Hacker News Reader

"The NSA" is a collection of people acting in a certain manner. It cannot be untrustworthy unless its members - its employees - are behaving in an untrustworthy manner. Associating with an entity that is known to be engaged in hostile behavior towards you should carry a reputational stain, even if it wasn't you that "pulled the trigger".

That secretary is facilitating the erosion of our personal privacy and liberty by logistically supporting the people who are doing the actual dirty work, and now, she knows it. At this point, her choice is "Continue supporting people doing bad things and carry the stain that comes with it" or "Stop associating with people who are doing bad things".

Persons who engage or support the kind of behavior that the NSA is engaged in are untrustworthy and should be treated as such. You don't have to be the actual guy tapping data lines to be complicit. Shoving it off of "the employees" and onto "the NSA" is a copout.

> Persons who engage or support the kind of behavior that the NSA is engaged in are untrustworthy and should be treated as such. You don't have to be the actual guy tapping data lines to be complicit. Shoving it off of "the employees" and onto "the NSA" is a copout.

No, that is not. You are making the same mistake that "because I work for someone evil it means I must be evil too." You are assuming every single person who have or is currently working for NSA must be evil. Just because someone accepts that having a job is important than public good at some point does not make them less untrustworthy. You can have someone who donates to good causes all the time, does a lot of community work and yet when he quits his job because he is sick of NSA or because he just want a better job and now he can't because he was with NSA.

This assumption is wrong; you are equating government to its workers. If so, should anit-war people look at our American soldiers evil too? Because people are following orders?

If I work for a Mafia boss, you know, take care of his house so that he can be comfortable and safe at home, am I supporting to the cause? If a German citizen was supplying raw materials to Nazi is that citizen a Nazi and evil when he was just making a living for his family while he absolutely hate Hitler and Nazi?

But it's also wrong to say that an institution and its members are completely separate. They aren't and can't be. There is no institution without members, and there are no members without an institution to be a member of. You've got to deal with them as entangled, and treat them as such. There are varying degrees of responsibility for acts that we attribute to an institution, because generally we're talking about institutions with internal hierarchies. So for example General Keith Alexander is much more culpable than a random sysadmin. But because of the responsibility-diffusing nature of institutions, no, you can't completely let members off the hook without also letting the institution off the hook.

By the way, about your Mafia/Nazi examples: a zealous prosecutor could easily charge the housekeeper, and the police and FBI would certainly lean on them a bit whilst investigating the boss. That's totally commonplace. Meantime, in the case of the literal Nazis, yes, there were in fact consequences for such people (leaving aside that you've constructed that scenario very poorly).

I never argue they are not morally responsible for what they do. But arguing that we need to look at the issue of discrimination being a current or ex-NSA. How would that affect employment. Will major employer like Google or open-source giant like Mozilla, reject people for the sake of being NSA?

That's my issue I want to discuss. If we are striving for a better society, discrimination should be minimized. If we keep discriminate them, penalize them, the only job they will ever have is NSA job.

I think now this point is clear why it is important to look at the effect and the moral issue of how we treat them.

And to many, it is NSA is evil, every NSA employee is evil. and that's a big issue.

> If we are striving for a better society, discrimination should be minimized.

Bullshit. Discrimination is the foundation of a sane society. Unjust discrimination with no bearing on one's ability to do a job (such as on the basis of one's genital configurations or preference of who you like to smooch) should be minimized, but you absolutely must be discriminating about you who choose to work with. After all, if we really wanted to minimize discrimination, we'd just hire people for any job without any consideration towards their capabilities, experience, or work history.

Being cautious about hiring potential employees because their work history demonstrates that they may be a threat to the security and reputation of your company is a damned good reason to discriminate.

>If I work for a Mafia boss, you know, take care of his house so that he can be comfortable and safe at home, am I supporting to the cause?

In an ethical/moral, if not a legal, sense: yes. Absolutely.

>If a German citizen was supplying raw materials to Nazi is that citizen a Nazi and evil when he was just making a living for his family while he absolutely hate Hitler and Nazi?

Does it mean they were Nazis? No, Nazis were members of the NAZI political party. Does it make them a Nazi supporter, though? Yes.

Does it make the person evil? That's a moral judgement I don't think we can have a sensible argument about, but unarguably it does make the person a supporter of evil.

This is the key takeaway from the Milgram experiment, and the key point of Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil". We think of evil acts as things perpetrated by conniving, malicious villains, but the reality is that evil acts like the holocaust were not perpetrated by cackling villains, but only happened because enough regular, otherwise perfectly nice people surrendered any personal responsibility for the larger implications of their work and contented themselves to "just follow orders".

> No, that is not. You are making the same mistake that "because I work for someone evil it means I must be evil too." You are assuming every single person who have or is currently working for NSA must be evil.

No, I'm not at all. I'm assuming that some of the people working at the NSA are evil (that is, that there isn't some "The NSA" entity that is evil while the people employed there are not), and that the rest of the well-intentioned people working there now know about it, and have a choice to make about whether they are going to work with and enable these evil people to do their jobs or not.

A housekeeper with mob ties would be looked up with distrust. A person who supplied material aid to the Nazis would be rightfully branded a "Nazi supporter". Doing something to make a living isn't an excuse.

Let's put this into a more Valley-friendly context: You can't really work for a porn company in some non-porny capacity (sysops, let's say) and not expect that stigma to follow you around. You know exactly who you're working for, what they represent, and how other people would perceive that line of employment. Would you expect to be exempt from people making any kind of judgement about the kind of people you choose to work for since you're just making a living?

That's a super softball variant on what we're talking about here. Porn is something that doesn't bother some people and deeply bothers others, but "I contributed to your government spying on you and systematically eradicating your privacy (but just a little bit)" isn't going to play well anywhere, as well it shouldn't.

That is how social reproach works! I feel like you're strongly missing the point. The institution of The National Security Agency is made up of people. The institution and its members are embedded in a social context. Institutions, among other things, are responsibility-diffusing machines. You can't reproach the institution without also reproaching its members, because otherwise the members don't feel any responsibility for whatever you disapprove of about the institution and carry on with business as usual. You can't make the disapproval stick without affecting the individual members. Or, to flip it around a little, when you scold the institution and let members off the hook because they're just following orders and trying to pay the rent, you are saying "those orders were okay to follow."

I agree that it's not fully accurate to say "The NSA is untrustworthy, Bob worked for the NSA, therefore Bob is untrustworthy" - but because of how institutions work, if you want the institution to pay attention, then yes, there must be impact on its members. There is no way around this.

Maybe I was maybe others were. We are not saying NSA employees should not feel bad for what they did, for following orders. I am arguing that when someone is titled NSA employee, the first instinct is "I don't like this guy and I don't him near me" when all he wanted to do was to say Hi my name is Bob and I had this interesting problem I want to solve with you guys."

And to those who left NSA either because they hate it or because they realize it was wrong.

So if the solution is to be snowden, declare publicly that he does not endorse NSA, it is the equivalent to saying "you must face a public trial, you must tell the world you do not and will not endorse nsa anymore upon exit." Everyone ought to be a hero.

I do understand the institutional constraint. If all NSA employees rage quit today, will we just forgive them? But that is not going to happen, for various reasons.

We might be talking past each other. I'm saying - yes, the burden should be on current and former NSA employees to explain why they're trustworthy. People can set their standard of "acceptable explanation" however they like - however, I feel strongly that someone who worked for a deeply compromised institution, should bear the burden of explaining.

When Bob just wants to introduce himself and people say "You worked for the NSA? Go away, spy" -- that is a sign that effective social punishment of the NSA - the institution - is taking place. I see you worrying about the scenario where no amount of explanation Bob can give is enough to get him in the door. That's fine. But I'm arguing that Bob should have to do some explaining, and I'm arguing that if you do want the NSA - the institution - to suffer effective consequences, then you must accept that individual members will also face some gnarly consequence, because that's how institutions in a social context work. You cannot meaningfully punish the institution without also punishing its members. It does raise moral issues, yes - but if you have already decided, "we must punish the institution," then you fatally compromise that goal by adding a lily-livered "but let's not make things too hard for the members."

We probably are.

> should bear the burden of explaining.

Yes. Indeed, but how many will accept that? How many of us here will bother to look at it and say "he sounds genuine." We should evaluate what things one can do to help people to get out of NSA and still receive some degree of respect/human treatment.

If by punishing is by not giving them a chance because, as some have declared, "I will not trust them at all anymore", these poor souls will have no jobs but NSA jobs. And let me restate my position: I don't endorse NSA and I believe they are morally responsible for the work they do (everyone should, regardless of whether NSA or Adobe leaking password). But let's focus on what one can do to make the transition easier. What makes them part of us again.

When we say Mr. Foo Bar, NSA cryptographer, publishing a paper for his next talk, sure, the chair will just throw that away and say "fuck it, no one would want to hear bs from NSA." As you can see, even though some people say "I have no problem with individual contribution", some probably left the part "but I will remain skeptical and uncomfortable with them being around, and making changes to Linux kernel." And to some they just never want to see those poor souls on IRC anymore.

I'm not sure this is equivalent to the red scare. If you have a friend who is a known communist (assuming for the sake of argument that communism is bad here), then it might be you have tolerated that friend for the sake of other good qualities.

However, if you work in a place, there is the Buddhist question of "right livelihood." I'm sorry that I don't know any better way to put it. Given that the NSA has been doing some things that seem objectionable, shouldn't everyone who contributes to that effort begin examining their conscience? And yes, a secretary does contribute to that effort.

Now it might be that the latest report will make some well-needed changes. And heaven knows, countries need intelligence to combat things like terrorism. But still. If you were part of the NSA, two things would today be true:

a) You knew what went on, and agreed with it. Well, maybe your ethics are not what we would all like.

or

b) You didn't know what went on, and aren't impressed now you do. I suggest it's now time for you to consider whether this is an enterprise you should contribute time and effort towards.

And if that comes at odds to feeding your family, well, maybe you can't just resign. But you certainly can look for more ethical work, or take part in internal conversations about how the organisation can become more ethical.

> And if that comes at odds to feeding your family, well, maybe you can't just resign. But you certainly can look for more ethical work, or take part in internal conversations about how the organisation can become more ethical.

And we continue to be scared because of their background, previous involvement.

> a) You knew what went on, and agreed with it. Well, maybe your ethics are not what we would all like.

Not everyone is a saint and some are utilitarian and some are not. People also change they way they perceive things.

>Unprofessional because we put the government's fault onto an employee's fault. Let's take a secretary.

I suggest reading and considering Hannah Arendt's famous work, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" for a different perspective on this.

Our typical idea of a perpetrator of evil is this malicious, moustache-twirling, cackling super-villain. The reality of how very evil acts are perpetrated is typically much different, though. It has more in common with what we see with the Milgram experiment: lots of small cogs doing highly compartmentalized, abstract work that simply adds up to something ghastly. Paper-pushers who simply "do their jobs" without bothering to examine or take responsibility for the ethical implications of their work output, preferring instead to shift that ethical responsibility to the superiors/authorities who handed down their orders.

I probably will mark that as one of my to-read list. I enjoy works on ethics.

But the issue people keep on missing, or not in sync with me, is practically, how do we minimize discrimination, how do we handle future employments? All I am hearing is "they are still morally responsible." If for the sake of discussion, assume yes they are morally responsible, my actual questions are still unresolved. And we just keep saying "yeah it sucks to be them, but what can we do?" That's the exact attitude we always have and won't eager to fix on;y because we dislike what the NSA has done.

that is because the work that makes the NSA untrustworthy is done by its employees.

why on earth should they get a free pass for that? have you seen the scope of the damage they have done?

And whose idea is it in the first place? A few people. The rest is what, following orders.

You lose. "Following orders" is not a defense. Established at Nuremberg trial of Nazis.

Following orders is the problem.

I don't trust people who blindly follow orders.