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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Why punish the employees of a business when the root cause is corrupt government employees abusing their power?

Edit to respond to smt88:

IBM knowingly selling services to the Nazis specifically to violate human rights is not the same as Flock selling services to cops to aid in identification. In addition, going after 1 business is simply an inefficient use of resources, when the government employees can simply use a different business to abuse their power.

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I didn't say the employees should be imprisoned. I said the c-suite, the ones actually in charge. They're enabling these cops to be lazy and not do their job properly, and have directly contributed to numerous human rights violations.

C Suite are employees too. I do not see them breaking any laws, but I do see government employees abusing their power, if not breaking the law.

C-suite are officers. Officers have more responsibility.

C-suite are officers. Officers have more responsibility for the conduct of the company than employees.

No they're not, they're executives who can only be fired by the board. Equating them with line-level employees is somewhere between naive and isingenuous.

Sure, and Elon Musk is just a Twitter employee

C-Suite are the top level of the company. Above them is only the board of directors, whose power is limited to firing the C-Suite if they don't like what they're doing. In day to day operations, the C-Suite controls the entire company.

Your question is too unspecific. We're talking about cop tech and surveillance, which has a very specific business ecosystem.

Why didn't you just respond to my comment instead of editing?

Anyway you didn't explain how IBM and Flock are different. Flock's work has already resulted in innocent citizens getting murdered extrajudiciously.

Do you think IBM executives should've been punished for facilitating the Nazi war machine after WW2?

If you sell a tool and know that it'll be used for evil, are you innocent?

> Do you think IBM executives should've been punished for facilitating the Nazi war machine after WW2?

Emphatic yes

Bayer lost their exclusive rights to aspirin because they aided the Central Powers during WW1

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