Comment by gnosis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnosis | Hacker News Reader

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"offered money and a chance to work on such a system, I'd work on it in a heartbeat"

You would. But that doesn't mean that everyone would.

I am appealing to those of us who value privacy and ethics above making a quick buck or getting to play with neat toys.

It's not like there's some huge shortage of interesting technology jobs in this second internet/startup bubble. And not all of these jobs are for companies that want to spy on their users. Many of us still have a choice.

Even if you are at a company which spies on its users, you could at least try to make some positive change from within, or at least avoid advocating for going down the road of ever more surveillance and spying.

Way too many developers, VCs, and founders either don't consider the privacy implications of what they're doing, or are only too happy to collect and sell data about their users to the highest bidder.

This mercenary mentality is not some unchangeable part of human nature, but is a learned attitude that can be countered and rejected.

My point is that it's not even remotely practical to convince enough of the population to "value privacy" so much that these things won't be built or to even remotely hinder them. The population of earth is just too large. "HN readers" aren't some magic special bunch that cannot be replaced.

> This mercenary mentality is not some unchangeable part of human nature

No, it's just basic game theory. The more people that refuse to sign up for these "unethical" things, the higher the reward for those that do. And those rewards are very small compared to the pressures involved.

So even if you succeed in convincing a ton of hackers to join your cause, you've done what? Raised the salary from $250K to $750K a year for the people that do defect? That's nice, but the actual effect on privacy is zero.

"My point is that it's not even remotely practical to convince enough of the population to "value privacy" so much that these things won't be built or to even remotely hinder them. The population of earth is just too large."

When you get enough people educated and caring enough about some issue do something about it, what you have is a social movement. Such social movements have a long history of bringing about significant changes, especially when they are well organized.

If there are enough HN users caring and doing something about privacy, there is no doubt in my mind that positive, significant change will come about. HN users might not be "magical", but they are pretty special in that most of them are very technologically savvy (especially compared to the typical internet user), with a deep knowledge and understanding of the very technologies which make the surveillance state so effective.

Knowledge is power, and we have to recognize that collectively we hold a lot of power in our hands. Our collaboration with the surveillance state or our opposition to it, our advocacy for and work to build privacy-respecting alternatives could be a major game changer.

Quite apart from the effectiveness of such opposition are the ethics behind it. Some of us believe that we should do what's right even when the odds of success are against us.

inspiration produces better everything (software) than lucre but if you wanna talk $ rewards its obvious theres a mass market for privacy developing.

Please expand.

The argument of inevitability is the argument of a fatalist.

Yeah, so what if the incentives increase on the other side?

That's what hard work is made of. No one said this is easy. Far from it, it's hard.

And if its inevitable, so note that the success of the government to pass CISPA and its variants was considered by some to be inevitable.

And hackers have generally been at the forefront of keeping the net safe.

It's only after the government started going after them, and SV built a narrative of - interesting challenges-talent-fair,just but outsized rewards, that the equation shifted.

> Basic game theory

The guy who came up with game theory was mad + in real life people don't comply to it.

> Basic game theory

The guy who came up with game theory was mad + in real life people don't comply to it except economists and psycologists.

"You would. But that doesn't mean that everyone would."

Sure, but those things only need to be built once.

The more talented people work on privacy-invading technology, the more powerful, pervasive, and smoothly-running the surveillance state will be.

Most of us have the choice to deny the surveillance state our own talent. We can work at more privacy-respecting firms and on more privacy-respecting projects. We can try to educate people about privacy, and advocate for positive change. We can even actively work to counter the surveillance aparatus by building crypto, stego, mesh-network and other privacy and anonymity enhancing technologies. Most of us probably don't have the luxury of doing this latter as our day job, but certainly as a side project -- if we care enough and want to make a difference.

There will always be developers who will be willing to do this either because it's challenging or because they need to put food on the table. You can't win that fight. The people who take those jobs also have the potential to become whistle-blowers and throw 6 months+ of internal emails to $POPULAR_TORRENT_SITE showing all kinds of interesting dialog and/or corruption.

Concentrate on getting laws passed or technology made to stop or avoid the tools of "Big Brother" and educating the general public on what's going on with the internet and BigCorp/government. What I would like to see is a browser extension or app that makes PGP easy for the masses so they can encrypt emails, messages, etc. Open source of course. We don't need any secret backdoors.

"There will always be developers who will be willing to do this either because it's challenging or because they need to put food on the table."

But those people don't have to be us. Each of us has a choice to make: to cooperate with the construction and maintenance of the surveillance state or not.

Perhaps I am too much of an optimist, but I'd like to think that many of the most talented and capable of us want to make positive, constructive changes in the world. We don't want to be a part of making the world worse. Many of us are lucky enough to be in an industry where we actually have a choice in this respect.

If the most talented and capable of us deny the surveillance state our talent and capability, they'll have to make do with whatever ethically challenged people they can scrounge up. I'd like to think that they'll be the worse off for it, and the resulting surveillance state will not be nearly as powerful and effective as it would be were everyone to unhesitatingly and willingly participate in it or sell themselves to the highest bidder without thought of the consequences.

> There will always be developers who will be willing to do this either because it's challenging or because they need to put food on the table.

Of course, but that's bullshit, and they're being immoral. Evoking romantic images of providing for your beloved family is misplaced here. No programmer is left with the choice of either working for evil scumbags or starving.

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