I actually have software that'd be a decent fit for this use case. I'm working on bringing it to market for VoIP companies to use in troubleshooting networks. (Hint: It's super effective. At one place we cut ticket response times down by an enormous factor.) And one benefit I'm planning on adding is lawful intercept. A lot of VoIP companies are sitting at risk of getting a valid warrant and having no way to respond. Some companies sell technical insurance (pay monthly, they'll overnight an intercept box if you get a warrant) for this exact reason and it's not cheap. Only problem is CALEA has this dumbass weird format to provide the data in. But hey, that's worth like $100K a year per company or so...
But it'd also be rather well suited for a government wanting to monitor connections. Just some scaling issues. My thought process is currently going "Well I could definitely use the money. And that'd put me in a better position to compete. Otherwise another competitor will do it. Or worse, an open source version will step up to the scale."
I'm not sure it's much different than selling general services to the public. A lot of irrational people are going to buy your product and perhaps that might propel them to success. Taken to its conclusion, I'd have a super limited market as most people are idiots so given a choice, I'd only want to help a very limited range of people. I just have to put my personal feelings aside if I'm to deal with anyone in the real world.
Here's the problem: you think someone else will do it anyway thus damage is certain, so you can at least be the first to profit from it. And guess what, your competitors probably think the same thing. And you'll all rush to delivering morally dubious products. Because hey, if someone will defect anyway, it's best I defect fist.
I am increasingly convinced that the very point of morality is to steer society away from stupid coordination failures like this.
Fair point. I guess if I was convinced that my actions would actually matter, then I'd care. It's like voting for a third candidate in US elections - pointless.
Anyways I'm far more interested in how to get to a point to sell to governments the first place. Hacking Team's marketing seems juvenile and lame from the naming to the way they phrase stuff. But at E200K per license, they were obviously successful.
But it'd also be rather well suited for a government wanting to monitor connections. Just some scaling issues. My thought process is currently going "Well I could definitely use the money. And that'd put me in a better position to compete. Otherwise another competitor will do it. Or worse, an open source version will step up to the scale."
I'm not sure it's much different than selling general services to the public. A lot of irrational people are going to buy your product and perhaps that might propel them to success. Taken to its conclusion, I'd have a super limited market as most people are idiots so given a choice, I'd only want to help a very limited range of people. I just have to put my personal feelings aside if I'm to deal with anyone in the real world.