Miramax
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2018–2023
3:01 · 2.4M views · Feb 26, 2015
The Good Will Hunting scene in which Will explains to NSA recruiters why he would not work for them. It is a monologue on the ethics of national security work.
Brought up whenever NSA recruiting and hiring comes up, as a favorite scene capturing ethical objections to that work.
4 comments from Hacker News
...and then also things like Y Combinator being one of the recruitment arms for this US empire (alongside all the US universities like Stanford, MIT, etc.) - luring technologists and scientists from other countries in, in order to capture and monopolize new advances and adding these innovations to the US portfolio as part of the supposedly neutral US-led 'intellectual property' regime (WIPO, TRIPS, etc.) [1]. Of course this is nothing new. This is one of my favorite scenes in Good Will Hunting: this video I am against any system that aims to make knowledge artificially scarce and monopolizes parts of our collective human inheritance (all of humanity's scientific and technological discoveries). I am for new systems which respect both our world's 1) actual material scarcity (natural resources, human labor, etc.) and 2) it's immaterial abundance (any knowledge/resources that can be replicated by (digital) technology). [1] Against Rentier Capitalism: David Graeber, Michael Hudson & Guy Standing: [LINK]
Say I'm working at NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it, maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cause they were all pullin' a tour in the National Guard. this video the divide between silicon valley and washington is that not everyone views the world in adversarial us-versus-them terms. washington needs more bridge building than bomb dropping, physical and cyber.
> I don't think that enabling capricious air strikes is the kind of work that is going to allay most people's ethical concerns. Seriously for a second I was like, maybe the NSA isn't such a bad idea anymore. They're out there making Ghidra and other open source tools so that's nice. And then I read this and immediately thought of that monologue from Good Will Hunting: this video That's gonna be a no from me dawg.
Not surprising. They’ve gone from having the perception of being the most elite organization for hackers to more of what is described in Good Will Hunting [1]. Perception is everything. I say this as someone who dreamt of working at the NSA for most of my high school years, but would now never even consider it. Edit: although I bet a lot of it is the 4x-5x salary jump you can get in cyber security jobs by having the NSA on your resume. :-) [1] this video