We need a code of ethics for software developers, with actual teeth (violating it means you can't commercially build software any more).
Edit: it's amazing how much the alt-right has infiltrated Hacker News. The notion that we, as developers, should have a professional obligation to engage ethically should not be so controversial (yet here I am with negative karma for proposing it).
To expand on my point:
1. This is hardly a novel suggestion. Lots of positions have professional associations with ethics rules. See engineers, doctors, lawyers, librarians, etc.
2. This is not a union. Lawyers don't bargain collectively.
3. Nobody is talking about illegal immigration. The worry here is around proposals for a database of Muslim-Americans (who are almost all here legally).
4. Nobody is coming for your code. Obviously you won't need to enter your professional PIN to compile code. It just means you'd have to be a member to work for a major tech company.
I struggle with the same issues here in the UK, where the professional body for tech, the British Computing Society (BCS) is not just toothless, but in my eyes, actively harmful (for example, chose to vote _in favour_ of NSA-like practices at GCHQ - including giving evidence (in the form of an expert statement) to the government).
I think what is important to realise is that something approximating the majority of people do actually go against the values typically espoused by the people who visit HN, not just in the wider public but also within tech. And even discounting those, how many people are quite happy to just do as told? How do we work to distill the concept of professional ethics in tech from these people, and then instill it?
I think a good first step is to learn from groups—doctors, librarians, lawyers, engineers—who have such a working system of professional ethics in place.
They define a much more narrow set of ethics. Nobody's losing their engineering license for designing missiles. You lose your license for sneaking in last minute changes in without proper review, accidentally causing missiles to explode in their launch tube.
Actually, since 2010 anesthesiologists have refused to participate in capital punishment. [0]
> In at least one case, the planned execution of Michael Morales, the execution warrant was stayed indefinitely due to the objection of the contacted physicians to participate.
Definitely true, and all the ones I am familiar with are purposefully non-partisan. That is, they define as ethical things that both Democrats and Republicans agree on.
Capital punishment is a good example, but also an extreme one, and slightly tangential. It isn't that doctors oppose capital punishment for the reasons the anti-capital punishment movement does (the government shouldn't kill people, mistakes are made, the sanctity of life, etc.); instead it is simply because it violates the doctors direct "do no harm" oath.
And it is a rare corner case. Overall, there are plenty of doctors across the political spectrum. I mention this because the ethics proposed in "Never Again" are not like that. They would need to be changed quite significantly to be. That's the issue here.
Doctors are also prohibited from assisting in "enhanced interrogations" performed by the US government.
>"Any interrogation process that...requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks" and is thus "contrary to international law."[0]
Torture is unfortunately political in America, with the president-elect and many on the right supporting it. And it's another thing an ethics board is standing against.
You distil it through trial, error, and refinement, and you instill it by rejecting the established consensus and being willing to tolerate unpopularity or even persecution. If you're not happy with the BCS, start drafting an open letter of rejection of their standards and a demand for something better, while teaming up with people to research and rough out an alternative you can live with. Germany offers examples from both fascist and communist regimes, so looking into their post-war/post-regime experiences might be the best place to begin.
You need to finish that thought: the majority of people do actually go against the values typically espoused by the people who visit HN, and they too have strong feelings about the concept of professional ethics. In other words, they consider your values unethical, and you'd be outvoted in a professional society. Your resistance to the GCHQ (or NSA or FSB or Mossad -- whatever your local agency is) is thereby declared unethical. Due to lack of ethics, your membership in said professional society is suspended.
If like any other professional body, a group with an interest in keeping barrier to entry high and expensive. Writing commercial software without a four year degree? Well that's just downright irresponsible and immoral!
No residency working under Big Tech Co for 5 years? No self employment for you! Lets see what giving that kind of power to authorised employers does to tech wages, should be fun.
I was thinking about this on the drive home. A minimal set:
* That we be mindful of the difficulty of our craft and not work on systems where failures can harm others when we're uncertain of our ability to execute reliably. For instance: that we not work on projects that seem likely to produce another Therac-25 disaster.
* That we be mindful of the outsized impact technology can have, especially when put to unexpected use, and thus be obligated to design systems with all reasonable safeguards against misuse. For instance: that we not work on projects that are benign when used as designed, but that are easily turned into instruments of mass surveillance --- like: a big chunk of the network security product market.
* That we design and build systems that ordinary users can reliably use safely and, where applicable, securely. For instance: that we don't repeat the mistakes of Adobe Flash.
Number 2 is effectively impossible. You correctly point out the entire netsec industry, but it goes much much further. Cisco, Oracle, Google, and Facebook would all immediately fail that test.
I would shed no tears, but it'd be a tough sell with most people.
You'd be surprised. Sit down with a group of smart people, isolate a single problem, and pick it apart. For instance: you've got a giant database of sensitive information that could be used to build a(nother) national Muslim registry. So:
* Aggressively aggregate data into statistical aggregates that address your business questions while discarding, the way we already do for credit card data, sensitive information we don't immediately need.
* Seed the database with false information in a way that allows it to answer the business logic questions your application needs, but that would respond to an unexpected compelled production request with data that would be untenably expensive to true back up.
* Design the system so that it can efficiently answer the questions the system was designed to answer, but that takes proof-of-work-scale effort to answer other questions. There are already database systems with these designs.
There are plenty of other answers; this was like a 5 minute conversation in a bar in San Francisco a few weeks ago.
The point is that rule #2 isn't a professional obligation today, so there's little incentive to design comprehensive safeguards --- or really even to conduct the misuse modeling exercises that would even suggest what kinds of countermeasures are needed.
What I think is the case is that we won't come up with good solutions to these problems until we make them professionally mandatory to solve, so that their solutions enable new revenue by enabling applications to be built that could not be built ethically otherwise.
It's getting more attention now after the Apple news, and it would be a great start industry-wide. But it isn't cheap, and takes a real commitment from the business.
If there was enough support among tech workers to force industry to align with that sort of model, it might obviate the competitive efficiency problem.
What do you mean "you can't build"? What does "build software" mean? You can't run gcc anymore? Contribute to opensource? Publish your app?
What would you add to that "code of ethics"? Should I be banned from "build software" if my library is used in non-ethical (in someone's opinion) project? Is working for institutions in countries that violate human rights (UAE?) should be considered "unethical"?
Just take your witch hunt ideas and leave us alone.
Negative enforcement by punishment is not likely to hold well for programmers. What are you gonna do, ban all hacking? good luck trying to enforce that.
Pardon me for being d's advocate. I think there already exists avenues to reject requests to do unethical things. I don't know what this "code of ethics" offers that will replace or surpass existing avenues.
You start documenting evidence and bring it to court or (threaten to)expose them in public. I don't see what this "code of ethics" can do to shield you from whatever.
seriously? You think a company willing to violate ethics will stop at you saying to them "you can't hire somebody who will."? This is why I think such "code" has absolutely no power or leverage when it comes to employer-employee interactions.
Oh, but you think you'll be able to scare them into compliance with the threat of a lawsuit? You don't have enough power. Capital provides one kind of power, large social networks a different kind of power. You as an individual don't have much power at all unless you are some sort of indispensable genius...in which case you're more likely to be running the business than taking orders.
It's important that both sides of this discussion remain civil and refrain from casting aspersions. This comment would be better without the "alt-right angle on HN" bit. Having misgivings about a code of ethics or about this pledge doesn't make someone an "alt-righter".
I'd encourage you to focus on the arguments rather than on attributing things to the people writing those arguments; if you must do that, have real evidence.
What exactly do you think is the substantive argument of "but illegal immigration?"
Nothing in the article is about illegal immigration, nor is the discussion of a Muslim database about illegal immigration. It's a red herring. We already have immigration databases.
This is how the alt-right derails discussion. They exploit our preference to treat all arguments as valid until we're at the point of debating whether mass deportation of ethnic/religious minorities is okay. The growing and vocal influence of the alt-right on HN should not be ignored.
I'd like to remind the citizens of HN that I and other alt-righters here are rarely guilty of inserting political articles into the News Feed of this website. Otherwise my posting history would probably include a tide of Drudge Report, Unz, Breitbart etc. I would expect a ban if I did that. Links to such websites are rarer than hen's teeth.
The evidence is that many people on the other side of the isle are more than comfortable submitting articles from Daily Kos, Huffington Post and Salon.
Thomas, I'm not that inclined to be civil towards people who are actively trying to harm me or my family. Quite a lot of the alt-right people, some of whom are open participants in HN, subscribe to an aggressive white nationalism with a declared agenda of ethnic cleansing and genocide. If you're in any doubt about this shoot me an email and I'll feed you evidence until you're sick of it.
My politics on this particular issue are probably identical to yours. What I'm saying is that we should be careful not to attribute alt-rightness to people simply because they have misgivings about the pledge or disagreements about immigration policy.
Ultimately, I believe there's a variant of this pledge that should pass the "moderate Republican" test. I recognize that the current pledge does not and I don't think that's because everyone who has an issue with this pledge is unreasonable or part of the alt-right.
More importantly, though, civility is an iron law on HN. The right response to someone who is baiting you into incivility is to flag their comments and to point out that that's what they're doing without descending into incivility yourself.
> Ultimately, I believe there's a variant of this pledge that should pass the "moderate Republican" test. I recognize that the current pledge does not and I don't think that's because everyone who has an issue with this pledge is unreasonable or part of the alt-right.
Why do you say that? I'm a reformed conservative, and most of the moderate Republicans I know agree that a database of Muslims is unethical and evil.
> The right response to someone who is baiting you into incivility is to flag their comments and to point out that that's what they're doing without descending into incivility yourself.
I don't think that helps much. Despite dang's best efforts HN is increasingly turning into a place where the alt-right feels at home.
It's not optional, whether you believe it helps or not. Incivility on HN will almost certainly result in your comments being taken less seriously (especially as they plummet down the page and are ultimately flagged), and will eventually just result in your account being banned.
That's happening consistently to the alt-righters I do see on HN. Why own-goal yourself by calling them names? Call out their arguments, flag their comments, but remain civil.
Regarding moderate Republicans: I think we're talking past each other, and that we agree. It's the specific language of the pledge that I think is tricky for them, not the substance of it.
What I'm saying is that we should be careful not to attribute alt-rightness to people simply because they have misgivings about the pledge or disagreements about immigration policy.
Agreed, but I'm pretty good at detecting when people aren't arguing in good faith on certain issues, and exploiting the good faith of others to subvert the equally important civic notions of inclusivity, rationality, and consensus-seeking.
That's no more possible than a code of ethics for painters that would prevent them from creating new pictures. But the technical impossibility of this is no barrier to stringent social sanctions that would make it virtually impossible to get hired to any position of responsibility in the future.
A code cannot have teeth without being backed up by some organization to do the biting, as it were, meaning some sort of union or professional association whose bylaws enshrine these ethical standards. Otherwise the 21st century equivalent of 'I was only following orders' will be 'that's above my pay grade.'
Obviously we're not going to make it impossible to code without being a member of the developer guild. But it's totally feasible to make it so you can't get hired by any self-respecting tech company without being a member. Start at the top and things will trickle down quickly.
I feel like these sorts of discussions too frequently get entangled with unions and collective bargaining, which they really shouldn't. Lawyers don't bargain collectively, but they're all members of the bar.
All that's needed to enforce a code of ethics is shop rules requiring membership in the relevant professional organization. That organization needn't be a union.
Marketing protip: call your proposal a "guild" (as in the Writer's Guild of America) instead of a "union" and you'll wash off a lot of the blue-collar stigma.
This. Union is a dirty word in Silly Valley but after a few decades of "management" making our work cheaper and more fungible SWE's will realize we're not special and subject to market forces like everyone else. We don't even have the benefit of being hard to outsource like some service-oriented professions. We're fucked TBH.
SWE's are becoming more specialized, and our work more standardized, prerequisites for an assembly line. Get ready, folks, we're the new auto-workers.
For the time being I'd rather focus on a professional association, since talk of unions will send those capitalist bros running for the hills (and I think ethics are more important than protecting our salaries).
Also I think we're professionals. Doctors and engineers are doing just fine without unionizing.
Unions aren't just about salaries, they're about resisting all sorts of unfair management bullshit. And developers may be "professionals" (that's kind of a loaded fucking word; carpenters are professionals too, and they have unions), but we are also the victims of a lot of unfair management bullshit, including unpaid on-call time and mandatory unpaid overtime (oh, but we're exempt, that makes it okay? Fuck that.)
I'm more concerned with ethics than salaries, too. Which is precisely why i think unions are important. Corporations have no ethics. Management has no ethics.
Both my examples did in fact mention "unpaid", but there are plenty of others. Unions would give us leverage against management asking us to do illegal or unethical shit. They wouldn't be able to just say, "Okay, won't write the Muslim Database code? You're fired! Next person!" Seriously, they are a solution to the whole set of problems here.
Suppose you were actually developing a muslim registry.
You'd be at a government contractor. They are required to post notice of the "fraud, waste, and abuse" hotline. They are mostly prohibited from making you do unpaid on-call time and mandatory unpaid overtime. Everyone would attend yearly ethics training.
Oh yeah, a whistleblower hotline - because that's going to be useful under a Trump presidency. And yes, government contractors mostly don't do unpaid work, but what good is "yearly ethics training" when you're already tasked with building a Muslim registry? I mean, that is in and of itself unethical! And if you quit, they'll just replace you with someone who's totally happy to build it. That's the whole reason people are discussing some kind of professional organization.
You call the "waste, fraud, and abuse" hotline if you find your employer sabotaging the muslim registry. It'll work, even under a Trump presidency. Your employer wouldn't even be allowed to retaliate.
Many would say that it is unethical when you don't take every reasonable measure to protect America. The yearly ethics training might help you with this. The professional organization might reject unamerican activities. For example, if you fail to help America whenever appropriately compensated, you get ejected from the organization. At the very least, any organization with a supposed "ethics" code in opposition to American security is obviously not going to get the sort of support ("must be a member") that it would need.
How do you enforce that?
How do you avoid it making software even costlier to build by several orders of magnitude?
How do you make sure that outsourced developers that will inevitably be used due to this rise in cost follow the code of ethics?
Librarians follow a code of patron privacy that they take incredibly seriously. It doesn't result in non-code librarians being smuggled in from Ukraine.
I'm not sure why you think a basic code of professional ethics would add so much cost to software development.
If you want to enforce it and have oversight at any basic level, for example the way it might be done in law, then you need a licensing of some form, and it's going to add overhead and delays = costs.
There's much we can learn from librarians, but it's clear that the comparisons between library practice and software engineering are going to be tenuous. Are hundreds of librarians ever tasked with building multi hundred million dollar systems + ongoing maintenance etc? I can think of a few perhaps (BNF, LOC, etc) but it's nowhere near the same magnitude or scope as software.
I have a hard time seeing how you can get all the benefits of a code of ethics in a field as money heavy as software without none of the overhead that unionizing/licensing/etc would bring.
Not that I am fundamentally against unionizing. But then, why would a company choose a costly, slow US union over cheap, fast overseas engineers?
You asked for examples of librarians running hundred-million dollar projects, and I gave you one.
I think the issue is one of professional culture and norms, and has little to do with budgets. If you don't like the analogy to librarians, pick one of any number of professions that have a robust code of ethics. Mechanical engineers build aircraft and bridges, for example, at budgets that dwarf ours.
I think the fundamental issue lies with the fact that software is one of the most geographically agnostic fields. You're going to have a very hard time getting librarians in the Philippines running a library in Virginia, or engineers based in India building a bridge in San Francisco. But in software, it just doesn't matter. (well, we all know it does matter - but to the vast majority of MBA types, it doesn't matter)
That's why I have a hard time with the librarian analogy, and even the mechanical engineer one and others to some extent. Software just feels conceptually different from other professions in that it's very hard to imagine work that would be any easier to ship to the lowest bidder anywhere in the world. That seems to me like the real philosophical problem to deal with.
We have a professional organization, it's called the ACM. I've been a member of it all of my career, and no employer has ever given a shit. Why isn't it succeeding at doing what you want it to do?
I want better ethics in software as much as everyone else in this thread, and I'm putting out these comments in the hope of having people reply with concrete, realistic paths to how we can achieve it, and so far I'm not seeing it.
We need to establish the idea that to work professionally as a software engineer, you must be a member of a professional organization.
This could come through two paths:
1. Directly lobbying the biggest tech companies to institute it in their hiring. If Google required ACM membership for all developers, ACM membership would actually matter. This would also help to trickle down to small employers.
2. Lobby at "access points." Maybe AWS should require that any system with an annual bill of $1k or more had a professional developer involved.
3. Lobby the government to require professional licensing for anyone working on large-scale production software.
How do ASME members enforce their code of ethics? How do doctors enforce the Hippocratic Oath? We should resist the temptation of assuming that just because software development is new, the professional ethics problems we face are novel or especially challenging.
The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor.
The same is not true for software and will NEVER be true for software.
Nobody is ever going to care if the guy fiddling around with CSS and HTML to make a marketing landing page is licensed or not. Hell, I know small startups that will pay a bright high school student to do stuff like that.
Vast swafts of software engineering can be reduced to basic crud web dev that a bootcamper college dropout is capable of doing.
There is no "high school intern" level equivalent of medical work that the world has a massive shortage of.
> The issue is that very few people would be willing to be treated by an unlicensed doctor.
That's true today, mainly due to centuries of work to professionalize medicine.
There was a time in history where much of treatment was basically the equivalent of high school crud work.
More importantly, I don't think we need to worry about the random fiddlers. They're not the ones building massive databases. It's the people working at places like Google and Facebook.
The code of ethics doesn't even have to be enforced by employers. All it takes is for a sufficient number of senior developers to adopt it, and then companies that want reliable access to senior talent will be required to reckon with their code of ethics.
Thats a fair point, for sure. But if that is the case, senior devs would have to have some reason to join this organization, as it only seems to put you at a disadvantage.
Lawyers are only in their professional org because it is enforced against them.
There'd have to be some negative effect to "defecting" by not joining the org. Self enforced maybe? Devs refusing to hire other devs that aren't in the org? Possibly.
I'd join a professional organization that committed me to the three ethical rules I proposed downthread. Why would I do that? By your logic, it would serve only to put me at a disadvantage. And yet: I'm pretty senior as engineers go, and still happy to sign up?
IMO, you'd be solving the wrong problem. The real problem that needs to be solved is licensing software engineers. This comes with the added benefit of standardizing competence. If lawyers and doctors need licensing, why shouldn't we also have a licensing body for software engineers? Then you get the ethics enforcement for free.
Target the big players (large tech companies) so that they'll only hire people who are members of the developer guild. We're not going to prevent people from ever building software, but permanently taking employment at Google/Facebook/etc. off the table would be a strong deterrent.
> How do you avoid it making software even costlier to build by several orders of magnitude?
Why do you think that following ethics would make software much costlier to build? You're the one making the assumption so you need to give evidence.
No, specifically not like a union in that there's no collective bargaining.
I feel like people are acting deliberately obtuse. This isn't some radical proposal.
Doctors have professional associations (with ethics requirements). So do lawyers. So do librarians. We're professionals—it's time to act like it.
Also, being bound to a professional code of ethics is a benefit. It pre-commits you so that if your boss tries to get you to do something unethical you have substantially more leverage to refuse. Try getting an attorney to do something which would get them disbarred—they'll refuse, even if you're offering a ton of money.
The AMA or ABA is useful for censuring activities which are obviously noxious to broader society, which helps it manage its standing within society, but I think that is almost the entirety of the motivation, utility, and scope of professional ethics. Nevertheless I think there are advantages to organization and I hope for more of it. That being said,
You can't stop a metaphorical mass database of Muslims at a time when there's sufficient political support to do so -- and there's plenty at the moment. A lot of people see <it's just information, what do you have to hide if you're righteous> as a good enough reason, enough to generate broad acceptance.
There's also enough political support to build illegal mass surveillance machinery, and then lie to Congress about it. The aggregate of the US is okay with that, just like how the aggregate of the UK is okay with even more in-your-face surveillance. Likewise, you cannot stop the documented abuses of psychiatry when there's all too much political support for it.
There are useful reasons for a union, and I hope it so for the health of the technology community, but I don't think it can dent the issues which people mean by this "never again" political speech (big databases of people -> risk to vulnerable minorities).
Any self-regulating professional organization ultimately is granted its status by the government. If its ethics deviate significantly from that of wider society, it will lose support in government and will probably not survive as an organization.
Trying to create a government-appointed organization to oppose a government policy is simply foolish. It's not going to happen.
No it isn't. Sure, it could register as a 501(c)3 or something and technically the government could then revoke its charter to operate as a non-profit, but is the possible existence of future difficulties really a good excuse to do nothing at all? That's a bit like saying 'why get up in the morning, since you're going to die sooner or later anyway.'
Sure, but it's government laws that require that engineers, doctors and lawyers have licenses. It would be a toothless organization without government backing.
This is a strategy that has little chance of succeeding. There are more effective political groups such as the EFF or the ACLU.
While that is true, they largely agree with policy. There's only occasional conflicts. Those organisations have long histories and clearly defined, non-partisan principles that most people largely agree with.
Congress is not going to pass a law to deport Mexicans and Muslims, then pass a law to establish an organization that is designed to thwart their previous law.
Perhaps Congress won't, but that's assuming that government is unitary.
Professional licensing is done at the state level anyways. It would be very easy to imagine, for example, California passing a law to establish/bolster a developer guild at the same time that Congress is trying to deport Muslims.
I don't think state governments could bar programmers from working on federal projects. I suppose they might be able to bar them from working on anything but federal projects, though. Maybe. I'm not exactly a constitutional scholar.
There is the supremacy clause. If state and federal law conflict, then federal law is applied. The state government cannot flat out prohibit the federal government from implementing a federal law.
Stop looking at it as a technical legal problem and start considering it as a sociopolitical one. Even if an organization doesn't have the legal means to obstruct the federal government it can still stand for something politically and have significant social ramifications. The Pirate Party as a political entity springs to mind.
Almost every other major profession has rules like these. You can't even prepare taxes without complying with a code of ethics. This isn't the crazy logistical challenge you're making it out to be.
- Taking the hippocratic oath
- Passing the bar
- Obtaining a pilot's license
- Completing series 7,(63,66) exams
Yes, these are things people do. But these things are each different from each other, and different from a petition.
Some of them are not centralized lists, and others are not calls to political action.
Meanwhile others are discriminatory, in that they distinguish those who have proven proficiencies, as capable practicioners of valuable skills.
Simply affirming a willingness to act in a certain way only means so much. Refusing to act means less. Indicating an intent to prevent others from acting is yet another behavior.
Advertising any political intentions, regardless of actual skills or rationale, may carry sentimental value, and that's nice, I guess.
Meanwhile the possession of technical skills, which rest on the firmament of electrified silicon substrates, with open-ended usage patterns, which may eventually lead to these objects ...behaving with some semblance of ...sentient free will? Deciding thier own ethics? In ways not obvious to the inventor?
Are their parenting licenses?
Just kidding. That last part's a can of worms all its own.
Pledges don't require signatures. I've taken the pledge of allegiance to the United States of America...
Specifically, though I was pointing out flaws with respect to the part about "having teeth":
with actual teeth (violating it means you
can't commercially build software any more).
Taking a "pledge" sure ...but then also recording names, and then beyond even THAT enforcing violations, violations which carry penalties. But not just any single penalty for some transgression, a PERPETUAL penalty that blacklists a person.
There's an escalation in the magnitude of authority hidden in this idea, which starts with an ideal, and can quickly spin into ideology. And maybe delves into impossibilities, at best. At worst suspends disbelief, and convinces people things are fixed when nothing has actually changed.
Crimes are crimes. Incidents involving civil damages are recognized by state authorities. Meanwhile the by-laws of a subculture, fraternal guild or trade association are something else entirely. Without passing the bar exam maybe this becomes cult-like.
Okay, industry self governance is a thing too. Agreeing to ground rules, when regulatory iversight is dubious. Is the intent to provide protections against situations which legal state appointed authorities cannot legislate or perhaps fail to grasp? That sounds like a tall order which carries realities beyond a simple pledge or civic association's intentions.
If the intent is to somehow apply dogma to adversaries whom already flout rules and willfully undermine codes of conduct, those people will assuredly happily lie, sign the pledge, infiltrate and destroy whatever beautiful thing that had yet to hatch anyway. With falsified identities, no less. So, then what?
Making promises is nice. Communication of expectations is good. Codified guidelines are even better. Maybe the idea is for something like standards and practices departments within television networks, or the PMRC which tried to take stand against foul language in music, according to opinions regarding morality.
Software, isn't simple artistic expression, but still there would need to be enforcement, and a registry of good children who get presents from Santa, and bad children who get coal.
Who has the teeth? Who gets to bite? (hint: the words "everyone/anyone" does not belong in the response, because the buck stops somewhere real)
You sure seem to have a lot of irrelevant arguments designed to discourage people from engaging in concerted ethical action by committing to a code of conduct. It's not like anyone is forcing you to sign up to such a thing, so why are you so eager to pick holes in it?
Because it kind of smells like bullshit seizing moral high ground, and not actually changing anything.
Religion promises everything and delivers nothing.
My arguments are not irrelevant. You seem to be hinting that I'm a forum sliding paid mercenary shill on a mission to gaslight political opponents blah blah blah...
I am not some political interloper out to dilute conversation or discourage the action of others. I only outline my own rationale for why I think this is a pointless feel-good activity. Take this comment as my pledge. I am not being sarcastic.
> We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
This would mean I can never work on a system to support a social program that identifies at risk minority children to improve health care initiatives. No one can ever work on a national census again, or demography surveys.
It also highlights the "Americ-centric" view from a lot of tech people. The US government is right out, but despite this pledge talking about their recent Genocides, its perfectly fine to build these systems for Bosnia or Rwanda.
I'm also curious to know to whom anyone can "whistleblow" to now days, especially now that people are trying very hard to paint Wikileaks as a Russian front.
Ultimately, this is too broadly worded and toothless. I'll just stick to "First do no harm".
> identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
> to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.
Those are the only two instance of "target" in the text on http://neveragain.tech/. There is no context on the pledge and that's what they are asking people to sign.
Governments target individuals for a broad number of entirely valid reasons, for healthcare, social services or law enforcement. Some genetic diseases are racial or ethic - if a new genetic disease is discovered, is a national health service obligated to or discouraged from contacting members of that racial group? Scientology is a "religion" that has had a sketchy background, should we make it impossible to build a database to track members?
> No one can ever work on a national census again, or demography surveys.
Many countries actually put strict restrictions on the data that can be gathered in a national census, for just that reason of fear of being used for repression and division. See: France.
Not that that strategy has been particularly successful in France's case.
To be clear, I think it's useful to collect racial and religious information in a national census. It's been critical in enforcing civil rights and equal representation.
American institutions around freedom of religion and the right of privacy are key to keeping national censuses forces for good instead of tools for oppression. We should do whatever we can to maintain strong, healthy American institutions that protect freedom of religion.
but despite this pledge talking about their recent Genocides, its perfectly fine to build these systems for Bosnia or Rwanda.
That's obtuse to the point of nonsense. 'Your proposal fails to encompass all imaginable situations and is therefore invalid' is such an obvious fallacy that it moves me to doubt your honesty.
by the way, it wasn't the government of Bosnia that launched a policy of genocidal ethnic cleansing; rather they were the victims of Serbian violence.
The "Never Again" pledge also means you can't work at Google or Facebook, who already have those databases. They know our religion, ethnicity, etc. And as Snowden showed us the US government can and does get that information from them.
Sure, force your boss to have the H-1B guy write that SQL query.
Then hop on the Google Bus and try not to think about the ways in which the tech industry is rotting away American democracy (c.f. "Facebook is confirmation bias at scale").
I don't view a decentralised resistance of technology workers as the right remedy behind this "Never Again" movement.
* It underestimates the amount of diversity which exists within the tech community in terms of political or moral beliefs and attitudes. Just a small fraction of disagreement is enough technical capability to build a lot of things for big entities.
* The AMA or ABA is useful for censuring activities which are obviously noxious to broader society, which helps it manage its standing within society, but I think that is almost the entirety of the motivation and scope of professional ethics. Nevertheless I think there are advantages to organization and I hope for more of it. That being said,
You can't stop a metaphorical database of Muslims at a time when there's sufficient political support to do so -- and there's plenty at the moment. There's also enough political support to build illegal mass surveillance machinery, and then lie to Congress about it. The aggregate of the US is okay with that, just like how the aggregate of the UK is okay with even more in-your-face surveillance. Likewise, you cannot stop the documented abuses of psychiatry when there's all too much political support for it.
* I anecdotally see tech workers as constituting a small % of society, and as too politically diverse and unorganized to do anything interesting. The tech community places too much responsibility on itself without a commensurate degree of reliable power to back it up.
It's true all human beings - including software engineers - need to think about ethics and to avoid participating in human rights abuses. But the "Never Again" pledge is a simplistic, knee-jerk way to do that.
Refusing to build a database of people based on their ethnicity or religion sounds like a good idea when you think of the possible abuses it can be used for. But the US census gathers precisely that information, and (almost) no one freaks out about it. Google and Facebook already have that information, and (almost) no one freaks out about it.
The only reason someone is freaking out now is because Trump was elected. Now, that might make sense - maybe a normally harmless database will be put to horrible use by him. He has said horrible things. But he's also shown a lot of what he says isn't intended literally.
We do need to be careful and vigilant. But "Never Again" isn't a good way to do that.
Another issue is with this kind of thinking:
> But history tells us that, whether you do it humanely or not, this kind of large-scale human rights abuse requires huge numbers of people working together with the full knowledge that they are committing human rights abuses.
No, as Hannah Arendt and many others have shown, large-scale human rights abuses often do not involve lots of people consciously doing evil. Instead, they usually think there are good reasons for what they do.
But he's also shown a lot of what he says isn't intended literally.
I am so sick of this bullshit meme. The price of all the privilege and power of being President is that you take responsibility for what you say and how people could interpret it, because your actions have potentially life-changing consequences for people and so people have a strong interest in knowing (through your speech) what sort of actions you intend to take. If Trump can't or won't control his own speech, why should we assume that his actions are rooted in competence? You're basically saying that the concept of honesty is irrelevant when it comes to politics, which is an invitation to the worst sorts of corruption.
It also overlooks two things: one, that it's incredibly disrespectful of people who are victimized by his casual remarks to say that the anxiety and fear stimulated from his position of power don't matter and thus (implicitly) that it's OK to provoke anger and fear in other people - in a word, bullying. Two, that many of Trump's supporters do take him literally - about building a wall, or how to treat Muslims, or about it being OK to grab women by the pussy, and Trump is empowering them while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility for their actions.
I can't believe I even need to explain what a steaming pile of bullshit that position is.
No, as Hannah Arendt and many others have shown, large-scale human rights abuses often do not involve lots of people consciously doing evil. Instead, they usually think there are good reasons for what they do.
You mean like in the opening sentences of your comment?
The problem is that in fact half the US population interprets Trump the way he intends. You and I belong to the other half, and we are puzzled by his non-literalness.
Apparently for the last 8 years the opposite was happening, you and I had a president that spoke "our language", while the other half of the US kept misreading him.
I don't know what to do about this except to try to listen to the other side and understand them the way they intend to be understood.
I've been listening to the other side for a good 15 years now and I have a very good idea of where they're coming from, thanks. And I don't mean secondary sources like liberal commentary websites or hand-wringing books on America's changing social fabric, I mean that I read all kinds of right-leaning sources, from think-tank publications t forums, public and private, from abstract economic theory to neo-nazi groups. I pay close attention to everything from what sort of humor they like to their religious and philosophical justifications for a wide variety of radical views. I have spent many thousands of hours immersed in conservative thought, which is pretty much the opposite of being in a filter bubble.
A tiny, tiny amount of people freak out about Google and Facebook's massive data collection. Not enough to be noticeable in the market shares of those companies' products.
> The only reason someone is freaking out now is because Trump was elected.
This is a good point. A lot of things that might have seemed sort-of reasonable under president Obama/Bush/Clinton are scarier under president Trump, and those things that were built in the past during different presidents remain in existence. So, when considering whether it's a good idea to build such tools, it's important to consider future worst-case scenarios, rather than freak out about what we've already built when it's too late.
I think a good test to apply is: "what would the House Un-American Activities Committee have done with this tool" and if the answer is scary, then that tool probably shouldn't be built. (I realize that Facebook would definitely fall into the category of "really scary tools", and yet I still grudgingly use Facebook because it's convenient for some things.)
The US government, no matter what its size, has been capable of large-scale human rights abuses throughout its history. How small do you plan to make it? As small as it was under Andrew Jackson?
This seems like a laudable goal, but what are concrete steps that would help make it happen in the next year, say? Because that's the time scale we're up against with policies like mass deportation.
The problem is we need _something_ like government to advocate for, and protect the safety and interests of the people. Something that has teeth. Because without it, we, and our land, and resources, will be raped.
> “We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.”
National origin - don't you have to declare what country you were born in to visit/emigrate to the United States? This is trying to legislate intent, which fails miserably. One thing we've seen is that if the database/tool exists, it'll be used in ways that nobody had ever thought of before.
> I’m not one of the people who seriously believes that the cost of deporting millions of people will deter the Trump administration from doing it (one easy way to reduce costs: don’t deport people humanely). But history tells us that, whether you do it humanely or not, this kind of large-scale human rights abuse
I like how she goes straight from deportation to large-scale human rights abuse. If you deport illegal immigrants (regardless of national origin or faith), you're enforcing the law. Period, point blank. To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best.
Mass migrations of people are a huge risk factor for human rights catastrophe. The Armenian genocide started as a mass deportation.
Once you're seriously talking about uprooting millions of people, including breaking up families that have lived in the United States for decades, you create a destabilizing set of conditions you may not be able to control.
Those people need to be housed, fed, moved, put on planes or ships to wherever they're being sent. The potential for abuse and tragedy is there at every step in this process.
> I like how she goes straight from deportation to large-scale human rights abuse. If you deport illegal immigrants (regardless of national origin or faith), you're enforcing the law. Period, point black. To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best.
So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation?
Tell that to the Japanese people we interned in World War II.
> So if something's legal it can never be a human rights violation?
I said it was far fetched. Many legal things can be considered morally wrong but without a consensus of what's morally right or wrong, the law is what we fall back on.
What are you proposing, doing whatever feels good at the moment while ignoring the law?
Enforcing an unjust law can easily tip in human rights abuse; witness the various anti-Jewish laws promulgated in 1930s Germany.
Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust. Did you know that if you are taken into custody for an immigration violation, you may not be entitled to any sort of hearing for as long as 6 months? Did you know that there have been many cases involving illegal abuses of people in immigration detention? Did you know that American citizens have been wrongly reported? Also, the process of determining who is deportable is nowhere near as simple as you suggest. Not everyone who comes here illegally is deportable even under a narrow reading of the law.
It is precisely your sort of poorly-informed complacency that enables human-rights abuses to occur in the first place. Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated, in which case further conversation is pointless.
> Enforcing an unjust law can easily tip in human rights abuse; witness the various anti-Jewish laws promulgated in 1930s Germany.
How odd, a Nazi/Hitler reference. Who'd had thought that was coming?
> Much of American immigration law is arguably unjust.
It's the implementation that needs work. The law is the law. You said yourself "illegal abuses" and "wrongly reported".
> Of course, maybe I've read you wrong and you're OK with some people having their rights violated
If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to. You're fighting with one hand tied behind your back. You probably shouldn't be in a country that doesn't want you.
> If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to.
Sigh. For the umpteenth time, the US Constitution does not stipulate that non-citizens are subhuman. The right of due process, as described in the Fifth Amendment:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Note that illegal immigrants are still people. The US Constitution does not define them ipso facto as subhuman.
They aren't inherently being deprived of due process. But that's an irrelevant distraction from the actual claim you made that I was responding to, where you said that non-citizens do not have the right of due process.
You're wrong. Point blank, you're wrong. They do have the right of due process, both by natural law and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
You previous response said that non-citizens were not entitled to due process. A speedy trial is part of that, under the Sixth Amendment:
> In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
How odd, a Nazi/Hitler reference. Who'd had thought that was coming?
Why shouldn't I use the best available example when it's germane? Your rhetorical flourish is a clear attempt to duck the question.
It's the implementation that needs work. The law is the law. You said yourself "illegal abuses" and "wrongly reported".
Misdirection. Not all laws are of equal significance; a person who jay-walks is a criminal, but we see a vast qualitative difference between that activity and murder, for example. Cliches like 'The law is the law' are mere tautology, and inaccurate to boot - as any lawyer will readily confirm. You seem to forget that the Constitution speaks of equity as well as law.
If you're not a citizen, you don't have rights to due process, or many other rights that citizens are entitled to. You're fighting with one hand tied behind your back. You probably shouldn't be in a country that doesn't want you.
Wrong. Let's reread the 14th amendment to the Constitution:
'No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'
(emphasis added)
Some Constitutional protections extend only to Citizens of the USA. Others extend to everyone within its jurisdiction. Would you like me to cite case law to drive home just how wrong you are?
> You probably shouldn't be in a country that doesn't want you.
I happen to be in agreement with most Americans that people who have never known any country but the United States shouldn't be deported to countries they've never known.
> National origin - don't you have to declare what country you were born in to visit/emigrate to the United States?
Yes, but once you're a citizen you certainly shouldn't have your original national origin tracked. Or that of your parents.
> To stretch that into human rights abuse is far-fetched at best.
No it is really not. Genocides almost invariable start with deportation.
Nothing in this article is about illegal immigration. For one thing, it's a wholly separate issue than the proposed Muslim database—the vast majority of Muslim-Americans are here legally.
I am so far batting .750 with my conservative friends trying to convince them that mass deportation is an issue they should be concerned with. Every one of them begins by pointing out that "illegal immigration is illegal, full stop". Here are the issues they're not immediately considering:
* For many Latino immigrants, the wait list for permanent residency is over 20 years long. The wait isn't that long because we want to restrict immigration; we broadly agree that if we drastically reduced the immigrant population in the US, the economy would suffer, because those people are staffing the meat packing plants, cleaning the hotels, working the line at practically every high-end restaurant, harvesting crops, laying bricks, and putting up tile. Rather: the 20 year wait list is simple bureaucratic cruelty: there are loud constituencies who are uneasy about formally allowing people to stay here while being totally content with allowing them to work here undocumented, so long as they're kept second-class.
* That's bad enough, but not dispositive. The real problem is that we've created the expectation that people can work here for years and years without obtaining permanent residency, and so people put down roots and then have children here. Children born in America are American citizens, full stop. We are idiosyncratic in having a Constitution that guarantees birthright citizenship, but we do, and we are a nation of laws. To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly. We owe our fellow citizens better.
* A huge number (pretty much everyone agrees it's a plurality) of undocumented workers are undocumented not because they've done something wrong, but because they've somehow fallen off their visa track --- which the law makes incredibly easy to do! We put them on an untenable 20 year legal obstacle course that really requires professional representation to complete. They spend that time working and raising children. Then we punish their children for technicalities, while quietly replacing them with other Latino immigrants.
* The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming. More than 70% of deportation cases in which the subject is represented by an immigration attorney fail --- the immigrant isn't deported. But the overwhelming majority of deportees aren't represented, because we don't guarantee counsel to people in immigration court. All we give them is a translator. If I sued you on some bogus libel charge for pissing me off on HN, how well do you think you'd do if you were denied a lawyer?
I am ultimately ambivalent about immigration enforcement. I recognize that we are in many ways more lenient than much of Europe. My objection to the big dumb wall isn't moral, it's just that it's a big dumb waste of money.
I am not ambivalent about pointlessly tearing up, or, worse, forcibly relocating families that include American citizens. There are hundreds of thousands of those. I would absolutely quit a job, refuse investment from a firm that supported, or sever ties with a client that participated in a mass deportation program that forced children to choose between their parents and their country.
Add to your list of arguments the many illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, and have lived here ever since. Where is the part where they did something morally wrong?
> Do they have a moral right to live in the United States? Probably not.
Yes, they do. Everyone has a moral right not to be deported to somewhere they've never known, especially if it tears up families in the process, extra especially if it's ultimately just for bureaucratic reasons.
> Everyone has a moral right not to be deported to somewhere they've never known.
That's the exact same argument people who live in any rapidly gentrifying neighborhood make. You do NOT have the moral right to live whereever you want, even if it's the only place you know.
Fundamentally you live where you can afford and it's legal for you to live. You don't have the rights to any piece of land unless you have a deed, and even then, eminent domain can trump your rights.
1. Out-of-control housing prices are also a moral problem. That's why it's such a hot-button issue, after all. The difference is that the housing market is a tough issue to solve, while the prospect of mass deportations is a very easy issue to solve: don't start mass deportations.
2. We're not talking about having to move across town. We're talking about being deported to a country you've never known. Being forcibly separated from your friends and family. Being unable to even visit them due to the mandatory 10-year ban on entering the United States after being deported.
And again, since you mention legality, it was illegal for Japanese-Americans to live in their homes during World War II. Yet they had a right to do so.
Hah. You're already confusing mass deportation as a moral problem, rather than a legal and policy problem. Should illegal immigrants be deported en masse? Should criminals be incarcerated en mass?
> We're talking about being deported to a country you've never known.
You're talking about children who were born in the states? They have a choice. Either stay in the states or go with their parents to another country. It's up to them, just like it's up to any other citizen. The children are not forced to leave.
How do we make decisions about these things if not based on some set of principles? What's the logic we'd use to deport someone brought here as an infant, who has known no other country but ours? What possible benefit could accrue to use to offset the harm we'd be doing? What's the point?
That the law doesn't mandate an entitlement to permanent residency for undocumented immigrants brought here as children does not mean that we should be arbitrary about making these decisions.
> What's the logic we'd use to deport someone brought here as an infant, who has known no other country but ours?
We should not try to help clean up other peoples' mistakes. If you bring a newborn illegally into a country where they should not be, you're accepting the consequences not just for yourself, but the baby.
The point is not we're deporting the baby, we're deporting the whole family and trying to deter future illegal immigration.
Again: I am not talking about newborns brought here illegally. I am talking about birthright citizens of the United States, owed all the same rights and protections as any other citizen.
You're the one that said "brought here as an infant", not "born in the United States".
And those babies born here have the same rights and protections. Either move to another country because your family is there or stay here without your family. Those are the rights that all citizens have.
> there are loud constituencies who are uneasy about formally allowing people to stay here while being totally content with allowing them to work here undocumented, so long as they're kept second-class.
If you have to get smuggled into a country without papers to live in this country and work for wages less than people who already live in the country, you sort of already have the expectation of being second class. Yet, people still come. It's a choice they make. It's not an easy choice, but still a choice.
> we are a nation of laws
and then
>To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly.
The law is the point, as you said, we're a nation of laws.
> The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming.
Due process is only a right guaranteed to citizens. Not quite sure what your point is.
That argument works for really any situation involving children.
Children never had choices to make when born into an alcoholic family, or in a country in a war torn third world country, and yet they still suffer. That's just sort of how life is. The children suffer based on the mistakes of their parents.
We have limited resources, and we have to decide how to partition these resources.
So because children suffer injustices, it's fine to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money to deliberately cause more injustice? That can't be your argument.
> it's fine to spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money to deliberately cause more injustice?
To enforce the law and to prevent these injustices to happen in the future. How are you causing more injustice? That's sort of like saying "Why spend money to evict squatters in houses they don't own? They have children, and it costs money to evict them."
Childhood arrivals are definitely squatters. If they're not born in the states or citizens. They're here when they shouldn't be here.
Those that were born here are citizens, and get the choice like every other citizen - move to be with their families, or stay here alone. The fact that they're children is immaterial.
That we are a nation of laws obviously does not mean we're a nation of ruthless, pointless enforcement of laws, or else we'd all be in prison for Harvey Silverglate's "Orange Juice" crimes.
> obviously does not mean we're a nation of ruthless, pointless enforcement of laws
That's absolutely incorrect. Cops will and can enforce laws arbitrarily. If you're an illegal immigrant, you just have less rope to play with.
If you get bored, do a search of police arrest records on how many people are charged with just "resisting arrest".
Or you can always apply that timeless advice, "only do one illegal thing at once. For instance, either drive without a license, or have a tail light out. Not both".
Immigrants already are driving metaphorically without a license.
Cops also take bribes, as I know from personal experience. But we are not a nation of bribing the cops, just as we are not a nation of ruthless, pointless enforcement of laws.
At this point I'm wondering if we actually disagree, since you seem to be agreeing that deportation of families that include citizen children would qualify as ruthless.
> deportation of families that include citizen children would qualify as ruthless.
Depends. There are several instances. Trump has gradually softened his stance on illegal immigration, basically saying now that if you keep your nose clean, you probably won't get deported.
If however the family contain family members who are violent criminals or have known gang ties? How is deporting them "ruthless"? It's self-preservation.
Whether or not Trump currently says he's going to do it is besides the point. That is a super common and easily disposed of objection from conservatives. If you don't think Trump is going to propose something, a pledge not to do it should be even less objectionable to Republicans.
But... but... think of their children and families! Aren't they human beings too?/s
But then it comes down to a value judgement, and all laws/rules have edge cases. Should you take a generally good law, point to the edge cases, and then abolish the law?
> If you don't think Trump is going to propose something, a pledge not to do it should be even less objectionable to Republicans.
Not from a negotiating perspective. By keeping options in your pocket you're able to wrangle concessions from people.
Why do you keep making up straw man arguments? There's literally nothing in this comment that is responsive to anything I've written, or to the pledge, or to the immigration issue I brought up.
Have I not demonstrated that I'm willing to listen to you and address arguments you bring up respectfully? Is there something I said that made you feel like your best way forward was to play message board nerd games?
You're the one insulting people. "message board nerd games".
There are no strawman arguments here. San Francisco has a sanctuary city policy, blocking immigration attempts to deport people. Deporting people is not a horrible deplorable thing, as you're making it out to be. It's a fact of border enforcement.
You can make any number of arguments about families and suffering, but the fact of the matter is that people chose to immigrate illegally and raise families when they knew what the consequences could be, and now they're trying to weasel out of the consequences.
1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them. Do you recognize the truth of this statement?
2) Is it bad and oppressive to target a stigmatized minority religious group for government surveillance and policing?
3) Are software engineers morally obligated to not implement oppressive policies? Or is whatever they do justified, so long as it came as an order from above?
> 1) Donald Trump has called for keeping a database of Muslims, to surveil and police them.
The problem is that all that information already exists. Google and Facebook know everyone's religion (and ethnicity and so forth). And as Snowden revealed, the government can get access to those databases.
And you can be sure they already do so specifically for Muslim people, for terrorism intel purposes.
If the author of the piece were serious, we would need to start by getting Google and Facebook to remove that information. Or stop working with the government. Or stop working at those companies until they do. But the author realizes that is something people wouldn't accept, I guess, and suggests we "not help create a new database" which just a meaningless distraction.
There's still a world of difference between the government actively maintaining a database of Enemies of the State, and the government having to extract that information from at best neutral, and often hostile third parties.
That said, it certainly behooves Facebook and Google to be thoughtful about what data they keep in a form easily accessible to the government.
I don't see a world of difference. The government gets that information either way. Once Google and Facebook has it, it can be retrieved by the government through both legal and non-legal mechanisms. Again, we know this happens, Snowden showed us.
The only option is for Google and Facebook to not have that information in the first place. That's just not going to happen - there is tons of financial value in knowing people's religion, ethnicity, etc. etc.
I don't get it. You are saying you don't want to make a database that the US can abuse(but it is OK for other countries?) but then you concede that the US probably already has the best database, but, wink-wink, they won't abuse it?
No. The pledge acknowledges that abusable databases exist. It doesn't ask that people leave companies that maintain those databases. What it demands is that signatories commit to resist abuse, and, ultimately, to sever ties with employers that abuse those databases.
The fundamental idea is that if enough people sign, management at tech companies will have to make decisions to comply with unethical government orders knowing that the discovery of their compliance (which is inevitable) might cause significant retention problems.
> The pledge acknowledges that abusable databases exist. It doesn't ask that people leave companies that maintain those databases. What it demands is that signatories commit to resist abuse, and, ultimately, to sever ties with employers that abuse those databases.
In practice, developers work on those databases in Google and Facebook. They'll be "ok" because they don't know they are abused. Other engineers in those companies will work on giving the government access to it (as Snowden documented), and they too will not see any abuse so they are ok. The government gets that information and does what it wants with it. It might be abusing it right now. (There have been many deportations under Obama, for example, with little uproar; it's possible tech databases helped in those.)
The pledge is toothless. To be actually effective, it should have called on people to not work at Google and Facebook.
That's the point of the petition: to publicly name people who had committed to the pledge. If you're worried about being publicly identified as a signatory, don't sign it.
Strongly agree, the lack of ethics in our field is deplorable. If people were building software for gas chambers HN commenters would find a way to excuse it.
There's no way to make the case this person is trying to make.
It's also hypocritical to make this case now that the team with the branding they don't like is in power. This type of sanctioned prejudice has been going on for decades.
The reason your comments are getting flagged off the site is that instead of calmly making an argument, you're name-calling, such as you did here with "leftist software developers waving their broomsticks angrily in the air".
If you follow 'dang and 'sctb's comments --- the informal mod log for HN --- you'll see that pretty much everyone who gets flagged (or banned) for name calling says some variant of this.
The answer is, just don't call people names. Make your argument calmly and simply, rather than baiting people into incivility.
Trump has said many contradictory things about all kinds of policies.
You are choosing to believe (one interpretation of) one of the things he said about immigration and not the others. I hope you are right. I am not optimistic that you are right.
Edit: it's amazing how much the alt-right has infiltrated Hacker News. The notion that we, as developers, should have a professional obligation to engage ethically should not be so controversial (yet here I am with negative karma for proposing it).
To expand on my point:
1. This is hardly a novel suggestion. Lots of positions have professional associations with ethics rules. See engineers, doctors, lawyers, librarians, etc.
2. This is not a union. Lawyers don't bargain collectively.
3. Nobody is talking about illegal immigration. The worry here is around proposals for a database of Muslim-Americans (who are almost all here legally).
4. Nobody is coming for your code. Obviously you won't need to enter your professional PIN to compile code. It just means you'd have to be a member to work for a major tech company.