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What Are We Building Here? Software Ethics in a Time of Surveillance – Andrew C. Stone, stone.com pdf | 3 | ||||
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 Every now and again, one must climb the trees of the forest to get an overview of where the heck we are as a nation, a civilization, a planet of 8 billion souls. This last year, I took a hiatus from the breakneck speed of software engineering to try and get a more comprehensive understanding, all because of two things that precipitated a crisis. The first affected everyone on the planet: Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, of which, we apparently have not even heard the worst. Let's take a little cold comfort that Apple held out until a year after Steve died before forking over the keys of our iCloud to the NSA, unlike Microsoft who rushed first to deliver it's clients confidential data to the government as early as 2007. Well, the part of my mythology that said “Microsoft was an evil unpatriotic sell-out” turned out to be true. 
As the Snowden revelations have unfolded, I've become sicker and sicker with outrage and the sense of violation, not only from the NSA, but the corporate partners who have betrayed us. What was your reaction to all of this? Did you just stuff it into the Fear Pit, the Mystery Vault, the Chamber of Horrors where we put realizations we cannot cope with? The same place we put news of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Katrina, BP Horizon, Fukishima. Gargantuan failures that have evaded scrutiny because they run counter to the official manufactured narrative. | |||||