Since there's quite a few people here working at US companies with access to lots of user data, but they may not have decision making capacity, I just thought I'll link the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, out of context and for no reason at all https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
If some data is shared with an external entity, it likely needs to be included in a few usual disclaimers, with at least a few meetings to clarify the exact wording and verification of the legal implications with the right dept and double check how it complies with others data protection rules, and don't forget the audit, and I think this contains a mistake so maybe let's investigate this issue first, and ...
Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for? Especially when they’re an industry that knows itself well?
They will find out. And act accordingly. And your career will end, with the mess cleaned up and billable to you.
Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.
Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.
The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
No because employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause. That's why ad-tech is so effective in the first place.
Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for).
The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).
Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”.
Does your argument still hold up?
>”employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause.”
“employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions directly cause deadly harm.”
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be voting with our wallets and supporting these people but your initial argument is flawed. They produce goods precisely because consumers buy them…
I didn't say "tech", I said "ad-tech" and "big tech" (meaning ad-tech like Google, not TSMC) which aren't morally neutral like ammunition is. Invasion of privacy and exploitation of private information is an inherent part of their business model.
You can avoid coke but approximately every brand in the supermarket is funding ad-tech. And even if you can find brands that don't, your supermarket is likely funding ad-tech to advertise itself so you can't go to there at all. Maybe you still have a farmer's market but chances are that they're advertising online.
You can't buy a car or any smartphones you've ever heard of, you won't find an ISP that doesn't advertise online, and good luck finding a decent job without supporting ad-tech.
Coke is always a discretionary purchase. Basic food staples are not. Kroger relies on national brand advertising to lure people from the perimiter of the store into junk food land.
Most (maybe not all) basic food staples have store brand alternatives. Even junk food does. Sometimes (maybe even often) those products are just repackaged version of the name brand.
If the goal is to decrease money going into advertisement budgets, then the best thing you can do is buy store brand when possible. Even if both products are ultimately made from Nestle corp, the cheaper store brand will send less money into Nestle's pockets which means less money for advertising.
That's what I mean by "avoiding nationally branded products". A package of "signature frozen peas" will taste just as good as the "birds eye green peas" without sending money to a major company (Looks like all the major companies have spun off their frozen food departments, but at one time this was a Nestle brand. I spent too much time looking into major frozen food brands :D).
The advertisement budgets for the grocers are simply a lot smaller than that of the national brands across the board. It also doesn't seem (to me at least) to have been really spent on invasive advertisements.
There are degrees of culpability in any discussion. Generally, this is approximated by how much damage you individually are doing to your society compared to the alternative. You have to consume a lot of a company's products before your impact is comparable to working for them.
Exactly. If you have regular meetings on how to best progress development of the torment nexus, then you can't claim innocence just because you aren't the one deploying the torment nexus for torment-purposes.
If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product.
If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.
With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.
There's nothing voluntary when your options are homelessness and starvation. The bank won't accept your morals in lieu of money when accepting mortgage repayments.
Thankfully I don't live in the US and I don't work for anything even remotely related to this. I don't know if I would have the fortitude in the current US job market (based on what I read here) to threat the well being of the wife and daughter by taking principled stances.
Dilapidating the world for an easy buck is gonna bite you and/or your kids eventually. We have reached technological sophistication where certain kinds of mistakes are not allowed if civilization as we know it is to survive.
When the bank reposseses the house because you are not paying the mortgage, this will bite you and your kids too.
You can call it an "easy buck", and it is just coping. An easy way to make some poor schlemiel creating a miserable report with user location data during his sprint into a greedy bastard that is just enriching his bank account out of the suffering of plenty.
Atomization enables this. Any number of individuals are individually weak against their employer/some org, but a big group of them can be quite powerful.
If many were to sacrifice their morals out of financial pressure easily (the control over which is in increasingly few hands) the path the US is treading becomes pretty deterministic... We've seen it in the movies and read it in the books.
You guys seem to need collective action and civil disobedience.
Then again.. maybe the will for collective action comes only after the repossessions...
One of the reasons I chose to move to Europe is because I value the mininal safety nets and labor protections on this side of the pond. Yes, I make less money and pay more taxes but I believe this is how society should work, I reject the hyper individualism that ignores any sort of collective.
But I am also not naive. Expecting individuals to take the burden for decisions way beyond their control is silly. It takes immense fortitude to threaten the well being of those dear to you based on principle, when the only outcome is your own suffering (the company will likely find another employee right away anyway).
There's nothing extreme in what I said, it is actually how the world we live in works.
It's an extremely unfair system based on coercion - you are beaten down into submission by the implicit threat that without work you won't be able to make ends meet.
Maybe you have a family that can support you financially. Maybe you already own the place where you live and could save up money over an extended period that you can weather a storm. If you are in these situations, that's great, but it is also an extremely privileged position to be in.
Absolutely no one with the skills to work in the software industry is in a position where working for unethical mega-corporations or literally starving are their only options.
Okay, I'll accept your point for those software engineers that have a choice between working at an immoral company or "homelessness and starvation".
Thankfully, that isn't most of them. Despite the job market not being as good as it used to be, the vast majority of software engineers in the US could still find another job to pay the bills before becoming homeless and starving.
If that's the case, great then. I did work for a company I find morally objectionable in the past (i.e.: evil), and I eventually found my way out.
At the time I was still paying rent and needed employment to keep my visa. I also had little savings, and an ill parent that depended on me. I certainly couldn't take the principled stance of "fuck this, I'm out".
My point is that if you are in the position to take a principled stance, good for you. Maybe you already own your home, maybe you had time to accumulate savings, maybe you can do a few interviews and land a less evil job even in the current market (and perhaps a pay cut won't be a massive blow in you life). All that is awesome, but also a position of relative privilege.
Prescribing principled stance as universal without recognizing this is just cruelty though.
I sympathize with your situation, and I'm not calling you a monster. But "I had no choice, I had people depending on me" is the exact reasoning that has enabled every atrocity carried out by ordinary people; it's the banality of evil.
None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.
Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.
So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.
I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.
(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )
From the angle of your 2015 post, I can at least see where you're coming from. Modern adtech is much more granular and up to date than a census ever was.
I understand quite well. The banality of evil is a thing because most people have actual very little power to enact meaningful change. Risking yourself for the well being of complete strangers is commendable, but often has an obscene cost for the individual.
I reject that societal and systemic issues can be fixed by individual action, unless as an individual you are extremely powerful (and the ones that are typically are the ones causing the societal and systemic harm).
As an common man you can do small things. Do a lousy job when processing the paperwork of evil. Malicious cooperation to the powers that be. Small acts of charity. That sort of thing.
Systemic change can only be achieved through collective action. Easier said than done.
The world is cursed. Life is tough even at the best of times. The system as it is ensures compliance through coercion and threats.
I honestly believe we would agree more than disagree on the current state of things. I just reject the approach that individual action is a way out of this sort of mess.
Perhaps to show the level of privilege I enjoy as a software engineer with some level of seniority, I have had zero problem resigning from a position (more than once in fact) because I objected to something my employer was doing. It's been enough for me to filter potential opportunities exclusively to tech-for-good concerns.
Sure, I don't earn half a million a year total comp to kiss some billionaire's ass, but I still have a very comfortable lifestyle that is well above the median.
Yeah, software is perhaps one of the industries where the "I got bills to pay" argument is the least justifiable. If your lifestyle can only be sustained by working for unethical companies then your lifestyle is unethical. You certainly don't need to sell your soul to FAANG to live a comfortable and happy life.
> With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food
You really think adtech is the way to avoid starving on the street? There are a hell of a lot of jobs between entry level and adtech dev that could give you the same basic peace of mind.
There was never shortage of developers who "would sell their soul" for higher salary in conditions where job with slightly lower salary was easily available. I really do not think we have to pretend to our selves that if one of us does it, it is because he/she is poor and the kids would starve.
Also, layers are resining from positions in doj they find unethical. It is not like the jobs for them were easier to find.
Blind is like 4chan, not representative of the vast majority of software engineers but rather their own self contained bubble. I wouldn't use Blind as exemplary of anything in this case.
Considering there are hundreds or thousands of users on this site who have taken cash—either directly or indirectly—in exchange for building the world's most egregious examples of privacy-abusing software that were formerly only memes in 80s sci-fi movies. Yet they choose to focus their energy on getting upset over things they don't understand and can't control—like immigration enforcement.
Hey there, I quit a job over similar concerns, knowing it would lead to a >70% decrease in comp. Without a significant nest egg or wealth, whether personal or through family.
Now let me say the same: But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
There, now there's no longer a high horse concern.
>...I quit a job over similar concerns, knowing it would lead to a >70% decrease in comp. Without a significant nest egg or wealth, whether personal or through family.
It takes real courage and it costs to have principles. And just like I detest those that fall for the money I have insane respect for those that stand up.
@anoym - There isn’t something inherently bad about working for law enforcement or national security agencies as long as what you’re doing cannot be used now or in the future unethically. But too be honest I think this is a ‘don’t hate the player’ type things, if palantir didn’t exist, another company would take its place - privacy legislation is the only thing that prevents it, not relying on ethics of the masses.
I strongly agree. There's even the argument to be made that if no legislation exists, even if you're anti X, you might get incentivized to build a company for X just so it's not a fan of X at the helm of the top company for X.
Blaming it on the employees is pointless. It's the law that should dictate what's allowed and what isn't and if the lawmaking or enforcement isn't working you probably want some "good" people in those companies.
All Law enforcement and Nat Sec of the United States is inherently unethical, or at minimum tied to ethically questionabke tactics. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world, death penalties ect. Our Military isnt exactly ethical in its missions, pretty much since WW2
You're basically saying "There isnt anything inherently wrong about working for the 4th Reich"
For instance, the local cops checking in on grandma, or those checking in on a troubled child are really not the bad guys. You WANT them when you need them.
Not all LEOs are brown shirts, In my experience, few are, but they give the lot a bad rap.
Treating LEOs uniformly as evil is just counterproductive
Yes but I don't have a definitive map of who are the good ones, so we must treat it as a life or death situation and suitably defend ourselves in an interaction with any of them.
Why would I want cops doing that instead of social workers or teachers doing it?
No one becomes a cop because they want to be nice and help vulnerable people. Some might say they did but that is some coping technique. Being a cop involves exerting violence towards people who are vulnerable and desperate, and to become one you have to be fine with this. Some would say that this alone is enough to deem a person ethically dubious.
Even if one would accept the premise that society requires some degree of organised violence towards its members, one would also have to handle the question of accountability. Reasonably this violence should be accountable in relation to the victims of it, and police institutions inherently are not.
I think that we should also note that the other person above used "childishly" to denote something negative, apparently they don't think of kids as the light of the world and childish as something fun and inspiring. This is something that makes me quite suspicious of their morals.
Maybe you and I have vastly different experience with police. Disclaimer: From a rather small US state.
Your other note is also well taken, it does however not imply that anything a kid or teen does is OK or automatically positive.
Finally, it's OK to be suspicious. I am too. What I am saying is that one cannot just make the decision "all cops are evil or must be treated as such" and then hope for a good outcome in all cases. I argue it's a better policy to keep an open mind and decide on a case by case basis.
Is it worth pointing out? It seems counterproductive to respond to a call to action by sarcastically complaining about the people being called to action.
As effective calls to action often do! It's almost tautological when I say it this way, but if you want people working in ad tech to oppose ICE you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.
Perhaps the conflict is that you just want to make people who work in ad tech feel bad, and don't care whether or not they enable ICE? That's fine, I suppose, there's industries I feel the same way about. But then we don't have much to talk about and I'm not sure what you hope to gain from being here. To me opposing ICE is very important - I think tobacco companies are pretty bad too, but if ICE sent out a request for cartons of cigarettes I'd shovel praise on them for declining.
> you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.
Yes—and one of the tools we have for that is shunning.
If enough of us who are appalled and disgusted by the state of things, and the people who willingly lend themselves to creating said state, make our disgust with those people known, it can lead to some of them choosing to act differently, because they care about being thought well of by their fellow techies.
I agree with what you're saying, but shunning has to be selective to be effective. People have to believe that you won't shun them if they avoid the terrible things you're trying to stop. It's too much to simultaneously beef with ICE, adtech in general, Tesla, $8 donuts, and anyone who lives in a trendy neighborhood.
If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.
Powerful people are paying a lot of money to locate their dispersed enemies. Think of the system in Palestine that tracks wanted terrorists back to their homes at night, so their whole families can be exploded.
What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.
I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.
People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.
Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.
Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.
The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.
I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.
Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.
Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.
The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.
This has bean a long time coming. This is a stark reminder that you should consider who the future stewards of whatever you are building might be.
We built a vast surveillance network under the guise of servings ads and making money, and lost track of how this power could be abused by an entity not aligned with our own values.
Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.
Well I guess I mean the pubic in general. I also don’t necessarily mean willfully creating technology that can be abused.
For example, we all stood by when we let Twitter and other US-based social media become the main way politicians communicate with the public. This has, in my opinion, had disastrous consequences on how they communicate and actively blocks politicians from achieving consensus.
This is to say that you don’t need to have actively worked on something.
I think that expecting the public to reason through the myriad n-order effects that were going to happen from the whiplash of technology in the last 30 years is a little much.
However, I think a lot of people in tech could and did see those consequences coming and were pretty vocal about it. So, I don't think we all did stand by, we exercised what limited power we had. I don't want to seem accusatory here and I don't mean it harshly, but maybe you just didn't see the folks who have talked about problems like this.
We also as individuals [without billions] have fairly limited capacity to directly act against these things. I donate a fair bit to the EFF for instance and I've sent outreach to representatives multiple times over the years for specific bills and when its possible I vote against surveillance.
You are right, I do acknowledge their efforts but did not do so here, which I should have.
I don't necessarily mean to berate the public, but rather the politicians, who saw that they could use social media/big tech for their own personal gain, and the media, who went along with the narrative that putting all our public communication into privately owned platforms was good for democracy. And maybe our own governments and institutions (speaking from a EU perspective) for dropping the ball in protecting us.
I think Evgeny Morozov's 2010-ish writing was prophetic in this regard.
Several years ago in Stockholm (2014) during a conference focus on the Internet, the Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign held a talk on how they revolutionary the campaign process by using targeted advertisement campaign on social networks, mostly Facebook, and how effective the technique was to reach voters during fund raising and getting their voters to vote. In their view, this was the first major use of social media during an election. The talk is still available on Youtube for those interested. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3WS9bs3Aps)
There are also articles from 2011 where political commenters noted how the Obama campaign broke new ground using targeted Facebook advertisement and outreach, and how EU politicians could learn from it. The many smaller, but in total larger donations given to Obama was contrasted with Hillary Clinton who had larger individual donations but less in total, and the commenters attributed this to the use of Facebook and finding and meeting a younger audience on those online platforms.
People thought that targeted advertisement was a good thing and politicians looked on the techniques from that election and saw the potential for power. It was mostly just those privacy advocates, free software advocates and security experts that expressed doubt and warned about the dangers.
Yes! I distinctly remember the time magazine issue and article about this. This is exactly what I mean: we normalize and celebrate technologies without realizing what the repercussions are when we give the same tools and power to others.
Yes because not assenting to the anon rando who makes a snide insulting comment is outside the bounds of normal well regulated self interest. I can't possibly eyeroll any harder at you.
"We also as individuals [without billions] have fairly limited capacity to directly act against these things. I donate a fair bit to the EFF for instance and I've sent outreach to representatives multiple times over the years for specific bills and when its possible I vote against surveillance." - from a parallel thread I was commenting in.
I'm totally fine stopping at minimizing my culpability. I sleep just fine at night and don't really jump at purity tests like you seem to want. I'm not other people's savior and I don't want to be. If you want to put your energy into that, I support you.
> Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.
I don't think you know how to read because I certainly didn't do that. But also go fuck yourself.
This is why no one cares about your causes btw because weird angry little dudes isn't a good look.
From day one everyone who worked on these ad-tech surveillance systems knew they had the capability for abuse. They were built to come as close as possible to the legal limits of surveillance and in several notable cases crossed that line. This isn't a surprise to anyone
There was a narrative here earlier that I'd rather trust Google/Apple with my data than any other company or any government. The end result is the same in the end. When it comes to privacy, the only thing that works is zero trust.
> Against that backdrop, ICE’s assertion that it is considering privacy expectations appears designed to reassure both policymakers and potential vendors that the agency is aware of the controversy surrounding commercial surveillance data.
We can't seriously believe that this agency has any sense of respect for privacy right? They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants. I mean nobody's going to stop them using the purchased data however they want, but don't lie and say you'll be good with the privacy and care of the data.
>They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants.
Noem at the Senate hearing : "Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to ..."
While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".
Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.
Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.
Please do not stop using our product. Download this proprietary app. You can't (legally) know what it does. Please download and execute it. Please don't google the FSF or EFF. Please.
I've argued for a long time that adblocking isn't just a quality of life thing, it's an essential security control for browsing the Internet in the same way that patching your system and running malware protection is. I didn't expect it to be protecting your physical security quite so soon..
This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.
> Intellexa also uses malicious ads on third-party platforms to fingerprint visitors and redirect those who match its target profiles to its exploit delivery servers.
The prominent link there not protected by https redirects to the wikipedia page for "uphill battle"...who and why about that redirect is the question being posed perhaps but how alarmist do we want to be?
Look at this topic in the meta-level. It has a relatively low number of upvotes, extremist comments being actively upvoted - with the current top post suggesting people engage in sabotage, with many if not most dissenting views ending up flagged. This isn't exactly a productive nor interesting topic, because people are more interested in attacking people and circle jerking, rather than engaging in any sort of interesting discussion. So it ends up reading like the typical slop on Reddit, which is essentially where discussion goes to die. It's not great seeing that sort of stuff here as well.
What is "extremist" about "sabotage"? These are private companies and private individuals, they can choose whether to or not to interact with ICE. Unless its a part of some formal investigation there is nothing criminal or extreme about providing whatever data or response or lack thereof to them. Or do you not believe in freedom of association and free speech?
ICE is a law enforcement agency and so intentionally seeking to obstruct an investigation is indeed a crime. Impairing the access to data opens the door to fraud and other charges. And the manual linked goes above and beyond these relatively 'soft' crimes and into things like arson. Betting your life, and career, on these sort of things testament to how radicalized some have become.
How is this obstruction? Unless it's part of a proper investigation, they are just another private individual. You are free to do or not engage in business contracts with them, and any data given true or false or data not gievn can hardly be a criminal matter as its not an investigation and simply a business dealing between two parties.
A company is absolutely free to choose whether or not to do business with them, but an employee acting to try to undermine them as a customer or their relationship with the business is what would open the door to all these sort of laws and consequences, especially when that relationship is precisely in the furtherance of a law enforcement purposes, and the interference was motivated by an effort to impair that enforcement.
Stuff like actively expressing opposition to taking them on as a customer, trying to persuade management to do otherwise, and so on would all be perfectly kosher. But the stuff the top post in this thread alludes to, let alone what it links to, is how you end up in prison for a very long time after the 'I didn't know it was illegal' defense fails.
An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themsleves, I don't understand how it's a criminal matter. To the outside entity it's a business contract, to the company it's an internal matter if and how to deal with any specific activities of the employee.
> An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themselves
There has been a few news articles (and court cases) where this question has been raised and it is not strict true. Employee actions are only actions for which the employee has been given as an task as part of their employment and role. Actions outside of that is private actions. When this end up in court, the role description and employee contract becomes very important.
A clear case example is when a doctor is looking up data on a patient. Downloading patient records from people who they are not the doctor for can be criminal and not just a breech of hospital policy, especially if they sell or transfer the data.
I was tempted to add this very line when I wrote my message but I hoped it would be obvious I don't mean things like illegally stealing private data. I was talking about things like "falsifying" data to the contractor, which doesn't seem like a crime to me just a contract violation.
If the employee are destroying property owned by the employer, for which is not part of the employee role or assignment, then they could be charged with hacking and property destruction just as if it was done by someone outside the company. The way around this that some people can attempt is work-to-rule strike. That would be a legal way to sabotage a contract without actually going beyond that of the employee contract.
You're granting an employee a special status that doesn't exist. Imagine a random person working to undermine a contract between the government and a business, motivated by an effort to obstruct law enforcement from enforcing the law. I'm sure you'd agree that this would obviously be illegal - that doesn't change simply because the person happens to be working for the business in question.
It's still not clear to me, where did I anywhere imply it's any different if a single individual or company is in question. I said it's a matter between the company and the employee because a company may dislike the employees actions and choose to deal with it eg by firing them, the contracting party isn't involved here. It still seems to me at most a matter of contract whether it's directly a single person being contracted or a person as part of a company.
If it's still not clear, I am saying my understanding is unless it is very specifically part of an investigation and involves the party in question, the entity whether an individual or a company is irrelevant, they are just as far as it seems to me engaging in a business deal.
I mean why not, if they are just taking on a blanket software or data proposal, its no different than say a local government contracting the construction of some accounting software. At most they could claim failure of contract, I don't see how it should be a criminal matter if non functional or bad outcome was delivered.
The Nazis were engaging in systematic and large scale genocide. ICE is deporting people in the country illegally back to their home countries, free of charge. I'm not being snarky there either, immigration offenses are taken seriously worldwide and in many places you can end up in indefinite detention, required to pay for your own deportation + fines, and more. The 'penalty' being a free ticket home is a pretty sweet deal.
The Nazis started with a deportation plan [0] and building camps as well. It never starts with genocide, you slowly work up to it. The "final solution" happened once they realized the impracticablity of mass deportations.
The Madagascar plan was Germany scheming to to remove all Jews from Europe and their occupied territories. It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with a country removing illegal immigrants from its territory as happens every day, world round. The only thing that makes it notable was previous administrations intentionally enabling and encouraging illegal activity which turned a small problem into a big one.
What "illegal activity" were previous admins "intentionally" "enabling"? Be specific. Cite specific facts and cases. And give comparison of rates of "illegalities" against the current admin.
Instinct says if this current admin had any at all even remote evidence of some wrongdoing by the previous government, they'd already have been screaming their lungs out about it. I mean they always are screaming and blithering about incoherently, but they'd be screaming along with suing at least.
No it obviously is not. You do not have a right to stay in a country illegally, anywhere in this world. If you want to migrate to a country, you need that country's permission. Without it you are an illegal alien and will, at the minimum, be removed from that country as soon as you are caught. In many places in this world you then may end up in detention - potentially indefinitely, imprisoned, fined, and so on. The US system, which is mostly just giving you a 'free' ride home, funded by US taxpayers, is incredibly lenient.
There is no in group, out group, or whatever else. Go to Mexico or Canada illegally, as an American, and you're getting deported, same as everybody and everywhere else. Vice versa if a Canadian, Brit, or whoever else comes into the US illegally, they're also getting deported.
This is both technically and logically incorrect. From a technical point of view - it's just wrong. Jews were persecuted and encouraged to leave, yet never formally expelled from Germany. And as the Nazis moved towards genocide, they moved in the other direction and made it impossible for Jews to leave the country.
But from a logical point of view, it also fails, even in a parallel reality where you were right. Countries are generally deemed to have the right to kill their citizens for major violations of the law, in the pursuit of justice. But that does not mean a country has the right to just start killing their citizens on a whim. And similarly, every single country has the right to expel people who enter their country illegally or remain beyond the terms of a granted temporary stay. This does not mean a country has the right the randomly start expelling their own citizens, en masse, for no normal reason.
Not to make it out to be some paradise, but illegal immigration isn't a crime in Argentina or Brazil. Argentina doesn't enforce it, and in fact I have read court cases of people criminals arriving illegally with fake passport and granted citizenship.
If you are illegal, you can literally show up fresh off of jet and on day one in .ar, file a court case for citizenship, have a lawyer run down the clock for a few years (by constitution in argentina illegal residence and subsistence for a few years = citizenship), and all the meanwhile they are legally barred from deporting you.
This doesn't justify it by any means, but the parallel between the Madagascar Plan and the issue with illegals in the US is actually quite similar in reasoning for how the perpetrators end up opening concentration camps.
There are several countries that refuse involuntary repatriation of their citizens. With the Jews in germany, same issue, hardly anywhere was willing to take them. And that's when you ended up with the perpetrator buffering them in these camps until they just gave up because there was no place to send them other than back into the broad population.
Of course it is the fault of the USA if these people are abused in these camps, but these peoples' home country are not doing any favors to the people stuck there by refusing to take them back.
People in i.e. France are dealing with similar issue where much of their criminals are Algerian because Algeria is refusing much of the repatriation of illegal immigrants in France. France has chosen to just release them back into population rather than build camps, with end result Algerian gangs terrorize the populace knowing they can't be sent back, which obviously plays into the hands of pushing voters towards the right-wing.
That's the point, it's not an investigation in the first place so how can you "obstruct" an investigation. It's just a business deal. Unless you believe special rules apply for business deals with them that make perfectly normal things crimes.
I heard the new division of ICE that is implementing these investigations is called
Government Ethics, Security & Transparency Agency for Public Operations, with some kind of acronym I couldn't quite hear.
It is really hard to understand that this is a country that our nation’s media and KOLs have vigorously whitewashed for decades. They say the United States protects private property, that America is free and democratic, and that everyone owns guns, so they can guarantee their own freedom.
All of our people should feel ashamed of this—being deceived by the media day after day for decades. Too stupid. Even today, there are still many people who firmly believe it.
Although this is quite a dark time, I hope ICE may finally (accidentally) do some good by making it super obvious to people how much online platforms track them.
In a way, this is a good thing. Hopefully it will draw the attention of other countries and make them realize how important it is to prevent such data hoards, and hopefully once the US has recovered they'll learn from it like the Germans did from the Stasi.
Maybe California will even take it as an incentive to make proper privacy laws and impose it on anyone doing business in California in any way.
If anyone else finds this stuff interesting I've off and on worked on an open source MMP to try and keep the functionality of ad tracking but move the data collection off of centralized hubs like AppsFlyer. I'd love to pick it back up if some people are interested in working together.
ICE got additional $80B over next 4 years in addition to the standard appropriations resulting in $28B budget for example in this year. That definitely gonna buy a lot of “market research”.
To whom? To the country losing people or to the country getting people? Like, what is the cost of Elon Musk immigration? And who bears that cost? And who enjoys the benefits of it?
I love this. All these years I've been a privacy enthusiast lunatic, because ofc no-one has anything to hide. Now ad trackers are being potentially weaponised by the govt, and ofc no-one could have foreseen that. This is absolute gold. Will be patiently waiting for recall install's to start sending screenshots to ice of your private documents and comm's.
In a way Im glad its happening because its going to be a wake up call for many, on the other hand, there is going to be a lot of suffering as a result of this..
> ICE says it is attempting to better understand how commercial big data providers and advertising technology firms might directly support investigative activities, while remaining sensitive to “regulatory constraints and privacy expectations.”
That's rich and i'll believe it when they respect the written law.
To be clear, I fully expect other departments have been investigating these sorts of things in past and present, but ice have conducted themselves differently now and should be treated accordingly.
This must be a real conundrum for the surveillance capitalist weekend 'resisters' who created this technology in the first place. "Oh, but it's not evil when we use it."
Don't forget - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, etc are all proud partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE. When the NSA asked these companies to participate in an unconstitutional and unlawful program (as ruled by a federal judge) called PRISM, they didn't fight, they eagerly complied. They kept their compliance secret. They lied about it to citizens, to their users, to their customers, and even to congress. These are fundamentally untrustworthy entities, and there's no reason to believe they've changed and won't comply with secret DHS and ICE requests just like they did with secret NSA requests.
Every dollar spent on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, iPhones, Macbooks, Windows, Office, etc supports the widespread violation of rights committed against the innocent of all political and demographic backgrounds in the name of "national security".
Know what doesn't? Open source operating systems, open source software, and self-hosting. Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I remember rolling out encryption over all the DC<->DC fiber after the PRISM leaks at Google. People were pissed about it. I'm sure they comply with legal requests but I would be very surprised if they break the law (such as it is) in any way.
And for Europeans or those in other countries: every dollar spent on these companies is supporting their support of Trump; that's against Greenland, NATO etc. For example, Microsoft donated $1M (IIRC) to Trump for Davos.
At work we have stopped buying new American services, but there's been very little reduction of existing use.
(Yet we did manage a policy stating we won't buy anything from Russia.)
>Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I think it needs to go a bit further than that. We need names, for purposes of blacklisting but also future prosecution. Collaborators should not be tolerated.
I'm sure it's not popular, but quite a few of our colleagues and fellow HN readers do belong in cells.
GrapheneOS is the only phone that Cellebrite admits they can't hack. And the only phone that if you bring it to Catalonia, they'll assume you're a drug dealer.
The last time I looked illegal immigration is still illegal.
I don't see people protesting en masse to take Clinton, Trump, Gates etc. accountable. Maxwell Ghislaine is alive and well, and they can't get a incrementing confession.
But somehow people loose their shit when some MS-13 gang members get arrested.
Illegal immigration enforcement/code is civil, not criminal. If it was criminal, enforcement would require giving suspected offenders actual Article III judge hearings pre-every deporations, not use immigration court, etc. You know, rights. If you lot want to change it to criminal, go for it. But don't lie.
People lose their shit when the Constitution is violated. When civil norms are violated in evil ways. When people following the legal process with pending applications before the Government get punished/unfair enforcement against them because grannies in the government system are easier targets than tracking down actual MS-13 gang members. When law enforcement hides their identity and act like a secret police force ABOVE civilian oversite (again against the Supreme Court saying civilians have a right to monitor police actions and against American norms of... not having secret police).
My argument is not about the legality, but selectivity of the outrage. Somehow if it's politically beneficial there are a ton of people outraged, and in other times like the pedophile scandal of the century, with a lot of powerful people in it, no one seams to really care.
Funny because the first line of your point is "The last time I looked illegal immigration is still illegal." so specifically about the legality, and I explained what you said is not true, and that if it was these people would have legal protections that match what the Constitution requires and the public would be way less upset.
It sounds like you don't really care about the law, or people that want the constitution enforced, you care about the politics and if it the Constitution is politically inconvenient. Following the Constitution is ALWAYS the politically correct choice in the USA. Choosing the law over 'civil immigration enforcement' used as a loophole to bypass the law/Constitution is always the correct choice.
You don't get MS-13 in the kind of operations that the populace have been protesting. If people are showing up with whistles and megaphones you have lost the element of surprise by such a long-shot what you are basically are getting are people who have to be there to wait for their kids to get back from school, or are sticking around because they need to go to their regular doctor appointment.
If they were getting gang members the protests would be useless because tactically they would be in and out every time before anyone could protest their operations.
Look, this is tangential, for what is worth I don't agree with a lot of what ICE is doing.
My argument is that if you have two injustices A and B with severity of lets say 50/100 and 90/100. And injustice A is being globally protested, but injustice B is ignored, then your fight is not for justice, then you are being used as a political tool.
Or you are seizing your moment to temporarily ally with your enemies on a 50/100 topic when the 90/100 topic doesn't have the moment you need. I generally despise the politics of most people protesting DHS/ICE but I find them to be useful idiots on this particular topic so I'm happy to form a tenuous agreement with them.
Since there's quite a few people here working at US companies with access to lots of user data, but they may not have decision making capacity, I just thought I'll link the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, out of context and for no reason at all https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
If some data is shared with an external entity, it likely needs to be included in a few usual disclaimers, with at least a few meetings to clarify the exact wording and verification of the legal implications with the right dept and double check how it complies with others data protection rules, and don't forget the audit, and I think this contains a mistake so maybe let's investigate this issue first, and ...
Might I suggest to instead reflect on why you are working in an industry that collects all this data.
Money!
Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for? Especially when they’re an industry that knows itself well?
They will find out. And act accordingly. And your career will end, with the mess cleaned up and billable to you.
> Are you sure that not even the most mediocre insider threat program doesn’t have this accounted for?
I worked for a big corp. None of this is out of ordinary.
But yeah, if you need to survive and worry about being fired, you make your own decisions that you'll be able to live with.
You've obviously never worked in big corpo.
People unwittingly deploy this whole handbook back to front throughout the entire process of the sdlc.
It's impressive that anything ever gets done ever.
Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.
Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.
The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
> you support what’s happening.
I don’t know that things are that black and white.
Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?
No because employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause. That's why ad-tech is so effective in the first place.
Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for).
The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).
Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”.
Does your argument still hold up?
>”employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause.”
“employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions directly cause deadly harm.”
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be voting with our wallets and supporting these people but your initial argument is flawed. They produce goods precisely because consumers buy them…
> Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”. Does your argument still hold up?
Can you explain why you think it wouldn't?
Tons of principled engineers choose not to pursue opportunities at military contractors, for instance, and this is not widely seen as unreasonable.
I didn't say "tech", I said "ad-tech" and "big tech" (meaning ad-tech like Google, not TSMC) which aren't morally neutral like ammunition is. Invasion of privacy and exploitation of private information is an inherent part of their business model.
"The only way for consumers to avoid this "
Or they could stop drinking coke? But I guess that is too much to ask.
That's what gp said, except Coke isn't the only thing that funds the advertising industry - it's pretty much every product you can buy.
It's not perfect, but you can go a pretty long way by prioritizing store brands when possible.
Stores still fund the advertising industry but to nowhere near the extent that name brand goods do.
You can avoid coke but approximately every brand in the supermarket is funding ad-tech. And even if you can find brands that don't, your supermarket is likely funding ad-tech to advertise itself so you can't go to there at all. Maybe you still have a farmer's market but chances are that they're advertising online.
You can't buy a car or any smartphones you've ever heard of, you won't find an ISP that doesn't advertise online, and good luck finding a decent job without supporting ad-tech.
There's a large difference in the magnitude of spending.
A big chain like kroger, for example, is spending around 10 to 100M. Coke is spending around $5B.
Avoiding national branded products goes a long way in avoiding contributing to the problem.
Things don't need to be all or nothing.
Coke is always a discretionary purchase. Basic food staples are not. Kroger relies on national brand advertising to lure people from the perimiter of the store into junk food land.
Most (maybe not all) basic food staples have store brand alternatives. Even junk food does. Sometimes (maybe even often) those products are just repackaged version of the name brand.
If the goal is to decrease money going into advertisement budgets, then the best thing you can do is buy store brand when possible. Even if both products are ultimately made from Nestle corp, the cheaper store brand will send less money into Nestle's pockets which means less money for advertising.
That's what I mean by "avoiding nationally branded products". A package of "signature frozen peas" will taste just as good as the "birds eye green peas" without sending money to a major company (Looks like all the major companies have spun off their frozen food departments, but at one time this was a Nestle brand. I spent too much time looking into major frozen food brands :D).
The advertisement budgets for the grocers are simply a lot smaller than that of the national brands across the board. It also doesn't seem (to me at least) to have been really spent on invasive advertisements.
There are degrees of culpability in any discussion. Generally, this is approximated by how much damage you individually are doing to your society compared to the alternative. You have to consume a lot of a company's products before your impact is comparable to working for them.
Exactly. If you have regular meetings on how to best progress development of the torment nexus, then you can't claim innocence just because you aren't the one deploying the torment nexus for torment-purposes.
Consumers less so.
They are the victims, not the source.
Fully agree.
If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product.
If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.
Black and white thinking is a large part of what got us here.
With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.
I can pay rent and feed myself without hurting people
Everything else is an excuse
Is this your way of sharing that you work at X or are open to hurting people in exchange for cash?
Also, you can retain your morals and choose a career, it is optional to select where you work as it’s hopefully voluntary.
There's nothing voluntary when your options are homelessness and starvation. The bank won't accept your morals in lieu of money when accepting mortgage repayments.
Thankfully I don't live in the US and I don't work for anything even remotely related to this. I don't know if I would have the fortitude in the current US job market (based on what I read here) to threat the well being of the wife and daughter by taking principled stances.
Dilapidating the world for an easy buck is gonna bite you and/or your kids eventually. We have reached technological sophistication where certain kinds of mistakes are not allowed if civilization as we know it is to survive.
When the bank reposseses the house because you are not paying the mortgage, this will bite you and your kids too.
You can call it an "easy buck", and it is just coping. An easy way to make some poor schlemiel creating a miserable report with user location data during his sprint into a greedy bastard that is just enriching his bank account out of the suffering of plenty.
Atomization enables this. Any number of individuals are individually weak against their employer/some org, but a big group of them can be quite powerful.
If many were to sacrifice their morals out of financial pressure easily (the control over which is in increasingly few hands) the path the US is treading becomes pretty deterministic... We've seen it in the movies and read it in the books.
You guys seem to need collective action and civil disobedience.
Then again.. maybe the will for collective action comes only after the repossessions...
> You guys
One of the reasons I chose to move to Europe is because I value the mininal safety nets and labor protections on this side of the pond. Yes, I make less money and pay more taxes but I believe this is how society should work, I reject the hyper individualism that ignores any sort of collective.
But I am also not naive. Expecting individuals to take the burden for decisions way beyond their control is silly. It takes immense fortitude to threaten the well being of those dear to you based on principle, when the only outcome is your own suffering (the company will likely find another employee right away anyway).
The best way to evaluate any society is to look at what happens to people without power in the system. Inmates, illegals, the poor and children.
Actually the social safety net has allowed Europeans a level of individualism that is completely unimaginable for the rest of the world.
No charity from church or family needed. Just the State- and it does not care about your religion or sexual preferences.
You chose the most absolute and extreme predicament possible to cast your “money is money” belief.
You do realize this is what most criminals of the world just so happen to say as well, right?
Where is the line?
There's nothing extreme in what I said, it is actually how the world we live in works.
It's an extremely unfair system based on coercion - you are beaten down into submission by the implicit threat that without work you won't be able to make ends meet.
Maybe you have a family that can support you financially. Maybe you already own the place where you live and could save up money over an extended period that you can weather a storm. If you are in these situations, that's great, but it is also an extremely privileged position to be in.
Absolutely no one with the skills to work in the software industry is in a position where working for unethical mega-corporations or literally starving are their only options.
Okay, I'll accept your point for those software engineers that have a choice between working at an immoral company or "homelessness and starvation".
Thankfully, that isn't most of them. Despite the job market not being as good as it used to be, the vast majority of software engineers in the US could still find another job to pay the bills before becoming homeless and starving.
If that's the case, great then. I did work for a company I find morally objectionable in the past (i.e.: evil), and I eventually found my way out.
At the time I was still paying rent and needed employment to keep my visa. I also had little savings, and an ill parent that depended on me. I certainly couldn't take the principled stance of "fuck this, I'm out".
My point is that if you are in the position to take a principled stance, good for you. Maybe you already own your home, maybe you had time to accumulate savings, maybe you can do a few interviews and land a less evil job even in the current market (and perhaps a pay cut won't be a massive blow in you life). All that is awesome, but also a position of relative privilege.
Prescribing principled stance as universal without recognizing this is just cruelty though.
I sympathize with your situation, and I'm not calling you a monster. But "I had no choice, I had people depending on me" is the exact reasoning that has enabled every atrocity carried out by ordinary people; it's the banality of evil.
None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.
Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.
So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.
I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.
(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )
> That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But it may well become true soon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897620
From the angle of your 2015 post, I can at least see where you're coming from. Modern adtech is much more granular and up to date than a census ever was.
And hopefully the worst case can be prevented.
I understand quite well. The banality of evil is a thing because most people have actual very little power to enact meaningful change. Risking yourself for the well being of complete strangers is commendable, but often has an obscene cost for the individual.
I reject that societal and systemic issues can be fixed by individual action, unless as an individual you are extremely powerful (and the ones that are typically are the ones causing the societal and systemic harm).
As an common man you can do small things. Do a lousy job when processing the paperwork of evil. Malicious cooperation to the powers that be. Small acts of charity. That sort of thing.
Systemic change can only be achieved through collective action. Easier said than done.
The world is cursed. Life is tough even at the best of times. The system as it is ensures compliance through coercion and threats.
I honestly believe we would agree more than disagree on the current state of things. I just reject the approach that individual action is a way out of this sort of mess.
My father keeps asking me why I don't I ever apply to $BIGCO and earn more money. I certainly have the ability, he says.
But I ask him, "But would you work for Lex Luthor?"
He doesn't have a good comeback to that.
Anyway, I (mostly, hopefully) try to make my small corner of the world a happy place. And I hope everyone else does for theirs.
Perhaps to show the level of privilege I enjoy as a software engineer with some level of seniority, I have had zero problem resigning from a position (more than once in fact) because I objected to something my employer was doing. It's been enough for me to filter potential opportunities exclusively to tech-for-good concerns.
Sure, I don't earn half a million a year total comp to kiss some billionaire's ass, but I still have a very comfortable lifestyle that is well above the median.
Yeah, software is perhaps one of the industries where the "I got bills to pay" argument is the least justifiable. If your lifestyle can only be sustained by working for unethical companies then your lifestyle is unethical. You certainly don't need to sell your soul to FAANG to live a comfortable and happy life.
> With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food
You really think adtech is the way to avoid starving on the street? There are a hell of a lot of jobs between entry level and adtech dev that could give you the same basic peace of mind.
There was never shortage of developers who "would sell their soul" for higher salary in conditions where job with slightly lower salary was easily available. I really do not think we have to pretend to our selves that if one of us does it, it is because he/she is poor and the kids would starve.
Also, layers are resining from positions in doj they find unethical. It is not like the jobs for them were easier to find.
Blind is like 4chan, not representative of the vast majority of software engineers but rather their own self contained bubble. I wouldn't use Blind as exemplary of anything in this case.
I spent enough time in FAANG and adjacent to realize that some of the senior engineers and directors around me held 4chan/Blind-like beliefs.
Some of those folks were cultural leaders in the orgs I belonged to. Some even passed for nice people.
But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
Quite the high horse you got there
Considering there are hundreds or thousands of users on this site who have taken cash—either directly or indirectly—in exchange for building the world's most egregious examples of privacy-abusing software that were formerly only memes in 80s sci-fi movies. Yet they choose to focus their energy on getting upset over things they don't understand and can't control—like immigration enforcement.
No, my conscience is clean.
Hey there, I quit a job over similar concerns, knowing it would lead to a >70% decrease in comp. Without a significant nest egg or wealth, whether personal or through family.
Now let me say the same: But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
There, now there's no longer a high horse concern.
>...I quit a job over similar concerns, knowing it would lead to a >70% decrease in comp. Without a significant nest egg or wealth, whether personal or through family.
Hey, thanks for doing the right thing.
Thank you!
It takes real courage and it costs to have principles. And just like I detest those that fall for the money I have insane respect for those that stand up.
It’s worth pointing out that a non-insignificant subset of tech workers know the impacts and still don’t give a fuck though.
@anoym - There isn’t something inherently bad about working for law enforcement or national security agencies as long as what you’re doing cannot be used now or in the future unethically. But too be honest I think this is a ‘don’t hate the player’ type things, if palantir didn’t exist, another company would take its place - privacy legislation is the only thing that prevents it, not relying on ethics of the masses.
> legislation is the only thing that prevents it
I strongly agree. There's even the argument to be made that if no legislation exists, even if you're anti X, you might get incentivized to build a company for X just so it's not a fan of X at the helm of the top company for X.
Blaming it on the employees is pointless. It's the law that should dictate what's allowed and what isn't and if the lawmaking or enforcement isn't working you probably want some "good" people in those companies.
Laws are a reflection of the collective ethics of the masses, or at least they should be in a democracy.
All Law enforcement and Nat Sec of the United States is inherently unethical, or at minimum tied to ethically questionabke tactics. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world, death penalties ect. Our Military isnt exactly ethical in its missions, pretty much since WW2
You're basically saying "There isnt anything inherently wrong about working for the 4th Reich"
This is a childishly simplistic view of the world
What complexity is it you'd like to add?
For instance, the local cops checking in on grandma, or those checking in on a troubled child are really not the bad guys. You WANT them when you need them.
Not all LEOs are brown shirts, In my experience, few are, but they give the lot a bad rap.
Treating LEOs uniformly as evil is just counterproductive
Yes but I don't have a definitive map of who are the good ones, so we must treat it as a life or death situation and suitably defend ourselves in an interaction with any of them.
Why would I want cops doing that instead of social workers or teachers doing it?
No one becomes a cop because they want to be nice and help vulnerable people. Some might say they did but that is some coping technique. Being a cop involves exerting violence towards people who are vulnerable and desperate, and to become one you have to be fine with this. Some would say that this alone is enough to deem a person ethically dubious.
Even if one would accept the premise that society requires some degree of organised violence towards its members, one would also have to handle the question of accountability. Reasonably this violence should be accountable in relation to the victims of it, and police institutions inherently are not.
I think that we should also note that the other person above used "childishly" to denote something negative, apparently they don't think of kids as the light of the world and childish as something fun and inspiring. This is something that makes me quite suspicious of their morals.
Maybe you and I have vastly different experience with police. Disclaimer: From a rather small US state.
Your other note is also well taken, it does however not imply that anything a kid or teen does is OK or automatically positive.
Finally, it's OK to be suspicious. I am too. What I am saying is that one cannot just make the decision "all cops are evil or must be treated as such" and then hope for a good outcome in all cases. I argue it's a better policy to keep an open mind and decide on a case by case basis.
No, I’m not ‘basically’ saying that. Stop putting words in my mouth.
Is it worth pointing out? It seems counterproductive to respond to a call to action by sarcastically complaining about the people being called to action.
The call is coming from inside the house.
As effective calls to action often do! It's almost tautological when I say it this way, but if you want people working in ad tech to oppose ICE you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.
Perhaps the conflict is that you just want to make people who work in ad tech feel bad, and don't care whether or not they enable ICE? That's fine, I suppose, there's industries I feel the same way about. But then we don't have much to talk about and I'm not sure what you hope to gain from being here. To me opposing ICE is very important - I think tobacco companies are pretty bad too, but if ICE sent out a request for cartons of cigarettes I'd shovel praise on them for declining.
That’s the voice part of exit, loyalty, voice is it not?
> you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.
Yes—and one of the tools we have for that is shunning.
If enough of us who are appalled and disgusted by the state of things, and the people who willingly lend themselves to creating said state, make our disgust with those people known, it can lead to some of them choosing to act differently, because they care about being thought well of by their fellow techies.
I agree with what you're saying, but shunning has to be selective to be effective. People have to believe that you won't shun them if they avoid the terrible things you're trying to stop. It's too much to simultaneously beef with ICE, adtech in general, Tesla, $8 donuts, and anyone who lives in a trendy neighborhood.
A lot of them are even proud of being the loyal partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE.
NARRATOR: It wasn’t.
If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.
It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry
Not really. Surveillance might create an arbitrage opportunity, but insurers hate data they can't trust. The more data the more noise.
Powerful people are paying a lot of money to locate their dispersed enemies. Think of the system in Palestine that tracks wanted terrorists back to their homes at night, so their whole families can be exploded.
>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies
No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.
It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick.
In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."
What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.
I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.
People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.
Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.
Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.
The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.
I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.
Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.
Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.
The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.
This has bean a long time coming. This is a stark reminder that you should consider who the future stewards of whatever you are building might be.
We built a vast surveillance network under the guise of servings ads and making money, and lost track of how this power could be abused by an entity not aligned with our own values.
Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.
Well I guess I mean the pubic in general. I also don’t necessarily mean willfully creating technology that can be abused.
For example, we all stood by when we let Twitter and other US-based social media become the main way politicians communicate with the public. This has, in my opinion, had disastrous consequences on how they communicate and actively blocks politicians from achieving consensus.
This is to say that you don’t need to have actively worked on something.
I think that expecting the public to reason through the myriad n-order effects that were going to happen from the whiplash of technology in the last 30 years is a little much.
However, I think a lot of people in tech could and did see those consequences coming and were pretty vocal about it. So, I don't think we all did stand by, we exercised what limited power we had. I don't want to seem accusatory here and I don't mean it harshly, but maybe you just didn't see the folks who have talked about problems like this.
We also as individuals [without billions] have fairly limited capacity to directly act against these things. I donate a fair bit to the EFF for instance and I've sent outreach to representatives multiple times over the years for specific bills and when its possible I vote against surveillance.
You are right, I do acknowledge their efforts but did not do so here, which I should have.
I don't necessarily mean to berate the public, but rather the politicians, who saw that they could use social media/big tech for their own personal gain, and the media, who went along with the narrative that putting all our public communication into privately owned platforms was good for democracy. And maybe our own governments and institutions (speaking from a EU perspective) for dropping the ball in protecting us.
I think Evgeny Morozov's 2010-ish writing was prophetic in this regard.
Several years ago in Stockholm (2014) during a conference focus on the Internet, the Chief Technology Officer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign held a talk on how they revolutionary the campaign process by using targeted advertisement campaign on social networks, mostly Facebook, and how effective the technique was to reach voters during fund raising and getting their voters to vote. In their view, this was the first major use of social media during an election. The talk is still available on Youtube for those interested. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3WS9bs3Aps)
There are also articles from 2011 where political commenters noted how the Obama campaign broke new ground using targeted Facebook advertisement and outreach, and how EU politicians could learn from it. The many smaller, but in total larger donations given to Obama was contrasted with Hillary Clinton who had larger individual donations but less in total, and the commenters attributed this to the use of Facebook and finding and meeting a younger audience on those online platforms.
People thought that targeted advertisement was a good thing and politicians looked on the techniques from that election and saw the potential for power. It was mostly just those privacy advocates, free software advocates and security experts that expressed doubt and warned about the dangers.
Yes! I distinctly remember the time magazine issue and article about this. This is exactly what I mean: we normalize and celebrate technologies without realizing what the repercussions are when we give the same tools and power to others.
We are all very impressed, I assure you.
Going by the upvotes I have generally yes people do seem to think so. It's only weird folks like you and the other guy that seem to have a problem.
It's exactly why I don't do more because I really don't want to be associated with people like you folks.
Well one thing we can be sure of is your self regard.
Yes because not assenting to the anon rando who makes a snide insulting comment is outside the bounds of normal well regulated self interest. I can't possibly eyeroll any harder at you.
I just don’t know what patting yourself on the back for your incorruptibility is really adding to the discussion.
Good for you
What are you doing to organize around that?
Or is it just “I decided to leave so my hands are clean” self adoration?
Passive resistance is still resistance.
It's the gateway to any sympathetic contingency.
Where’s the passive resistance?
This user is still on twitter and actively promoting their handle there
"We also as individuals [without billions] have fairly limited capacity to directly act against these things. I donate a fair bit to the EFF for instance and I've sent outreach to representatives multiple times over the years for specific bills and when its possible I vote against surveillance." - from a parallel thread I was commenting in.
I'm totally fine stopping at minimizing my culpability. I sleep just fine at night and don't really jump at purity tests like you seem to want. I'm not other people's savior and I don't want to be. If you want to put your energy into that, I support you.
Then don’t jump into a conversation as though you have some answer if all you’re doing is virtue signaling that you’re detached
> Don't lump me in that "we". I did no such thing. I know exactly how it could be abused and have spent 12 years intentionally not working for companies that perpetuate it.
I don't think you know how to read because I certainly didn't do that. But also go fuck yourself.
This is why no one cares about your causes btw because weird angry little dudes isn't a good look.
From day one everyone who worked on these ad-tech surveillance systems knew they had the capability for abuse. They were built to come as close as possible to the legal limits of surveillance and in several notable cases crossed that line. This isn't a surprise to anyone
The way I understand it, which may be dated: is that if it's automated or robotic it doesn't qualify as an "unreasonable search or seizure".
Or if it's a third party. The government is allowed to hire corporate contractors that don't obey the constitution.
There was a narrative here earlier that I'd rather trust Google/Apple with my data than any other company or any government. The end result is the same in the end. When it comes to privacy, the only thing that works is zero trust.
It was always intended to be used that way, the programmatic advertising industry is a product of US Nat Sec.
> Against that backdrop, ICE’s assertion that it is considering privacy expectations appears designed to reassure both policymakers and potential vendors that the agency is aware of the controversy surrounding commercial surveillance data.
We can't seriously believe that this agency has any sense of respect for privacy right? They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants. I mean nobody's going to stop them using the purchased data however they want, but don't lie and say you'll be good with the privacy and care of the data.
https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...
>They literally are going around thinking they don't need judicial warrants.
Noem at the Senate hearing : "Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to ..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46832512
It’s quite obvious that all of these seemingly paranoid about privacy, were not that paranoid after all.
For the software builders the conclusion is that we should not store ANY identifiable data.
Exactly.
While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".
Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.
Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.
"what's wrong? Oh, it literally paints a target on your face that can be shot at if you happen to be brown".
Maybe the answers must be blunt and unpleasant.
Huh?
Please do not stop using our product. Download this proprietary app. You can't (legally) know what it does. Please download and execute it. Please don't google the FSF or EFF. Please.
This is why you must block all ads always. No exceptions.
I've argued for a long time that adblocking isn't just a quality of life thing, it's an essential security control for browsing the Internet in the same way that patching your system and running malware protection is. I didn't expect it to be protecting your physical security quite so soon..
This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.
OS security was in the previous step:
> Intellexa also uses malicious ads on third-party platforms to fingerprint visitors and redirect those who match its target profiles to its exploit delivery servers.
-- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/12/leaks-show-in...
Not blocking ads is bordering a self-destructive behaviour now.
>This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.
Finally. There are a lot of high profile YouTubers who have been saying this like LinusTechTips.
Do one better, block ads and give them false data on your profile using a solution like Ad Nauseam.
Ad Nauseam unironically gives ad networks massively more information and data points to track you than if you just straight up blocked the ads.
It's not about blocking ads, but blocking tracking. If you connect to internet you are being tracked even though you block known tracking URLs.
e.g. Hacker news uses no tracking url but uses Cloudflare which tracks the user across sites for things like bot detection.
You are not powerless.
https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare
The prominent link there not protected by https redirects to the wikipedia page for "uphill battle"...who and why about that redirect is the question being posed perhaps but how alarmist do we want to be?
I love your URL!
Not sure that blocks device ID tracking through timing metrics for example. You can turn off java but then you become a beacon of suspicious activity.
Why do all the discussion posts about ICE’s biometric app get taken down? Although they may invite politicing, they are very relevant to HN.
e.g [flagged] Target director's Global Entry was revoked after ICE used app to scan her face [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833871]
Digital brownshirts, using moderation tools as weapon to stifle discussion critical of the regime.
Look at this topic in the meta-level. It has a relatively low number of upvotes, extremist comments being actively upvoted - with the current top post suggesting people engage in sabotage, with many if not most dissenting views ending up flagged. This isn't exactly a productive nor interesting topic, because people are more interested in attacking people and circle jerking, rather than engaging in any sort of interesting discussion. So it ends up reading like the typical slop on Reddit, which is essentially where discussion goes to die. It's not great seeing that sort of stuff here as well.
What is "extremist" about "sabotage"? These are private companies and private individuals, they can choose whether to or not to interact with ICE. Unless its a part of some formal investigation there is nothing criminal or extreme about providing whatever data or response or lack thereof to them. Or do you not believe in freedom of association and free speech?
ICE is a law enforcement agency and so intentionally seeking to obstruct an investigation is indeed a crime. Impairing the access to data opens the door to fraud and other charges. And the manual linked goes above and beyond these relatively 'soft' crimes and into things like arson. Betting your life, and career, on these sort of things testament to how radicalized some have become.
How is this obstruction? Unless it's part of a proper investigation, they are just another private individual. You are free to do or not engage in business contracts with them, and any data given true or false or data not gievn can hardly be a criminal matter as its not an investigation and simply a business dealing between two parties.
A company is absolutely free to choose whether or not to do business with them, but an employee acting to try to undermine them as a customer or their relationship with the business is what would open the door to all these sort of laws and consequences, especially when that relationship is precisely in the furtherance of a law enforcement purposes, and the interference was motivated by an effort to impair that enforcement.
Stuff like actively expressing opposition to taking them on as a customer, trying to persuade management to do otherwise, and so on would all be perfectly kosher. But the stuff the top post in this thread alludes to, let alone what it links to, is how you end up in prison for a very long time after the 'I didn't know it was illegal' defense fails.
An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themsleves, I don't understand how it's a criminal matter. To the outside entity it's a business contract, to the company it's an internal matter if and how to deal with any specific activities of the employee.
> An employees actions would be a matter of judgment between the company leadership and themselves
There has been a few news articles (and court cases) where this question has been raised and it is not strict true. Employee actions are only actions for which the employee has been given as an task as part of their employment and role. Actions outside of that is private actions. When this end up in court, the role description and employee contract becomes very important.
A clear case example is when a doctor is looking up data on a patient. Downloading patient records from people who they are not the doctor for can be criminal and not just a breech of hospital policy, especially if they sell or transfer the data.
I was tempted to add this very line when I wrote my message but I hoped it would be obvious I don't mean things like illegally stealing private data. I was talking about things like "falsifying" data to the contractor, which doesn't seem like a crime to me just a contract violation.
If the employee are destroying property owned by the employer, for which is not part of the employee role or assignment, then they could be charged with hacking and property destruction just as if it was done by someone outside the company. The way around this that some people can attempt is work-to-rule strike. That would be a legal way to sabotage a contract without actually going beyond that of the employee contract.
Again I was thinking of things like submitting non-functional application or data, not obvious property crimes like destruction of property.
You're granting an employee a special status that doesn't exist. Imagine a random person working to undermine a contract between the government and a business, motivated by an effort to obstruct law enforcement from enforcing the law. I'm sure you'd agree that this would obviously be illegal - that doesn't change simply because the person happens to be working for the business in question.
It's still not clear to me, where did I anywhere imply it's any different if a single individual or company is in question. I said it's a matter between the company and the employee because a company may dislike the employees actions and choose to deal with it eg by firing them, the contracting party isn't involved here. It still seems to me at most a matter of contract whether it's directly a single person being contracted or a person as part of a company.
If it's still not clear, I am saying my understanding is unless it is very specifically part of an investigation and involves the party in question, the entity whether an individual or a company is irrelevant, they are just as far as it seems to me engaging in a business deal.
I mean why not, if they are just taking on a blanket software or data proposal, its no different than say a local government contracting the construction of some accounting software. At most they could claim failure of contract, I don't see how it should be a criminal matter if non functional or bad outcome was delivered.
The other side of this is, if you don't obstruct, you will eventually have to be the guy saying "I was just following orders" [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
The Nazis were engaging in systematic and large scale genocide. ICE is deporting people in the country illegally back to their home countries, free of charge. I'm not being snarky there either, immigration offenses are taken seriously worldwide and in many places you can end up in indefinite detention, required to pay for your own deportation + fines, and more. The 'penalty' being a free ticket home is a pretty sweet deal.
The Nazis started with a deportation plan [0] and building camps as well. It never starts with genocide, you slowly work up to it. The "final solution" happened once they realized the impracticablity of mass deportations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
The Madagascar plan was Germany scheming to to remove all Jews from Europe and their occupied territories. It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with a country removing illegal immigrants from its territory as happens every day, world round. The only thing that makes it notable was previous administrations intentionally enabling and encouraging illegal activity which turned a small problem into a big one.
What "illegal activity" were previous admins "intentionally" "enabling"? Be specific. Cite specific facts and cases. And give comparison of rates of "illegalities" against the current admin.
Instinct says if this current admin had any at all even remote evidence of some wrongdoing by the previous government, they'd already have been screaming their lungs out about it. I mean they always are screaming and blithering about incoherently, but they'd be screaming along with suing at least.
It is the exact same thing, with a different outgroup.
No it obviously is not. You do not have a right to stay in a country illegally, anywhere in this world. If you want to migrate to a country, you need that country's permission. Without it you are an illegal alien and will, at the minimum, be removed from that country as soon as you are caught. In many places in this world you then may end up in detention - potentially indefinitely, imprisoned, fined, and so on. The US system, which is mostly just giving you a 'free' ride home, funded by US taxpayers, is incredibly lenient.
There is no in group, out group, or whatever else. Go to Mexico or Canada illegally, as an American, and you're getting deported, same as everybody and everywhere else. Vice versa if a Canadian, Brit, or whoever else comes into the US illegally, they're also getting deported.
Yes but first prove illegality. And if you believe killing any person on the streets without any suspicion or charge is legal, cite the laws for it.
You did not have a right to stay in Germany as a Jew either. My point exactly.
This is both technically and logically incorrect. From a technical point of view - it's just wrong. Jews were persecuted and encouraged to leave, yet never formally expelled from Germany. And as the Nazis moved towards genocide, they moved in the other direction and made it impossible for Jews to leave the country.
But from a logical point of view, it also fails, even in a parallel reality where you were right. Countries are generally deemed to have the right to kill their citizens for major violations of the law, in the pursuit of justice. But that does not mean a country has the right to just start killing their citizens on a whim. And similarly, every single country has the right to expel people who enter their country illegally or remain beyond the terms of a granted temporary stay. This does not mean a country has the right the randomly start expelling their own citizens, en masse, for no normal reason.
Not to make it out to be some paradise, but illegal immigration isn't a crime in Argentina or Brazil. Argentina doesn't enforce it, and in fact I have read court cases of people criminals arriving illegally with fake passport and granted citizenship.
If you are illegal, you can literally show up fresh off of jet and on day one in .ar, file a court case for citizenship, have a lawyer run down the clock for a few years (by constitution in argentina illegal residence and subsistence for a few years = citizenship), and all the meanwhile they are legally barred from deporting you.
This doesn't justify it by any means, but the parallel between the Madagascar Plan and the issue with illegals in the US is actually quite similar in reasoning for how the perpetrators end up opening concentration camps.
There are several countries that refuse involuntary repatriation of their citizens. With the Jews in germany, same issue, hardly anywhere was willing to take them. And that's when you ended up with the perpetrator buffering them in these camps until they just gave up because there was no place to send them other than back into the broad population.
Of course it is the fault of the USA if these people are abused in these camps, but these peoples' home country are not doing any favors to the people stuck there by refusing to take them back.
People in i.e. France are dealing with similar issue where much of their criminals are Algerian because Algeria is refusing much of the repatriation of illegal immigrants in France. France has chosen to just release them back into population rather than build camps, with end result Algerian gangs terrorize the populace knowing they can't be sent back, which obviously plays into the hands of pushing voters towards the right-wing.
That's the point, it's not an investigation in the first place so how can you "obstruct" an investigation. It's just a business deal. Unless you believe special rules apply for business deals with them that make perfectly normal things crimes.
I heard the new division of ICE that is implementing these investigations is called Government Ethics, Security & Transparency Agency for Public Operations, with some kind of acronym I couldn't quite hear.
You know when you have corrupt organizations calling themselves exactly what they are not, we are in an authoritarian state. And its moving fast.
ICE will need to hit up Israel for that data.
Israeli companies are constantly working on spyware and advertising technologies.
Take a look at abominations such as the product Sherlock produced by Insanet:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/
https://cyberjustice.blog/2024/01/22/sherlock-the-terrifying...
There are loads of others.
It sounds like you’re just looking for another opportunity to bash a group of people that you hate.
Spyware is produced in many countries - although the Israeli ones are very good, because Israelis are very good at what they do.
It is really hard to understand that this is a country that our nation’s media and KOLs have vigorously whitewashed for decades. They say the United States protects private property, that America is free and democratic, and that everyone owns guns, so they can guarantee their own freedom.
All of our people should feel ashamed of this—being deceived by the media day after day for decades. Too stupid. Even today, there are still many people who firmly believe it.
Ah yes the famous Constitutional freedom to gun down tyrants. It turns out nobody can agree on who the tyrant is!
I am all for government and private industry working together to keep the country safe and ensure our laws our efficiently enforced.
If you want to target a demographic, ask the experts.
Although this is quite a dark time, I hope ICE may finally (accidentally) do some good by making it super obvious to people how much online platforms track them.
In a way, this is a good thing. Hopefully it will draw the attention of other countries and make them realize how important it is to prevent such data hoards, and hopefully once the US has recovered they'll learn from it like the Germans did from the Stasi.
Maybe California will even take it as an incentive to make proper privacy laws and impose it on anyone doing business in California in any way.
Unlikely. Other countries will watch and realise how important it is to collect their own data hoards so they can do it too.
If anyone else finds this stuff interesting I've off and on worked on an open source MMP to try and keep the functionality of ad tracking but move the data collection off of centralized hubs like AppsFlyer. I'd love to pick it back up if some people are interested in working together.
https://github.com/openattribution
ICE got additional $80B over next 4 years in addition to the standard appropriations resulting in $28B budget for example in this year. That definitely gonna buy a lot of “market research”.
For comparison, what is the cost of immigration?
Negative cost. It brings more money.
To whom? To the country losing people or to the country getting people? Like, what is the cost of Elon Musk immigration? And who bears that cost? And who enjoys the benefits of it?
Here is another example of ICE directly working with Israeli Spyware companies.
"What Is ICE Doing With This Israeli Spyware Firm?"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/software/what-is-ice-do...
The abuse to us normal people has to stop before we really organize and fix things.
I love this. All these years I've been a privacy enthusiast lunatic, because ofc no-one has anything to hide. Now ad trackers are being potentially weaponised by the govt, and ofc no-one could have foreseen that. This is absolute gold. Will be patiently waiting for recall install's to start sending screenshots to ice of your private documents and comm's.
In a way Im glad its happening because its going to be a wake up call for many, on the other hand, there is going to be a lot of suffering as a result of this..
Someone please hint ICE that they can get a lot more data from AI companies. Asking what your rights are? Straight to jail.
> ICE says it is attempting to better understand how commercial big data providers and advertising technology firms might directly support investigative activities, while remaining sensitive to “regulatory constraints and privacy expectations.”
That's rich and i'll believe it when they respect the written law.
To be clear, I fully expect other departments have been investigating these sorts of things in past and present, but ice have conducted themselves differently now and should be treated accordingly.
Hey but who cares about cookies anyway right?
This must be a real conundrum for the surveillance capitalist weekend 'resisters' who created this technology in the first place. "Oh, but it's not evil when we use it."
"It's my job - I just followed orders"
Don't forget - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, etc are all proud partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE. When the NSA asked these companies to participate in an unconstitutional and unlawful program (as ruled by a federal judge) called PRISM, they didn't fight, they eagerly complied. They kept their compliance secret. They lied about it to citizens, to their users, to their customers, and even to congress. These are fundamentally untrustworthy entities, and there's no reason to believe they've changed and won't comply with secret DHS and ICE requests just like they did with secret NSA requests.
Every dollar spent on AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, iPhones, Macbooks, Windows, Office, etc supports the widespread violation of rights committed against the innocent of all political and demographic backgrounds in the name of "national security".
Know what doesn't? Open source operating systems, open source software, and self-hosting. Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I remember rolling out encryption over all the DC<->DC fiber after the PRISM leaks at Google. People were pissed about it. I'm sure they comply with legal requests but I would be very surprised if they break the law (such as it is) in any way.
And for Europeans or those in other countries: every dollar spent on these companies is supporting their support of Trump; that's against Greenland, NATO etc. For example, Microsoft donated $1M (IIRC) to Trump for Davos.
At work we have stopped buying new American services, but there's been very little reduction of existing use.
(Yet we did manage a policy stating we won't buy anything from Russia.)
And for Europeans: Germany France and UK do the same thing
>Do the right thing, ditch the modern day equivalents of IBM collaborating with the enemies of freedom, human dignity, and human prosperity.
I think it needs to go a bit further than that. We need names, for purposes of blacklisting but also future prosecution. Collaborators should not be tolerated.
I'm sure it's not popular, but quite a few of our colleagues and fellow HN readers do belong in cells.
What phone do you use?
GrapheneOS is the only phone that Cellebrite admits they can't hack. And the only phone that if you bring it to Catalonia, they'll assume you're a drug dealer.
AND YET YOU PARTICIPATE IN SOCIETY
Pixel 8 Pro with Graphene.
I'm against this type of surveillance everywhere, but seeing the holier than thou attitude of some of the comments rubs me the wrong way.
Doing basically the same for people who are on the Epstein list was OK, but now it's wrong?
Uh yeah, it's ok to track and arrest confirmed pedophiles, but not normal people at random
The last time I looked illegal immigration is still illegal.
I don't see people protesting en masse to take Clinton, Trump, Gates etc. accountable. Maxwell Ghislaine is alive and well, and they can't get a incrementing confession.
But somehow people loose their shit when some MS-13 gang members get arrested.
MS–13 is running amok in Minneapolis, but they call themselves ICE.
You say they're ICE, but I don't see any way to tell the difference.
Illegal immigration enforcement/code is civil, not criminal. If it was criminal, enforcement would require giving suspected offenders actual Article III judge hearings pre-every deporations, not use immigration court, etc. You know, rights. If you lot want to change it to criminal, go for it. But don't lie.
People lose their shit when the Constitution is violated. When civil norms are violated in evil ways. When people following the legal process with pending applications before the Government get punished/unfair enforcement against them because grannies in the government system are easier targets than tracking down actual MS-13 gang members. When law enforcement hides their identity and act like a secret police force ABOVE civilian oversite (again against the Supreme Court saying civilians have a right to monitor police actions and against American norms of... not having secret police).
My argument is not about the legality, but selectivity of the outrage. Somehow if it's politically beneficial there are a ton of people outraged, and in other times like the pedophile scandal of the century, with a lot of powerful people in it, no one seams to really care.
Funny because the first line of your point is "The last time I looked illegal immigration is still illegal." so specifically about the legality, and I explained what you said is not true, and that if it was these people would have legal protections that match what the Constitution requires and the public would be way less upset.
It sounds like you don't really care about the law, or people that want the constitution enforced, you care about the politics and if it the Constitution is politically inconvenient. Following the Constitution is ALWAYS the politically correct choice in the USA. Choosing the law over 'civil immigration enforcement' used as a loophole to bypass the law/Constitution is always the correct choice.
You don't get MS-13 in the kind of operations that the populace have been protesting. If people are showing up with whistles and megaphones you have lost the element of surprise by such a long-shot what you are basically are getting are people who have to be there to wait for their kids to get back from school, or are sticking around because they need to go to their regular doctor appointment.
If they were getting gang members the protests would be useless because tactically they would be in and out every time before anyone could protest their operations.
Look, this is tangential, for what is worth I don't agree with a lot of what ICE is doing.
My argument is that if you have two injustices A and B with severity of lets say 50/100 and 90/100. And injustice A is being globally protested, but injustice B is ignored, then your fight is not for justice, then you are being used as a political tool.
Or you are seizing your moment to temporarily ally with your enemies on a 50/100 topic when the 90/100 topic doesn't have the moment you need. I generally despise the politics of most people protesting DHS/ICE but I find them to be useful idiots on this particular topic so I'm happy to form a tenuous agreement with them.
They’re going from Brownshirt to Gestap to Stasi overnight.
Auschwiiiiitz
Sorry I sneezed