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Comment by strgrd | Hacker News Reader

With only a brief skim of your talk, I wonder what you think of the moral implications of this project being DARPA supported.

> ...DARPA said Memex wasn’t about destroying the privacy protections offered by Tor, even though it wanted to help uncover criminals’ identities. “None of them [Tor, the Navy, Memex partners] want child exploitation and child pornography to be accessible, especially on Tor. We’re funding those groups for testing...”

Doesn't this sound like the same "protect the kids" line embedded in every press release for not-so-subtle government spy programs? $1 million is a lot of money, and I'm sure being able to name drop DARPA in any conversation about your company carries its own cache -- surely you feel pressured to design your optimizations to fit DARPA's needs. Does it feel weird to write code that's being used to track people? Or is that off base?

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To be clear, our projects (at Parse.ly) don't have anything to do with Tor. In fact, I didn't know much about Tor until researching DARPA and the other participants involved in the program.

But, I'll address your general question, which is, do I have a moral/ethical problem with DARPA funding some of our open source work, such as streamparse and pykafka?

The answer is a resounding "no". There are very few funding sources for open source work. Part of DARPA's funding supports fundamental tech advancements (famously, the Internet itself and GPS) and recently, important open source projects (such as, Apache Spark and the Julia language).

Now, there is no doubt in my mind that open source software is used for intelligence purposes, regardless of its funding source. To restrict ones contribution to F/OSS based on the fear that some government or entity may use it toward an end you disagree with seems a battle you can only win through willful ignorance.

The nature of open source software is that people can use it however they please (within legal limits, of course). This is a trade-off I accept with eyes wide open, and in my mind, the benefit to the community for F/OSS always wins out.

> In fact, I didn't know much about Tor until researching DARPA and the other participants involved in the program.

This reminds me of the movie Cube :(.

Brilliant little unknown film. First time I've seen it mentioned, ever.

It's a means of searching public-facing (albeit cloaked) content, not a means of tracking people specifically.

If anything, it's ethically much superior to what the NSA is doing: law enforcement searches for content that is clearly criminal (child pornography, actual terroristic threats, murder-for-hire services), then requests a warrant after showing the content to a judge. That's how the process should work; identify something illegal at the front, identify probable cause, then go in through the back with court approval. These search engines can only find content that is already accessible to other users.

The NSA is already in the back, looking for justification for already being there, then after finding something, lying and saying they went in through the front.

Of course, this software could theoretically be used to search a database of data unethically exfiltrated without a warrant, but that's not what the stated goal is and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that.

They're using it to search for "human trafficking", by which they seem to mean adult women having sex in exchange for money. Oh, sorry, adult women who describe themselves as "latina" having for money - mustn't forget that part. (Seriously. Look at the pictures in the article.) Minor details like whether the women in question are actually trafficked, or whether they should be deporting them right back into the hands of the people who trafficked them if they are, have never been terribly important to the police in the US. This will be used to hurt vulnerable women.

> Does it feel weird to write code that's being used to track people?

Does it feel weird to design mechanical implements designed for the sole purpose of destroying human life?

I'm not speaking of drones and missiles, mind you; I'm speaking of small arms, the very same tools so staunchly defended by libertarian lovers of the Second Amendment everywhere.

There are plenty of valid reasons to want to track someone over a network like Tor, just as there are insidious reasons. E.g. all the reasons that make legal, warrant-protected wiretaps a legitimate function of governments worldwide.

But even if there weren't valid reasons, other countries will develop (or already have) similar capabilities, so making DARPA your line in the sand for this is missing the point anyways.

>With only a brief skim of your talk, I wonder what you think of the moral implications of this project being DARPA supported.

You're not adding to the conversation by pointing this out. We can all clearly see this for what it is.

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