Offering software for snooping to governments is a booming business

[ignoramous]

LMFTFY: Offering software for snooping to the oppressors [0], the rich [1], the law-breakers [2], the law-makers [3], the advertisers [4] is a booming business. The modern day tech seems like a curse and a cancer, despite its enormous potential for good.

/rant

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109474

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336762

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874999

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346307

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017

...ad infinitum

[adamsbriscoe]

Once upon a time I worked on a mobile app that was to be used by the VA to help with the management of medical trainees. I thought it was routine stuff (time logging, policy directories, etc)...

They actually wanted a system that would do that stuff too, but behind the scenes it would track the location of each user down to the room they were in. The administrators were suspicious that residents/trainees were sneaking off premises to "work from Starbucks" and they wanted ammunition to use against the sponsoring institutions to revoke payments (which go to resident salaries)... They weren't the slightest bit worried about the legal, moral, or safety implications. It never crossed their minds at all. (They never got what they wanted, at least not from me.)

[Spooky23]

It's an example of why collective bargaining is important in your relationship with a big company.

Standard terms dictated by an employer and accepted by the employee are that you have no expectation of privacy, period. With modern EDR tools and smartphones, even less sophisticated companies can do big-brother stuff that only a relative few could years ago.

[hotsauceror]

I would prefer it if the journalists who wrote about issues like this would stop using cutesy words like "snooping" when they talk about government surveillance programs. It sounds like an effort to whitewash what "those naughty rogues" are doing. Same thing as saying that Politician X is a "fibber". No one out there, as far as I am aware, is clamoring for us to treat this behavior as "naughty", so I don't see why they've chosen to employ this langauge.

[ebg13]

This is a common problem across reporting today. Scam, cheat, and fraud operations are diminished as "trolls". Lying is softened as "telling mistruths". Shills and hucksters are praised as "moderate". I think it happens because major media outlets have a strong political interest in perpetuating status quo where the ruling class remains untouchable.

[tzs]

Snoop means, according to Oxford: "Investigate or look around furtively in an attempt to find out something, especially information about someone's private affairs".

Surveillance is "Close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal".

Going by those definitions, I'd sure rather have someone surveilling me than snooping on me. I don't see why you consider the word "snooping" to be cutesy or for whitewashing.

[prox]

Is there a difference between untruthful and lying? They seem perfectly synonymous yet I see that one all the time

[tptacek]

What drives me nuts about this narrative is how it immunizes the companies making the most money from these government programs. You'll hear a lot about NSO, but not very much at all about Cisco's role, despite the fact that NSO's revenue from foreign surveillance apparatuses is a rounding error compared to Cisco's.

[ga-vu]

Probably because Cisco is a hardware vendor. NSO actually has support staff that will craft exploits to attack certain targets, fix your server so you won't get discovered, write phishing emails, if you need a hand getting off the ground. Big difference.

[notlukesky]

Selling surveillance technology is a booming and legal business in most jurisdictions subject to respective export control laws. But they are not as ethically challenged as companies who deliberately sell lemons and backdoors to their customers in return for a payout from the NSA like RSA (part of Dell EMC) did:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa/exclusiv...

https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...

[JohnFen]

I don't agree. I think they're equally ethically challenged.

I accept that there will always be companies that sell offensive software to governments and the like. What gets my goat is when they aren't portrayed as what they are: sleazebag attackers.

[luisehk]

This is why software engineers should also study some humanities.

[fivre]

They can and do!

The end result is that they're fired from Google for being too uppity about raising ethical issues.

[SeanAppleby]

Is there substantive evidence that studying humanities or even ethics is causal to people behaving more ethically?

[nosequel]

What if you are born and raised in Israel and you've watched Hezbollah carry out terrorist attacks for the past 40 years, would you maybe not be motivated to work for an Israeli firm who claims to make software that helps fight terrorism?

I'm not saying that's what everyone's story is at NSO, but I also don't think that company is full of soulless software engineers who skipped out on humanities classes.

[quangio]

Software Engineers do study humanities. But, you know, there is big money involved.

[new2628]

Whether morality is learnable is something the ancient Greeks were already unsure of.

[ljd]

I'm surprised that Palantir isn't even mentioned in this article.

[manfredo]

Palantir does not build surveillance technology. They build data visualization technology. They build tools to let organizations better view and correlate between the data they collect. This could be considered to be adjacent to surveillance technology, but the company does not in fact built surveillance tools.

[ga-vu]

You don't say.

Someone's been reading Motherboard, I see.

[m3rc]

If there's any justice in the world every person who participates in this sort of work will be shamed and ostracized in the future.

[mulmen]

Leaving them no option but to continue building surveillance software?

Rather than hope for a chance to make someone else miserable I’d rather people just weren’t building this stuff to begin with.

[ngngngng]

There's exceptionally few things I wouldn't do for enough money to retire and take care of my family comfortably for the rest of our lives.

I assume a lot of people think like that.

[daenz]

Shame and ostracization only works when the person cares about being accepted by you.

[ossworkerrights]

I am wondering why aren’t protests staged in front of these companies’ offices. If they have any in the US or the EU, doing it in saudi arabia, china, etc. means certain death.

[briandear]

Is there any possibility that some of this “snooping” actually keeps us safer? Ostracizing these people is not unlike ostracizing police. Even though police have abused power from time to time, I bet there isn’t a single one of us that wouldn’t call the police if our child has been kidnapped.

[BickNowstrom]

Government surveillance is a good thing. Change my mind. Its stated goal is to catch baddies and protect a country. Business surveillance is a bad thing. Its stated goal is to monetize user data and surveil everyone on the internet.

So basically everyone on hackernews that worked for a modern data-driven consumer-target company participates in adversarial data gathering. Even if you just gave your data to a FANG company, in exchange for comfortable features, you helped them more effectively spy on people like you. So shame on you!