One of the USDS project selection criteria is that we prioritize work that based on what will do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need.
I do not believe a Muslim Registry does any good for anyone. Being involved in building one would require formally changing our values which would be visible to everyone in USDS.
Disclaimer: personal opinion, I am currently serving on a USDS team, my term is up in June of '17
> One of the USDS project selection criteria is that we prioritize work that based on what will do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need
The USDS is a taxpayer-funded public entity. The "greatest good..." is determined by the law, written by our duly elected representatives. You don't get to serve the public and selectively reject the law. If the Congress passes a law you disagree with, you must follow it or resign--those are the only options, per your civil service oath.
> you must follow it or resign--those are the only options, per your civil service oath.
Those aren't your only options. Your other options are to stay in and leak information. Stay in and try to damage the project etc...
I don't know what I'd do if I were in the position to damage, delay, or stop something as blatantly unconstitutional as a Muslim registration database, but I hope that I'd be able to muster to the courage to do so.
The civil service oath requires you to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
I understand that constitutionality is determined by the Supreme Court, but if the government attempts to create a Muslim registration, they've crossed the line and it's time to act.
The registry existed under Obama, but it was created in 2002 after 9/11, partially suspended in 2011, and fully suspended last month [0], though it looks like it remains to be seen whether the suspension will be undone.
Thanks for the link. Looks like that program was only indirectly about religion. It provided a list of countries whose citizens were subject to more intense scrutiny. Most of those countries were majority Muslim, thus most people affected by the program were Muslim. There were successful civil rights complaints about this.
Trump, of course, has suggested a much more aggressive and less subtle program that includes an explicit religious test.
NSEERS is not even remotely a Muslim registry. It says if you're from one of five countries or are specifically selected, you have to pass additional scrutiny to enter the US and are subject to additional notification and reporting requirements.
As opposed to what, conducting surveillance on basically every citizen in the nation? That was just dandy. But a Muslim registry, now you're going to get all uppity about that?
I'm confused. How did the USDS conduct surveillance on basically every citizen in the nation, or are you painting every US gov't employee with a very, very broad brush?
learc83 used the term "the government" in his post. I would not say that every US government employee is personally responsible for the current surveillance state. But when someone suggest "the government" is about to cross the line, it reeks of bullshit.
"The government" (our government in my case) has crossed the line so many times on so many different issues. The citizens never did anything. If the federal government built camps and starting rounding up Muslims or any group, we would do nothing tangible. There would be all sorts of racket made about it, but nothing would come of it. Any suggestion otherwise is just an attempt to bait some sort of discussion that Donald Trump is either the second coming of Adolf Hitler or the herald of the apocalypse. I don't like the man in any way. But where we all these people when Barack Obama decided he had the authority to execute US citizens?
I feel that is a rigid and too literal take on how government works.
At any given time, there are more laws to enforce and enact than people and other resources to enforce and enact them. Deciding what exactly to enforce or enact is - in other words, their priorities - is often left up to individual agencies. For example, the Obama administration prioritized immigration enforcement by targeting those found at the border, or those who committed crimes [1]. In another instance, marijuana use is illegal under federal law, but some local laws allow it, and the Obama administration explicitly deprioritized enforcement in such cases [2].
Finally, I think there are valid cases where individuals within government should exercise their own judgement and resist direct orders if they feel they are unjust. One such case is when Governor Schwarzenegger ordered the pay reduction (down to federal minimum wage) of 200,000 state employees until the state legislature agreed on a budget [3]. The person who was supposed to enact this order, state controller John Chiang, resisted.
"Under Schwarzenegger’s plan, the workers would receive their full salaries once a budget was approved. But California had enough cash in its accounts, and, in Chiang’s view, the Governor’s move could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Moreover, he thought, it was cruel. It was the height of the financial crisis, and mortgage defaults were up more than a hundred per cent over the previous year." [3]
> You don't get to serve the public and selectively reject the law.
You kind of do. If you're ordered to do something that seems in conflict with the law and/or Constitution, you have a responsibility to not leave, to oppose that unlawful or unconstitutional action. That may require you remaining in place. If you leave, all that's left behind are the sort of non-thinking automatons I was surrounded by at one job for the AF who "were just following orders". They will follow the unlawful and unconstitutional orders and our experiment fails.
Your obligation as a public servant in this country is not to the President or to the Congress, but to the People by way of the Constitution and those things which are permitted by it. Orders aren't obligations if they're orders to do things we shouldn't be doing.
You neglect the possibility of a legal, constitutional order with which one disagrees (neither the law nor the Constitution forbids all bad things). For a member of the civil service, one's choice, then, is to obey or to resign.
For the military, of course, there is no choice: one obeys.
I certainly hope you are wrong about the military. If the generals that lead the military attempt a coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of the US I would expect every loyal soldier to disobey those orders.
The "greatest good..." is determined by the law, written by our duly elected representatives. You don't get to serve the public and selectively reject the law.
Sure you do. Our "duly elected representatives" are bullshit and have no special standing at all. The State imposes itself on us whether we like it or not, and we are all, as individuals, certainly entitled to oppose its abuses in any way we can.
Sure if the President ordered the USDS to do it, they would have to (I believe they are under the executive branch?) But I don't believe that direct of control is generally taken by the office.
Trump will not be a normal President. I'm expecting he will either be really hands off or micromanage depending on the situation. So I could see Trump getting involved with the USDS if they made the news somehow.
Also, it would be silly to assume that we didn't have a database of "country from" for immigrants or visitors. "Muslim" is not a country, it's a religion, so you'd need some serious behavior profiling for that -- probably FB/Google are ones you should be after.
(Disclaimer: am immigrant, am minority.)
AMP is not an aggregator, it's a opt-in program to speed up pages. Personally, I prefer when someone posts an AMP link, because it is the exact same page and content but loads substantially faster. In this case, the AMP page took me 4.95 seconds to load while the non-AMP link took 10.73 seconds. Again, AMP is an opt-in program implemented by the website owner, is controlled by the site owner, and of course provides the same ad revenue for the site owner.
If amp were not an aggregator the URL would not point at amp.google.com.
I'm well aware of amp's purpose, function, intent, implementation, and effect. I strongly prefer not to have third parties mediating and obfuscating my browsing.
So please use direct urls rather than 3rd
Party aggregators. Thanks.
I dislike the amp links as they obscure the ultimate destination in a manner similar to (though not quite as completely) as URL shorteners. That said, aggregator is not the correct term to use here. Proxy may be closer.
Aren't we past the stage of building a custom database product for each specific use case?
Why can't a hypothetical Muslim registry enthusiast use AirTable, FieldBook, at least a dozen of similar database-in-a-box offerings, or just a managed instance of some open source database management system?
I don't support Trump or the unconstitutional American deep state, but you realize there is already a Muslim registry right?
In fact there are probably several competing implementations in various intelligence agencies, with substantially overlapping contents. Probably almost every agency has the capability to run
select first_name, last_name, home_address from us_residents where religion = 'muslim';
And get largely right answers. Similarly, there is already a border wall with Mexico.
I've filled out multiple hundreds of pages of visa and immigration forms, and I have never had to tell them what religion I am. Barring the use of country of origin or other specious proxies for religion, the feds still have no idea what religion I am.
Heuristic searches for muslims definitely exist - but they aren't as simple as you make them out to be.
They don't get the data for the (existing) Muslim registry by asking you. Just like the Stasi didn't send out a pre-persecution questionnaire to identify Catholics.
I'm not sure the surveillance state is anywhere near as pervasive as you think it is. It's important to realize that you don't yet live on the other side of the iron curtain, and that there is time to save yourself from that fate.
I would guess that most of the people who downvoted it, did so because they were opposed to the idea of a Muslim registry (as am I). If you're opposed to it, and hope that he is also opposed to it, then the last thing you want to do is to force him to go on record at this stage in his career as being opposed to it. That may do nothing, or it may hurt him, but it's not going to help him or the opposition to the registry.
On the other hand, if you're in favor of a Muslim registry and fear that he might oppose it, then it makes total sense to ask him this question at this time. In fact that's the only reason it makes sense to ask him this question at this time. Hence downvoters, assuming that the majority of HN is against a Muslim registry.
As the asker, I will say I'm opposed to the registry, and I disagree a bit with your notion on strategy. I see what you're saying. But I think it's important to establish a norm in our communities now (perhaps like http://neveragain.tech/), rather than being silent and hoping that we will have "sleepers" in the right positions that can stop it later on.
So much of tech opinion is shaped at HN, I believe it's worth it to share – and in a way collectively rehearse – personal reactions to some of these hypotheticals.
I hope that if I were to be given a task so clearly violating rights, I would follow through with what my first reaction now is: sabotage it, using means usually considered illegal if necessary, up to and including property damage.
edit: I'm not at USDS, nor anything similar, nor a US citizen. So the above is pretty cheap talk – nobody would ever ask /me/ for their illegal Orwellian IT project. I was just trying to express an attitude that I hope exists where it actually matters.
You state this as simple fact, but is it so? Delivering enterprise software is very hard. Matt suggests that USDS was necessary to rescue healthcare.gov, for example. The labor pool of skilled coders is smaller vs. demand than for many other professions. If the top 500 coders declined to participate in a project that savagely violates human rights - and encouraged this as a norm in our communities - isn't it plausible that doing so could either prevent, derail, or meaningfully weaken such a project?
I concede that we cannot prevent some software from being created. But there is a great qualitative difference between any software and effective software. And if there isn't, and our creativity/labor doesn't matter in creating such a difference, then what is all this talk on HN about?
besides...
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
> If the top 500 coders declined to participate in a project that savagely violates human rights - and encouraged this as a norm in our communities - isn't it plausible that doing so could either prevent, derail, or meaningfully weaken such a project?
Not sure what the top 500 vote totals were on this, but when Snowden's documents revealed existence of a massive domestic surveillance program that included large amounts of data collection, parsing and analysis, most people were surprised at the breadth, depth and sheer amount of data.
Worth noting that it was developed without any significant leaks either, which spells doubt on the idea that top 500 were even invited to express their stance on the subject, which nevertheless did not force the project into derailment. For all we know, some might have participated, through a government or a third-party contract that did not specify exact goals of the project and provided limited view into the overarching theme.
One thing that's hard to judge from the outside is the quality and efficiency of that code. It could be very bad indeed.
> One thing that's hard to judge from the outside is the quality and efficiency of that code.
I've had the opportunity to work with a few ex-NSA software engineers. One in particular was among the smartest and most capable colleagues I've ever had. If, as is the impression I gathered, he's at all typical of the talent NSA has at its disposal, I would expect the limiting factors to be the volume and accuracy of the data available, rather than the quality of the software built to analyze it.
That's why we need to more specifically show where software crosses ethical boundaries. With these NSA programs, I can easily see how you can work on them and never actually realise how bad what you're doing is – especially if your work followed a progressions.
Also, I can't resist, but:
> Worth noting that it was developed without any significant leaks either
I admittedly have little visibility into the scope of NSA programs, so have to resort to media for subjective evaluation of what constitutes "massive" or "domestic".
Assuming that journalists tend to sensationalize I'd agree to apply a grain a salt for these statements, but is there an argument suggesting NSA's operation was fairly small scale and is not indicative of their capability to build large systems?
I do not believe a Muslim Registry does any good for anyone. Being involved in building one would require formally changing our values which would be visible to everyone in USDS.
Disclaimer: personal opinion, I am currently serving on a USDS team, my term is up in June of '17