Then, a month later, this was published out of the blue. No prior communication, no broader input, not even the opportunity to opt-out.

Pretty unethical. As someone who was on that list, that letter is in no way representative... most had pragmatic complaints, like ethical oversight mechanisms to ensure engineers weren't transitively supporting dictatorships. This letter is so hand-wavy, simultaneously cynical and naive.

That sounds pretty unethical.

Nothing sudden about it. If anything, this trend is a return to normalcy. Hackers have traditionally been fairly opposed to authoritarianism, including - but not limited to - that expressed through the mechanism of governments and nation-states.

This fact is subtext to a lot of the flamewars that occurred between these "greybeard hackers" and mainframe programmers on the one hand, and Windows PC programmers on the other hand. In both cases, the greybeards saw their counterparts working at IBM or Microsoft, or working at other companies developing software for z/OS or Windows, as people who were willing to "sell out" and work for "the man." (Not "the man" as in Microsoft/IBM; "the man" as in the government's various three-letter agencies.)

This was also the original subtext of Microsoft and Apple's fight over personal-computer market mindshare. Bill Gates and Paul Allen came from money, met at a private prep school, and shared a vision of selling their software to companies like IBM, who would drop thousands of copies top-down into enterprise partners' offices. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were introduced because of a shared interest in illegal pursuits like phone phreaking and LSD use, and wanted—sort of like the One Laptop Per Child project—to empower individuals by putting computers in their hands. (Consider: they were probably envisioning use-cases exactly like "being able to share copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook over the Internet.")

Apple and Microsoft today are more alike than different, but they started off with diametrically-opposed cultures and corporate visions; and which ecosystem you bought into (at least back when) could tell people a lot about who you were as a person. There was a reason Apple found its first beach-head in schools: the schoolteachers of the 1970s shared pretty much the same countercultural ideals.

Read through the Jargon File, or the fortune(1) database, and you'll quickly get a sense of what "hackers" as a culture were like. A modern Stanford-MBA-alum YC applicant, who fancies themselves a "hacker", might be a bit shocked :)

Personally I'd be OK with government collection of some data if I knew it was properly secured, there was more oversight, and if it wasn't so beholden to corporate interests.

If anything, the current administration makes this even worse in my opinion, but it was already a really big problem with the previous administration.

I'm not clear if you're predicting a drought of Computer Science students or a drought of Fortune 500 company computer science hiring candidates.

Identifying as being on the "correct side" pushes an agenda of inequality and gatekeeping out of confirmation bias (which, in theory, this group stands against given the current political discussions surrounding such issues).

If the point of revoking services and kicking customers out of their walled garden is to combat the villain of the moment and make them suffer, that is sure to have unintended negative consequences as well. The terms of this letter are looking through a lens blanketing entities as good or bad, when in reality it isn't as clear cut. Such mechanism also seems rife for abuse.

People also love to knock the government because it's easy to do, but they forget we are also responsible for the government by choosing to live in a democracy. Times change, societies change, laws change. Sure, at times it seems nothing changes and things stay shitty, but with that attitude there's nearly a guarantee that will stay true. People can talk the talk to their heart's content, but it's far easier to wish than to do.

Could you expand on this? Because it reads like "help build killing machines even though you signed up for a completely different job, or you don't support your government because you're a political partisan."

What's to expand upon? Anyone will admit that there are good elements and bad elements to the way our police force operates. This boils down to the question "Do you believe our police force as it exists today has a net-positive impact on our society?"

I suspect very few people would say they believe they have a net-negative impact. And even among the people that say they believe the police have a net-negative impact very few people actually act as if that is what they believe.

That is supposed to be the benchmark now? Holy shit.

This sort of thing is not a matter of binary choices.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-bucks-the-bullies-1539818...