Excellent. If engineers and technologists refuse to take personal political and ethical responsibility for the future they help build, they need to be reminded to do so.
We need more of this.
We need more of this.
Yes, we should be ethically aware of the tools and products we build, but this is not the way to go about this! Harassing a man at his home like this is unnecessary and aggressive.
Please stop the promotion of individual harassment.
When people peacefully protest a Google employee and try to raise awareness in his neighborhood of his activities that they disagree with, it's individual harassment.
Isn't that just lovely? Hacker News: privileged technologists setting the standards for techno-skeptical protest. Tell us what the proper way to go about it (outside the established means of the sham that is representative parliamentary democracy, of course) is, then.
When you explicitly state, and act, with the intention to prevent people from leaving their own home, effectively placing them in a state of house arrest, then sorry, your protest is no longer any more peaceful than the force implied by that house arrest.
Hiding behind "raising awareness in the neighborhood" is a disingenuous sham that exposes a duplicity. What relevance has "representative parliamentary democracy" to your argument other than to make you feel martyred?
Remember, you are actively threatening a family that you will not let them leave their home, there is a distinct, and real, fear of how far you will go to do so. For all your "blocking busses, and breaking one window" (carefully emphasized to minimize), there's the Seattle WTO protests and everything in between, and a distinct set of people who -will- resort to violence that constitutes a non-zero threat to this man and his family's well being that you wave away as nothing.
At least have the courage of your convictions and stop pretending it's just some people "raising awareness".
I'm fairly sure that the correct approach to effecting political and ethical change is not harassing employees of tech firms in this way.
Maybe the bus drivers from all the tech company could protest against this threat to their livelihood and stage a drive in and shutdown the city like the french farmers do by driving extremely slowly though the city.