Howdy Matt - will you build a Muslim registry if Trump orders it or Congress passes it?
I do not believe a Muslim Registry does any good for anyone. Being involved in building one would require formally changing our values which would be visible to everyone in USDS.
Disclaimer: personal opinion, I am currently serving on a USDS team, my term is up in June of '17
The USDS is a taxpayer-funded public entity. The "greatest good..." is determined by the law, written by our duly elected representatives. You don't get to serve the public and selectively reject the law. If the Congress passes a law you disagree with, you must follow it or resign--those are the only options, per your civil service oath.
Those aren't your only options. Your other options are to stay in and leak information. Stay in and try to damage the project etc...
I don't know what I'd do if I were in the position to damage, delay, or stop something as blatantly unconstitutional as a Muslim registration database, but I hope that I'd be able to muster to the courage to do so.
The civil service oath requires you to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"
I understand that constitutionality is determined by the Supreme Court, but if the government attempts to create a Muslim registration, they've crossed the line and it's time to act.
The info about it is all available publicly.
Whichever way it is, the real time to stop NSEERS was when it started in 2002. Since that didn't happen, it didn't stop until 2011. So yes, it is a good time to complain about religious profiling when a new administration is planning to institute it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Entry-Exit_R...
Trump, of course, has suggested a much more aggressive and less subtle program that includes an explicit religious test.
"The government" (our government in my case) has crossed the line so many times on so many different issues. The citizens never did anything. If the federal government built camps and starting rounding up Muslims or any group, we would do nothing tangible. There would be all sorts of racket made about it, but nothing would come of it. Any suggestion otherwise is just an attempt to bait some sort of discussion that Donald Trump is either the second coming of Adolf Hitler or the herald of the apocalypse. I don't like the man in any way. But where we all these people when Barack Obama decided he had the authority to execute US citizens?
Snowden pulled the veil on many issues similar to what you're referring to. I'm fairly certain he was a citizen at the time. I'd reference Chelsea Manning, because she acted as a citizen when betraying her oath to the military. I could see arguments against that, though.
The government came down hard on both these individuals. It's a damn shame. And please don't take this to be a pro-oppressive-government stance. I'm simply saying that citizens did do something. And every day there are citizens working in thousands of government jobs across the country trying to make the right decision. There's no reason to slight them.
What's the difference between bureaucratic incompetence and sabotage?
You kind of do. If you're ordered to do something that seems in conflict with the law and/or Constitution, you have a responsibility to not leave, to oppose that unlawful or unconstitutional action. That may require you remaining in place. If you leave, all that's left behind are the sort of non-thinking automatons I was surrounded by at one job for the AF who "were just following orders". They will follow the unlawful and unconstitutional orders and our experiment fails.
Your obligation as a public servant in this country is not to the President or to the Congress, but to the People by way of the Constitution and those things which are permitted by it. Orders aren't obligations if they're orders to do things we shouldn't be doing.
For the military, of course, there is no choice: one obeys.
1. Jury nullification.
2. Police discretionary powers.
At any given time, there are more laws to enforce and enact than people and other resources to enforce and enact them. Deciding what exactly to enforce or enact is - in other words, their priorities - is often left up to individual agencies. For example, the Obama administration prioritized immigration enforcement by targeting those found at the border, or those who committed crimes [1]. In another instance, marijuana use is illegal under federal law, but some local laws allow it, and the Obama administration explicitly deprioritized enforcement in such cases [2].
Finally, I think there are valid cases where individuals within government should exercise their own judgement and resist direct orders if they feel they are unjust. One such case is when Governor Schwarzenegger ordered the pay reduction (down to federal minimum wage) of 200,000 state employees until the state legislature agreed on a budget [3]. The person who was supposed to enact this order, state controller John Chiang, resisted.
"Under Schwarzenegger’s plan, the workers would receive their full salaries once a budget was approved. But California had enough cash in its accounts, and, in Chiang’s view, the Governor’s move could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Moreover, he thought, it was cruel. It was the height of the financial crisis, and mortgage defaults were up more than a hundred per cent over the previous year." [3]
[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/08/31/491965912/5-things-to-know-abo...
[2] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/president-obama-marijuan...
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/resisting-trump...
Sure you do. Our "duly elected representatives" are bullshit and have no special standing at all. The State imposes itself on us whether we like it or not, and we are all, as individuals, certainly entitled to oppose its abuses in any way we can.
Every presidential administration since time immemorial begs to differ.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
Also, it would be silly to assume that we didn't have a database of "country from" for immigrants or visitors. "Muslim" is not a country, it's a religion, so you'd need some serious behavior profiling for that -- probably FB/Google are ones you should be after. (Disclaimer: am immigrant, am minority.)
However, no religion attribution there.
Permanent residents too (no retinal scan but digital fingerprints and photo every time you pass through immigration at an airport).
Name and country of origin goes a long way towards determining it
Of course it's not 100% correct, but should be enough to give a pointer
I'm well aware of amp's purpose, function, intent, implementation, and effect. I strongly prefer not to have third parties mediating and obfuscating my browsing.
So please use direct urls rather than 3rd Party aggregators. Thanks.
Why can't a hypothetical Muslim registry enthusiast use AirTable, FieldBook, at least a dozen of similar database-in-a-box offerings, or just a managed instance of some open source database management system?
I don't support Trump or the unconstitutional American deep state, but you realize there is already a Muslim registry right?
In fact there are probably several competing implementations in various intelligence agencies, with substantially overlapping contents. Probably almost every agency has the capability to run
select first_name, last_name, home_address from us_residents where religion = 'muslim';
And get largely right answers. Similarly, there is already a border wall with Mexico.
Heuristic searches for muslims definitely exist - but they aren't as simple as you make them out to be.
I concede that we cannot prevent some software from being created. But there is a great qualitative difference between any software and effective software. And if there isn't, and our creativity/labor doesn't matter in creating such a difference, then what is all this talk on HN about?
besides...
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Not sure what the top 500 vote totals were on this, but when Snowden's documents revealed existence of a massive domestic surveillance program that included large amounts of data collection, parsing and analysis, most people were surprised at the breadth, depth and sheer amount of data.
Worth noting that it was developed without any significant leaks either, which spells doubt on the idea that top 500 were even invited to express their stance on the subject, which nevertheless did not force the project into derailment. For all we know, some might have participated, through a government or a third-party contract that did not specify exact goals of the project and provided limited view into the overarching theme.
One thing that's hard to judge from the outside is the quality and efficiency of that code. It could be very bad indeed.
Also, I can't resist, but:
> Worth noting that it was developed without any significant leaks either
...until is wasn't
I've had the opportunity to work with a few ex-NSA software engineers. One in particular was among the smartest and most capable colleagues I've ever had. If, as is the impression I gathered, he's at all typical of the talent NSA has at its disposal, I would expect the limiting factors to be the volume and accuracy of the data available, rather than the quality of the software built to analyze it.
BBC called it "extensive internet and phone surveillance by American intelligence" http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-23123964
Wired described "the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs" in reference to Snowden leaks. https://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/
EFF refers to NSA's access to "large streams of domestic and international communications" https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works
Assuming that journalists tend to sensationalize I'd agree to apply a grain a salt for these statements, but is there an argument suggesting NSA's operation was fairly small scale and is not indicative of their capability to build large systems?
> if not this person, someone
> else will
On the other hand, if you're in favor of a Muslim registry and fear that he might oppose it, then it makes total sense to ask him this question at this time. In fact that's the only reason it makes sense to ask him this question at this time. Hence downvoters, assuming that the majority of HN is against a Muslim registry.
I hope that if I were to be given a task so clearly violating rights, I would follow through with what my first reaction now is: sabotage it, using means usually considered illegal if necessary, up to and including property damage.
edit: I'm not at USDS, nor anything similar, nor a US citizen. So the above is pretty cheap talk – nobody would ever ask /me/ for their illegal Orwellian IT project. I was just trying to express an attitude that I hope exists where it actually matters.
You grossly overestimate the reach and importance of HN