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Comment by greggarious | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but if they're under some Kafkaesque gag order there not much they can do right?

I still find it hard to ever trust an institution that wouldn't raise a huge stink about the ethical implications of this. They don't exist to serve "national security interests", that's what the NSA is for.

> They don't exist to serve "national security interests"

Yes they do. From their website:

"The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a not-for-profit Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) at Carnegie Mellon University, specifically established by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to focus on software and cybersecurity."

I interpreted the parent comment as saying that CMU doesn't exist to serve national security interests, whether or not there is an entity, like the FFRDC SEI, that does exist for related reasons.

On one hand, leading academic institutions are commonly understood to have a responsibility to preserve free speech (especially speech that is critical of military or government action), remain as a neutral education and research body decoupled from any specific political or military agendas, and help lead in social progress towards greater overall ethical standards in education, research, and scholarship.

On the other hand, many universities loan out the credential and status of being affiliated with them as a recruitment tactic to assist the DoD in the task of creating a diversified set of military research organizations, which from a superficial observation point of view (the view taken by many of the younger engineers duped into working for below market pay at such places) look like run-of-the-mill software/science/engineering jobs while having all sorts of ethical gray areas, and the end result is to create rampant ethical conflicts of interest, questionable management practices, and many other problems.

I don't think it's as simple as just pointing out that SEI is an FFRDC and moving on. The fact that universities in general continue to perpetuate this problem -- academia-military pseudo-credible research facility affiliation and status-mongering -- that is the bigger issue.

To be clear, NSL are anti-democratic and wrong.

But it looks like they put themselves in that position. Either by voluntary working with the FBI and allegedly taking a $1M grant, and/or doing unethical research by doing it on the live network.

Is it possible for an NSL to order you to conduct your research on the live network?

(I mean, I guess it's possible for an NSL to order you to do anything, because America.)

All an NSL can do is request subscriber information and simultaneously gag you from telling them that the request occurred.

So then it must be the $1,000,000 that made CMU adjust their ethical standards.

What's worse - that CMU did this in the first place or that they did it so cheaply?

SEI/CERT is for all intents and purposes completely independent of CMU

No, it's a (formally, administrative subpoena) request for transactional records related to a national security investigation.

No, it can't ask you to change behavior.

It can only require you to turn over existing records/information.

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