Photo by on rawpixel Unsplash Heard you are working in the weapon industry now ? How is sleeping at night going for you? This sentence was addressed to me a few years ago by a friend’s dad while his daughter was experimenting every possible drugs in her room 20 meters away from him, slowly trying to kill herself. As astonished as I was that this dad was more concerned about my than his daughter life, this is actually the first time I seriously considered ethics in development as a part of my . ethics duty as a developer Just after graduating in 2012, I had started working for the service branch of a French multinational that happens to develop weapons (Cyber, Electronic and conventional weapons). Working in the Network and Systems security branch I started as a Software Engineer, designing and building applications mainly for and never had faced any ethical dilemma other than the good old: “Should I tell the manager that this user has been watching adult content with the company’s device”. Good. I can handle that. I intended to keep it that way. After all, the only reason why I had chosen this company as a first job was because the and that . Anyway I had other plans for the future and just wanted to and be financially comfortable to later. Banks and Insurances pay was really good everybody wanted to work there learn as much as possible start something on my own This company’s main client was the (or defense, depending how you see it) and although my job was like any other Software engineer at the beginning I must say a number of times during random social encounters state military I took advantage of it I work for the military as an engineer, most of my projects are classified so if I tell you about it I will have to kill you after. That worked great as a conversation starter! Much better than the “I am a Software Engineer” which at that time in my city was usually welcomed with at best a polite “sigh” at worst an eye roll and a “Eww, so you are a nerd”. But internally to cope with the little guilt I was feeling I would tell myself. It’s ok you just develop Web Applications, it’s never gonna kill anybody And it was true, as good as they were . my forms and buttons could not be possibly used in any lethal way Working for the defense Eager to , and working I was well considered by my pairs and I climbed the company’s ladder. Gradually I was offered much more interesting missions that were closer to one of their core business : . learn day and night Cybersecurity Maryland Guard cyber warfare operators from the 175th Wing’s Cyber Operations Group Working for was than everything I had done before. I was working in a research lab, we were , to spend as much time as we needed and building . Eventually we developed an internal framework combining cutting edge web technologies that was used to showcase the latest Cyber-defense innovations during European defense shows. Cybersecurity way cooler free to innovate trying out the latest technologies prototypes These prototypes would range from a simple tool to in real time the in a complex network to a complete where you could see in real times the and visualize the trust you have in these data from a Cyber point of view. visualize vulnerabilities air defense control app radars coverage Again I was asked if I was developing weapons Nah, I only develop the visualization tools for threat detection and these are only prototypes anyway. I was promoted as an in and I never went further since I shortly after to start my own business . But I am sure that as I would have progressed in the company I would have ended up on or actually implementing the . And here is my question: ? expert web software technologies left the company more sensitive projects real systems that I had been prototyping where does your responsibility as a developer starts Military despite yourself Photo by on Hello I’m Nik Unsplash Few people know but . They cost (thank god), are , on-board a , the latest high definition , dozens of and use cutting-edge technologies. Most of the time these sensors and technologies were for military use and the people that have conceived them are of how it is being used. these missiles probably only requires , but in reality I would not be surprised if have worked on the embedded technologies that will allow target detection, missile launch, guidance and impact optimization . Actually if you are contributing to a widely used open source software or library . In my example, maybe one library that I’ve prototyped will be re-used in an air monitoring system that will allow threat detection and will automatically trigger a counter-attack. Of course I was working in the military so even if I never thought about it this way before, I agreed to my code being re-used for any purpose when I signed the contract but that is not the case for most of us in the . latest missiles can be compared to supercars millions each auto-guided computer cameras sensors not primarily designed not even aware Designing and assembling few people more than 1000 people your lines of code are probably already on there open source community Most popular open sources licenses and NMPL license concept : Non Military Public License My way to cope with that after leaving the company was to ask myself “ ” but I quickly realized that pretty much ( ), and the your contribution has the it is. So I just limit myself to the direct impacts that my work could have for lack of a better solution. Could what I’ve built be used for doing any harm? everything you do can be used in a bad way You can kill someone with a Pretzel after all bigger impact more dangerous So I was thinking, instead, could we start a that will allow and ? “Non Military Public License” or something like that. And can it realistically be ? new license opening sources forbid re-use for the military controlled
