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Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

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Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#441

Post by rayiner »

woodruffw wrote: post #290
rayiner wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic on so many levels. The first level is, of course, the irony of refusing to do military work at a company that only exists because of defense contractors working on a military project (ARPANET). More generally, the irony is that the U.S. military has made a far greater positive contribution to the world than Google. Under the Pax Americana , we have seen the greatest number of people rise out of abject pov…

This country only exists because of Puritan persecution in England, but you don't see me thanking the Anglican church for America. Bad means result in good ends all the time; that doesn't mean we should celebrate bad means. I agree that the US military has made positive contributions to the world, but I don't think it's the main source of the Pax Americana -- strong international bodies (NATO, UN, &c), the tendency f…

> This country only exists because of Puritan persecution in England, but you don't see me thanking the Anglican church for America. Bad means result in good ends all the time; that doesn't mean we should celebrate bad means.

You’re begging the question. If a particular means consistently yields good results, is it bad means? When the Roman Empire fell, we call the subsequent period the dark ages. What does that say about whether the Roman Army was good or bad?

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#442

Post by jiveturkey »

dev_dull wrote: post #12
robin_reala wrote: post #5

Every company I apply to is told during the interview process that I will not work on military projects, and that I would probably leave the company if they chose to take on a military contract. If you have personal moral limits and you’re upfront about them then no-one is the worse off; I’ve yet to be turned down for a job over it and, somewhat the opposite, companies seem to appreciate frankness.

If you contribute to open source software then you’re contributing to military projects.

Because the GPL (and other such) is a license, that can apparently have almost arbitrary restrictions, can there exist a NMPL -- non-military public license -- that excludes military use? For a current and real example, much commercial software is licensed under terms that exclude use in nuclear or lifesaving critical applications.

I'm not sure how one enforces such a license. Let's be real, even a successful lawsuit isn't going to remove said software from the military's hands. And to the extent it is honored, it has the negative effect of driving up the cost of developing military software, which of course comes out normal people's pockets.

But it might be an interesting way to take up a principled stance.

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#443

Post by kadenshep »

[deleted] wrote: post #430
bayfullofrays wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you on this. I am a recruiter for a large tech company in Seattle and with the recent political environment, I have asked my team to take it upon themselves to ask if the person they are going to bring into our team and our community is going to help us progress as a whole. I get angered when people tell me to look at just their CV, but there is so much more there. If I know that someone on their Facebook p…

[deleted]

Yeah, this is an incredibly unordinary talking point and it's not honest. At the very least it's just troll bait. "I hope your org gets sued." For what, not hiring crazy racist people?

It's okay to call a spade a spade, instead of trying to masquerade these "differences" as some kind of valid, constructive view point. It's incredibly politically correct and it's annoying.

The chances of you actually being a good, intelligent engineer that harbors absurd and morally repulsive view points tends to be astoundingly low in my experience. It's often been my experience that engineers that seemingly struggle with abstract concepts tend to harbor pretty nutty viewpoints once you start talking with them. There seems to be a pretty heavy correlation here, in my experience.

And I keep saying in my experience, but I think the phenemon is well understood across the industry. The chances of you not believing in the scientific valdity of global warming, or being okay with the current mess that is the health care market, and being able to model and reason about abstract concepts tends to be... misaligned. Or if you can't even rationally talk with people without being disingenuous. These tend to be decently understood subjects and if you're not able to comphrehend them the chances of you being able to reason about technically hard problems in an efficient manner is going to be low.

Hackers aren't supposed to be politically correct, yet this talking point gets brought up every thread and it's pretty boring and old.

I've worded the above like 3 different ways to avoid the predictable responses.

And for the record, I look at U.S. conservative candidates with extreme suspicion because of the above. I don't mind differing opinions. I hired an anarchist which is completely opposed to nearly everything I politically believe. Except for a few key points. His ideas are academically sound, well researched, and he's not xenophobic/homophobic or just generally unscientific. That's a far cry from what happens when U.S. conservative politics get involved.

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#444

Post by andrei_says_ »

nemild wrote: post #379
ggambetta wrote: post #321

I'm confused. When engineers from a company who deals with the military (or some other ethically objectionably client) don't refuse to work on these projects, HN questions their values and urges them to make a stand, refuse, find another job if necessary, etc. When the engineers do refuse, HN criticises them for beign self-righteous, virtue-signalling, and unpatriotic because countries with a lower ethical bar (Russi…

There is not often a monolithic "HN", but instead a group of people who decide to engage or not based on the subject matter. We need more media literacy around HN and Reddit. You just need a few users to upvote something, and people often respond when they see the opposing view (this is why conservatives and liberals in the US so often take the most extreme statements on the other side, and critique/retweet them; bet…

Thank you for the resource you’ve created on github. Love seeing using that platform for non-code related projects.

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#445

Post by allenz »

Bartweiss wrote: post #341
_ptgt wrote: post #30

These employees are free to exercise their right to (not) work for whomever they want, but the certainty they express (as well as most commenters here) in their own self-righteousness seems misplaced to me. There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest. In fact, I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the wor…

> a strong US military One point I haven't seen raised here is that "a strong military" is not a one-dimensional proposition. The military does a lot of things in a lot of contexts, and they don't all have the same moral value. If someone wants to build better Humvee armor for the US Army, I wouldn't criticize them at all. I don't think there's a reasonable case that better-armored Humvees are worse for the world. (N…

Defensive technology can shift the balance of power and escalate violence in ways that are hard to predict. Humvees carry armed soldiers, who could act more aggressively if they were safe from retaliation. Reagan's missile defense proposal was criticized for undermining second strike deterrence against US missile strikes, and thus escalating the arms race. Ultimately, there is no technical solution to prevent war. Education, tourism, economic ties, diplomacy, and humanitarian efforts are better ways of promoting peace than military defense.

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#446

Post by vbezhenar »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #221
tonfa wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest. In fact, I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world) hold the belief expressed in the previous statement. That's probably true for US citizens, but I highly doubt non-US folks share that view (at least from a western European perspective I'd say definite…

Fellow Western European here, and I understand that sentiment. However, it seems that countries which are closer to Russia or China don't mind the American military nearly as much. See: Baltic States, Sweden, Taiwan. Pax Americana is a thing, even if it's usually overshadowed by completely braindead interventions like the Iraq War.

I doubt that US would help those countries in the war with Russia. US didn't help Georgia, US didn't help Ukraine. It's naïve to expect that US would protect someone on the other end of earth.

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#447

Post by nemild »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #439
asafira wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand a bit: I think we need to embrace the fact that often times we have posts that don't have a "right" response --- i.e., where you can get a good view of exactly the right way to feel about something given the first few comments. Lots of these issues have many angles you can come from, and I hope people are (a) willing to keep themselves to a high-enough standard to think for themselves and see that it's a gr…

> I think we need to embrace the fact that often times we have posts that don't have a "right" response Indeed. I know I keep seeing during the immigration debate (of which is recent). Liberal-leaning say that we should provide due process and let in refugees. This is argument in good faith. Conservatives say that we have a body of law that must be adhered to regarding immigration. This too is a valid argument. I may…

But even Dang is just a single person. We really need to design systems (social networks) that encourage this type of thoughtful debate. Right now, all the incentives in social media are around "engagement" (upvotes, likes, retweets, large amounts of comments)

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#448

Post by vbezhenar »

blueatlas wrote: post #273
tonfa wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest. In fact, I would wager that a majority of Americans (and a majority of citizens of democratic countries across the world) hold the belief expressed in the previous statement. That's probably true for US citizens, but I highly doubt non-US folks share that view (at least from a western European perspective I'd say definite…

I'm genuinely curious - what do you think the world would look like if the US decreased their military capabilities and stopped involvement in any world conflicts or terrorism? I'm a US citizen and I would like to see the US stop being the worlds police for 5 to 10 years, just to see what the world looks like at the end of that.

I don't know whether it's the truth, but in my country it's universally accepted opinion among many people that most middle-east terrorists are created and financed by the US. Given the fact that western forces utterly failed to fight ISIS until Russia was involved and then tried to oppose Russia as much as possible (yet Russia still crushed ISIS), it doesn't look very unlikely for me. So one possible way for the world is to have reduced terrorism which might help even the ordinary americans.

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#449

Post by webkike »

rdtsc wrote: post #99
webkike wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God dammit, I knew my open source game framework was going to be used for nefarious purposes, how could I have been so short sighted?

You maybe joking but military loves them some games for training purposes. So ironically enough having a nice gaming platform actually gives you good chances of contributing (unwittingly) to military projects.

That's a good point!

Re: Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

#450

Post by nemild »

Judgmentality wrote: post #437
nemild wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not often a monolithic "HN", but instead a group of people who decide to engage or not based on the subject matter. We need more media literacy around HN and Reddit. You just need a few users to upvote something, and people often respond when they see the opposing view (this is why conservatives and liberals in the US so often take the most extreme statements on the other side, and critique/retweet them; bet…

> and people often respond when they see the opposing view (this is why conservatives and liberals in the US so often take the most extreme statements on the other side, and critique/retweet them; better engagement and an easier way to caricature the opposing side) https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-04-07

This is great! Added to my media literacy guide:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/commit/3d8091960e...

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