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Whatever Happened To Just Using Burner Phones?
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The CEO of a company that made customized encrypted phones and sold them to organized crime figures and the Sinaloa drug cartel pleaded guilty to facilitating drug trafficking, and I think there's an interesting topic here about morality and business. We keep seeing how Silicon Valley is more interested in creating new tech than considering the moral and ethical implications of what they've wrought -- look at Facebook and Twitter right now -- and you have someone in this case seeing a big-money opportunity in giving criminals a way to avoid detection. This is more extreme than the social media dilemma -- you can argue that the secure phone people know that their tools are likely to be used for illicit purposes. But the moral and ethical questions are there across the board: Do businesspeople have an obligation to do no harm? Or enable no harm? How responsible for bad things are the people who make the tools? What about when the tools are pretty obviously meant to be used to hide bad things? (Motherboard/Vice; Thanks to Sam Wood at the Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News/Philly.com for the link)
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