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.
Personal privacy is a right. If someone commits a crime and the equivalent of a warrant is issued that data becomes evidence and it becomes your job to discover what's on the devices.
Jobs like these exist in that balance between privacy and justice. A judge or however your justice system works has said that the potential crimes that person has committed justifies waving that person's right to privacy in the same way as searching a home.
Your job and scope is narrow and you should take that seriously but would you rather someone who doesn't respect privacy (e.g. a department inside the police force) does this job?
For the tools, those are the industry standards. they're just tools and yes they've been abused but they or tools like them are necessary to do that job.
This is where the problem lies. The company does not so much do the investigations themselves, but rather provide, setup, install the tools to agencies like a police department and consults them on it. So it sounds like I would not really have any control over how these tools will be used or abused later on..