From the article:
The three people with knowledge of the program say they believe Ripley’s use was justified in some cases because police outside the U.S. didn’t always come with warrants or relied on broad orders to conduct fishing expeditions.
Talk about misuse, sure. But there's nothing at all about that tool that restricts it to blocking lawful warrants.
There's no hint in the article that this was the sole purpose. From the article:
> Employees aware of its existence eventually took to calling it Ripley
So it was not codenamed from the start, there's an implication that a relatively small circle of users knew it.
> Workers in Uber’s IT department were soon tasked with creating a system to keep internal records hidden from intruders
Doesn't necessarily seem like something an ethical developer should refuse to do - it could easily be "sold" internally as security software protecting the sensitive information in case of network intrusion.
Which is the wrong approach. We don't know enough details to know what they knew or didn't know going into the project. If Uber at the highest level is okay with deceiving the government, then it's not crazy to think they wouldn't inform their developers about the potentially illegal things they were going to do. And this was all in 2015-2016 when Uber was still a "scrappy startup" in the people's eyes and not the monster it's been exposed to be.
However, we 100% know of people who did know about the project, specifically the higher ups. Our anger should be directed at them because they have no excuse.
Morality and legality are both very subjective, either to the person or to the legal system.
This is ridiculous, clearly there's a sliding scale of how much morality versus how much immorality you enable. How far along that scale is a tool whose sole purpose is to block lawful warrants?