Yes. I specifically avoid any projects adjacent to things which would work “against” the interests of any powerful government that I might be subject to.
I don’t believe that I can hide. I think if I was in Russia or China and wanted to take on some of these interesting projects I might consider some of them if I didn’t super love traveling.
But the only way to do work in those types of interesting spaces is to be very clearly aligned with your government and ideally positioning yourself towards partnering with your government.
I don’t think heroes are stupid as long as they understand the likely consequences and are willing to be “martyred”. But many of the people working in these spaces are merely greedy with delusions of grandeur or invincibility, or naive … not heroic. A select few have qualified as heroes e.g. TrueCrypt or Aaron Swartz or LavaBit. Though Swartz I also believe was naive, but he faced consequences that simply didn’t make sense, so I don’t entirely blame him for believing whatever consequences he would face might be more endurable than what he was threatened with - I make the assumption that he was resolved to face reasonable consequences.
Snowden would have counted as a hero to me if he only released documents relating to illegal domestic surveillance and not released operational details of legal international spouting. He was more resolved to deal with the consequences than any other character I can think of.
I don’t believe that I can hide. I think if I was in Russia or China and wanted to take on some of these interesting projects I might consider some of them if I didn’t super love traveling.
But the only way to do work in those types of interesting spaces is to be very clearly aligned with your government and ideally positioning yourself towards partnering with your government.
I don’t think heroes are stupid as long as they understand the likely consequences and are willing to be “martyred”. But many of the people working in these spaces are merely greedy with delusions of grandeur or invincibility, or naive … not heroic. A select few have qualified as heroes e.g. TrueCrypt or Aaron Swartz or LavaBit. Though Swartz I also believe was naive, but he faced consequences that simply didn’t make sense, so I don’t entirely blame him for believing whatever consequences he would face might be more endurable than what he was threatened with - I make the assumption that he was resolved to face reasonable consequences.
Snowden would have counted as a hero to me if he only released documents relating to illegal domestic surveillance and not released operational details of legal international spouting. He was more resolved to deal with the consequences than any other character I can think of.