Or the DoJ lawyers filing uncontested FISA warrants for inappropriate things?
I know! You must mean the federal prosecutors who overcharge as a matter of course to have negotiating leverage for plea deals.
Or maybe the patent trolls? Upstanding folks those are!
Lawyers definitely don't (categorically) do anything besides what their client wants, externalities and ethics be damned.
As an example, look at the Prenda Law guy, who was basically using his status as a lawyer to run a high-tech extortion scam. He's had his license suspended, and will surely be disbarred:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/prenda-lawyer-pa...
Or look at Jack Thompson, famous hater of video games, who got disbarred for making "defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate" people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)
And of course there are plenty of people who have been disbarred for cheating and abusing clients.
I too would like the legal ethics to be stronger on the "do no harm to society" side. But there's no denying that legal ethics have real teeth. Our industry could learn something from them.
That's not what the post I was responding to was talking about. It was talking about "all immoral or unethical activity", and specifically about surveillance, dark patterns, data aggregation, and cyber warfare.
Lawyers have signed off on all of those behaviors at their organizations (particularly the surveillance and cyber warfare ones). They've done contortions to get them "approved" in contracts. If the lawyers at those organizations okayed it, it's fascicle to pretend engineering ethics would've stopped it.
Further, when talking about "all immoral or unethical activity" it's entirely germain to point out lawyers routinely engage in both without consequence.
tl;dr: Lawyer rules are about professional standards, not conduct. You can represent the devil in his suit to rule the world, you just need to be polite and bill fairly.
Most lawyers don't do bad things because they're decent people. Ethics codes don't stop unethical behavior any more than laws stop crimes. There is some small percentage of the population who will shy away from a crime specifically because of the potential punishment, but most people wouldn't steal or murder regardless of the law. Ditto for lawyers.
Being a decent person is a good start, but that's just not enough. It's a complicated world, and the obvious thing isn't always the right thing. Especially when people are embedded in an economic system that strongly rewards behavior that could easily be ethically dubious.
Ethical guidelines can be useful for times when the person wants to do the right thing and the area is gray (e.g. should I represent a client I believe is guilty), but people who are content with unethical behavior will not be swayed by a code they promised to follow. An imperative to honor a promise implies intrinsic ethics.
Most of the actions that would actually get you disbarred are pretty flagrant.
This is a false dichotomy. Some people are deeply unethical. Some people are deeply ethical. Most people are just getting along in their lives and can be pushed in either direction by the practical and social context. Codes of ethics are helpful for everybody except the ardently unethical.
Codes of ethics are helpful precisely when things are not clearly "bad", but in the gray areas.
Would you care to tell me where I said that? Because I don't see that at all.
Reviewing the bidding, gregwtmtno, a lawyer, said maybe we could use a professional code of ethics like his profession had. SomeStupidPoint suggested that ethics didn't matter to lawyers, and his proof was naming some things lawyers did that he thought were bad.
My point was that one can't say that legal professional ethics is totally worthless just because of when they've failed (or at least failed to prevent things you dislike). You have to look at its successes as well as its failures.
That's how I read this: But what you're ignoring is the great number of bad things that lawyers don't do because either a) they are afraid of the professional consequences, b) they can get their clients to easily back off because they say, "professional ethics!" and people know it's a real thing, or c) they get disbarred and can't act as a lawyer any more.
> My point was that one can't say that legal professional ethics is totally worthless just because of when they've failed (or at least failed to prevent things you dislike). You have to look at its successes as well as its failures.
That's fair enough. I don't think codes of ethics are worthless either.
It just so transparently doesn't work in that field it's hard to even take the proposal as in good faith, since it has to ignore newsmaking and routine behavior. Rather, it comes across as a self-righteous comment: we have ethical standards (even if we routinely don't adhere to them and do terrible things as a matter of course) so clearly those engineers would be better if they were more like us!
The sarcasm likely wasn't constructive, so I'll apologize for that.
Having enforceable rules may improve ethical standards in the field without solving the problem entirely.
I'd also like to point out that I did not propose a solution. I think it should be considered, but I'm a long way from supporting the idea fully. There are a lot of negatives that come with license requirements that attorneys have.
The only rules I've seen applied to lawyers with any regularity are those governing decorum (eg, don't be an ass in court) or client obligations (ie, don't be a shitty contractor) or those that are also criminal (eg, if you commit fraud, we'll yank your license too). Technology could do better there.
But to call out government surveillance or cyber warfare, which are both overseen by legal departments that work diligently to inventively authorize the acticity? Or dark patterns and data collection, where lawyers go through contortions to authorize it in "agreements"?
I would say all four of your chosen examples are more failings of lawyers than engineers. (Though both bear some responsibility.)
It just seems strange to suggest professional rules for engineers would've stopped something that clearly professional rules for lawyers did not.
Among the various professions that do have an ethical code of conduct, generally speaking lawyers/solicitors are not seen by a large amount of people as being particularly compliant with it.
Now of course it is very possible that it is a wrong perception by the masses, but it is in my opinion quite unlikely that at the moment the argument "engineers lack a code of conduct, they should take lawyers as an example" will gain much popularity.
The rules for professional conduct, and the organization to enforce it for lawyers, did not prevent the NSA/DOJ lawyers from determining that mass surveillance was legal, and could be implemented legally.
In the face of that, what rules for professional conduct and an organization to enforce it like lawyers have, could engineers have implemented that would have prevented those engineers from building that system?
They didn't build the surveillance system, nor did they pass the laws in the first place that would allow for such a system to be legally built.
Regarding the engineers here, it's not black and white. Looking at the ACM code of ethics, #1 is "Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest." Is building a mass surveillance system "in the public interest?" That's grey. My personal opinion is "no", but I can see the point of view of "Protecting my country from terrorists is in the public interest."
If we're going to look at the NSA surveillance systems, the first place to look is at the legislators. If we want to prevent the government from building such systems, step 0 is to make these systems illegal. That ripples down all the way through this: the lawyers' analysis would have come up negative instead of positive, and it's clearly not in the public interest to build systems that have been democratically-determined to be negative.
Note that I specifically mentioned mass surveillance because the original poster pointed it out as "field that enables mass government surveillance", then wonders about the implementation of a "rules of conduct". The natural implication being that those rules of conduct would have helped stop the enabling of mass government surveillance.
I'm not convinced that what the NSA/DOJ lawyers did here was unethical. One of a lawyer's roles is to answer the question: "Is what I'm about to do legal? On what grounds?"
The lawyer says, "This is legal, here are the grounds for believing it is so. I'll go into court and defend it". The engineer says, "This is technically possible, there are the grounds for believing it is so. I'll build it and maintain it". What is the reasoning for saying then that a lawyer has acted ethically (even though mass surveillance is not in the public interest), but the engineer has acted unethically (because mass surveillance is not in the public interest)? What is the quintessential concept that allows lawyers to ignore the public interest, but precludes the engineer from doing so?
And if there is nothing that we can point to that differentiates lawyers and engineers in this manner, then how would a professional code of conduct (like lawyers have) prevent the actions that the original poster specifically highlights.
> This is technically possible, there are the grounds for believing it is so.
I don't see an ethical conundrum here. Determining whether a system could be built is amoral at worst, or in the public interest at best. If an engineer says "this could be built" and a lawyer says "this could legally be built", that's when you get into a spot where you can have real societal discussions about whether or not it should be built.
If something is legal to build, but impossible to build (given current technology), then it's mostly an idle curiosity. If something's illegal to build, but technically possible, then there's reasonably compelling evidence that you probably shouldn't build it (save for, e.g. civil disobedience).
> I'll build it and maintain it.
That's where the ethics comes into play, and the grey area. If something is both legal and feasible, then it's up to you to decide whether or not it's something you want to be part of. I can look at the folks who built the mass surveillance system and say "I don't believe that was ethical", and others can look at it and say "I'm so proud of these people for defending my country".
An opposing piece of technology would be end-to-end encrypted messaging. In my world view, end-to-end encrypted messaging is perfectly moral. I believe that people should be able to communicate without having their conversations eavesdropped. But I also recognize that this does enable immoral/unethical activity as well; it's just that, to me, the balance leans towards private communication. Others may (and do!) disagree.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2010/03/09/ronald-rotunda-yoo-sen...