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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: mod.comp-soc
Subject: Re: The Ethics of Work...
Message-ID: <546@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-Aug-86 13:49:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.546
Posted: Mon Aug 11 13:49:41 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Aug-86 08:39:45 EDT
Reply-To: hplabs!pyramid!nbires!rcd
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
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Approved: taylor@hplabs
Reference: <545@hplabsc.UUCP>

This article is from pyramid!nbires!rcd (Dick Dunn)
 and was received on Mon Aug 11 00:29:36 1986
 

The question of whether to work for the military complex is likely to get a
lot tougher in the next few years.  The "computer industry" is still pretty
soft except for military.  We're looking at SDI cranking up a whole bunch
(depending on political battles, of course) and non-military government
work withering.

In the latter case, I'm thinking of things like, to take an example near
home, the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  They work on stuff
like figuring out hailstorms or wind-shear phenomena.  They're only
working on saving lives, crops, and money; they're not doing anything to
save us from the massive global threat of the godless commies of the Evil
Empire (oops, sorry, getting a little too political there), so their budget
gets lopped.

I know of one guy who got laid off at NCAR and was faced with the rather
nasty problem that for his sort of skills, there wasn't much of a choice
on where to go--LLL and LANL were two of a tiny number of choices.  He
ended up choosing LANL because of his perception that LLL is far more war-
oriented, but I don't think he was entirely thrilled about the sort of work
that's going on even at LANL.

This is the sort of dilemma that will be facing an ever-larger number of
top programmers, scientists, engineers, etc.--namely, if we don't start
working for the military, where do we work?  Face it, the current political
mood is one of converting the country to a wartime economy!  In fact, if
you like conspiracy theories, you can probably invent one that says that
the government is trying to crank up military work and keep commercial
computer business soft just so that they can capture top talent.  (I don't
buy conspiracy theories much, though...)

Someone brought up, peripherally, the distinction between offensive and
defensive military work.  I hope that people can address that in their
responses.  (Obviously it makes a difference to some people, not all.)
Personally, I won't get involved in the offensive-weapon stuff, nor the
cloak-and-dagger business, for moral reasons.  (That's an incredibly stupid
overgeneralization in the interest of brevity.)  I'm not much interested in
other stuff that requires a security clearance just because I don't like
the work conditions implied--I like to speak my mind on things without
asking permission.  But I do distinguish the two types of work even though
I avoid both.

Finally, I guess I'd like to see the discussion broaden out to include
"What do we want to do if we want to stay high-tech but we don't want to
play the security-clearance games?"
    
Dick Dunn	{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd		(303)444-5710 x3086


[I appreciate the requests to broaden the discussion, but I don't think that
 questions of security clearances and offensive vs. defensive work fit in to
 this group.  (Note that offensive vs. defensive TECHNOLOGIES does, though,
 if we approach it from the 'can technology have anthropomorphic attributes')
 When I sent out this question I didn't realize we'd spawn off such interesting
 but away from topic discussions.  Maybe we need to create a temporary mailing
 list that's more to do with 'CPSR'-type topics (CPSR = Computer Scientists for
 Social Responsibility) that we're hitting.  Any volunteers?    -- Dave]