[PhantomGremlin]

Engineers who help create stuff like this are assholes.

Asshole is s pretty strong word. There's a somewhat different explanation; it posits that engineers are ignorant rather than evil. Cory Doctorow said it better than I ever could:

   Engineers are all basically high-functioning
   autistics who have no idea how normal people
   do stuff.

I got a lot of flack last time I posted that quip; I'll grant that it isn't strictly accurate in a medical sense. But it gets the point across. Engineers simply don't think the same way that muggles think, and in addition they're unable or unwilling to view the world from that different perspective.

[strict9]

No, they are definitely assholes. Additionally, dismissing engineers as "high functioning autistics" or "ignorant" is cheap stereotyping.

Thinking in a less than common way isn't an excuse or reason for doing something evil. To suggest it shows a lack of understanding of engineers, people with autism, and how things are designed and used.

[throwanem]

Cory Doctorow says a lot of things. I think he enjoys it. But their correspondence with reality is in my experience questionable. I've worked with many more engineers than he has, and of the lot of them, there's been exactly one who fits that description. And even he'd scruple at designing something like this.

[nashashmi]

If you got flack before, you should get more now.

Engineers are able to think that way, but it gets blindsided because the potential of the ideas in front of them are far too powerful and luminescent for anything else to be visible.

We aren't as dumb as people think we are.

[neffy]

Some engineers perhaps. All engineers, don´t be silly.

And the capacity for deliberate evil exists, is out there, and is used. Sometimes the engineer is just a tool.

[flukus]

Fortunately, the way normal people do stuff is possible to analyze.