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querying the hive mind
Looking for a post about ethics in military/wifi software development
I'm looking for a specific blog post/article about ethics/danger in software engineering.
Content warning: potential military/bombing applications.
I saw this article/post around several years ago, could be anything from 5-10 years maybe. I think it was a personal blog post rather than an article on a news site. Maybe even here, but I've searched and can't find anything. I want to find it to use as an example of how to discover and to push back on potentially unethical practices requested of developers.
The post was written from the point of view of a software engineer who was working on a project to discover something like the location of nearby fixed wifi points. This is all from my very woolly memory so I may be getting some details wrong.
As the post went on the engineer questioned their product owners/project managers to uncover some unusual requirements, like, what should they do when they discover that the wifi points are moving, that is unexpected behaviour for the fixed wifi points they'd been told to look for, so should those data points be excluded? And the managers said no, don't worry, just get all the data and we'll worry about it later. And as the post went on more anomalies were discovered and each time the developers went back to the managers to explain and see what they should do next.
And at the end it turned out that the engineers were being deceived about the purpose of their work, it wasn't to discover nearby fixed wifi points at all, but to trace phones or other antennae to potentially target/bomb those points.
Does anyone remember this post?
posted by conkystconk on May 08, 2024 at 4:01 AM
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not the blog post you are seeking:
the book Disciplined Minds is worth a read. The author was trained as a physicist, so the examples are from physics R&D, not software. There's a chapter titled "the concealment game" about how much physics research conducted in university settings is not the result of self-directed curiosity of researchers. Physics research funded for defence applications is relabelled and packaged in academia to appear very abstract and esoteric. The book may be an interesting resource re: pushing back. E.g. Chapter 15 is "How to Survive Professional Training With Your Values Intact" and quotes from US Army Field Manual No. 21-78 re: how soldiers captured as prisoners of war can resist brainwashing, as applied to training pipelines such as grad school.
Also not the blog post you are seeking:
http://www.killchain.org/
> Drone Inc.: Marketing the Illusion of Precision Killing, reveals the contractors and technology behind the targeted killing machinery of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, demonstrating how critical errors and assumptions in this remotely controlled war has resulted in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians.
there's a bunch of quotes from whistleblowers at the end -- mainly people who worked as drone sensor operators who worked at the pointy end, not software/R&D folks.
posted by are-coral-made at 5:30 AM
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And at the end it turned out that the engineers were being deceived about the purpose of their work, it wasn't to discover nearby fixed wifi points at all, but to trace phones or other antennae to potentially target/bomb those points.
The vast majority of military software development work is done by military contractors, big ones being BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc, and they are very aware of what they are building. Friends whose dads used to work for defense contractors occasionally brought home videos of smart bombs in development in the 1990s, with them flying into various parts of decommissioned military equipment or cinderblock buildings - they were very proud.
Also, as someone who works in IT, most home user equipment is at least lightly geofenced, to prevent users from taking it with them when they travel, etc.
Also, just from a administrative perspective, it's kind of hard to fudge requirements like that at even a 'middle level', because funding is based on requirements, which have to be relatively tightly controlled for budgetary purposes - edge cases like moving equipment if that hasn't been expected behavior would never be waved through by developers because it requires so much more development, ie storage of location history and database updates, etc - from a technical perspective. It'd be hard to hide, even if the ultimate purpose of the data or project was hidden.
I've worked on apple and google projects in the past as someone not working for those companies - they are all NDA and require signing various documents and segregating development duties so no-one sees the full product. But it's not hard to figure out what they are making, even with the spy stuff.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:32 AM
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