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Comment by suprgeek | Hacker News Reader

Why don't we (as the hacker/programmer community) also "fight back" in the meaningful & legal way that is our core strength?

Resolve to push for encryption if there is any PII data in an app that you work with especially if it is a e-mail/mobile/social app. at scale

Refuse to work with/at NSA until their policies change

Refuse to participate in any committee/standards body, conferences, with NSA employees (or their cohort companies who have willingly forsaken the public's interests)

Encourage non-tech folks to adopt stronger privacy practices

etc etc...

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>Refuse to work with/at NSA until their policies change

When the NSA demands your data, you're not really entering a business partnership.

>Refuse to participate in any committee/standards body, conferences, with NSA employees (or their cohort companies who have willingly forsaken the public's interests)

That said, if you're part a committee or a standards body and you have opinions, the only way that you'll get your changes in place is if you show up.

> When the NSA demands your data, you're not really entering a business partnership.

True, but I saw the original comment as relating more to recruiting. The NSA works just as hard as any tech company to compete for skilled employees.

If you're the kind of person they want to hire, you have lots of fantastic other choices. So choose something else. Unless you're planning to pull a Snowden (and have gonads of steel).

And if you do decide to help code the surveillance state, the rest of us may take that into consideration in future hiring, buying, and investing decisions.

>If you're the kind of person they want to hire, you have lots of fantastic other choices. So choose something else.

I am the kind of person they'd want to hire and what has kept me from applying is the relative low pay and not being in my area. As an engineer, you'd get access to cool tech in an interesting domain.

>And if you do decide to help code the surveillance state, the rest of us may take that into consideration in future hiring, buying, and investing decisions.

Really? Because you don't use Amazon, Microsoft, Google? You wouldn't hire a qualified candidate if she had worked at the NSA?

So are you saying that the actions that the NSA have taken are not against your conscience? If so, then I would hesitate to hire you because ethical and conscience-based decisions are key to having trust in employees.

>If so, then I would hesitate to hire you because ethical and conscience-based decisions are key to having trust in employees.

Because every employee working for the NSA is doing a-thing-that-you-don't-like(tm) and not something different or important. I wouldn't want to work for someone that simplifies complex issues anyway.

In this scenario, the qualifications of the person or what function they served at the NSA is pretty much irrelevant. (That said, as a hiring manager I wouldn't take what a former NSA employee told me about the functions they served at face value.) The poster is brainstorming ways in which average citizens could cripple an organization seen as out of control. While this particular method may hurt the individuals who work there, and leave the overall hiring a little less unqualified, it doesn't mean that the idea has no credence.

> Refuse to work with/at NSA until their policies change

Don't agree with this. Boycotts relying on cooperation and trust between unorganized members are doomed to fail and only hurts those that take part in such boycott.

There's also such a thing as having a conscience. I agree that organizing and solidarity are necessary for effective political action but let's not discount the power of resistance against the moral turpitude of the day.

I'm not going to jail due to fighting the government about disclosure of the users of my dumb smartphone game. It's fun to play the moral high ground, but let's not pretend we're the bastions of society because we encrypt user data.

So you think that after you join NSA, you'd participate in such a boycott against NSA? Or will you be even more terrified about losing the job you've already gotten, and try to be on the "safe side" as much as possible to keep your job?

If when you join a company, you lose your personal identity, your employer has gotten a bargain on your hourly rate. There will always be another job.

I think it would be hard to build a movement around the things you list. The core competency of the hacker/programmer community is technical and a lot of the technical solutions tend to have significant difficulties in implementation (such as email encryption).

Why not focus on a very limited number of simple to understand technical goals. For example, you could advocate the creation of private encrypted tunnels between large corporate networks. So that all traffic is routed by default over a VPN if such a route exists. This lets encryption be a compliance issue for an IT department rather than a user level app problem.

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