Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

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There's multiple responses echoing this idea that it's a defense company like any other and thus an evil we'll have to accept exists.

That may be true, but these companies (NSO group is by no means worse than the rest of them, just more notorious) have been caught over and over again, selling these "weapons" to dictators, companies, etc, who in turn use them to spy on journalists and activists, not terrorists or anything of the sort. And that doesn't even go into keeping 0-days for the benefit of the few, keeping literally everyone on the planet less safe, which is arguably as big an issue, if more systemic.

These companies may exist in some form or another because the nation state & private surveillance systems that form their client base want them to exist.

But my point is that the individuals working at this company should be ashamed of themselves. I'm not appealing to their sense of morals, I'm talking purely about "us the tech community" making it abundantly clear that having one of these companies on your CV will make it very hard to find any decent job afterwards. It needs to be socially expensive to work there. To loan from Max Goldt's opinion on the BILD newspaper [1]:

> NSO Group and the like are an organ of infamy. It is wrong to use their products. Someone who contributes to these products is absolutely socially unacceptable. It would be remiss to be friendly or even polite to any of their developers or managers. One must be as unkind to them as the law will just allow. They are bad people who do wrong.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6758128-die-bild-zeitung-is...

Yeah, I think the appropriate comparison is if a weapons manufacturer made "selling to dictatorships for suppressing dissidents" the core of its business strategy.

This is true, but then you have to also socially shame a large part of the US military, for invading Iraq. At least those that didn't resign as soon as it became clear that there are no WMDs there, and the large amount of Iraqis were killed pretty much for nothing.

In short - you have a point, but it's not quite that simple.

it is not that simple, but the scale and impact is different too. You wouldn't download a car, would you?

Yeah, every single US soldier who voluntarily stepped on Iraqi soil should be sent to the ICC and tried for war crimes. Some of them would be exonerated for being too stupid/brainwashed to understand that they were committing criminal acts. Others wouldn't.

However, those who develop the NSO spyware are middle class Israeli citizens who easily could get a well-paying job at a less repugnant company. There are no extenuating circumstances, no "had to put food on my table", no claims of being fooled/brainwashed. They 100% deserve to be punished and they 100% deserve our disgust.

I don't know- I imagine deserting your brothers in arms (which may include your literal brother or sister) would be akin to deserting your family in a deadly situation. Regardless of how stupid the causes, once you're in the shit and people are at risk that you care about, the reasons you're there probably arent your biggest concern. The people that should be held accountable are the ones who orchestrated and perpetuated the whole thing, not the soldiers (unless they commit war crimes obviously).

I mean, to follow that analogy, yeah people absolutely should abandon their families if the families are out there actively murdering innocents.

The person saying that they're only staying to murder with their families because they care about them is not a redeeming quality, and they should definitely be held accountable and not excused for their crimes.

For the record, I consider any armed person outside their home country should be considered as a terrorist and a militia and treated as such. There is no reason someone from country A should be carrying a weapon in country B and attacking people there. This is 100 times even more valid when country B has not authorized this.

I agree, but the world just isn't this simple. It's not about murdering with you family- it's about protecting your family. Kids I knew that went to Iraq were the protective types, not murderous. People can enlist in the military with the intention of protecting their country only to be ordered overseas caught up in some bullshit war. Historically, drafts were the main reason. And no man is an island, so whatever situation pulls one person in, is bound to ripple through other people's lives and pull others in as well.

> I consider any armed person outside their home country should be considered as a terrorist and a militia

I mean, there are situations like hostage crises where foreign countries send in soldiers that I think are completely justified. But, I agree, in general. Our foreign policy has been fucked since the CIA started after WWII. I'm just grateful I never had to fight a war- chances are I would've being born in the last couple hundred years

Why the soldiers? They aren't the ones that made the decision. Sure, if they committed war crimes themselves, but for anything else you have to address the people that actually were responsible. Prosecuting soldiers would be futile and certainly no justice.

There was a lot of media propaganda to make the war popular. It wasn't at first but it didn't even take half a year until people ate it up. Liberal, conservative, didn't even matter. It was scary to see how quickly people were manipulated. It had large support in the population. People should stop and reflect what made them support the war, which messages and by whom. That is the responsibility they can take here and it would be much more constructive than putting the blame on soldiers...

Israel citizens might have a better excuse to develop weapons than most other countries, so I don't see the point. Not an excuse, but at least an explanation.

Because no American was forced to commit war crimes in Iraq. Yes, participating in an attack on a state that is of no imminent threat to your own is a war crime. Brainwashing may have been an extenuating circumstance, but a lot of Americans were staunchly against the war so how come they let themselves be brainwashed? If I join a gang can I claim to have been brainwashed when most people in fact do not join gangs? People are responsible for their own actions.

So then, by this logic, once you've worked for NSO Group or the like, there's no way back for you. How then, can someone reform or "see the light"? Is someone once tainted, always tainted? Or do they have to do 10 years in the NFP space before we see them as worthy?

The problem is that by walling off developers who participate in these activities, we essentially force them to continue these activities. I'm not sure that's net positive.

It’s not like we don’t accept that people change, but stigma is useful for both discouraging starting there or staying. If your first job out of college or the military is a defense contractor, oil company, Palantir, etc. a lot of people will sympathize with needing to make rent. If you’re still there a decade later, they’ll assume you’re okay with what they do.

Don't hate the player hate the game. At the end of the day it's the policy makers that choose to look the other way

That’s a personal ethics shirk. For example, policy makers haven’t outright banned tobacco companies but a large number of people would not spend their time trying to make such companies successful.

social norms are part of "the game" and letting people feel in very practical terms that it's not okay to Be Evil(TM) is changing the rules.

Same could be said about weapon development.

They should be ashamed of themselves, but you are still barking at the wrong tree in the long run. You should demand your own government to outlaw this type of surveillance.

I can do both, actually. Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean it has to be socially acceptable. The two systems are often complementary, and often even contradictory.

Regulation at all is hard enough, expecting it to work by social norm is just impossible. Even more so in a country where all women do 22 months mandatory millitary training and all men do 36.

> have been caught over and over again, selling these "weapons" to dictators, companies, etc

Meanwhile, a nice silent worm propagates among their network... I have 0-faith that the version they have sold to bad actors is clean when they probably are begging you to take their software into your internal network.

How convenient. It almost makes the dead journalists seem like a win!

From being in MI, collateral damage is a thing... decisions like "if we act on this information, 100 people will be saved but they'll know we know and 1,000s could die. If we let 100 people die, we can save 1,000s" are more common than we'd like.

Two comments:

1. There's no compelling reason to think that this applies in NSO's case, since a lot of the bad actors are geopolitically aligned with "good" governments.

2. One needs only study the cold war briefly to see how the group-think in these unaccountable environments can become completely detached from reality.

Pardon me if I'm skeptical of unaccountable officials making those decisions, and orders of magnitude more skeptical of random people on the internet alluding to such actions as if we can all just assume abuses are justified by unspecified good ends.

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