hates it.

Wat? Luke brings "balance" by reigning in a Dark Side run amok, dismantling an Empire that got too powerful and literally oppressed the whole galaxy. That's the point of the OT. The "balance" is a galaxy with two Sith and enough Jedi to contain them, nothing more.

The Prequel Trilogy is a ham-handed social critique that tries to show you "how democracy dies" and attacks rigid institutions for being inhumane. Any "imbalance" for the Light Side is not even a topic - after all, the Force is just a bunch of nano-organisms in your blood! The prequels don't bring any meaningful element to philosophical issues surrounding the Force, and they are such terrible movies that they should just be ignored; a lot of people now rightly hope they will be remade by Disney, which would be the right thing to do.

I don't know. Luke brings "balance" by killing all known dark side users; only light side users exist now, and no one knows how it's going to play in the future (we merely see the celebration through the galaxy, not how things evolve in the years after).

There is no balance at the end, only one side is winning.

I'm in a post-Christmas hangover, so this seems like a great time for me to get pedantic about Star Wars stuff :)

I don't think anybody really changes sides. Star Wars is binary...everything is good or evil. The Republic (good) gets transformed by Palpatine into the Empire (evil), which is opposed by the Rebellion (good), which in turn overthrows the Empire and form the New Republic (good) to replace the Empire. Then lingering forces from the Empire form the New Order (bad) and a relative peace exists until it doesn't. Are there a small number of people who do ethically questionable things? Yes, but for the most part everyone adheres to their good or evil classification.

Darth Vader did help commit genocide, but I don't know that you could pin the blame for anything the death star did on him. Tarkin was the commanding officer and gave the direct command to blow up Alderaan. Vader was merely an enforcer detaining Leia and ensuring things were going according to plan. He's certainly got blood on his hands, but I wouldn't say he destroyed planets. AFAIK, Alderaan is the only one that got destroyed anyway.

Part of being a Jedi is shedding attachment, which is all Anakin's mother ever was (as evidenced by their relationship essentially sending him off the deep end into a genocidal rampage). The Jedi would've had no way of knowing that his mother was in danger while it was happening. If Anakin couldn't feel it in the force, how could people with no attachment to her? Anakin is the only living Jedi to have even met Shmi Skywalker, after all (Qui Gon is dead, Obi Wan never left the ship).

In episode III, it's shown that the death star was originally a separatist weapon.

rip expanded universe. sith where so much more nuanced.

There are worse criticisms of the Jedi than them being uncommitted to social justice---that dusty order of ascetics is an anti-democratic paramilitary that forcibly conscripts and trains child soldiers to engage in extrajudicial killings in the name of the Pax Galactica, a meritocracy rooted in the notion of genetic supermen. They are as vile as the Empire that succeeded them.

Most superhero teams seem to operate on similar principles.

And I would argue that this is somewhat justified because societies of muggles have not developed any mechanisms (organizationally and morally) to deal with individuals that fall several orders of magnitude outside the normal skillset of their species.

Put differently: Considering that there would almost nothing mere mortals could do to stop superman from declaring himself emperor of mankind (several supervillains try to do just that after all) they are already showing remarkable self-restraint and ethical behavior simply by not ruling the planet through force.

> Most superhero teams seem to operate on similar principles.

Agreed. This is why deconstructions of the superhero genre, such as Watchmen (or even lesser ones, such as Superman: Red Son), are so appealing.

I know it's still shocking to some, but the main reason people don't collect purses from elderly and disabled people they meet at night isn't because they might get caught, and it's also not because they're naive and passing up easy money. It's because they're holding on to something more valuable which they already have and are, which they would damage or even loose in the process.

If anything, the main or even sole reason to want power over others is impotence and insecurity, and if you're immortal and can do whatever you want, there is really no use for that, only downsides. Unless one subscribes to the Dwight Schrute theory of super heroes of course, which says all super heroes are born out of childhood trauma.

Isn't a meritocracy rooted in the notion of genetic supermen at least a little more reasonable when there are literal genetic supermen?

The standard critiques of anti-democratic regimes almost never appeal to the existence of individual decision makers -- or even groups of decision makers -- whose governing ability is superior to that of the current dictator.

(In fact, many critiques of anti-democratic regimes don't even accept that this is something over which there is even a debate to be had. As one author put it, men have a "self-evident" right to govern themselves within a framework respectful of human rights.)

Genetic superiority as a trope distinctly lacks the kinds of compassionate loving-kindness, strong moral/ethical codes, and good leadership skills one would want out of the supermen put in place to rule mere mortals such as ourselves, hence Iain Banks' reply, when questioned whether Culture AIs would be what gods are actually like, was "If we're lucky."

The trope is based on it allowing for reluctant superhero character. Since powers are given by birth, we can watch kids struggle to come to grips with their powers. If powers are earned, then superheros would all be driven 'winners' ... mostly the psycopaths able to defeat all competitors. That is where we get evil characters.

As a general rule, good guys have powers forced upon them. Bad guys have to work for them. This enforces the concept of an elite class of 'good' families and a dangerous group of upstart peasants. The theme has been with us since ancient times. Far too long imho.

Ok, but that's a critique of the writers, not an in-universe critique of the Jedi. I guess I misunderstood the angle you were coming at this from.

>meritocracy rooted in the notion of genetic supermen

Always funny to see phrases like that here, however if someone was force sensitive and had a zero midichlorian count they'd want them anyway, the order was never bred for their abilities, and with their vows of celibacy actively removed themselves from the gene pool. In regards to their use as a paramilitary, if a child was found to be able to read minds the CIA would be looking to kidnap them.

My point is not about social justice, but leaving behind your mother in bad conditions.

That's the real awesomeness about Rogue One... imo, it was a middle finger for Lucas and is the way Disney will unwind those godawful prequels.

The appearance of the force as a religion that people have faith in and are passionate about is a good way to do away with the dopey prequel stuff.

Not to mention that in Rogue One, it was essentially a suicide mission against an existing government.

It's seemed to pull alot from the US invasion of the middle East, except that the rebel terrorists are the good guys. Alot if desert scenes, roadside bombs, even some of the style of head dress was reminiscent of the black head scarfs Al-Qaeda uses

> I would not be surprised if Death Star construction was initiated during the Old Republic.

It actually was. In the prequel trilogy, we see that the Separatists have plans for it, which are then acquired by the Empire at the end of the film.

> The first Death Star's schematics are visible in the scenes on Geonosis in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones showcasing the early development of the Death Star prototype, the Death Star plans were designed by Geonosians led by Archduke Poggle the Lesser, a member of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and is shown early in construction at the end of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

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

Is this an EU knowledge, or one after the continuity refresh?

No, that's right out of the movies.

It's on screen in the RoTS, so it's always been canon:

https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7330/13094455004_f54959dbb5_b....

OK, thanks for clarification.

I didn't see anyone say it yet; so The Old Republic is the name of the story-line that exists 3,000-4,000 years before the time of the Star Wars movies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic

The appearance of the Death Star plans in the prequel trilogy is not proof that development of the Death Star was started during 'the old republic'

My guess is the OP is referring to the Republic that directly preceded the Galactic Empire as 'the Old Republic'. Despite the confusing nature of having another storyline, it is the previous(old) republic from the context of the events in episode IV-VI.

Yeah. After victory over the Empire, the Rebellion formed the New Republic. I'm pretty sure the name the Old Republic was coined later and is just meant to make clear which Republic you're referring to.

The Rogue One companion novel, "Catalyst", clarifies this. These days, those new books are full-fledged canon rather than "expanded universe" material.

The Republic obtained those Death Star plans from the Separatists after the Battle of Genonosis (i.e. Episode II). The Republic started building it during the Clone Wars, they hadn't even been rechristened as "The Empire" yet.

Not to mention the droid slave race, who are as human as any other characters yet are bought and sold as chattle.

I am taken aback by the regular use of torture, specifically the depiction of how well it works.

Isn't the Jedi's goal only to bring "balance to the force"?

So their mission isn't to "do good", but more like "not let there be any bigger evil than what already existed" (that would break the equilibrium of forces). At least that seemed to be the theory. In practice, they were mostly law enforcement agents of the Republic, until the republic turned into an "evil empire".

I really find the opposite in Star wars (before Rogue One). Most of the villains are bad and most of the good guys are good. There are only occasional flip-flops and they are all major plot points to clearly indicate the transition. They keep the morality so easy the average 7 year old can follow it. They go so far out of their way to make it easy as to color code good and evil (what color is uniform? The lightsabre?).

Compare this something like with actual moral issues like Schindler's List. The main character navigated a huge moral gray area. He couldn't make any proper kind of stand against the industrialization of evil in WWII Germany but he did what he to save what lives he could and that meant not saving some (to reduce suspicion). It also meant lying to all the people who accepted him as peers. He was a traitor all the Germans as he ran factories that hurt the war effort, He was an enemy of the allies because he ran a munitions factory. To the families of the people he saved he still might have been viewed poorly because his employees were functionally slaves. But the choice to enslave those people in safe working conditions and keep them alive and well fed saved them and to them he was a hero.

There are tons of other movies, books and stories where the good guys are not clearly good and the bad guys not clearly bad. Consider Worm (Web serial), the heroes are jerks who sacrifice the lives of others and the villains are often just looking out for their own. Who is really good and bad?

To anyone who hasn't seen Rogue One yet... I think it's the best Star Wars movie since Empire. Worth your time. Amazing fast-paced character development and arcs (compare Star Wars to Suicide Squad if you really want to be impressed or see how badly it could have turned out), wonderful little cameos, rich visuals that show what the prequels could have been, and paramount a superbly written and acted story.

(Spoilers)

The ambiguous ethics of sending an assassin to kill Galen because The Rebellion didn't believe how he could leak truthful information (and keep this mission secret from Jyn in order to get her help locating her father) was especially well done. The concept of sides, Empire or Rebellion, being unclear to people until they join one was also woven in nicely -- normal people just want to go about their lives free from conflict.

The most hotly debated topic between me and my friends though wasn't about ethics, it was about if Donnie Yen's character was using The Force or not. (Of course he was, and in prior movies plenty of characters used The Force before becoming Jedis.)

https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2016/04/08/rogue-one-a-star-w...

Rogue One's story certainly muddies the waters a bit, but the fact Star Wars is willing to embrace more complexity and a blurring of the lines is great for the franchise and mature fan base. Someone woke up and realized that the value of the Star Wars ins't just how many lunch boxes it can sell, they can make a buck telling compelling stories as well. #NoEwoks #NoGungan

YMMV. For me the attempts at a serious story fall flat due to the amount of plot holes and asspulls. I've enjoyed suicide squad a lot more - it wasn't trying to be taken seriously, so the absurdity didn't clash. Same with the previous star wars - it went for a very simple story, so it was harder to mess up

Rogue One is pretty, sure. But the story is a chain of coincidences. No character, except maybe for Vader - who's mostly a cameo, actually tries to act according to its presented motivation, or tries to solve any of their presented problems. Throughout the movie character motivations are at best tertiary to firstly doing whatever is flashiest, or secondarily executing whatever morality cliche the movie is currently on.

Basically, every character in rogue one is unbelievably stupid. And then you get to the 'science fiction' setting where battles between capital ships happen at 200m (but the bad guys only start shooting after the obligatory 5 minutes of tactical discussions), shooting at a force field that just destroyed multiple ships that rammed into it is a thing that makes sense, etc. Etc.

Rogue One is still as much of a fairy tale as previous star wars moves; but it tries to pretend it's not. And that completely destroys any immersion the viewer might have.

If the premise of the defense shield is that it can dissipate a certain amount of energy by distributing the energy across its whole, why doesn't throwing more explosives makes sense? Presumably the people doing weapons design in this fantasy setting have at least as much sense as we do now. This means a ship colliding holding weapons are unlikely to detonate completely (not armed) and thus not deal a ton of damage.

This movie is set in a universe where less than 20 years ago, fully automated machines nearly destroyed those who remain. Both the complexity of a firing solution in space as well as explicit non-automation of some things rather easily suffice as reasons for a delay. This discounts surprise coupletely.

I don't know much about magic space lasers, but I'm also willing to suspend disbelief enough to allow they have a limited range of effectiveness.

If you wanted to make random technical arguments, I'd have imagined that "pew pew" sounds in space is where you would start.

The ships impacting and exploding on the gate are effectively oversized kinetic missiles. There's no way the things they're shooting can even compare.

I wouldn't mind if they were shooting at the machinery controlling the gate/shield. But what was happening was clearly a case of 'we need to show the fighters trying to do something without actually having them try anything'.

Are you sure kinetic missiles is the best use of a starship's mass? If I have a few kg of enriched uranium, I don't turn it into bullets to shoot at the bad guy. Starships seem to have some kind of reactor as well.

One thing that did seem a bit silly is that every building with a function needs a whole planet: this is the refinery planet, this is the government archive planet, etc.

Maybe they had all those planets sitting around to begin with and wanted to avoid single points of failures in the face of planet-destroying weapons!

...Then you should distribute the archive.

The Republic/Empire was space based and something repeated over and over was that planet-side they were an analogy to the American experience in Vietnam where the villages pretty much do what they want in between being destroyed, but there's not really an area of influence on the ground. Meanwhile in space before the death star very little could stand up to the fleet and after the death star they had ultimate total stellar control.

Likewise this is why blowing up one, admitted very big, battleship, meant the rebellion won. They had already won planet-side for all intents and purposes and now that the empire had little to no space superiority...

Star Wars is very cross genre (come on, knights in shining armor and sword fighting monsters and wizards?) and part of the middle ages fantasy is an economic system of mercantilism. So the empire is not going to be amused with smugglers and they're gonna be very interested in regulation and taxation of interstellar trade etc.

Another novelty is that HN is culturally extremely urbanite. In the US there are urbanite areas that are extremely crowded and everyone wants to live there solely because everyone wants to live there. However outside urbanite areas the "company town" is a meme that still exists even in post-industrial era. Most small cities or towns have the one big employer and everyone lives off them directly or indirectly. For many state capitals and state uni towns the "big employer" is the government itself. Very few people on HN will know that outside SV and NYC there are many towns that do virtually nothing but turn trees into paper or cast plastic into molds or refine oil or whatever their one big task is. Not unusual for the town to be the grain elevator and railroad, or its the manufacturing plant, or some kind of resource extraction site. If you spread humanity thin across the galaxy you'll end up with "the refinery town" being the only town on an entire planet.

It has certain interesting implications WRT long term environmental issues. Everything in star wars is smokey and doesn't appear to be overly ISO9001 driven, unlike star trek. Several billion people living like that on a planet will screw it up pretty quickly, but maybe a thousand living in one town can maybe live that environmentally sloppy until the star novas in a couple billion years.

You could live downwind of a cattle stockyard if you want, but if space travel is cheap enough, you'll end up with nothing but one cattle stock yard on a planet, because, why live there of all places?

> Likewise this is why blowing up one, admitted very big, battleship, meant the rebellion won. They had already won planet-side for all intents and purposes and now that the empire had little to no space superiority...

The Empire still had plenty of space superiority - see, for example, any number of Star Destroyers scattered around the galaxy.

The Emperor had centralized all mechanisms of government control around him, though, and a substantial percentage of the (newly disbanded) Galactic Senate were supporting the Rebels, and so when he died a not-quite-civil-war between different political factions and different regional heads kicked off, letting the Rebels defeat or subvert the splintered centers of Imperial power one at a time.

I find it interesting how polarizing this movie is.

Many people told me it was crap, because the characters had no depth, so you didn't care when someone died. Just waiting for the next action to happen.

Maybe this isn't entirely surprising given the audience, but it seems like most of the comments and discussions here prefer to deal with topics very much contained within the Starwars universe, rather than looking at the parallels the article raises between the moral choices faced by Galen and those faced by we Engineers today. There's a dozen ways to interpret that I guess. I hope it speaks more to the fandom of Starwars rather than contemporary disregard for the discussion of ethics in engineering.

You're right that the discussion is leaning to the fictional side, but to be fair, the article falls into this trap as well. I don't think it's disregard, I think it's practicality…

The fact is the movie is the only shared-context for discussion that's been offered. Everyone works somewhere different, but everyone (apparently!) has seen the movie, so that't the 'moral arena' being discussed.

If you reply to the comments that you find disconcerting in this way, and try to tease the conversation onto a real world example that you offer, I think you'll see the real discussion start.

In Star wars there's a very clear sense of good and evil. The bad guys seem to be aware that they are bad guys.

Most engineers, most soldiers, and even most terrorists genuinely believe that they are the good guys. And that makes discussions of ethics a lot more difficult.

And to the best of my knowledge, we don't really have guidelines the way doctors do. Is it okay to write code that tracks users even when your app is closed? Is it okay to build missile guidance systems? Bombs? Ad + tracking networks that tell companies 90% of your browsing habits without your permission?

Indeed! It makes the discussions very difficult and all the more necessary.

It's interesting what you say about guidelines. I actually went looking for anything which might resemble an engineers code of ethics. There are a couple out there [1] but those I found are firmly routed in the abstract, and offer little in terms of practical guidance.

All of your questions are exactly the kinds of discussions engineers need to have, both among themselves and with the engagement of the society we serve and influence.

> Most engineers, most soldiers, and even most terrorists genuinely believe that they are the good guys.

You're right. I think there is also a false dichotomy between "good" and "bad" technologies and their applications as well. It isn't as clear cut as that and we would do well to appreciate the nuance rather than race to ascribe something an approximate and inadequate label.

1. https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-profess...

I believe a good measure is the likelihood of someone else doing it.

If you're forced to shoot someone innocent, you can do it if it's obvious that someone else (a fellow soldier?!) would be doing it instead and you will suffer from the consequences.

Also as a dev, if you design a user tracking feature, it's clear someone else will do it if you don't.

However, for the first atomic bomb there is probably a time window where you might not be replaceable and hence saying 'no' would have had an actual effect.

I know it's morally questionable (mind though it doesnt tell you what you should do, only what's acceptable) but avoids all avoidable stuff and is just honest enough to acknowledge the situations in which you don't have the power to affect outcomes.

The argument of "if I don't do it then someone else will" is a self fulfilling prophecy. You are that someone and it speaks to a weakness of character in anybody who invokes it.

If everyone said no then someone else wouldn't do it. Consider this: you are the last in the line of people - everyone before you has said no which is why they're asking you - except instead of being principled like all the rest you have caved and said yes. Congratulations, you are the "someone else" and the downfall of the entire system.

Your example specifically ignores what I said: I was referring to the "likelihood of someone else doing it".

If I am the last in a line of people, the likelihood of someone else doing it is zero, so the above would suggest refusal as well.

And of course, all these decisions are quite easy to make if you ignore the "being forced to" part.

In most scenarios we see in films or know from history it was: Either you do it or you will suffer dire consequences (some Nazi prison or death for example).

I understand that the above is not romantic and doesn't make for heroic films. But this is about reality, so tell me would you as a soldier refuse to kill someone even if probability was highly likely that someone else would do it? At the threat of death?

If so, you probably just got two people killed instead of one. If not, you cannot really complain about what I wrote above.

Can someone help me understanding the downvotes?

>The bad guys seem to be aware that they are bad guys.

Not in this film! Their stated intention is to bring peace to the universe by demonstrated capability to wield overwhelming force.

Y'know, US foreign policy.

Watching "Rogue One," the real-world historical parallel that came to my head was that Galen Erso was modelled after Werner Heisenberg and Nazi A-bomb programme. I was surprised, Heisenberg was not mentioned in the essay: maybe that would have driven points home?

I was on the fence concerning the essay. I think I understand many of the points made by other respondents: The canonical Star Wars Universe is too black-and-white and inconsistent to use as a backdrop for thinking about engineering ethics.

As a side note regarding the relationship between the Dark Side, the Sith, the Emperor and technology. Actually some of points touched on in the essay (i.e., reliance on technology) are explained in the excellent twenty-five issue Marvel series "Darth Vader."

The most interesting part is: "Galen’s reflection on engineering could have come straight out of real-life engineering discussions of the 1970s. As the historian Matthew Wisnioski captures in his book “Engineers for Change”, many engineers were criticized during the Vietnam War for their role in developing major weapons systems. In the real world, Galen could have become a conscientious objector and left the project, but oftentimes engineers can choose to stay engaged and try to influence the project." <- influencing as euphemism of engineering sabotage of course.

Perhaps that was the author's intent. But influencing without sabotage is perhaps relevant to our modern world, especially to the HN crowd - because weapons systems are likely to become more autonomous.

If you're working on a battle robot - no longer just a science fiction concept - paying serious attention to the systems that prevent it being an indiscriminate civilian-slayer could be seen as ethical engineering, compared to leaving a project in the hands of people who care less about such things.

I agree, it is very relevant and especially to the HN crowd (who have always appeared deaf to this sort of thing from my limited experience here, though I am happy to be corrected on that point!). We all work on tools which might get twisted and applied to that which was not their original purpose. It's important to discuss the implications of that.

I don't even know what the equivalent would be today -- handing Isis the passwords and frequencies for predator drones?

I just saw this yesterday after being cajoled into it by my wife. I had very low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised at how misplaced they were. It was a lot more compelling than the rehashed installment from last year.

Really? Being a Star Wars fan who was very impressed by VII, I was shocked to find out how astonishingly bad Rogue One was. Almost like abysmal Avengers (once again: long time Marvel fan), it tried to push in so many unsignificant and inconsequential plot details that the movie got cramped and boring at the same time. All different McGuffins, buttons and objectives of the final battle looked like a series of mindless quest objectives for a video game, while offering nothing in terms of actual character development.

IMO, it was not only the worst Star Wars movie so far, but one of the worst blockbuster movies ever made.

The characters were a little flat yes but it was an original story with a unique ending. VII was basically ANH2.0 when ANH was sufficiently good without being remade.

And they both, just like most of scifi, fantasy and other action movies are just variations of hero's journey with similar archetypes. So what? Originality for it's own sake doesn't make anything better.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but it seems obvious to me that originality makes things better. Otherwise, why make new movies instead of merely rereleasing old ones? People want to see things they've never seen before, and they enjoy some degree of unpredictability.

* spoilers * I found myself caring more for the characters in Rogue One than in most Star Wars movies. I suspect it's because they were (relatively speaking) normal people who could die at any moment, not unstoppable heroes of destiny. They were also deeply flawed and conflicted in realistic and relatable ways. This gave their risks and sacrifices far more gravity, and is why so many people found the final half hour so fresh and compelling.

It's interesting, but it seems like fans are being pretty polarized by Rogue One. It seems like the ones who love it wanted another entertaining story in the Star Wars universe, and got it. Those who hate it wanted something new out of it, and got another rehash.

I fall into the first category. I wanted to see the story of the plans getting into the rebel's hands, and got what I wanted. In addition, they created some fun one-off characters, wrapped up some plot holes in "A New Hope", and threw in some nice nostalgia with the X-Wing pilots.

In short, I wanted another stand-alone episode of the Star Wars space opera, and got it.

I'm also a Star Wars fan, and I thought VII was pretty mediocre (unoriginal to a fault, cheesy, the stakes felt low, the pacing was weird, the character interactions were forced and unrealistic, Rey way too powerful, the New Order was too incompetent, too much blatant fan service, lack of scale, etc.), whereas Rogue One is probably one of my favorite Star Wars movies (along with ESB). Funny how opinions work like that?

But calling it one of the worst blockbuster movies ever made.. can't tell if you're joking.

I agreed with this at first. It felt rushed, and cramped. But then I saw it again (not really by choice, my family had already booked the tickets) and this time most of it actually made more sense to me. There's still gratuitous fan service, like bumping in to Dr. Evazan and Ponda Baba or putting blue milk in the middle of the shot, but in terms of the scenery and story I think it works. It can be argued that there are too many insignificant characters being introduced and killed off before you have time to start caring, but given it's essentially a war movie that kind of makes sense to me. People largely unknown to one another rally together against a common foe, knowing full well the chance of success is slim and risk of death is great. As there's plenty of peril, characters are killed off unceremoniously all over the place – because it's war and war does that to you. Add to that the Death Star designer with a conciense, some really evil dudes like Krinnic – commenting "oh, it's beautiful" without so much as an inkling of remorse upon wiping out an entire city in an instant – and a great tie-in to ANH, and I think it works really quite well. I liked getting the backstory to why the Death Star has such a crucial flaw, and I buy it. It then also makes sense to me that the Death Star in ROTJ suffers the same fate – it's an iterative design (probably getting rid of exhaust ports) rather than a fundamental fix.

I'm hoping there's a directors cut that fixes some of the pacing and adds some more reason to care about Saw Gerrera, but even without I quite enjoyed it – the second time around. I can definitely see how it's very confusing though, for someone not very well versed in the Star Wars saga, or if it's their first movie in the series.

I recommend, if you're a fan of the series, that you see Rogue One again. It did the trick for me anyway, maybe it will for you too.

One thing that did disappoint me quite a lot is the musical score. It feels entirely different from the established themes, and not in a good way.

Rushed, cramped, and thin characters are far too common in modern movies. I think it is a sign of the times that people going to movies want more depth and 2 hours isn't enough to tell a deep story.

While it has its flaws, the modern mini series (Game of Thrones, Daredevil) tell much better stories that are more compelling and have depth. (except The Walking Dead, they have some issues)

I would rather see a 6 hour series on Netflix that tells the Rogue One story than a single 2 hour flick with characters that I have no interest in.

I'd love a Star Wars series rather than these filler movies to be honest. I enjoyed Rogue One as mentioned above, but agree it'd probably be more suited as a mini series than a movie. Same for the upcoming Han Solo movie. Just a different theme for a different season. Given Disney owns the franchise now, maybe it could happen...

Generation kill is a miniseries, Daredevil and GoT are just series :)

Saw Gerrera Is more fleshed out in episodes of the canon Clone Wars animated tv show.

"I'm just doing my job" is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to "I'm just doing it for money."

I never understand why most people do not realize this and treat one as sacrosanct and an automatic moral dodge but the other as totally morally bankrupt even when people aren't being harmed.

Engineers talking about engineers that should act ethically is good, but self limiting, and even self defeating.

For every engineer that builds a terror weapon, every architect that builds a McMansion, every chef that brings out unhealthy food with not fresh ingredient, every school district that fails at educating kids adequately, there is someone with a checkbook that decides who/what gets paid for a goal. All bad or unethical product is ultimately possible because of someone writing the checkbook.

If one or even all engineers of an organization disagree and leave due to ethics, the checkbook writer will just go out and hire next batch of engineers.

In the fictional story or Star Wars, someone had money (or credits in Star Wars universe) to put the stormtroopers, Star Destroyers, Tie Fighters, a planet with beautiful tropical islands with sandy beaches and competent engineers (but often incompetent security force) to work at building the Death Star.

Sure the Emperor has the force to get it done, but in our life, someone gets to dictate what gets built with a checkbook.

So, discussing ethics in engineering is great, but even more important imho is, who writes the checks.

The whole point of the article was that Galen Urso was cognizant of that fact and chose to involve himself in the project in order to introduce a fatal flaw.

The people writing the checks obviously have the most power and responsibility, but that doesn't mean that engineers don't have to engage in ethical reasoning.

>> just go out and hire next batch of engineers

Reducing supply will increase the price, though. If people factor morality into their work, doing evil will be a bit more expensive.

See eg the opposite happening with people taking low wages to work in charities and research.

Before reading the article I saw the title and turned to my partner to discuss the ethics of engineering. I mentioned that the State is largely powerless without the technical prowess of engineers and that one of the key aspects of engineering is designing and building the machines that make machines.

Gavin the bread-maker might be good enough to build an individual tank through trial and error, but one tank isn't enough and a collection of hobbyists isn't enough to arm the State with a worthy arsenal. The hobbyist can build one or a few things, but it takes an engineer to build many. They are force-multipliers.

The discussion turned to game theory. I mentioned that perhaps Chartered Engineers should have something like the hippocratic oath, where they would collectively refuse to design things from casinos to war-machines - anything that has the potential to harm society. My partner, who has a background in history and law, suggested it was futile as the State would simply hold them to ransom, either for their family's lives or their own, guaranteeing cooperation from a considerable number.

She then suggested that a way of getting around these issues would be to design very subtle flaws, weaknesses or exploits that could only be known by an engineer intimately involved in the project. Funnily enough, that was exactly what the article focussed on: After Krennic captures him, Galen later tells his daughter Jyn that he had a choice: he could have continued abstaining, and let someone else build the Death Star, or he could dive deep into the project, become indispensable to it, and find a way to stop it. He chooses to dive deep, and succeeds in building a subtle flaw in the Death Star design. Then 15 years later, he sends a messenger to the Rebellion informing them of the weapon’s existence, power and most importantly, its fatal flaw.

Ethics should be taught on all levels. It's impossible to predict how a good invention of today would be twisted to serve an ulterior motive tomorrow. Can we get a universal understanding of right and wrong. Not sure. Isn't AK-47 the biggest killer today? That doesn't mean that world would be less bloody without it. More than engineers and inventors, people at large should be less violent. Can that be made possible through ethics? Religion is a way to do that but all it becomes eventually is superstition.

For many more variations on Star Wars in terms of the modern military, check out Angry Staff Officer's posts:

https://angrystaffofficer.com/category/star-wars/

One of my favorites is "Skywalker on Trial":

https://angrystaffofficer.com/2016/07/11/skywalker-on-trial-...

I'm just happy the Calamary dudes were in this movie haha.

And then presumably all die in the end when seemingly the entire rebel fleet gets trashed. :-( No wonder they resort to attacking the Death Star with tiny fighters in Episode IV.

They also say in E IV that the death star is well defended against a full fleet, but that a small group of fighters should be able to break through more easily.

Its a spoiler but a small group of fighters DID get thru the planetary defenses and none of the large capital ships got thru, it wasn't entirely theoretical.

Its a classic surface area to volume ratio thing combined with scalability and miniaturization limits, in that its always the case that the smallest thing will get really close to the larger thing while it quickly takes its losses, and if that's in weapons range the larger thing will get scratched up a bit, and if the smaller things have a secret killer weapon or strategy, they win. Thats just how swarm attacks are.

Operations theory and all that. You can do graphs of differential equations of loss rates in a very abstract sense to show it always turns out like this.

It was also nuts in (EP VI I think) when the Super Star Destroyer crashes into the Death Star and nothing really happens to the Death Star.

Related IRL, you can sign this pledge to refuse to build a Muslim registry: http://neveragain.tech/

Wonder who built Obama's muslim registry[1], why were these ethical concerns not an issue for Obama version of it.

Edit: i don't mean this as a gotcha comment, I am genuinely curious why there was no hullabaloo over Obama's registry.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/22/politics/obama-nseers-arab-mus...

A nitpick, but an important one: NSEERS was started as a response to 9/11 several years before Obama took office. It's absolutely not correct to call it "Obama's muslim registry" or "the Obama version."

The hullabaloo over NSEERS was drowned out by the hullabaloo over all the other things 9/11 brought forth.

> hullabaloo over NSEERS

Bush or Obama, I don't think a single tech company publically refused to build this registry. What is the hullabaloo you are referring to. Why is it different this time? Also puzzled why I am being downvoted, is this a stupid question to ask?

I think he's referring to a "hullabaloo that would have been" had the American populace not been otherwise distracted and coerced into thinking it needed such things.

But these are not regular people, these are corporations. Were corporations coerced into building these registries by bush/obama govt's.

The pledge you originally mentioned (neveragain.tech) was created by and for individual people, not corporations. It is not a petition.

The difference is important. In a pledge, engineers sit down and define their own ethical boundaries for themselves. A pledge succeeds when even a single one of its signatories follows through: by action, by resignation, by speaking up, or by sabotage. The power remains with the individual to keep their promise or not. The intent is already there; only the action matters.

A petition is different. Several concerned citizens who are not stakeholders ask a corporation to do something. A petition fails when the company simply decides not to do the thing. Here, neither the intent nor the action is present.

We saw the difference clearly illustrated in Rogue One. Chief scientist officer Galen Erso did not petition the empire to dismantle the death star. He simply pledged that no matter the circumstances, he would destroy it by whichever way he knew how, even though he knew full well this action would cost him his life.

Back to your point: the difference between the rise of NSEERS and the future rise of the Trump Muslim registry is that now individuals _within these corporations_ are beginning to make a concrete, visible, and actionable pledge to destroy the registry.

Maybe there was less hullabaloo during the origin of NSEERS. I see the current stance as "learning from previous mistakes." Or perhaps "trying a more effective approach." There's no reason to place blame on "obama's muslim registry" (your words not mine), when we're trying better strategies now.

This is a great idea in part because it forces ingeers to actually sit down and think about the boundaries they wouldn't cross.

An important part of the pledge is to dismantle the existing data sources that companies have already been collecting. Fierce advocates within companies could do a lot of good.

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