Not bragging about hiring a dude whose entire portfolio is invasive mass surveillance would be a start.
Edit to add: Since the genie’s out the bottle on that, a little bit of transparency over what the dude’s role in their company actually is and what their intentions are, or heck, literally anything would be nice.
Like, personally I think ‘ceasing to be a cop’ is the best thing a person in the police could ever possibly do and pretty much proof they are salvageable as a person, so I’m already inclined to think positively of the espionage dude they hired. But their complete and total opacity, all the way down to blocking/banning anyone who criticised them over it, suggests that his presence in the company is not just a case of ‘he’s good with tech and we hired him’, but rather that his expertise in surveillance specifically is the reason he was hired, and yes, there will be insidious things in new Pi models.
Hmm… thanks for sharing the link, but none of what I have read jumps out at me as egregious.
I think their PR department thought the whole “Technical Surveillance” aspect would be cool to highlight to attract more techies due to the mystique of potentially hiring a weirdly-quasi “James Bond”-ish type persona, but they failed to anticipate people’s penchant for cynicism.
Nothing they did or said would cause me any concern or stop me from buying an RPI in the future; they simply hired someone that wanted a job, showed a history of passion for the RPI product, had technical knowledge, and at one time happened to be a tech surveillance cop. They didn’t hire him as a cop and didn’t hire him as a tech surveillance / security resource authority either; they hired him as a maker: a DiY hobbyist that likes to build and test prototype products.
Again, I am not dismissing what some may feel or think on the matter; I am simply stating that for me, their transgression of miscalculating the PR just doesn’t register as a big enough issue compared to what I believe was their true intention: to just hire someone DiY capable and excited for RPI itself.
To be honest on my end I see this as a PR Disaster first and foremost?
Like, I generally prefer to assume incompetence over malice where it is possible, and in the incompetence hypothesis – This is just some extremely bad room-reading skills considering who RPi caters to (Open Source people) and our personality (fundamental distrust of any authority, hatred for anything perceived as ‘control’, further intensified by the constant surveillance in modern proprietary software, etc.) – I don’t think having this man in the team or not is going to change what RPi is like in any way… Not because I assume he’s a good dude, but because presuming imperial governments have any interest in backdooring and surveilling projects like the Pi, then that backdoor either already exists and has existed since the first model ever OR it was added much earlier, quietly, without them blabbering about hiring an ex-spy. That’s just how it be with those things.
I generally assume anything I don’t personally understand is going to have something insidious, to be honest. Like I told the other person, the only way to make sure your hardware isn’t compromised is to have its schematics and the know-how to understand everything that goes on inside it.
I hear you… ultimately I agree on the PR disaster, and I also agree on the benefit to open source; being able to verify nothing shady is going on when you want / need to is everything.
How would they achieve that?
Not bragging about hiring a dude whose entire portfolio is invasive mass surveillance would be a start.
Edit to add: Since the genie’s out the bottle on that, a little bit of transparency over what the dude’s role in their company actually is and what their intentions are, or heck, literally anything would be nice.
Like, personally I think ‘ceasing to be a cop’ is the best thing a person in the police could ever possibly do and pretty much proof they are salvageable as a person, so I’m already inclined to think positively of the espionage dude they hired. But their complete and total opacity, all the way down to blocking/banning anyone who criticised them over it, suggests that his presence in the company is not just a case of ‘he’s good with tech and we hired him’, but rather that his expertise in surveillance specifically is the reason he was hired, and yes, there will be insidious things in new Pi models.
Hmm… thanks for sharing the link, but none of what I have read jumps out at me as egregious.
I think their PR department thought the whole “Technical Surveillance” aspect would be cool to highlight to attract more techies due to the mystique of potentially hiring a weirdly-quasi “James Bond”-ish type persona, but they failed to anticipate people’s penchant for cynicism.
Nothing they did or said would cause me any concern or stop me from buying an RPI in the future; they simply hired someone that wanted a job, showed a history of passion for the RPI product, had technical knowledge, and at one time happened to be a tech surveillance cop. They didn’t hire him as a cop and didn’t hire him as a tech surveillance / security resource authority either; they hired him as a maker: a DiY hobbyist that likes to build and test prototype products.
Again, I am not dismissing what some may feel or think on the matter; I am simply stating that for me, their transgression of miscalculating the PR just doesn’t register as a big enough issue compared to what I believe was their true intention: to just hire someone DiY capable and excited for RPI itself.
To be honest on my end I see this as a PR Disaster first and foremost?
Like, I generally prefer to assume incompetence over malice where it is possible, and in the incompetence hypothesis – This is just some extremely bad room-reading skills considering who RPi caters to (Open Source people) and our personality (fundamental distrust of any authority, hatred for anything perceived as ‘control’, further intensified by the constant surveillance in modern proprietary software, etc.) – I don’t think having this man in the team or not is going to change what RPi is like in any way… Not because I assume he’s a good dude, but because presuming imperial governments have any interest in backdooring and surveilling projects like the Pi, then that backdoor either already exists and has existed since the first model ever OR it was added much earlier, quietly, without them blabbering about hiring an ex-spy. That’s just how it be with those things.
I generally assume anything I don’t personally understand is going to have something insidious, to be honest. Like I told the other person, the only way to make sure your hardware isn’t compromised is to have its schematics and the know-how to understand everything that goes on inside it.I hear you… ultimately I agree on the PR disaster, and I also agree on the benefit to open source; being able to verify nothing shady is going on when you want / need to is everything.