They all learn from each other. In addition we have companies that are building the necessary infrastructure which then probably can be used by a surveillance state. Unless surveillance gets checked by law it will soon be world wide.
It would be different if people had the self awareness to admit it and that they were ok with it. But it’s either cowardly (afraid of peers’ reactions) or somewhat delusional.
I wince to express this, but I’m at least happy to be living in America. For all its flaws, it feels like the founders really did see this type of situation coming and did the best they could to give us some tools to defend against it. Other places have fewer.
Still, those tools seem to be eroding with time.
The worst are pure mercenaries, who care only about the paycheck.
(But that's still simplifying the problem. Taking a moral stand is also a function of your life circumstances. It's easy to complain about ethical problems when you aren't the sole provider for two households and also facing a huge medical bill. Also, evil people don't write job advertisements for complete turn-key doomsday products. There's a spectrum there - isolated parts may not seem that evil.)
The argument goes like this: any student of war will tell you that the most important factor in warfare is intelligence. Strength is of course a requirement, but it’s secondary. It was why Japan was defeated at Midway, for example — that situation arose only because we knew for a fact what their plans were, thanks to breaking their comms.
In that light, since humans seem no different from a hundred years ago till now, it seems rather better to be top dog than to be someone else’s dog. And that makes it my duty to keep my country firmly in that place.
... at least, that’s how I felt growing up. Those feelings have translated more into “we have to be in this for each other, not for governments.” It feels like the Internet is one of the last bastions of true freedom — free from employers, free from identity. You can even make a fortune if you’re sufficiently lucky and talented.
It feels hollow, though. Part of the reason for the feelings I expressed above was that it fulfills a deep primal desire to be a part of something greater than yourself, to be aligned to a common goal, something more than just chasing a paycheck.
I wrote this mainly to give some context about how someone might be ok with the idea of building surveillance software, but feelings are always a complex and multifaceted thing. And we’re all still learning what it means to be human and to contextualize our place in the world. Is this really the best way to spend our time? And yet we’re forced to, if someone else has a club they want to club you with.
One closing point: the best way to change an organization is from the inside. If someone was truly worried about the NSA, joining them seems like one of the most effective things you could do. Because you truly believe it could be a tool of good, rather than a dystopaian weapon. There’s a reason idealists like Snowden were attracted to the job.
I hope this wasn’t too philosophical. Mostly it’s just hard to determine what you should even do with your life. It feels like no matter what you do, there will be people who hate it. So why bother defending your own point of view? Yet that feels like a cheap way out.
It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.
I'd like to argue that this even leads to us caring less about it than we should. In the west we are so convinced that our political systems are far superior, so that our governments can't do any evil, and if theyd try, someone would take care of stopping them. Only that I have my doubts about that really happening. The favorite way Americans like to do this is playing the "freedom of speech" card, but I guess other countries have equivalents.
This already seems nearly impossible. As the surveillance state gains strength it becomes more difficult to oppose it and win an election. In legal means, they can fund your opposition well and they can attack you for crimes that could have been prevented. And beyond that, their surveillance is a very strong tool in an election.
"Probably can"? Definitely can and is being used.