If you don’t take the position, more than likely the person who does fill the position is a bootlicker.

This seems like a great opportunity for a person with a conscious to infiltrate and get some insight into how these companies and governments operate.

Best case scenario you witness the government gathering evidence against actual bad guys. Worst case, you witness rights violations and contact EFF or another human rights organization as a whistleblower.

I say try it out. But hopefully you already separated your online identity from your professional. I’m sure they’ll see this post if not.

digital forensics

recovering deleted data - may be ok if deleted data is cat photos

and e-discovery company.

sounds like spam?

cellebrite

Ooooh… nope. Get out.

Anything that helps police is an automatic no in my book.

Cellebrite is israeli spyware. Only take the job to sandbag it

I was in a very similar situation a couple years ago, I was scouted by a recruiter for Axon (who make body cams and tazers). It was a bump from my current role, but I realized that if I was struggling before even taking the role then either

1. I’d be struggling even worse after taking it, which would make me miserable

Or

2. I’d realize that I wasn’t struggling with it anymore, and that’d make me really miserable.

Ignore the people telling you to take the job as some kind of infiltrator/ insider/ conscientious objector: you’re not going to change or dismantle the company from the inside, you’re just going to end up being constantly stressed and miserable each day until you eventually quit. The better solution is to fine a role somewhere that you feel actively helps people.

I once worked for a company with similar moral privacy/human rights issues. At first I thought it was a gray area and didn’t realize how seriously fucked up what they were doing was, after 7 months I quit even though to this day it was the most exciting and interesting job I have had.

No job is worth compromising your moral beliefs, avoid it and you will be able tp forever know that you stood by your morals, even when it was hard.

almost all of the progressive leaders that this world has ever had came as a result of someone empowered to bad stuff, but chose to do good instead and this is your shot to do the same thing.

the true question is how much do you know about how the world works and if you use fox news, npr, bbc, le monde, der speigel or wikipedia to keep yourself informed; then you will only do bad stuff.

EDIT: that goes for reddit, facebook, or any other american/western centralized social media too.

I’d 100% take the job if you haven’t already. The technology exists and will be used with or without your involvement. Being in the industry gives you valuable info about how the tools work and what they’re capable of. Our fight against mass surveillance would be useless without people on the inside who have knowledge about what our enemies can do. We would have no idea what devices and operating systems Cellebrite can break into without the documents being leaked a while back, for example.

Not saying you should immediately leak sensitive info (don’t do anything dumb), but if you put your head down and be careful you can help us fight the good fight while doing a job you enjoy.

IMO it comes down to the actual clients and work. Like you said, there are legit reasons for digital forensics.

I assume in your country that there is some judicial process, including challenges and appeals, involved in searches and that those phones are allegedly being used in specific, articulated crimes. If that is the case then I think there’s justification for trying to get into the phone. However if that judicial process is absent or a sham, there are no crimes being articulated beyond hand-waving like “terrorism” or “national security”, or the entire apparatus is rotten to the core, then it becomes immoral.

I know people who have had similar jobs and when a bad job comes down they refuse. So far, they haven’t been fired, but they were willing to be fired. If you were cracking the phones of child molesters and human traffickers then you’re doing good work. If it’s people protesting climate change you’d have an ethical duty to refuse, and be prepared to walk.

The top two are very much standard industry tools. It’s not that this company per se has a preference for using zionist products it’s that they’re really the only game in town because no competitor comes close.

It would be a lot easier if their clients were corporations and businesses and you were asked to do things like incident response to systems compromises, retrieving information improperly deleted by people acting against company orders. Other mundane things like that. Non-criminal, white collar stuff is a lot easier and less ethically fraught.

Only you can decide whether this is moral stuff. It’s not mass surveillance true but I’d have to wonder what kinds of matters you’d be dealing with. If it’s child abuse, human trafficking, narcotics, criminal networks that doesn’t seem to be a moral issue to me. On the other hand if you’re being asked to assist breaking into the phones of climate change or pro-Palestine protestors or similar that would IMO present an ethical dilemma.

If you think you’re strong enough to say no and possibly be fired for it should such a case come to you then I think taking the job is fine. If you feel you’d be coerced by the salary and the friction of finding a new job into doing things you’d hate yourself for then I’d give it a pass.

As others said someone will certainly fill this position and that person may have no moral scruples about privacy or human rights at all as you do.