[doctoboggan]

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.

[testfrequency]

If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.

Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.

The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.

[andsoitis]

> you support what’s happening.

I don’t know that things are that black and white.

Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?

[Diti]

With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.

[satvikpendem]

Blind is like 4chan, not representative of the vast majority of software engineers but rather their own self contained bubble. I wouldn't use Blind as exemplary of anything in this case.

[tokyobreakfast]

But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.

[badbird3]

Quite the high horse you got there

[niek_pas]

NARRATOR: It wasn’t.

[salawat]

It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick.

In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."

[cucumber3732842]

>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies

No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.

[account42]

If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.

[direwolf20]

It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry

[casey2]

Not really. Surveillance might create an arbitrage opportunity, but insurers hate data they can't trust. The more data the more noise.

[mrtksn]

What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.

I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.

People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.

Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.

Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.

The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.

I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.

Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.

Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.

The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.

[direwolf20]

A focus on preserving order is a far liberal/far centrist thing, not fascist. Fascists would ban to achieve political goals and not to maintain order.

Major political groups:

Liberals/centrists - maintain order/decorum at all costs

Fascists - gain power at all costs, in groups of decreasing size

Libertarians - reduce taxes at all costs

Leftists - argue for an equal society but never get there

Conservatives - return to monke

[prophesi]

Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.

[intermerda]

What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.

[trhway]

ICE doesn't follow the law. It breaks it.

Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law (like hearing, lawyer, etc).

Edit: to the commenter below:

>I care because my children are approaching the workforce and I want their opportunities to open up to them

do you really want your children to work in strawberry fields in CA in 100+ degrees weather? That is the opportunities which mostly get open when you remove the migrants, legal or illegal, that ICE is targeting.

[saubeidl]

Enforcing racial purity laws is abuse? Why are you impeding the Gestapo, a federal law enforcement agency? Why do you hate law and order, dirty anarchist?

[blurbleblurble]

"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."

https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

[int0x29]

Get a warrant. The federal government should not be "soliciting vendors" for my location.

I love how the accounts defending ICE are always brand new.

[sham1]

I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

That implies a crime was committed. I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance. Getting a warrant from a judge is far better than ICE doing what they’re currently doing.

[jacquesm]

You seem to be a bit scared of doing this all under your own name, comrade. But don't worry, we know exactly who you are.