Those were all technologies that were "known" to be "evil". But to get that point, there were probably scientific advancements made that were pretty benign, in isolation. And those advancements were probably used to develop other technologies that were "known" to be "good". The people working on those earlier advancements had no way (necessarily) of knowing what would be derived from their work. The same is true of technological advancements advancements today. The people who first started working on the internet probably had no idea (for the most part) of the privacy issues that have arisen. Ditto for satellites, GPS. . .
What's being referred to is the development and implementation of a very specific technology produced by Narus, not some open-ended research project. See here for more info:
I'm actually sort of surprised by the negative sentiment here. A project with government backing and legal cover will get done, regardless. This is hardly a case where you need some 4-sigma genius (which I am not) to conceive of some major breakthrough.
But creating something like Narus must require all sorts of interesting research and engineering. I wrote a packet analyzer for a single protocol and was just barely able to parse at 1Gbps speed, off a loopback device. Actually getting it deployed at much lower speeds was rather difficult.
Doing the same at 10Gbps, multiprotocol, actually doing neat stuff to the data? Unless their boxes have incredibly expensive hardware inside, they must have done some pretty neat hardware and software designs.
The way to fight this type of surveillance isn't convincing people to avoid working on such projects. That's hopelessly naive or incredibly optimistic. Change the rules of the game: Either make it illegal and enforce or spread proper privacy software like cryptography.
You're missing the point. Social conditioning and shame are very powerful.
It's likely that designing land-mines involves many interesting technical problems. Regardless of whether there are still engineers who will work on land-mines, there's a social good to shaming them (assuming you think land-mines are bad).
If you don't have strong feelings about land-mines, or you don't think they're all that bad, then this argument won't make any sense to you.
People can choose to do or to not do things regardless of their effectiveness.
Do you realize that you're implicitly adopting an amoral viewpoint when you raise pragmatism above ethics or morality? That's a choice -- not a given. This is why you're getting the strong negative reaction, here. History is littered with examples of how this leads to bad outcomes and evil systems.
The way to fight this type of surveillance isn't convincing people to avoid working on such projects. That's hopelessly naive or incredibly optimistic. Change the rules of the game: Either make it illegal and enforce or spread proper privacy software like cryptography.
Why not simultaneously push for change in government, develop powerful and easy-to-use cryptographic tools, AND refuse to work on projects that are very likely to have a negative impact on society?
I don't deny what you're saying, that these projects will end up being built by someone (hopefully someone less qualified though, and at a higher cost to the contractee), but by the logic in your first post in the chain, anything could be justified morally as long as someone is paying you to do it. What's wrong with pulling the lever in the gas chamber? If you don't, the next guy will, right?
You must be a terrible person to be willing to directly further evil in the name of money and "fun".