Not really. Outsourcing and then claiming ignorance is not a defense against financing North Korea.
"I told X to get it done. What X did to get it done is not my fault/responsibility."
If I can't trust the bank to know more about the UBO of some rando after KYC what the hell are we doing this for?
A good outcome of this would be more restrictions on outsourcing to China since it’s been repeatedly shown that they will not maintain meaningful restrictions on North Korea, Russia, Iran, etc.:
> All three cities are known to have many North Korean-operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas.
Or is it the faith of hackers that any misdoing in the world should always be traced back and blamed on a tech giant? From the article:
"There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images had any knowledge that a part of their project had been subcontracted to North Korean animators."
If it's a subsidiary, that's another case.
So why is it different if they sell me floor tiles made with slave labor?
Global retailers like H&M and IKEA do do audits of their supply chain to try to stop labor abuse (although how effective they are at that is up to debate)
But if you unknowingly buy floor tiles that have been made with unethical practices, should you be held responsible as a customer? Of course not.
If you tell X to get something done and ALSO give X rules that they must follow and X gets the thing done but __breaks the rules__ then this is different. It is also different if you have reasonable suspicion to expect them to break the rules or are using subversive language to tell them to break the rules. These are different things and have different consequences.
If you are truely acting in good faith, then yes, it is a defense. But determining if that's true is not an easy task.
There is good faith, coercion, negligence, and willful negligence. These are different things.
This is the iterated game that morally bankrupt manufacturers (IE the vast majority) play to insulate themselves in these sort of scandals: - First, they get caught doing A,B,C, so they pass rules about A,B,C - Then they outsource to someone who is willing to do A,B,C, then they get caught outsourcing to violators - Then, they impose rules about A,B,C on these firms, but do no verification of the firms adherence to those rules. It insulates them of liability without ever increasing costs (because the firms still get to break the rules and the company gets to say "I'm Shocked! I told you not to do that!")
The verification process is exceptionally difficult. We're on HN and I think it should be rather common knowledge that attackers almost always beat defenders because the game is asymmetric. Attackers only need to find a single flaw while defenders need to find a large number of defenses. There is a huge difference in the resource expenditures between these two groups. This is related to the reasons why one single person can fuck shit up (e.g. a bad driver can impact tens of thousands of other drivers) but it is difficult for a single person to fix things. It is the nature of unstable equilibria.
A society, of any form, depends on trust. Like it or not, there are no trustless systems available to us. Certainly not at any meaningful scale.
This does not mean one should be negligent, but rather I'm saying that it isn't easy and the best intentioned can still be taken advantage of. We should recognize this and accommodate this fact when approaching solutions or we will end up with many undesired results.
We outsourced to company X, who is bound by law and contract not to engage in illegal actions. Company X, without our knowledge or approval subcontracted illegally.
The Amazon and HBO are the victims here. They were the ones harmed and deceived.
Companies like amazon are extremely powerful. They set the terms of the agreement, they set the project requirements and metrics, and then pretend that whatever happens has nothing to do with them.
Though, Apple has the exact same issue you claim Foxconn might have - funneling value to shareholders over laborers.
It is just a part of the nature of outsourcing. Your supplier might just choose to outsource himself and have the work done by companies you couldn't possibly work with. For a digital good this is extremely hard to monitor. How would a Californian studio possibly know what company their supplier outsources to?
If you outsource, have boots on the ground ensuring working conditions and no re outsourcing.
Pick one. Pretty straightforward.
But yes, please let management know that outsource is only attractive on paper. Every experience I have had with it is has been bad. The communication gap is just so much larger and your ability to oversee what gets done and how it gets done just evaporates. The ethical/legal problem is just one result of that, but even without it outsourcing often just costs far more in hidden expenses.
If this were codified into law I would suspect that it would quickly lead to monopolization. I can't imagine how the world would work without contractors. Imagine if Apple had to operate the mines, build the machines to mine the materials, to build the machines to build those machines, build the silicon foundry, and all the things along from dirt in the ground to the iPhone. Boy, you'd get nothing done. Because that's the world with no "outsourcing." It is too broad of a word.
"We only do X" is one of the best tools to manage complexity.
I think what the other poster is referring to is specifically the practice of companies to have work done by workers in areas of the world where labor is cheap. That particular practice is something very different than e.g. buying chips from a foundry. Specifically buying parts from q supplier involves very little management, outsourcing work means you have to actively involved in the management of the offshore labor.
Sure, but part of what I wanted to (albeit indirectly) convey is the difficulty of creating a meaningful rule about this. Even if you locked work within a country's borders (I imagine this would have terrible consequences too), this concept scales.
I understand the complaint, but I think we need to also recognize the complexity of the issue if we're to do anything meaningful about it. Trivializing it will get us nowhere and often leads to bad laws that get more abused than the original ones.
In general it is very easy and safe to work with companies in the same country as you, as they are bound by identical laws to you and litigation and control is relatively easy. They also can't legally re-outsource to companies you can't outsource to. Similar things are true if the company is in a broadly aligned country. E.g. the US and Germany.
The further away, physically, ideologically, linguistically and legally away the country of the other company is the worse it becomes and the harder it is to effectively control them.
Yeah, I agree that this is definitely a weighting factor. But neither do I think it is good to return to isolationism. Globalism, despite its many flaws, has clearly contributed to the long peace. Encourages negotiations at the table rather than on the battlefield given that in the end, wars are primarily economically driven. Better to destroy economies than people, even if the former can indirectly result in the latter. (wish there were better solutions and a larger gain, but that's a whole other conversation fraught with far more complexity)
But given your response I think there maybe confusion as to what is being referred to when discussing "Long Peace." It is not the absence of war, it is the absence of __direct__ war between __major powers__. This may not be clear since being born into long peace (as presumably you are <80 years old), is that this is the only type of war we've experienced and directly know. Prior to this, major powers directly fought, and quite frequently. Usually this is discussed with respect to Europe but the general trend is true elsewhere and similar patterns exist on the Indian subcontinent as well as Asia and even in the Americas. It is also worth noting that even wars between these smaller powers has decreased (likely due to the connections with larger powers and how many are unwilling to go to direct war with larger powers).
While sanctions certainly aren't absolutely effective, that's not entirely the point either. The point is to make these actions more resource intensive, not impossible. Even our direct discussion about NK is illustrative of this, as they have to spend resources to be covert and it is clear that this sub-sub-...-contracting would be more economically fruitful were they not have to operate though these sidechannels and could operate directly. I mentioned in another comment about how society operates in unstable equilibria and how this is why there's a clear imbalance between red teams and blue teams, where the blue team has a much harder job. The same is true here too. Just because they can bypass sanctions also doesn't mean they are ineffective. It is important to not binarize things.
And to clarify, globalism isn't necessarily American dominance, but rather that countries are negotiating on the economic table. While described by Pax Americana there have also been Pax Britannica, Pax Romana, and others which saw similar trajectories but never before at the global scale as the world was not operating globally previously. In that sense it is often explained how this trend has happened through human history and correlates heavily with globalization.
If you're going to make an argument I'd suggest one about delay, as (in my opinion) one can more easily create a stronger argument about how the proposed explanations of long peace (note that there is not a singular one, and no serious person believes a singular factor is the cause, as should be apparent by the initial lines in my comment), rather displace the inevitable wars and death. That these result in growing tensions where the pressures accumulate and result in large scale and more horrible war. But we must also explain the much longer historical trend and it isn't unreasonable to believe that issues like these are more akin to a damped oscillator rather than a clear monotonic decay (which is measured to not be true but also confounded with the suggested argument).
Is your ignorance a defense? Should we hold you accountable for the entire supply chain that goes into what you consume?
Or can we just say that you should put in a reasonable amount of effort towards avoiding this (with reasonable being defined by the legislature and the judiciary)?