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.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 ๐ I'm just having a hard time rejecting a potentially really good job offer.
IMO it comes down to the actual clients and work. Like you said, there are legit reasons for digital forensics.
I assume in your country that there is some judicial process, including challenges and appeals, involved in searches and that those phones are allegedly being used in specific, articulated crimes. If that is the case then I think there's justification for trying to get into the phone. However if that judicial process is absent or a sham, there are no crimes being articulated beyond hand-waving like "terrorism" or "national security", or the entire apparatus is rotten to the core, then it becomes immoral.
I know people who have had similar jobs and when a bad job comes down they refuse. So far, they haven't been fired, but they were willing to be fired. If you were cracking the phones of child molesters and human traffickers then you're doing good work. If it's people protesting climate change you'd have an ethical duty to refuse, and be prepared to walk.