Post 8: Government Backdoors

I think that this is an incredibly complex issue. I think that just reading a few articles on it puts me in absolutely no position to make take a standpoint on the issue. I know this is an ethics class and the idea is to argue a point and use data or scholarly information to make a conclusion on a point–ethical or not ethical. I just think its difficult when there is no ethical side, or when both options are unethical in different reasons.

I thought it was interesting in the article, “Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balances Between Public Safety” how it explained the government and law as “going dark”:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today about the growing challenges to public safety and national security that have eroded our ability to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to a court order or warrant. We in law enforcement often refer to this problem as “Going Dark.”

I can see that people are concerned about the government’s issues with surveillance and privacy, and they have responded in to those issues. They believe that they have to uphold civil liberties including privacy:

We, too, care about these important principles. Indeed, it is our obligation to uphold civil liberties, including the right to privacy…

We would like to emphasize that the Going Dark problem is, at base, one of technological choices and capability. We are not asking to expand the government’s surveillance authority, but rather we are asking to ensure that we can continue to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to the legal authority that Congress has provided to us to keep America safe.

In their eyes nothing will change with regard to the privacy of the American populous. They will still use legal ways to obtain search warrants, etc. The idea is not to expand the government’s surveillance authority, but instead to ensure to give the electronic information to keep America safe.

In the eyes of the government and the DOJ, they admit that the problem is incredibly complex.

Mr. Chairman, The Department of Justice believes that the challenges posed by the Going Dark problem are grave, growing, and extremely complex. At the outset, it is important to emphasize that we believe that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy that will ensure progress.

The issue is that the complexities that they see definitely are not the only issues that could arise from going either way on the security issue. From what I read from these articles, I cannot go ahead and say that the government backdoors are the solution to our national security problem. In the article, “ISIS using encrypted apps for communications; former intel officials blame Snowden (Updated)” we saw that these taps might not be the magical solution that the government once thought they could be.

But even if the US government were to press forward a demand for companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google to provide a way to tap into message traffic, that would do little to prevent the use of existing peer-to-peer encryption and other encrypted social media tools by terror organizations.

Alongside that, in the article “F.B.I. Director Repeats Call That Ability to Read Encrypted Messages Is Crucial” we saw that this might be a premature avenue to approach a change in national surveillance and privacy. Everyone is still left worried and vulnerable after the Paris attacks, it seems like a time where rash decisions could be made that could completely alter the entire precedent that the government could take when evaluating ethical methods of enforcing security.

Some security experts and cryptographers said some officials were trying to use the Paris attacks to push their agenda.

My understanding is not combatting the argument that “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” argument. My idea of this, is that it is too rash to make a decision right now on policy before a robust security system can be created to protect everyones sensitive information. Secrets are security. The government, even though are in a position to do a lot of good, could also do a lot of bad if legislation makes it mandatory for the companies such as Apple and Google to allow government backdoors. At this point, if the government is allowed in a backdoor. The same terrorists and criminals that we are trying to stop will also be able to utilize these weakened security measures.

I am looking forward to learning more about this in class so that I can make a more informed answer to these questions. This is my response based off of my first exposure and understanding to this ethical dilemma.

Project 2: Interview guide

We decided to delve into the project that is the job interview process guide. You can find our project posted here. We took a simplistic approach that walked us first through what should be done year by year. Then we looked more closely at different scenarios like preparation, outreach and interview tactics.

I am glad that we picked this topic because I ended up learning a lot. As a junior, I have only committed to a summer internship, not a full-time job. Even just with the discussions we’ve had in class, I wish that I had discussed this more before even entering the job process. This class is not even required for my major, but I think it should be taught even at the sophomore level. I am happy that I am getting to discuss these issues as a junior whereas most of the students in the class are seniors without the ability to act upon what we’ve learned until after they’ve fulfilled their contracts.

By doing this project, I learned a lot from my group-members who have been involved in the job interview process more extensively than I have. I was able to look back at my college career and think of things that I would have rather done, but also learn about tactics and skills that I can use in the future.

Something that I hadn’t really considered was the idea of looking for jobs in relation to location. I had been blindly applying to random jobs in random cities without really considering where it would be and how that would affect my life. Now I am not projected to go home to my house until next Thanksgiving. I think I just started to think about location when I started thinking about my full-time job, but I wish I had that as more of a criteria before. I don’t like that family members say goodbye to me and really don’t have any idea of knowing when the next time they are going to see me. I know picking jobs for summers aren’t that big of a deal, but picking summer locations far from home compiles with the fact that Notre Dame isn’t close to my home either. Now I haven’t lived at my home since I was in high school. Not that I would want to live at home after graduation, I just think it’s nice to be near people you love.

I think the one of the most important parts of the guide is the section on what people wished they knew before they started the job process. I think this section really highlights the humanity of the process and how everyone needs support through it. I feel like we all have been told about how to utilize the career center and how to prepare for an interview. I just don’t know if I ever knew why I was applying for jobs that I was and where I was looking on going with it.

I think something that I am now starting to realize is that I never really received great advice or guidance about the job interview process. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I never really sought it out. I don’t think I ever really understood how much of a process it was until really looking at it from a personal perspective, not just as a means to get a job. I think its important to differentiate a job from a career.

I know college traditionally has been viewed as a place of learning, not a job training or a job interview boot camp. I don’t think that colleges should change to accommodate the interview process, but I do think that colleges could alter what they teach in their place of learning to better apply to the workforce.

Especially with a computer science or engineering degree, it is really important that we continue to learn things that will be relevant to the workforce and the current technology that is being used. I understand that there is a learning curve and that we must start on more simple systems, but I think the direction we take as we move to more advanced fields could be directed by industry.

Either way, I don’t think college should be some sort of “prep” academy. I think its better to invest in an education you find is worthy, and then find people who think your skills will add to their team. Eventually, if we keep switching to this “prep” attitude I feel like we will never go into depth into our own interests and eventually learn less and less.

 

 

Post 7: Whistleblowing

The idea of “Whistleblowers” and what the motivations and consequences of them are, is a very difficult topic to discern on an ethical level. I did not know much about this topic going in, and started by reading the article, “Computer security faults put Boeing at risk”. There I saw how difficult it was for companies to deal with new laws and misconceptions in the execution of computer security. It says,

The federal guidelines for computer controls are unclear, and where the law is murky, auditors and company officials are left to fill in the gaps — facing criminal penalties if they are wrong. Companies are hungry for clarification on how to handle the information technology portion of Sarbanes-Oxley, according to The Institute of Internal Auditors, a leading professional association.

This leads me to understand why it is so difficult to get organized under a new set of criteria. It’s hard because it is so easy to villainize either the company or the person who did the whistleblowing. It continues to mention that,

“There’s no bright lines,” said Tootle, who asked not to be told which company the P-I was examining. “It’s judgment, judgment and more judgment.”

I think it is important to understand that there is no right and wrong side of this, but instead a gradient. With this gradient, there will always be the cases where innocent people get put at fault or guilty people get let go free. When you apply this over such a wide range of businesses–big and small–that is the ever-present danger.

With a company as big as Boeing, it would make sense that an employee was trying to get his/her voice heard when faced with some ethical dilemmas. The article, “Boeing Employee Fired for Discussing Computer Security Problems at Company”, said that the employee first tried to deal with the issue internally but was faced with backlash.

The fired employee says he was trying to save the companybut was treated badly after he raised ethical concerns internally about how the company was conducting security audits of its systems.

It is also evident that that company was not following protocol with the new Sarbanes-Oxley Act

 Boeing’s alleged security problems revealed that the company had failed repeatedly to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — a law that requires companies to prove that they have internal control of their data to prevent anyone from manipulating financial numbers and deceiving stockholders.

Manipulating financial numbers, deceiving stockholders and fraud are something that are very important issues. Companies should all be held to an open and transparent standard, and I see why this Act is put in place. But I also see that from the Boeing side of the argument, they felt perpetrated by the employees who apparently used password-cracking tools.

In July this year, another Boeing whistleblower was charged with 16 counts of computer tresspass for allegedly stealing 320,000 company files and giving some of them to theSeattle Times to document flaws in the company’s inspection process for one of its new planes. Police say they discovered password-cracking tools on the employee’s computer. The company estimated that the stolen data could have cost the company between $5 billion and $15 billion if the information got into the wrong hands — presumably meaning the hands of competitors.

It’s a difficult topic because on one hand, it is very detrimental to the company to release stolen data. Having auditing issues does not seem to be the terms for having billions of dollars worth of data stolen. It also does not seem appropriate to have them brought to the media, not the government. This is touched upon in the article, “Court OKs Firing of Boeing Computer-Security Whistleblowers”, which analyzed the position the whistleblower was in.

A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based appeals court sided with Boeing, saying a provision in the act only protects those who notify the authorities, not the media, of alleged wrongdoing…

The law protects employees from discrimination if they deliver the information to a federal regulatory or law enforcement agency, a member or committee of Congress or or a work supervisor.

I definitely understand this. It is not healthy for a company to feel like any employee might just give away company and industry secrets if the company is having difficulty at the administration or financial level. I think it is more professional to notify the authorities, not the media. However, I do not know all the circumstances. If there was a great inhumane or inappropriate corporate incident that occurred and the authorities did not do anything, the only other avenue of seeking justice is to go to the media.

I know this is not always very clear, and we read that;

The court noted that another statute, the Whistleblower Protection Act, (.pdf) prohibits employer firings for leaks to the media. But it is unclear whether the alleged wrongdoing in the Boeing case constituted “gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to the public health or safety,” as the law requires.

I do not know enough about the Boeing case to see if they should have been protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act, but to me it seems that the Boeing case has a possibility to be considered a ‘gross mismanagement’ since it has been years trying to fix the issue. However, releasing sensitive data to the magnitude of billions of dollars does not seem comparable to this ‘gross mismanagement’ if it is to be considered such. At this point, I cannot conclude where I stand on this issue since there must be more information that I am missing before I can conclude a reasonable side to take.

Post 6: Diversity in the Tech Industry

I think that the lack of diversity in the tech industry is a problem without a doubt. The diversity statistics show that it is weaker than the national average and even compared to other countries. In the reading “Diversity Imbalance” it says that,

Sure, it’s obvious that there are biological differences between men and women, and there is evidence that there are differences in brain function between the sexes. But there is no evidence that indicates that the skills that make people better programmers are more common in men.

So it leads me to think that there is not some cognitive challenge that cannot be overcome in order to equally staff the workplace with both female and males. People have been trying to push the fact that women and men’s brains function differently for ages. Even if that is true, wouldn’t that be an advantage in the field of computer science where it is helpful to attack a problem in multiple different ways? The article also said:

Lack of diversity is itself a problem. Different people think differently, and consequently come up with different ways to solve problems. If you have a bunch of people with the same background, they miss lots of ideas – leading to inefficiencies and lack of innovation. A diverse group is usually more effective.

I think this imbalance is something that we will look back upon as being as stupid and incorrect as how the gender dynamic looked more than 50 years ago. Clearly, things always look a more obvious in retrospect, but I think we already have the retrospective ability to make a good judgement on the importance with diversity in the workplace. For example, it actually makes no sense that there is such a deficit of minorities in the tech field. That just reflects poorly on companies and the educational system in general for not providing ample opportunities. There is no innate reason that a minority would perform more poorly in a tech position than another person. The article continues to post that:

How can we say we are hiring the best people when we ignore significant chunks of our population. Critics of efforts to fix the diversity imbalance often fret that we risk failing to hire a well-qualified male, when we habitually fail to hire well-qualified females.

I think that quote describes the need for diversity well. You cannot hire the best workforce if you are only looking at a small portion of the population. I think it was my mom that said to me one time that the cure to cancer is probably sitting inside a mind of a child in a developing country that will never be educated.

In the same way, I think a lot of the corporate issues arise from educational issues and inequality. This problem cannot be isolated, and the U.S. has a lot to do before we will be anywhere close to the solution for diversity in the workplace.

Forbes posted about the importance of publicly posting the statistics on diversity. In the article “The Lack Of Diversity in Tech Is A Cultural Issue”, they explained it:

With the increased public awareness of the lack of diversity in technology and other STEM fields, companies will experience more pressure to disclose their statistics and be accountable for reaching diversity objectives. It is time for organizations to address their cultural bias and create initiatives to retain women and minorities. Addressing bias in workplace practices along with providing employees with the tools to survive and thrive in the workplace will have a positive impact on diversity.

People and companies just tend to be a little more moral when all their business is out in the open for the general population and especially clients to see. This idea was cemented by Google, who shown to be “shamed” into adding more women into the workplace. Even though being shamed into doing something isn’t necessarily the most gracious way to add diversity to the workplace, it is still effective. In the article “Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it’s not good”, it confirmed the hypothesis that public information helped the issue of diversity:

 

“I think this will put pressure on other companies to release their gender data — which is good because it will lead to change,” Wadhwa said. “Look at all the companies that are now adding women to their boards because they were shamed into it.Things are changing. Silicon Valley can be arrogant and insular, but at the end of the day, it does listen.”

 

 

I think women and minorities face a lot of obstacles in the tech industry even further than actually just not getting what they need. In a lot of start-ups and just tech companies in general, there is some monopoly on the culture and that is majorly being dominated by white males. I read that there is a certain “bro-culture” that women and minorities are simply excluded from. I think with a better culture in the company, more change and progress can be made from there. That may start from a top down method or a bottom up method.

After looking at Silicon Valley’s plan to become more diverse, it appears that they are just going to throw money at the problem and hope that it gets fixed. Sure, it is better to be allocating funds to be fixing the immediate problems at hand, but saying you are putting $130 million dollars to the cause says nothing about how you can fix a company culture that does not lend to women and minorities. I hope that companies can do more and provide more of a plan about how they will combat issues of diversity other than just putting a dollar value to it.

Post 5: Work-Life Balance

 

To begin, I don’t think anyone can have it all. It is impossible to go through life without sacrifices and disappointing circumstances that need to be overcome. That being said, I think there are a lot of ways that parents suffer because of a workplace that will not tend to their needs as a human and a unit in a family.

I think in a traditional workplace, men have the issue of spending too much time working and not enough time with their family. This is illustrated by “The Work-Family Imbalance” article:

According to Pew, 46 percent of fathers say they’re not spending enough time with their children, compared with 23 percent of mothers. Fathers devote significantly less time than mothers to child care (an average of seven hours per week for fathers, compared with 14 for mothers). Among mothers, 68 percent say they spend the right amount of time with their children. Only half of fathers say the same.

In a lot of ways men, especially men in highly important and demanding work positions, do not adequately ever separate themselves from their office. I think this is traditionally a problem that is uniquely for men because women aren’t even privileged enough to be put in that situation. The husband of Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in his piece “Why I Put My Wife’s Career First”:

Researchers refer to the gap between male and female wages and seniority as the “motherhood penalty,” because it is almost entirely explained by the lower earnings and status of women with children. Despite their superior performance in college, surprisingly few women reach the pinnacles of professional success: They account for only 21 percent of surgeons, 20 percent of law-firm partners, and 9 percent of equity-fund managers.

I think this is a strong support of how gender inequality effects the family life and especially women with children. Women, simply, are not yet in the position to balance home life and a life of a career. I do not mean that women cannot work, that is clearly not true, I mean that women cannot pursue a demanding career in the sense that they can chase after their goals and dreams.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in “Why Women Still Cant Have It All”:

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.

And later follows up with:

In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

In this way, I see that women cannot fully “have it all” in the sense as the opportunity to have what most men have in the workplace. Even though I don’t think men “have it all” either, I think they have a much higher opportunity to manage the work-life balance themselves. After reading “Silicon Valley’s Best and Worst Jobs for New Moms (and Dads)”, I am so shocked that the US is only one of four countries in the world that does not guarantee the right to paid maternity leave. I am surprised that I didn’t know that before and now after knowing it, think that it is vital that that changes before the workplace can even start to become equal.

I was especially concerned with the NYT articles that gave specific examples of companies and situations that are incredibly horrifying. To me, the work-life balance is extremely important. I think that the human element should never be forgotten in the workplace. However, I don’t think companies are specifically the people who are supposed to create it for you. To me this seems childish. But I do think companies should be required to provide the bare minimums for a work-life balance. I plan on maintaining a work-life balance by keeping in mind what is important to me and seeing that I have enough time to spend with friends and being healthy. I know a work-life balance becomes increasingly more difficult with age so I think it is important that I understand the groundworks when I start my first job to get on the right track.