Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

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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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