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/...
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.
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.
@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.
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"
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.
Would you also consider it to be abuse if such tools were used to identify, locate, and apprehend perpetrators of less-controversial crimes (assault, pedophilia, theft, murder)?
I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.
That implies a crime was committed. I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance. Getting a warrant from a judge is far better than ICE doing what they’re currently doing.
Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.
Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law.
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."
What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
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.
> 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 ..."
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."
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”.
> 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.
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.
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/...
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.
NARRATOR: It wasn’t.
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.
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.
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
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.
A lot of them are even proud of being the loyal partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE.
Would you also consider it to be abuse if such tools were used to identify, locate, and apprehend perpetrators of less-controversial crimes (assault, pedophilia, theft, murder)?
Get a warrant. The federal government should not be "soliciting vendors" for my location.
I love how the accounts defending ICE are always brand new.
I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.
That implies a crime was committed. I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance. Getting a warrant from a judge is far better than ICE doing what they’re currently doing.
Unless of course that population wide surveillance pays $150k+/yr, with unlimited free snacks and gym membership, then all bets are off.
> I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance
Lately I'm not sure that's the case.
Immigration enforcement is abuse? What laws are okay by you? Please let us know so we can update the courts ASAP.
Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.
ICE doesn't follow the law. It breaks it.
Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law.
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
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.
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.
This is why you must block all ads always. No exceptions.
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
Hey but who cares about cookies anyway right?
If you want to target a demographic, ask the experts.
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"
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”.
They’re going from Brownshirt to Gestap to Stasi overnight.
if ICE is only removing illegal immigrants, they should of course be granted all tools to achieve those objectives.
> 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.
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.