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Reminds me of a security hacker's refusal to work on a project intercepting Whatsapp messages of Saudi Arabian telco customers. http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

This is something I think about a lot, too. But recently, I am thinking that ethics can't survive in a non-ethical world - especially in one that doesn't respect ethics.

It's very prevalent, too, not just in engineering. To give a different example: does Adriana Lima stop and think about what Victoria's Secret does to body image issues for girls? That the mass-media promotion of a model's figure gives a too high standard for beauty? No. She takes the money and models. Not only that - but we love her for it. She is insanely popular.

Now in such a world - if given the chance to model, wouldn't you? Even if you are morally against promoting 38000$ clothing items in a world where there are still starving children, even though you think it's absurd that all magazines have skinny female figures on their covers -- if given a chance to make a lot of money by modeling, wouldn't you take it?

By denying yourself the opportunity, you are 1) extremely unlikely to change the system, because you're not so unique that without you things wouldn't work and 2) not even getting appreciated for the ethical choice you made.

There are plenty of people with Victoria Secret levels of body fat percentage walking around in Asia. They are the norm by far, probably over %80 of the under-35 population there are that skinny or even skinnier, and it's not because they are starving. It's not Adriana Lima's fault that we live in a food culture and industry that pushes toward obesity. You don't have to be anorexic or bulimic to be that skinny, but you'll have to be constantly telling no to almost everyone to trying to invite you to eat more and more crap.

A coworker in a previous job was asked by her Korean coworkers at LG to take pictures of how fat people got in new jersey because they, never, ever saw people get that fat in Korea.

Let's be honest here, Korean food's not that exciting - it can be good, sure, but there's not a lot of variety. Plus, if you eat too much of their chilli and vinegar dominated kimchi, you wind up with stomach cancer. ("It is the leading cancer type in Korea, with 20.8% of malignant neoplasms.") That probably contributes to less fat people. Also, they're more image-centric than Hollywood! (I used to work above a Korean plastic surgery in Hollywood, it was a veritable production line)

I think the stomach cancer comes from the sodium actually, the Japanese have a similar problem. But you have to look at these causes of death on an even basis too. Cancer is a higher cause of death in Korea than heart disease, that's fairly impressive!

IIRC most of Asia / developing countries without inactive lifestyles, overzealous meat consumption and fatty/sugary modern pretend-foods don't have issues with heart disease.

I suspect that the NSA engineers have their own ecosystem where they are made to feel how important preventing terrorism is.

I also suspect that most of the people in the HN crowd feel that working for such govt organizations is not exciting. These guys are not working with the latest and greatest that we see every day on HN.

Hearing how they work at GCHQ, they can't have a cell phone or just google for a quick fix on Stackoverflow, having to rely on language manuals instead.

So we each go our different ways and wonder about the other.

> I also suspect that most of the people in the HN crowd feel that working for such govt organizations is not exciting. These guys are not working with the latest and greatest that we see every day on HN.

NSA and GCHQ probably have better quantum computing than D-Wave. Who, apart from Google and Lockheed have anything similar? They have big computers, big networks, big databases, big everything.

GCHQ is said to have a 3 day cache of all content transiting the UK. That's a lot of storage, but it's also interesting data mining.

> Hearing how they work at GCHQ, they can't have a cell phone or just google for a quick fix on Stackoverflow, having to rely on language manuals instead.

Stack overflow is great. But I imagine that working with people who know in depth about the language they're using is also great.

EDIT: I doubt "preventing terrorism" is part of the day to day moral justification that people use. "Providing good quality intelligence" sounds like a better fit.

It's also possible that those inside the system have more information about what is going on and why. HN is often working on a very worst case assumption when it comes to these stories whereas internal employees probably have a lot more context about what is actually happening.

They'll also probably being seeing the internal disfunction of their organisation, as every insider does. From the outside the NSA, GCHQ etc seem scary, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent beings. If instead you know the people doing the work, the internal politics etc you might be less afraid that the rights of normal people are being infringed.

I've worked in the sector in question as a consultant. Without breaking anything I've signed I can say the following:

The employees don't have any context either. They are strictly partitioned and assigned tasks. Most of the time they probably have no idea of the implications of what they are doing. People are forbidden from talking about work on a social level as well.

What you don't say, no one else knows.

Likewise I also have no interest in any work which involves spying or building weapons. However, we're living through extremely difficult economic times and I can totally appreciate how for some people putting your personal beliefs to one side in order to feed your family and ensure that your home isn't repossessed is a trade-off which many will be willing to make.

Highly qualified engineer working for the government on a highly sophisticated data-mining system ? Please don't be so naive or at least make a better attempt at finding an excuse.

It is highly likely that many of the people involved in building them believe that what they are doing what is morally right.

The reality is that even the NSA controversy has huge grey areas and differing levels of support even among young, liberal engineers.

I'm not a supporter of codes of ethics, only of laws.

Exactly this is the problem! Similar to our little hn echo chamber these people are living in an echo chamber where they believe that what they are doing is the right thing to do.

Very, very difficult to disrupt that kind of thinking, especially when they have been subscribing to the "big government knows what is right for its little children" idea for too long.

Perhaps that's a luxury that some people can't afford.

If everyone said no, we're not going to do that no matter how much you pay us, governments would not have these tools.

And you wouldn't be reading this, because by an obvious extension of your logic, numerous modern technologies including the Internet wouldn't exist.

The flaw in your fundamental argument is that the technologies and access that can be abused for mass surveillance are exactly the same technologies and access that can be used for legitimate surveillance of actually bad people. The people plugging in the cables and writing the data mining code have no way to know how those systems will be used later.

There's a distinction between the core technologies (which are neutral in and of themselves, and can be used for good or bad), and the surveillance systems built using these technologies.

The examples of plugging in cables and writing data mining code fall into the former category. I'm not suggesting that those people are to blame. Most of the technology that people in our industry build is like this - such as the Internet and the web.

Where I would draw the line (in terms of me personally agreeing or disagreeing to be part of a given project) would be whether that project was specifically designed to operate in a manner that violate's peoples privacy in the manner so many people are upset about right now. This second category builds on the generic technologies of the first, but I consider agreeing to build something like PRISM to be something requiring ethical judgement, whereas the protocols and storage systems which comprise it would not be.

Where do you stand on so-called lawful interception, where communications of a specific suspect are monitored after appropriate legal authority has been obtained based on probable cause (or your local equivalent)?

I fully support this where there is probable cause. If there is sufficient evidence to suggest that someone may be involved in criminal and/or terrorist activity, and the authorities have gone to a (non-rubber stamp) court and been granted a warrant, then I agree that they should then be permitted to use whatever tools are at their disposal to track that person's communication. This is basically what the fourth amendment is about (as my understanding goes).

What I'm opposed to is wholesale collection of everyone's data, regardless of whether or not they are suspected of a crime. People who are innocent should not be subject to government surveillance.

That's my opinion at least; I know that some people disagree on that. But regardless of where any of us stand, the public should have full knowledge of the ways in which the government carries out its activities and this should be decided in an open debate in a democratic manner.