that's true ever since I use an ad blocker I haven't seen it. But I remember seeing it before. Either way most people don't use ad blockers as far as I know.
"One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI."
It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
It is my understanding that the US Government set up a system, long, long ago, where the British would spy on Americans and then the British would supply the information to the NSA, thereby the NSA is not technically spying on American citizens.
Words mean nothing. They can be interpreted how ever they need to be interpreted by those in power.
australia and america have the same agreement. these countries may be dragons but live in fear of losing their hoard (borrowing that analogy from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963204)
Procuring someone else to do it on your behalf is still an offence under s 7(1) of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cth).
TELECOMMUNICATIONS (INTERCEPTION AND ACCESS) ACT 1979 - SECT 7
Telecommunications not to be intercepted
(1) A person shall not:
(a) intercept;
(b) authorize, suffer or permit another person to intercept; or
(c) do any act or thing that will enable him or her or another person to intercept;
a communication passing over a telecommunications system.
In this case we have law, which gives effect to treaties and binds the employees of the intelligence agencies, and then we have the unsupported conspiracy theories that you’re mindlessly parroting here.
People need to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction as well. The technique is used to shield these secret programs by laundering the information they collect through plausible evidentiary chains.
The number of terrorists who have been caught because they were controlled by a police officer "because they ran a traffic light" (yeah, sure) is wild.
In the EU at some point after every single terrorist attack the terrorists' names were known because they had left their passports in a car they left at the scene. (yeah, sure again).
The really amazing thing is that they don't know the name of the terrorists right away: because the terrorists don't have the passport on themselves apparently. No: they all leave them in the last car they used.
Probably that, by now, terrorists see past terror attacks and think: "Oh, I'm supposed to have my passport with me, but then leave in the last vehicle I'll use before killing people".
In France we had a case where the government tried to bring terrorist charges against someone, the problem is that the police couldn’t materially have seen what they wrote in their report, because their car was too far and the timing didn’t line up correctly. Eventually the policemen invoked confidentiality rules against their mobile phones so that no accurate probing could be made. The judge threw away the terrorist charges anyways, because the facts didn’t warrant it. Since the police knew exact facts without being there, there is a high suspicion they used illegal spying on the people and tried to launder the data.
Having graduated from a police academy, I was greatly surprised that the reason that most criminals (at least in the US) do incredibly stupid things that make it almost trivial to catch them.
In the original Dunning-Kruger paper, one bad guy thought that since rubbing lemon juice on his face made his eyes blurry, he felt that it also made cameras blurry.
I find it amusing to watch sovereign citizen videos. One of their failures is that they think that "law" is magic. All they have to do is utter the correct recipe of magic spells/words/red ink/stamps and they will be able to force the legal system to bend to their wishes.
> they were controlled by a police officer
I'm reminded of the COINTELPRO program run by the FBI in the 1960s. On more than one occasion, every participant in the "terrorist cell" (modern term - the common one in use back then was "subversive group") were FBI informants attempting to implicate the other members of the cell.
in 2002 I worked at an AT&T major datacenter and watched the NSA install all the black boxes in every rack, complete with a black curtain and armed guards while they did the project (St Louis). Before that it was still going on, it just wasnt so embedded like they did in 2002.
> Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world).
Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.
Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.
(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)
Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.
Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
It's easy for others to say, "oy, you coward, you should have blown the whistle" from the comfort their web browsers. For what it's worth, I had a security clearance in a previous job (not as high as yours, I'm sure) and I understand where you are coming from. I would have likely done the same as you. Especially with my career and the ability to provide for my family on the line.
It's probably different if you have a family, but I have quit jobs over moral implications no problem. Most people have pretty flimsy morals and will do anything to keep the money rolling in.
Most people in the world? Potentially, though I doubt the "life ruined for years" part holds for >50%.
Most people on HN? Definite no. Most people on HN who work in roles where they're exposed to such mass surveillance or other evil at scale (like Meta)? Absolutely not.
You'd be amazed at the number of people that live pay check to pay check. Even on here, I'd guess the number is higher than you'd expect. There are plenty of people in tech that do not live in SV or work for a FAANG. You're failing victim to the echo chamber if you think everyone here is a well paid bit banger
> You'd be amazed at the number of people that live pay check to pay check. Even on here, I'd guess the number is higher than you'd expect.
Well you don't have to live anywhere near paycheck to paycheck to be intimidated. If you're stonewalled from employment, you're in trouble unless you are so fabulously wealthy that you can afford to never work again.
- There are people with $1M+ salaries who live pay check to pay check. This is a choice. A lot of HNers fall under this category.
- A lot of people who are actually poor and live pay check to pay check aren't ruined for years if they lose their job. Because the nature of their work and lack of career usually means they're unstable and replaceable "commodity" jobs in the first place.
- Almost everyone who is in a position to be exposed to evil at scale as a tech worker, is among the top 5% earners in the world. I'm being very conservative there, it's likely top 1%.
That's the whole point. That treadmill is purely for selfish personal satisfaction. This thread was about the ability to quit jobs over ethics. Those people absolutely can get off it and cut their expenditures, without their life being ruined for several years for any reasonable definition of "ruined".
I've seen [alleged] homeless people post on here before. Do you really need more than an interest in tech (and an internet connection) to read/post here?
I've seen them too, and I see no reason to question them. I'm sure there's indeed homeless people on here. I also have very good reason to believe they're a small minority. Try sample 100 profiles, especially of frequent commenters (not in "Get hired" threads). It is by its nature and origin an incredibly SV-dominated group. You and me are outliers.
I took far too many ethics and philosophy electives to have a well-paying career in computing. I should've just taken the one required ethics course for the major and gone to work for the "kinetic delivery system" company that tried to recruit me.
I always keep coming back to the Nixon years when basic income was first approved in the senate by the republicans and stopped in the house by democrats.
What a different world we'd be living in, if the (back then, at least supposedly) greatest democracy would have shown the way to a universal safety net.
How fucking sad that we ended in a world where the finders of flaws or zerodays are being suppressed and prosecuted, instead of allowing them to make the world a better place.
A handful of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths now hold almost all power with these structures.
At least now the pretense of democracy is dropped.
Stopping the action is not the only reason to quit a job you deeply disapprove of. There's a related anecdote in the book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. From my memory: a man working for the US embassy in Japan was unhappy and doing psychotherapy. The therapist was trying to see if his issues with his boss had something to do with his relationship to authority, digging into his relationship to his father, etc. Turns out, he was just in deep disagreement with the policies he had to enforce, and quitting solved the issue.
Quitting a job you think is harmful (or even maybe meaningless) can be good for yourself, in addition to the morality question.
It's a systemic issue if we can't afford to have morals. In the US, It's not just a paycheck you lose with your job. Many benefits are tied to employment. It's hard enough to quit a job (for any reason) in order to take time to find a better one. If you're whistleblowing it's even worse, as that generally invites a long legal battle & having future potential employers reluctant to hire you...
Of course, seeing what happened with Snowden or even other whistleblowers more recently, like Suchir Balaji or John Barnett, makes it clear that more than financial security is at stake & acts as a chilling effect.
The mistake wasn't in not blowing the whistle but it was taking a job with this kind of organization in the first place.
Yeah the solution is to not put yourself into a position where you need to make these choices. The fuel for the fire that are organizations like the CIA are people who don't have moral qualms or who have flexible ones.
The less people who work for these organizations the better.
I never worked directly for them. I was a contractor.
If all the people of conscience quit, they are left with a workforce without a conscience, which I guess is pretty much what they have now, at least in certain areas.
> Yes that frees the people with a conscience to work on endeavours that challenge these corrupt institutions.
That... Isn't really how that works in the real world, though.
What happens when people with conscience leave legitimate institutions is that they lose legitimacy. Now you have a legitimate institution with power and no conscience, and a myriad of non-legitimate institutions with little power and some conscience.
I don't think that's true. I don't think the world has ever worked the way the person I was replying to described it.
Organizations are always reflections of the individuals of which they exist, in aggregate. I think that has always been true, and always will be true. It's sort of true by definition?
I mean, unless you're talking about revolutions, I suppose, but that's usually the end result of the ruling class distilling their support structure too much?
That sounds great in theory, but how did it work out in practice?
It's been thirteen years since Snowden, and twenty years since Mark Klein, and there have been no real reforms in the system, people continue to work for them, and with them and it's only gotten worse.
The course of action that you suggest is exactly what has lead America into a Mad King scenario with big tech oligarchs and theocratic running the show with China on the cusp of becoming the world hegemon.
People keep chasing that carrot, keep working for the man and the end result is that they to chase that carrot a little bit harder, burning them out until the man replaces them with someone new just as eager to chase that carrot a little harder.
And all along the way the noose around all of us tightens a little bit more the temperature outside gets a little bit hotter and America's grip on the world weakens.
I'm not the guy you responded to, but I just wanted to say I think you misunderstood him. He wasn't prescribing a solution. He was describing a situation. If good people leave all institutions because of corruption, then only corrupt people will be left. There will most likely always be some corruption. We need to keep corruption and violations of rights from getting out of control because nobody wants to live through a war to restore order.
The US has been leaning toward the worse for years. I think it can be traced back to the JFK assassination or earlier. The Church Committee found out a lot and ultimately changed very little. We certainly have a theocratic influence but I think the Christians are played off the leftists masterfully to subvert the nation. If people weren't at each other's throats over random issues, they might start to think about where all the tax money goes.
It is pure arrogance to think that the US can essentially rule the world forever. Being in this position and having the reserve currency is why we seem superficially rich as all the production goes abroad. Instead of factory jobs, kids get to drive for DoorDash and stuff like that. If this trend is not reversed soon, we won't produce enough of anything to defend the country. We may already be in that position IMO.
Where does it go? I think we are in for a rude awakening. We might see severe economic turbulence and war, hopefully followed by peace and preservation of our individual and national sovereignty. I would count anything past this as a bonus.
I think there might have been some other reasons Trump got elected.
Which do you think works better--protesting/suing the people making the decision? Or being the person making the decision? It's much harder to change the course of law from the outside, without access to power. The problem is that power corrupts.
Either works if enough people care enough. Maybe instead of blaming the messengers for not putting their own careers on the line, you should blame all the people who just didn't care at all?
I don't know, I think the Left's attitude of making civil institutions socially radioactive has contributed more to the decay than people burning out from within.
You speak as if "the man" is by definition "on the wrong side" (i.e. lacking conscience), but there is no "man", just a body of civil servants trying to do what they think is right, for varying definitions of right. After all, isn't that what folks were out protesting during the DOGE days, when whole departments were eliminated?
Your argument assumes its conclusion, and thus is circular.
I agree with the issue of folks trying their best and burning out--but this is why it's important that the people replacing them be just as hungry to do the right thing, if not more so.
However, it's been a tactic in politics recently to call entire departments corrupt, and insinuate that anyone who wants to work for them are likewise so.
But I don't understand the logic of doing this. If, for example, you think "all cops are bastards"... Wouldn't you want more people who think like you to become cops, instead of fewer? Wouldn't you rather run into your best friend in a cop's uniform, than someone you don't know? Why, then, would you vilify the entire organization, and make it clear you could never stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would dare want to be a police officer?
Wouldn't that make it less likely that someone who thinks the same as you would consider joining?
And yet the need for police persists; thus by vilifying them, your end up increasing the concentration of people who don't think like you. This seems, like my statement above, a strictly worse situation, and seems to be exactly what has played out in many jurisdictions!
You can apply the same line of thinking to all parts of the government, with similar results. In fact, I'll go further: I think this dynamic better explains the rotting of our institutions than yours does.
We should be encouraging people who think like us to work in the government, not discouraging them with pointless fatalism.
You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.
The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.
Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.
I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that Americans for generations now are conditioned to not be able to reason about America not being the dominant player in the world, they can't process a scenario where America falls, and due to the past ten+ years of hyper-partisan political discourse and the corrosive effects that it has on their brains they lack the ability to understand these things when people talk about them.
Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved -- that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.
You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last twenty years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.
It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.
Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.
America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.
> You're assuming that I subscribe to the left-right paradigm and that I am an American but that is not the case.
Not really. And you can choose to not subscribe to a "left-right paradigm", but it remains a functional reality in the US. Not believing in something doesn't always make it less real!
> Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.
This is a wildly arrogant take. I don't necessarily disagree that there are (a lot of!) real problems with "Modern America", but writing an entire country off, as an outsider, is incredibly self-centered.
> You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
This is completely incorrect. If the government behind any of the examples you cited were actually full of "friendly people", those organizations would never have reached the points the did, or done the things they did.
You have a weirdly immutable view of the world, as if completely changing the moral and ethical makeup of entire governments would somehow have no effect on the actions that government takes?
What about you, do you work for the EFF? If not, I'll give you an out - donate just $100. (I just did.) As a bonus you can even get the book this article is from.
Or just like, don't work for the government. simple as. Some people have morals, some people want money. It's OK. We get it, AI startup engineer hell bent on destroying thought work. We get it rastifarian bomb builder for the US navy. we get it All American who works for the chinese virualogy lab. it's just work its not your life. just do whatever and make money.
Quitting would just be the first step in "I do not want to participate in this". Whistle blowing is much more complicated in that you are hoping to not just not be participating but maybe stopping it altogether. Being young and single compared to being older with dependents would absolutely make that decision harder. Violating secrecy laws to disclose illegal activity seems like something that should have a caveat to allow, but of course they don't.
Actually they do. The law states that not only is it illegal to classify stuff to hide illegal activity, things classified that way are not actually classified. The whistleblower before Manning was very careful about what they leaked, and apparently went through the right chains. He was found guilty of misusing government property and given a slap on the wrist... And blackballed from working anywhere they had reach. But the law itself upheld that what he leaked was not classified.
This is a moral psychological quandary: quit and hope everyone shares your moral compass. (hint: they don’t).
Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.
Neither work without organizing. You cannot apply any meaningful pressure from the inside as an individual worker. You also do not need to work someplace to organize it.
If you work outside of the organization and compel someone to act on your behalf, you will be charged with that. It's how journalists have been tripped up in the past. If someone leaks to a journo, the journo is not part of the leak. If the journo asks someone to get data to be leaked to them, they've overstepped and get into trouble. That's something to not be forgotten.
From the inside, talking to coworkers definitely seems risky. If they are not like minded, they could report you. It'd have been better to just have quit at that point.
Because of all of that, "ethical" leaking really does seem like the only option left. It's then a matter of can the leaker live with the consequences.
Every administration effectively creates their own interpretation of what is permissible in this regard. The rules of engagement as it were that are set down by each administration vary widely. Nonetheless, it has effectively become a one-way ratchet.
I would push back against the idea that intelligence agency behavior changes administration to administration. Looking through history, it's the intelligence agencies which have superior continuity of leadership. Which suggests things about who's directing who.
Bureaucracy in general exhibits that kind of hysteresis. It is like a running average of who has been in charged mixed with a big dose of the culture that people who choose that sort of career create. Ironically, that inertia is considered by political scientists to be a safeguard for democracy.
Here's the Safety Ladder that exploits Fears to justify anything -
Why are you doing X?
We are doing it for your safety.
We are doing it for the safety of your family.
We are doing it to keep the org and thousands of jobs afloat.
We are doing it to save the country
Reducing peoples fears, not increasing them is the only path to prevent the entire chimp troupe quickly climbing that ladder any time something unpredictable happens.
well people want to finish their work and go home, that's why
I know HNers don't like "surveillance everywhere", but...
if you're some law enforcement, every chance to get info means hours/days saved on your work... so you reach for the "easy-way": if you can get comms of a drug gang, you can identify who belongs to that gang (instead of risking their own life by actually 'joining' the gang)
But... some do cross their lines (eg watching comms of their ex, getting paid by political actors to listen over opponents, etc)
it's not like law enforcements are 100% bad guys, but things are "complicated"
It's mainly a problem of consequences and accountability. The people who suffer unjustly from unlawful surveillance and overreach are usually unable to do anything about it, and they are assumed to be criminals anyways so nobody cares. Punishments for violating the law are nearly nonexistent for "law enforcement", so a culture of impunity is formed that cannot be easily fixed. Anybody trying to enforce the rules would run into both corrupt and noncorrupt noncompliance, just like trying to get fast food workers to follow health and safety guidelines. It's probably impossible to reform and only a wholesale teardown and replacement without keeping anyone contaminated by the existing culture has a chance.
> “Hong Kong” is not “China”, and if it subjectively is now, was less so at the time.
As far as the Chinese intelligence services are concerned, there is no difference. The maintained a heavy presence and operated as freely there then as they do now.
> He was aiming for Ecuador, or similar.
He seems to have found himself on the wrong side of the Pacific for that to be true.
> It’s really mostly a matter of politics (and a bit of luck) that he didn’t get scooped up in HK for one intent or another.
It’s historically common for walk-ins to be turned away or reported by the receiving state to avoid political heat. Same happened to Jean-Phillippe Wispelaere and Brian Regan.
> He wasn’t a walk-in, his lawyer contacted the Chinese to see if they’d let him leave and continue on.
What else would you call a disgruntled SharePoint admin who shows up unannounced on your figurative doorstep with an enormous volume of classified material belonging to an adversary?
> It seems like you’re intentionally not interested in learning the details of the story, so I’m not going to engage with you anymore.
I’m well aware of the reality of the story but if you’re going to let your own ideology shape how you perceive them, I’m not going to stop you.
That is an unfair insinuation - ‘that he sounds proud of it’. There are many reasons one stays quiet - like you are sole provider for a family, its beem going on for a while that you ignore/doubt its seriousness etc.
The consequences for speaking out can be very, very real, and utterly catastrophic. A good friend tried to blow the whistle on something the Cameron government was doing in the U.K., involving the judiciary, and got steamrolled for his efforts. There isn’t a whisper of the topic itself in the public domain, but his “crimes” were so bad that Cameron himself did a press conference to condemn him. His wife couldn’t take it, as these were people who’d spent their lives as loyal subjects of the system, suddenly cast out and crushed underfoot, killed herself. His kids fled the country.
So - sure - it’s the “right thing to do” to speak out, but when dealing with government you have to do it with the foreknowledge that this may have mortal (or worse) consequences for you and your family.
Profoundly formative experience for me, witnessing it all.
That's just the way the "Unlike Snowden" part read to me. Had you read further down the thread, you'd see I had already stipulated the family part before you made your comment.
My little piece... it seems like we're litigating your past below, which doesn't seem to be helpful. What's done is done; what is each of us going to do, now?
Unrelated but genuine question: When did it become vogue to use the word "litigate" in a casual context like you just did, outside of any legal proceedings or the like? Why prefer it over, for example, "debate"?
(I first observed it watching a broadcast of JD Vance, but have encountered others effect the same usage since then).
During my career I signed dozens of NDAs. They were all either umbrella or caveat specific. All of them cited Title 18 referencing punishments (including death) for violations of the NDA, and all of them were related to either Title 10 or Title 50 activities.
Without being too specific, what I observed was the use of NSA assets to surveil grow operations within the US. It was explained to me that it began with Ronald Reagan's War On Drugs.
I've seen much worse since then while supporting Waived / Unacknowledged programs. Present classification requirements dictate that those be reviewed for declassification after 40 years, but they will never see the light of day because all documentation is destroyed at the end of the program and not archived anywhere.
This got me wondering how often a person in your position sticks all their contemporaneous notes in a place where the inheritors of their estate would find them. But perhaps encrypted and somehow time-locked to ensure the forty-year minimum standard is kept. Since obviously national security is going to be the number one, but after that the law’s the law.
Oh maybe people assign law firms to disclose this stuff but that’s a decently sized tax to pay when you’ve done nothing wrong.
Actually security clearances do include an NDA. When I signed mine it contained an amusing clause, something to the effect of you will not share classified information until 70 years have passed or you die, whichever is _later_.
Could the person who drafted that have been contemplating something like a Dead Man's Switch? Even if so, not sure how it would have much teeth in terms of consequences after you're dead.
Or some weird scenario where an individual technically dies but is then brought back to life?
Or maybe they secretly recruit zombies and only drafted one set of employment contracts.
The existance and general operation of no such agency and echalon were common knowledge. I remember reading about them in Tom Clancy novels. Fantasy, but also widely understood reality. One doesnt need to have a clearance to count satalite dishes at like pine gap and realize what is happening.
You said; "it sounds like they should have picked somewhere with a stronger tradition of free dialogue."
Where would that be in today's world? Within the past decade, nearly every country in the world has overtly attacked digital freedoms. Can you name one country that has improved digital freedoms during the past decade?
It seems to me that this conference should be held online only, and hosted from an undisclosed location.
> anybody who does banking on their phone is taking a big and unnecessary risk
It is not necessarily a matter of choice. Besides what the other commenter notes about 2FA, in some countries banks have been removing functionality from their online-banking website, and you can only do certain things in the phone app.
> in some countries banks have been removing functionality from their online-banking website, and you can only do certain things in the phone app.
The most infuriating I've seen, is a bank which removed the anual tax report (which you need to do the anual income tax) from the online-banking website, requiring you to use the phone app... to download a PDF file, which you then have to transfer to the computer anyway so you can print it!
This annoys me to no end. I have an old phone that I boot up occasionally because it holds all the apps that I only need once per year for a niche feature that is only accessible in their app. I don't need 200 apps on my main that I would otherwise never open.
See, the thing is, here you can't use banking on your computer without having a bespoke authentication app on your phone. There used to be a system of one-time codes sent via paper mail, but even that has been scrapped by now, so using bank ID apps is literally the only option across all of the local banks. In my bank the ID app and the bank app are even different apps, and it's the ID app that's the truly important one to have (and that, of course, hates rooted/modified phones with a passion).
The government services also go through these ID apps, although there is a poorly supported alternative that uses USB smart card readers. I have not seen a single person actually use it, probably for a reason, though I'm planning to get one just to have a backup...
At least in Finland's Nordea bank you can order a physical code calculator, they used to be small enough to keep on your wallet but the new one is the size of an old small phone. It even has a QR scanner. So I just keep it at home.
I live in a "developed" country and don't have a banking app on my phone. It's a choice. Sometimes it's a choice of which bank you bank with. Sometimes it's a choice to stick with more traditional means of interacting with that bank and not even checking your account using a website, but it's absolutely a choice.
I got a Voice Modem at some point toward the end of the 90's. I played around with it and wrote an answering machine for it in bash. It announced a synthesized welcome message with date and time, and gave options for control of some elements of my home automation via DTMF (after authenticating). It was clunky, but it worked well.
I came across it a few months ago while clearing out some old junk. I did not think twice about tossing it into the trash.
Coming from a family of alcoholics (half of my aunts and uncles, my father, and my sister), I have seen the social and physical damage that alcohol does. My father was a role model to me of what not to become. I do drink, but nothing stronger than wine, and not very often.
It may have been easy for the author to quit, but it's a different story for the people who are addicted. The ones who are trying to quit are at least aware that they've got a problem. Many never even make it that far.
So, you kind of hit the nail on the head with "if" and "purpose". So, this is not an ESG fund (per your link) and more about baked-in filtering/excluding certain parts of the investable universe (with additional criteria), for an SRI (Socially Responsible Investing) approach. At the end of the day, some people simply don't want to profit or invest in certain industries, regardless of the return differential. I would say that's really a personal call, not a financial mistake.
I did some phreaking as a kid (in the 1970's), but stopped when I turned 18. I learned a lot about phones in the process, and spent most of my career doing telecommunications engineering.
This article is from 2002 when it was probably still a lot cheaper to roll your own PBX than to buy one.
For the past seven years, I've been running FreePBX in a VM (in the same embedded, fanless server that hosts my OpenWRT router). I've got three full-featured VoIP desk phones with way more capability than the author's, and with a lot less effort.
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