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Fellow hackers: stay away from anything connected to the defence industry. Security might be fun, it might pay well, but the ethics are terrible, things get used for bad purposes, and you can easily lose your freedom or worse.

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Shane Todd worked for the IME, a globally regarded research organisation based in a country that scored higher in the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index than the U.S. (87, #5 versus 73, #19) [1]. If he worked for the defence industry then so would an Oracle engineer deployed at Northrup Grumman or a SpaceX engineer in competing with Lockheed Martin.

[1] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/

What does corruption have anything to do with this? I would think it's largely irrelevant.

And also, you're right, those people do work in the defense industry.

Working in any industry in Pakistan or Nigeria (both #139 on the Corruptions Perceptions Index) is probably going to be more life-threatening than working for the Danish, Finnish, or Kiwi (tied for #1) defence establishments.

It may be relatable at extremes like you mentioned, but I'd have to see more evidence of a direction relationship between corruption and safety. Of course countries with little to no government will be more corrupt on some NGO's index.

Observing the 2012 Corruptions Perceptions Index scores [1] and the latest year United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime intentional homicide rates [2], one finds an an exponential relationship between the two with an intercept (homicide rate per 100 000) of 19.9, slope of -0.033, and regression coefficient of 0.25 (N=176). See chart [3].

Murder is the most vivid example without adjustmenting for income, but one can trace similar patterns across ambulance response times, food quality, transport efficiency, etc. Transparency International's report on their metric is a good starting point.

[1] http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/

[2] http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/...

[3] http://imgur.com/a1N5WXm chart!

From the little I know, corruption in Nigeria is usually about bribery, not murder.

I think the theory is that murder is an easier/safer/cheaper option in nations where the police are easily bribed.

Being higher in the corruption perceptions index really means people in that country are consistently better at hiding it, so outsiders perceive it less.

I live in New Zealand and notice corruption here, and way more of it when I go overseas. It is less corrupt here.

Lower corruption just means nobody risks their neck for relatively small amounts. For higher prices most are still for sale. If they offered the officers involved the equivalent of $50K each to cover it up, then it doesn't matter whether it's Germany, the US or Singapore: there is a reasonable chance they would succeed. And if a government (and Huawei, like any other Chinese company, is basically Chinese oligarchy/government property) is involved, money is not a problem.

I'm quite comfortable in defense. There are good reasons to avoid doing direct operations contracting for the USG (bureaucracy, inefficiency, etc.), but if you can just sell products, it's fine.

The USG doesn't tend to assassinate its contractors.

Some might see that as a bit of a head-in-sand perspective; ie. one that conveniently avoids considering the onward effects of one's actions. You could equate it to the situation vegetarians often encounter, ie. people that say eating meat is OK because the animal is dead already, or because it was farmed to be food, or some such. In such cases, the animals are farmed and killed (often under horrible conditions) because some people pay to fund that industry by buying the meat and others work within it as butchers, cattlemen, industrial vets, transport operators, cleaners, accountants, etc. to facilitate the scale and depth of suffering imposed upon the animals. Similarly, working in an industry based around killing, torturing, pressuring, wounding, imprisoning, spying, and other negative activities targeted at human beings also directly contributes to those activities.

One perspective on this type of activity is that of early Buddhism, which 2500 odd years ago summarized that one should not engage in five types of business. Which five? Business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison. — AN 5.177 http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma...

I believe there are moral uses of the military. I am not a pacifist (nor am I a vegetarian, nor a Buddhist). I don't think most people in the world are.

(It's great that you are or seem to be, though, if that works for you. The world I'd be most afraid of would be where 99% of people were pacifist and 1% were sociopaths, though)

Amen, my friend.

Money: not fuckin' worth it.

Counter perspective: I used to work in robotics and really the majority of the jobs are in defense or defense related. There are a handful (less now that willow garage is closing down) of robotics companies that do civilian work. Sometimes it is not just about the money.

I don't work in the field I have a degree in. You have to judge these things against your own morals and ethics and decide whether working in your field is actually even a good thing.

Faith in Humanity: +1pt

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