You are commenting on a forum full of people who build tools and technology for facebook and google and probably palintir and a thousand other facial recognition and thoughtcrime style systems.

There are probably some generalizable differences between software engineers who work for intelligence agencies vs private sector engineers. The most significant factor being that government engineers need to be able to get a security clearance and pass the attendant background checks and interviews. Most of the engineers I've worked with in the private sector probably couldn't pass these checks because of foreign nationality or recreational drug use. It's a virtual certainty that the need for a security clearance produces a strong selection effect. Not saying it makes the intelligence engineers better or worse just that I'm sure there are some significant differences.

I just wanted to point out that obtaining a security clearance is not nearly as hard as you make it sound. For most organizations prior recreational drug use does not preclude you from the clearance.

I have a clearance and a somewhat checkered past.

A lot of what they look for is consistency in accounts of previous behaviors between you and any references / interviews they undertake, trying to assess if you're currently honest.

Another big thing they are trying to decide is if you are blackmailable.

(throwaway because I have the sort of clearance you are not supposed to advertise that you have)

John McAfee discussing getting his security clearance when he worked for Lockheed-Martin: "They asked me very revealing questions.... Had I ever taken drugs? Yes. What kinds? Almost every kind. Uh, how much? A lot. Have you ever sold drugs? Yes. So I assumed I would never get the clearance but I did and it came in very quickly."

(clearly decades ago, and he's less than reliable, but fun nonetheless!)

It's not so much a problem if you do drugs.

It's a problem if you do drugs and are hiding it from someone (say, family). Then you can be blackmailed.

Can confirm (source: I have a friend that works for a three-letter agency). Before I sit for a clearance interview, I asked him about it. I used to think I'd probably be disqualified, but I learned that was not the case at all. Much of what they're trying to determine is your exposure to potential blackmail.

How recent? Posts like "FBI can't find hackers" have been frontpaging for years but people who have responded to the ads say they were dismissed at the clearance step or advised to not continue due to it.

Sure, Facebook and Google are pretty evil organisations but they can never match the scope of surveillance of governmental agencies.

Facebook and Google need the user to use their services and they say (despite the message being in legalese) what they're going to track. There is consent involved in these organisations, it's a voluntary transaction.

The government can (and did) just intrude on everything without consent or penalties.

From a moral point of view, I would be open to work for BigTech, but I wouldn't work for a state actor.

In theory, yes. In practice, if you'll try to avoid any interaction with sites affiliated with Google, Facebook or feeding surveillance data to them, you'll quickly discover that the internet became very small and much less usable than before. You don't need to use Facebook or search on Google to be tracked by them. Google owns one of the largest ad networks in existence, so if you visit any site that has ads or analytics trackers, the data about it will go to Google. Any site featuring Facebook social button may feed the data to Facebook. If you write to somebody with @gmail address Google knows about it. And so on, and so forth. For a highly technically skilled person, it might be possible to avoid interactions with Big Tech while being able to still using modern technology, but it won't be easy. For a normal person without deep technical background it's pretty much hopeless unless they avoid using the internet entirely. Of course, using the internet is "voluntary", but this is a very weak consolation.

And, also, both Google and Facebook eagerly cooperate with state actors in censorship and other aspects - likely surveillance too. So there's not much difference in that aspect whether you work for the government directly or for somebody who takes marching orders from the government while being formally independent.

Morality is the difference. That's not exactly "norms" but somewhat on an adjacent path. But in terms of interest and participation in our club, *they are us*. That's the true terrible reality.

A more accessible idea which is quite different but allows some truth to shine in similarly is to consider how many of us are utterly dependent on advertising in our careers but we all adblock personally.

> That's not exactly "norms" but somewhat on an adjacent path. But in terms of interest and participation in our club, they are us. That's the true terrible reality.

I remember "Spot the Fed" at DEF CON where I thought it was reflecting this deep and kind of intractable antagonism between the hackers and the government. It turned out that the government was regularly recruiting people there and at other hacker conferences, fairly successfully, and still does. (First I thought that all computer nerds would be at least somewhat anti-military or anti-surveillance, and then I thought that at least those who actively associate themselves with computer culture and counterculture would be, and now I don't really think either of those.)

The social distance between people working for spy agencies and people who vocally criticize and oppose the spy agencies is tiny. I worked at EFF and I've known socially, or kind-of-socially, four people I can immediately think of who worked directly for NSA at some point in their careers, and those are, of course, just the ones who chose to mention it. I've also seen someone unsuccessfully try to recruit someone for NSA face-to-face right in front of me, and had a boss whose next job was alongside an NSA alum.

I also think that NSA alums are more likely to mention it because they're less likely to have worked under false pretenses in other countries (compared to, say, CIA alums).

I had a relative who was a super-huge computer nerd (the biggest computer nerd in my whole family, possibly more than myself, and taught me a lot of my early Unix knowledge) who had previously held a clearance and worked in aerospace engineering (I think on radars or something). He didn't work for a spy agency, but did work on military projects. And nobody could hold a candle to his Unix expertise.

It's pretty striking how diverse in our beliefs we all are (not just about surveillance and espionage, but kind of on every issue and question). Maybe we don't notice it because of social pressures to act like we agree more than we do. Being fascinated with surveillance and secrecy is a common trait in our circles, but it seems that might translate into trying to fight it, or into trying to do it.

> The social distance between people working for spy agencies and people who vocally criticize and oppose the spy agencies is tiny.

That sort of makes sense to me? The average member of the public doesn't generally think about what spy agencies do. If you assume that recruitment is based more on topical proximity than positive/negative opinion, that's what you'd expect to see.

I would say it's that the set of morals or beliefs are different. Believing that someone is without morals or immoral is just the perspective of the observer.

Some of us don't agree with the intelligence gathering behaviors of our governments, but they certainly might not view it as an issue.

I for one don't necessarily disagree with government having a monopoly on violence and all that jazz. But I guess that what makes me HN crowd is that I'm also easily convinced to change my mind if someone brings up a convincing argument.

Pretty confidant that the odds of someone who works for a three letter agency responding to you here is much higher than most forums.

You imply hacking human minds to be more acceptable than hacking computers?

There are several industries built around hacking human minds: advertising, pay-to-win mobile games, political consulting, user engagement services like Facebook, and of course literature.

> and of course literature

Of course. And education.

Eh, by that metric `sudo apt-get install` is hacking your system.

No, I'm suggesting people be a bit more critical in their choices of who are "us". They are both "us" in some senses and "not us" in others.

Absolutely. It's the human mind's responsibility not to be "hacked", by which I assume you mean exploited to e.g. mindlessly scroll Facebook all day.

If most people are weak enough to become matrix-like slaves to the machine, so be it. I don't believe in free will and I don't think we need to preserve human life in a certain way (e.g. the way our ancestors lived).

Sure, a lot of people will fail this test, or maybe they prefer to live their life like that. I don't care, that's on them, that's their choice - or, better, the way DNA and the environment shaped this human shell.

If instead you wiretap my device, you're attacking my privacy and I don't have a way to defend myself. You are committing violence.

If you don't believe in free will, why should anyone care about your will to preserve your privacy? Sounds like you only believe in your own free will.

If you don't accept that you have free will, than nothing you write or say has any meaning.

It may be possible to believe you don’t have free will, yet act like you do and to find meaning in life. After all, given how hard it is to even define “free will”, how can we know for sure whether we have it? Now recent research seems to indicate (note the weasel words) that we have less of this “free will” stuff than we like to think. Yet hopefully, if you dig a little deeper, we find something that qualifies as free will, even if we live in a deterministic world. Which we don,t quite; see quantum mechanics. But a free will based on QM seems no better. Who wants a “free will” based on randomness?

Please forgive my ramblings. I may have been reading Daniel Dennett too much, most likely with too little understanding.

If you are capable of acting as if you have free will, that is the proof you have free will.

I certainly would like to think so, but the argument seems circular. These things are so hard to reason about!

To be fair, I too have ended up thinking that free will probably does not exist. Yet everyone else and I will always continue to behave and live as if it existed, that is my consolation.

What someone says or writes could provide information useful for predicting the future. That by definition has meaning.

That's my point - that there is free will, otherwise no prediction has meaning.

That does not follow. Reduction in entropy generation surely has meaning, it has thermodynamic consequences, regardless of any ‘free will’ here or there.

Of course it follows.

It is specious to look at entropic consequences, when you should look at the existent will being exercised to predict those consequences.

You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction. Having such a will to act, is free will.

As another example - You are able to freely exercise your will to comment or not to comment.

‘You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction.’

I’m fairly certain fish can predict the course of future events, to a fairly high degree of accuracy, in relation to seasonal changes in water temp, food density, etc… e.g. spawning salmon

That's comparing apples and oranges. Perhaps, fish have free will, but this conversation is about human beings, where we have the internal laboratory apparatus required for introspection and determination. We can create hypothesis and tests, then inspect results. We are directly able to test, through choice, to prove that we have free will. It is foolish to compare yourself to a fish, though your ability to compare your mentality to that of a fish was your free choice made from your own free will.

That’s a fairly reductive definition of ‘will’ if fish can have it.

It is not clear at all your claim is true in the general case, which is the point. Humans differ from fish not in kind, but only in degree, a few hundred million years of evolutionary divergence as the biologists would have it. Unless of course special factors such as a ‘soul’ are assigned to humans and so on.

You didn't address anything I wrote, instead choosing to create a strawman about the will of fish. I sincerely hope that one day you will grow into realizing that you have free will.

‘You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction.’

That is a general claim that you wrote that I have shown is not correct unless you have an interpretation of the word ‘will’ that is so broad as to render your other statements somewhat meaningless.

In fact you are the one creating the strawman since you dodged addressing the question. I have made no separate claims about my personal free will, or lack thereof.

Thanks for pretending to be the arbitar of truth, but you are the one who responded to my comment (made to another), "If you don't accept that you have free will, than nothing you write or say has any meaning."

It is now obvious you have no point other than wanting to debate words and are being intentionally obtuse. This is not a high school debate class, and I will no longer engage in your foolishness, since you have stated that you are not actually commenting on the subject of the conversation.

Another strawman.

I’m not exactly sure why you think I would care so much about your opinions to be ‘the arbiter of truth’ for any topic. You’ve made claims that are clearly erroneous and I’ve been pointing them out to the passing reader, so they are not waylaid. I won’t comment on the correct interpretation of ‘free will’ since I myself don’t know, and decline to pretend to know.

I, for one, want to protect my Nation against terrorists.

Not exactly, you, have been convinced that protecting your Nation against terrorism was an important priority, so you endorse the budget going into it and the infringements on your liberties, in exchange for the feeling of safety.