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Comment by zapita | Hacker News Reader

> I'm an aerospace engineer and I specialize in rockets. I understand that the nature of my work will almost always 100% benefit the weapons industry because there's just no avoiding it.

Those people are software engineers. Unlike you, they could have easily found equivalent jobs elsewhere (almost anywhere) that did not contribute to building a worldwide surveillance network in the name of serving better ads.

I agree with GP that it takes a wacky moral compass to willingly engage in mass surveillance but feel strongly enough about weapons to quit over them. It's either very naive, hypocritical, or both.

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This is not entirely true. I mean, sure, they could not work for _Google_, but almost the entire field of eCommerce involves either contributing to surveillance, or benefitting from it as much as you can. You basically get a choice over the brand of the bad.

Of course, there are other jobs, but much of it either comes with its own significant ethical hurdles - like fintech, for example, or any form of marketing and much of banking - or is much less accessible (good luck switching fields from eCommerce to embedded programming for power plant equipment or something).

Pretty much only solution I can come up with is seizing the means of production, but that might be an unpopular proposition on this particular website.

> I agree with GP that it takes a wacky moral compass to willingly engage in mass surveillance but feel strongly enough about weapons to quit over them. It's either very naive, hypocritical, or both.

I don't see why it's inconsistent. They don't want to be complicit in physical violence and death, but surveillance leads to neither.

Surveillance does lead to that if it's how we identify where someone is located or leads to actionable intelligence which can then be used as justification for dropping a missile from the sky.

Name a single industry or product that can't be a starting point of a chain that ends in a missible dropping from the sky.

1. Being curt with someone can lead to them going home and beating their spouse to vent their frustrations. Should we then never be curt because it might lead to domestic abuse? How improbable does the outcome need to be before this kind of argument is considered invalid?

2. Dragnet surveillance alone cannot lead to actionable intelligence, it can only be used to confirm other sources of intelligence. The false positive rate is simply too high. Would they still drop that bomb without that surveillance? In most cases, probably.

3. Weapons have only one purpose: to physically harm. Surveillance can have many legitimate purposes. They simply aren't directly comparable.

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