Hi everyone,

I recently got offered a job (or not quite yet, but in the process) for a European digital forensics and e-discovery company. The position sounds really fun and exciting and really what I am looking for, but I don’t know if I can reconcile it with my privacy concerns and my moral concerns that we are turning further and further into a surveillance state.

Here are some of the products and companies they are using / working with:

https://cellebrite.com/en/home/

https://www.passware.com/

https://www.milestonesys.com/products/software/briefcam/

And many more similar tools. Do you think I am overreacting? Would you ever consider working for a company like that? It almost feels like a European version of Palantir. When remarking my concerns in the interview, the interviewer was very surprised about that question (which in turn really surprised me…). The “justification” he gave me, to reassure me, did not do a good job either:

  • 95% of their customers are state actors, i.e. national police departmenty. As I said, it’s not the US, so my image of our police is not quite as bad, but still it’s not like I view government agencies , justice system, or the police as the “ultimate good guys” that I trust with everything.
  • “Things like unlocking and searching through some evidence like a phone is not surveillance, since it is not live” - maybe I misunderstood something there because to me that argument makes zero sense

I’m a little torn, because I believe that digital forensics is obviously a very important tool for solving crimes and is clearly already part of reality. But building such powerful tools with access to so many sources of data requires an amount of trust that I currently cannot say I have into any entity really. And that’s ignoring all the AI that all these tools use internally too.

Sorry for the rant, I am just curious what this community thinks about this industry? Even though I can already guess 😉 I’m just having a hard time rejecting a potentially really good job offer.

  • Majestic@lemmy.ml
    1·
    4 days ago

    The top two are very much standard industry tools. It’s not that this company per se has a preference for using zionist products it’s that they’re really the only game in town because no competitor comes close.

    It would be a lot easier if their clients were corporations and businesses and you were asked to do things like incident response to systems compromises, retrieving information improperly deleted by people acting against company orders. Other mundane things like that. Non-criminal, white collar stuff is a lot easier and less ethically fraught.

    Only you can decide whether this is moral stuff. It’s not mass surveillance true but I’d have to wonder what kinds of matters you’d be dealing with. If it’s child abuse, human trafficking, narcotics, criminal networks that doesn’t seem to be a moral issue to me. On the other hand if you’re being asked to assist breaking into the phones of climate change or pro-Palestine protestors or similar that would IMO present an ethical dilemma.

    If you think you’re strong enough to say no and possibly be fired for it should such a case come to you then I think taking the job is fine. If you feel you’d be coerced by the salary and the friction of finding a new job into doing things you’d hate yourself for then I’d give it a pass.

    As others said someone will certainly fill this position and that person may have no moral scruples about privacy or human rights at all as you do.