I do not want to sound shockingly naive, but I wonder how these people can sleep at night. You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in the world, who will use your technology to track down and brutally torture incredibly brave human rights activists.
How can you do this, and still get up in the morning while looking at yourself in the mirror? I can understand petty crime if the alternative is watching your family starve, but these are all skilled software developers, it's not like they will have a hard time finding a job.
The people who are involved in this should be forced to watch videos of what those friendly governments do to the civil rights activists they catch.
People who join the US army should be forced to watch videos of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture, they should be forced to watch testimonies of people in drone-bombed municipalities. But I am afraid that for many the "we good, they bad" mentality would justify those atrocities. Like another commenter said, who is bad and who is good really depends on your viewpoint.
I think that's a little bit of an excessively simple viewpoint. The US army does much more than Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and drones (in fact, a lot of what you just described is probably managed by agents outside the army such as the CIA). To flip this around, should every employee of a Silicon Valley company be shamed for rising property values in the area that have left many homeless? Should every Google employee be shamed for the illegal wifi capture done by Streetview vans?
> should every employee of a Silicon Valley company be shamed for rising property values in the area that have left many homeless?
Property values have nothing to do with homelessness. The roots of homelessness lie in the closure of mental-health facilities all across the US and California. These people need mental health counseling more than anything else.
it's not just closure of mental-health institution. You may also say the roots of homelessness lie in liberal values.
Here is a bit of context for often mentioned closure of mental hospitals/services: at first there was a decision NOT to force anyone with mental issues to be admitted into such establishments against their will unless they dangerous to themself/others. And only ofter that closures of half-empty at that point mental facilities started.
How do you think, how many of those psychos on the streets of SF/SJ will seek institutionalising on their own?
" You may also say the roots of homelessness lie in liberal values."
LOL - no. Liberal values include state housing which is proven time and time again to end mass homelessness at a smaller cost than the law enforcement, judicial and social cost of managing homeless populations. Liberal values strongly support taking from the rich to support the poor, including the mentally ill and homeless. You do not see many liberal values at play here.
Conservative values of "everyone must work, no work means you get no pay, no pay means you have no home" is the core cause of modern homelessness.
Not everyone in our society will or can work, and those who don't are lucky enough to be supported privately or publically or they're eventually homeless. This is the reality of a conservative value system.
Also, it's not just mental illness, homeless and mental illness are not synonyms. Many people are homeless, living in cars, couch surfing, and are not mentally ill requiring institutionalization.
Not everyone in our society will or can work, and those who don't are lucky enough to be supported privately or publically or they're eventually homeless. This is the reality of a conservative value system.
That's not the reality of a conservative value system. That's just reality.
>LOL - no. Liberal values include state housing which is proven time and time again to end mass homelessness at a smaller cost than the law enforcement, judicial and social cost of managing homeless populations. Liberal values strongly support taking from the rich to support the poor, including the mentally ill and homeless. You do not see many liberal values at play here.
It's pretty ridiculous to say that when in democrat-controlled areas (I will strip the political posturing from the "liberal"/"conservative" weasel words to the teams they refer to, democrats and republicans) there is still plenty of homelessness, very little state housing, and plenty of law enforcement.
DC has been controlled by democrats for decades, as has Chicago, and I know DC has been having a great time selling off homeless shelters so developers can keep gentrification rolling.
Pretending that the other team is responsible for all the world's ills is so juvenile. Can you really not see how partisanship has literally blinded you?
That's almost certainly true. However, it's equally almost certain that they would agree with the statement that the Republican Party embodies conservative values.
I'd also like to clarify: I was neither assuming nor asserting that the Democratic Party "embodies" "liberal" "values". Rather, I was asserting that the use of the term "liberal" is a weasel word meant to refer to a in-group centered around the Democratic Party, not any political ideology.
I'll paraphrase it for you: psychos on streets are caused not by closure of mental health institutions, but by decision not to put them there in the first place. Closing of empty hospital after that was just a question of time.
to clarify it further:
I'm not trying to talk about homelessness in general. That's very complex subject. State housing - haha, welcome to 6th street/any sro in tenderloin, tell me how great that solution is.
DanBC: how does what work? It's not about availability of services, it about engagement in it. There are programs in US too.
Something people here looks like don't understand: there are resources for homeless. May not be enough but it's not nothing. There multiple programs to help. How about places where you should be sober to stay? AND HOW ABOUT STREET PEOPLE WHO'RE SAYING FK THAT, I"LL BE DOING WHAT I WANT? how about all the free rides to all the hospitals and emergencies? do you think they turned down? People here on HN are sitting in warm chairs and projecting themself on others. NOT EVERYONE IS THE SAME. And plenty of people on streets are genuinely fked up. but you may keep thinking about throwing little money toward them and how it suppose to fix it all.
actually fuck that. I keep forgetting how people like to talk about ideas and theories about crazies (crazy enough to be shitting in the middle of main city streets in front of eateries) suggesting that they just need a little money thrown their way to fix it all. Those are degenerates and not someone who just doesn't work.
I find it incredibly ironic that you're espousing these types of arguments in a thread dedicated to black-hat programs used by developing world States.
To anyone without sufficient knowledge, such tools would lend an air of almost magical ability to the reputation of organizations who already rely on fear, persecution, physical & emotional violence and so on.
The irony being that many of the tools of the trade can be used to break the will of those deemed non-acceptable. I'd suggest you look up "gas lighting".
Points if you understand what my user-name is referencing.
>Should every Google employee be shamed for the illegal wifi capture done by Streetview vans?
Oh FFS. I dislike Google. But doing tcpdump and forgetting to write -s 64 should hardly be a crime. Just because courts are technologically incompetent doesn't change the ethics of it.
No, the landlords and the activists who block new development should be shamed. They're milking the tech industry for all it's worth, with the side effect that middle income people are thrown under the bus. The tech industry is the victim of this scam.
> To flip this around
And that is to flip it a lot. The talk was about direct help to commit crimes against humanity. Your examples don't apply at all.
I think that helping dictatorial regimes to commit crimes should be itself a crime. "I just did it for money" is not an excuse legal nor moral.
> The US army does much more than Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo [...]
Sure. If it was just that stuff we'd abolish it.
But recruits (and the public) need to see the atrocities they needlessly commit all to easily. Without knowing the costs of the tool, how can we reasonably use it? Hmm?
> [...] illegal wifi capture [...]
No, nobody should be held liable for breaking stupid laws and making it illegal to listen to radio signals (that even pass through your body) is not only rude and unreasonable, but also 100% unworkable. Such a law only provides broken but apparently working security - the worst kind. Users think it's hard to get into their devices so they don't demand stronger devices, and so actual bad-guys have a field day.
Rising property values doesn't sound that bad compared to actively helping repressive governments to hunt, torture and murder the people speaking against them.
Another reply mentioned how the same questions can be asked of people joining the US military. And I'll add the examples of buying clothing made in sweatshops, hi-tech devices made in sweatshops, blood diamonds, bottled water, and even factory-farmed meat if your concern for suffering extends beyond human suffering.
It's easy to ignore the consequences of your choices when they do not directly impact you or the people you know and care about. I am not crying 'hypocrisy!' here--I take part in these systems too--only pointing to things that many of us do that can be viewed with equal abhorrence by those who pay attention to them. And I think that is the answer to your question: it's all in what you pay attention to.
A lot of people fail to understand what sociopaths are like. They do not, can not care in the way that most people do. The best they can do is pretend to care.
We should be very careful about labeling selfish people as sociopaths. It's easier to believe that there are incurable monsters among us, because this lets us be self-righteous in containing and punishing them.
IMHO simply realizing that there is a scale of selfishness that extends way beyond where you think the limits are is more predictive and actionable.
Because they're disconnected from the consequences of their actions.
I really doubt they're getting back business case studies talking about how they tracked down some dude and tortured him thanks to the information gleaned from their products (but now we can find out if they did get these).
I've asked people who work in these fields those same questions. Answers were along the lines of "someone else will do it if I don't" or "it's less violent than the actual violence the government would use otherwise." The reality of it is that you have to stop caring about the effects of your actions at some point: all the stuff we use daily is a product of exploitation and suffering of others with a dash of ruining the planet for future generations, yet we don't have a problem looking ourselves at the mirror.
You know, this is what I keep asking myself about all the fine folks in defense, developing the newest fucking weapons/plane/gun/drone/whatever which _will_ be used people in other countries.
We should introduce a "walk away from your job"-kickstarter thing to encourage leaving those positions.
There's a wide range of moral gray area there. Imagine, e.g., a US contractor who builds converters that make dumb bombs into smart bombs. The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
> The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
This has been used as a talking point pro smart bombs for some time now - and yet we have still bombings of weddings with a civilian hit rate of nearly 100%.
Killing is is still killing, no matter how smart the weapon is.
I think you should check out how bombing was conducted before the introduction of the smart bomb. We used to intentionally and systematically destroy entire civilian populations.
I'll let the people bombing you know that you are unhappy they have bombs and refuse to make your own to deter them from bombing you because you don't support the use of bombs.
Would you like your message to include the sound of the bomb explosion that killed your brother or should we leave that out?
The point people are trying to get you to understand is that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of years of human history that has shown that when two groups of people disagree and cannot come to an agreement: they war.
Even when they reach an agreement, it's possible that one group will backstab the other group. Or perhaps they interpreted a given part of an agreement in different ways and are now arguing over which is the proper interpretation (a naive understanding of the Shia-Sunni relations)?
So Group A decides they are correct and will force Group B to agree by force. They approach Group B with their army armed with bows and swords. Group B has to submit to Group A, die, or fight back. To fight back they need a better trained army with superior bows and superior swords.
Group A is fearful that Group B now has a superior army with superior weaponry. So Group A invents guns. The sword-armed troops of Group B no longer stand a fighting chance against Group A. Fearing they will have to submit to Group A or die - Group B invents explosives... and so on and so on.
Now we have nuclear weapons that devastate miles of land and kill anyone caught in the blast. Fearing that a war between Group A and Group B would kill both sides and a Group C might enforce their ways, Group A and Group B have decided against using such powerful weapons against each other.
Now imagine you have 250 groups.
248 don't believe in using bombs.
Which 2 groups are in power? Hint: it's not one of the 248 "peaceful" groups.
A nation's strong defensive capabilities deter action. If Ukraine had NATO level arms that could counter Russia's weapons, there would be no war in Ukraine right now. Instead, their military is all Soviet relics that current-gen and even most last-gen Russian arms can easily overrun; thus the Russian led artillery, Russian led AA, Russian led forces, and Russian special ops making mincemeat of their military.
Its incredible how people pretend deterrence isn't real or a social benefit. Nation state warfare follows pretty simple game theory rules. You'd think techies would understand this. We're living under the most peaceful time in human history thanks to major deterrence, including but not limited to nuclear arms.
--
Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.
The alternative to cold wars is hot wars. Do you really want another WWII (60 million dead)? The idea that peace will happen if we make shitty arms is historically untrue. The idea that peace happens when we make cutting-edge arms is historically true.
There is very little difference between arms and modern industrial chemicals. Without arms, we can still kill large populations by destroying their water supplies and crops. Even if you managed to rid the world of every weapon more advanced than a knife, if/when conflict arises, we can kill populations at a grander scale than ever before.
He is is making the correct assumption that even if some people want peace others will be more than happy to kill you and rationalise that it was actually a good thing. So you are both right: the alternative is peace or war. I would definitely prepare for war though. To do otherwise is naive and gratuitously stupid.
Si vis pacem, para bellum may be a practical advice, but the outcome of it is an arms race. Which is a big problem, because that feedback loop ties up resources and manpower that could be better used elsewhere. So even if it is the most practical option now (since we don't have a single global government), we need to recognize how shitty it is and maybe figure out how to reduce its impact.
But the nuclear game theorist's argument has always been that while functionally more dangerous (i.e. life on this planet could be obliterated at any moment), a nuclear-tipped détente has greater stability than any alternative (i.e. it is least likely to lead to hostilities).
I see the argument for nuclear de-foresting a lot like the argument against nuclear power. Yes, at face value it seems an obvious best option. However, when compared to the realistic alternatives, other approaches may be preferable.
It also allows both sides to maintain a minimal standing army while maximizing the cost of an opponent initiating hostilities. Most of the West's strategic nuclear position has historically been to counter an overwhelming Warsaw Pact numerical advantage in European conventional forces.
Deterrence indeed; the nations keenest right now on developing their own nuclear weapons (DPRK and Iran, I'm looking at you) are doing it because they know damn well it's the only way to be safe from the world's current invasion-happy globe-trotting nation and favoured sidekick (who, to be fair, do seem a lot less keen to invade other countries after the long series of monumental clusterfucks in Iraq and Afghanistan). The question is can they develop them before said warstarters decide to invade anyway?
China remembers what the US was thinking the last time it was yomping about near the Yalu River and certainly won't put up with anyone invading the DPRK, so they're safe at least from that quarter, but if I was Iran, having watched Iraq get invaded and then screwed over for a decade for essentially no reason whatsoever, I'd be really keen to have some kind of deterrence before the US decided to invade.
There is a relatively seductive and possibly correct argument that stability and predictability trumps human rights.
It's the reason Russians can be nostalgic for Stalin, etc. Revolution is messy. If the activists who were pressuring Assad for reforms had known that his reaction and the counter-reaction would lead to 250k+ deaths and the destruction of their country, would they have pushed as hard? Would they have been content with a phased approach, even though that would mean continued violations of their human rights?
One mans freedom fighter or activist is another mans terrorist.
Besides, it is human nature to be morally flexible. Many people don't really register atrocities of any scale as long as they don't affect their daily lives.
That's not to say this isn't terrible or shameful behaviour. It's just common terrible, shameful behaviour.
You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in the world, who will use your technology to track down and brutally torture incredibly brave human rights activists.
You make so many assumptions about the viewpoint of the other person and then state that you cannot understand how they behave like this. Of course you cannot, you've phrased the question in a way which doesn't necessarily even make sense from their point of view.
Of course, everybody has reasons, that's a given. Ranging from different perspectives (that is, knowing things others don't, or being ignorant to things others know), over rationalizations to pathology - nobody does anything ever without reason.
Yet "I didn't know" or "I really like doing this" or "I can't feel empathy and/or reason well" are not always a good argument for doing something. It's a good reason to not hate a person, but not to just let them do whatever.
Okay, if they're willing to issue a statement I'd be willing to hear them out :P But that's not the same as someone saying they might have a good reason.
It's very possible that I've made some unfair assumptions. Could you give me a more fair representation of what goes into the mind of someone selling surveillance software to Sudan or Omar?
I actually have software that'd be a decent fit for this use case. I'm working on bringing it to market for VoIP companies to use in troubleshooting networks. (Hint: It's super effective. At one place we cut ticket response times down by an enormous factor.) And one benefit I'm planning on adding is lawful intercept. A lot of VoIP companies are sitting at risk of getting a valid warrant and having no way to respond. Some companies sell technical insurance (pay monthly, they'll overnight an intercept box if you get a warrant) for this exact reason and it's not cheap. Only problem is CALEA has this dumbass weird format to provide the data in. But hey, that's worth like $100K a year per company or so...
But it'd also be rather well suited for a government wanting to monitor connections. Just some scaling issues. My thought process is currently going "Well I could definitely use the money. And that'd put me in a better position to compete. Otherwise another competitor will do it. Or worse, an open source version will step up to the scale."
I'm not sure it's much different than selling general services to the public. A lot of irrational people are going to buy your product and perhaps that might propel them to success. Taken to its conclusion, I'd have a super limited market as most people are idiots so given a choice, I'd only want to help a very limited range of people. I just have to put my personal feelings aside if I'm to deal with anyone in the real world.
Here's the problem: you think someone else will do it anyway thus damage is certain, so you can at least be the first to profit from it. And guess what, your competitors probably think the same thing. And you'll all rush to delivering morally dubious products. Because hey, if someone will defect anyway, it's best I defect fist.
I am increasingly convinced that the very point of morality is to steer society away from stupid coordination failures like this.
Fair point. I guess if I was convinced that my actions would actually matter, then I'd care. It's like voting for a third candidate in US elections - pointless.
Anyways I'm far more interested in how to get to a point to sell to governments the first place. Hacking Team's marketing seems juvenile and lame from the naming to the way they phrase stuff. But at E200K per license, they were obviously successful.
Someone's gonna do it anyways? So the choice is whether you do something and profit off it (and possibly use the money to accomplish good things) or if you let someone else do it and make the money and perhaps do bad things. Pretty easy choice for me.
In fact, I've written software to analyze VoIP networks (troubleshooting) at scale, and now I'm wondering if I can retarget that and sell to larger entities for much more money. I hadn't really though of it before, but I guess some of these shittier countries wouldn't be able to simply do the engineering themselves even if it's really not that hard.
On a separate note, we should be free to pursue scientific and engineering knowledge without having to deal with consequences of idiots that misuse such things. At least in this branch, imagine if all physicists last century had avoided furthering physics over nuclear weapons concerns. Now it's nowhere near as cool, but the challenge of indexing multiple 40G+ connections at linerate? It'll be fun at a minimum.
You can apply this reasoning to justify for absolutely anything that you want to do. And it is false.
> On a separate note, we should be free to pursue scientific and engineering knowledge without having to deal with consequences of idiots that misuse such things.
Completely agree. But this people are the "idiots" that are taking the scientific research of others and putting it in bad hands. And what they are doing should be punishable by law.
They are very similar to military contractors and weapon manufacturers, except that their industry has so far no regulations that prevents them for selling their product to anyone that has money to spend. Government could start defining this kind of tools as weapons but that prevent them for using it on their own population, and weapon trade is a very high profit industry.
Even if these outfits only sell to "good" countries there's no guarantee those countries won't give access to shady regimes like Egypt or Saudi Arabia to round up and torture political dissidents as these are supposedly allies of the West.
How can you do this, and still get up in the morning while looking at yourself in the mirror? I can understand petty crime if the alternative is watching your family starve, but these are all skilled software developers, it's not like they will have a hard time finding a job.
The people who are involved in this should be forced to watch videos of what those friendly governments do to the civil rights activists they catch.