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Comment by cheald | 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.

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> 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?

>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.

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.

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