Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere



I've been mulling over these ideas for quite a while, and I think I may still have more thinking to do, but recent events have gotten me thinking again about the increasing urgency of the need for a professional code of conduct for computer programmers.



I posit that, in no uncertain terms, it is a strong ethical obligation on the part of the programmer to make sure that programs do, always, and only, what the user asks them to. "The user" may in some cases be an ambiguous term, such as on a web-based system where customers interact with a system owned by someone else, and in these cases the programmer should strive to balance those concerns as exactly as possible: the administrator of the system should have no unnecessary access to the user's personal information, and the user should have no unnecessary control over the system's operation. All interactions with the system should faithfully represent both the intent and authority of the operator.



Participants in the DRM debate implicitly hold the view that the ownership of your operating system, your personal information, and your media is a complex, joint relationship between you, your operating system vendor, the authors of the applications you run, and the owners of any media that pass through that application. Prevailing wisdom is that the way any given software behaves should be jointly determined by all these parties, factoring in all their interests, and that the argument is simply a matter of degree: who should be given how much control, and by what mechanism.



I don't like to think of myself as an extremist, but on this issue, I can find no other position to take. When I hear lawmakers, commercial software developers, and even other open source programmers, asking questions like, "how much control should we afford to content producers in media playback programs?", I cannot help but think of Charles Babbage. On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently, disastrously wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it.



Computer programmers need a socially, and legally recognized code of professional ethics, to which we can be held accountable. There have been some efforts in this direction, the most widely-known one being the



Although there are many different codes of ethics for medical doctors, a principle which echoes through them all is one which was formulated in ancient history, originally by



The idea is that, if you are going to be someone's doctor, you have to help them, or at least, you shouldn't ever harm them. Doctors generally regard this as a sacred responsibility. This basic tenet of the doctor-patient relationship typically overrides all other considerations: the doctor's payment, the good or harm that the patient has done or may do, and the advancement of medical science all take a back seat to the welfare of the patient.



In this modern day and age, where doctors often perform general anesthesia on their patients to prepare them for surgery, this understanding is critical to the credibility of the medical profession as it stands. Who would knowingly submit themselves to a doctor, knowing that they might give you a secondary, curable disease, just to ensure they got paid?



Lawyers have a similar, although slightly more nuanced, principle. Anybody who has watched a few episodes of Law and Order knows about it. A slightly more authoritative source than NBC, though, is the American Bar Association, who in their The professional judgement of a lawyer should be exercised, within the bounds of the law, solely for the benefit of his client and free of compromising influences and loyalties. Neither his personal interests, nor the interests of other clients, nor the desires of third persons should be permitted to dilute his loyalty to his client.

(emphasis mine) For criminal defense lawyers, these "compromising influences and loyalties" may include a basic committment to the public good. A lawyer who represents a serial murderer who privately admits to having committed heinous crimes must, to the best of their ability, represent the sociopath's interests and try to get them exonerated, or, failing that, the lightest sentence possible. Low as we as a society might consider a lawyer who defends rapists and murderers, we would think even more poorly of one who gave intentionally bad advice to people who he personally didn't like, or sold out his client's interests to the highest bidder.



A doctor's responsibility is somewhat the same. If a doctor is treating a deeply evil person, they are still obligated by the aforementioned sacred patient/doctor pact to honestly treat that person, not use their position as a doctor to proclaim a death sentence, or cripple them. They are obligated to treat that person equitably, even if that person's evil extends to not paying their medical bills.



This pattern isn't confined to professional trades. Catholic priests have the concept of the "any circumstances, regardless of the possible harm to others. A priest certainly shouldn't threaten their flock with knowledge of their confessed sins to increase contributions to the donation plate, even if one of them has confessed a murder.



In each case, society calls upon a specialist for navigating a system too complex for laymen to understand: the body, the law, and the soul. In each case, both society at large and individuals privately put their trust completely into someone allegedly capable of navigating that system. Finally, in each case, the trust of that relationship is considered paramount, above the practitioner's idea of the public good, above the practitioner's (and other's) financial considerations.



There is a good reason for these restrictions. Society has systems in place to make these judgements. Criminal defense lawyers are not allowed to judge their clients because that's the judge's job. Doctors aren't allowed to pass sentences on their clients because that's the legal system's job. Catholic priests don't judge their confessors because that's God's job. More importantly, each of these functions may only be performed with the trust of the "client" - and it is important for the client to know that their trust will not be abused, even for an otherwise laudable goal, such as social welfare, because notions of social welfare differ.



I believe that computer programmers are a fourth such function.



Global telecommunications and digital recording are new enough that I think this is likely to be considered a radical idea. However, think of the importance of computer systems in our society today. Critical functions such as banking, mass transit, law enforcement, and commerce would not be able to take place on the scale they do today without the help of computer systems. Apropos of my prior descriptions, every lawyer and doctor's office has a computer, and they rely on the information provided by their computer systems to do their jobs.



More importantly, computers increasingly handle a central role in our individual lives. Many of us pay our bills on a computer, do our taxes on a computer, do our school work or our jobs on computers. Sometimes all of these things even happen on one computer. Today, in 2005, most of those tasks can be accomplished without a computer (with the exception, for those of us with technical professions, of our jobs) but as the public systems we need to interact with are increasingly computerized, it may not reasonable to expect that it will be possible to lead an average modern life in 100 years without the aid of a personal computing device of some kind.



If that sounds like an extreme time frame, consider the relative importance of the automobile, or the telephone, in today's society versus 1905. It's not simply a matter of convenience. Today it is considered a basic right today for accused criminals to make a phone call. Where was that right when there were no telephones?



Another way to think of this relationship with technology is not that we do a lot of things with computers, but that our computers do a lot of things on our behalf. They buy things. They play movies. They make legal claims about our incomes to the federal government. Most protocol specifications refer to a program which acts on your behalf (such as a web browser) as a user agent to reflect this responsibility. You are not buying a book on Amazon with your computer; you click on some links, you enter some information, and you trust that your computer has taken this information and performed a purchase on your behalf. Your computer could do this without your help, if someone has installed a malicious program on it. It could also pretend to have made a purchase, but actually do nothing at all.



Here is where we approach the intersection between programming and ethical obligation. Every time a user sits down to perform a task with a computer, they are, indirectly, trusting the programmers who wrote the code they will be using to accomplish that task. Users give not only the responsibility of performing a specific task, they trust those programs (and thereby their programmers) with intensely personal information: usernames, passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers - the list goes on and on.



There may be a technological solution to this problem, a way to limit the amount of information that each proram needs, and provide users with more control over what different programs can say to each other on their own computer. Some very smart people are working on this, and you can read about some of that work on



, but the real problem is that it's the top of a very long, very slippery slope. Its advocates point at the top of that slope and say "See, it's not so bad!" - but where will it end? While I am annoyed, I'm not really that concerned with the use of this kind of technology to prevent copyright violations. It's when we start using it to prevent other sorts of crimes that the real fear sets in.



Today, it's considered almost (but not quite) acceptable that Sony installs the digital equivalent of a car-bomb on my computer to prevent me from copying music. As I said at the beginning of this article - they don't think that the practice is inherently wrong, simply that there are some flaws in its implmentation. Where will this stop? Assuming they can perfect the technology, and given that my computer has all the information necessary to do it, will future versions of Sony's music player simply install themselves and lie in wait, monitoring every download, and automatically billing you for anything that looks unauthorized, not telling me about it until I get my credit card statement?



Whether unauthorized copying should be a crime or not, preventing it by these means is blatantly wrong. Let me be blunt here. It is simply using a technique to wring more money out of users because the technique is there. Much like the doctor who cuts off your nose and won't reattach it until he gets paid for his other (completely legitimate) services, this is an abuse of trust of the worst order. It doesn't matter how much money you actually owe the doctor, or Sony: in any case, they don't have the right to do violence to you or to your computer because of it.



What of "terrorism"? Will mandatory anti-terrorism software, provided to Microsoft by the federal government, monitor and report my computerized activities to the Department of Homeland Security for review? From here, I'll let you fill in the rest of the paranoid ravings. I don't see this particular outcome happening soon, but the concern is real. There is no system in place to prevent such an occurance, no legal or ethical restriction encumbent upon software developers which would prevent it.



This social dilemma is the reason I termed the IEEE/ACM ethics code "sophomoric". With the directionless enthusiasm of a college freshman majoring in philosophy, it commands "software engineers" to "Moderate the interests of [themselves], the employer, the client and the users with the public good.", to "Disclose to appropriate persons or authorities any actual or potential danger to the user, the public, or the environment", to "Obey all laws governing their work, unless, in exceptional circumstances, such compliance is inconsistent with the public interest." These are all things that a good person should do, surely, but they are almost vague enough to be completely meaningless. These tenets also have effectively nothing to do with software in specific, let alone software engineering. They are in fact opposed to certain things that software should do, if it's written properly. If the government needs to get information about me, they need a warrant, and that's for good reason. I don't want them taking it off my computer without even asking a judge first, simply because a helpful software engineer thought it might be a "potential danger to the public".



Software developers should start considering that accurately reflecting the user's desires is not just a good design principle, it is a sacred duty. Much as it is not the criminal defense lawyer's place to judge their client regardless of how guilty they are, it is not the doctor's place to force experimental treatment upon a patient regardless of how badly the research is needed, and it is not the priest's place to pass worldly judgement on their flock, it is not the programmer's place to try and decide whether the user is using the software in a "good" way or not.



I fear that we will proceed down this slippery slope for many years yet. I imagine that a highly public event will happen at some point, a hundred times worse than this minor scandal with Sony BMG, and users the world over will angrily demand change. Even then, there will need to be a movement from within the industry to provide some direction for that change, and some sense of responsibility for the future of software.



I hope that some of these ideas can provide direction for those people, when the world is ready, but personally I already write my code this way.



I've written about this



So, like I said, this post isn't about Divmod - exactly - but when we say "your data is your data"... we mean it.

This post isn't about Divmod, exactly.I've been mulling over these ideas for quite a while, and I think I may still have more thinking to do, but recent events have gotten me thinking again about the increasing urgency of the need for a professional code of conduct for computer programmers. Mark Russinovich reported on Sony BMG's criminal contempt for the integrity of their customer's computers , and some days later CNET reported on Sony BMG's halfhearted, temporary retraction of their crime . A day later, CNet's front page has news of Apple trying to institutionalize, as well as patent, a similar technique . While the debate over DRM continues to rage, there are larger issues and principles at stake here that it doesn't seem like anyone is talking about: when you run a program on your computer, who is really in charge?I posit that, in no uncertain terms, it is a strong ethical obligation on the part of the programmer to make sure that programs do,, and, what the user asks them to. "The user" may in some cases be an ambiguous term, such as on a web-based system where customers interact with a system owned by someone else, and in these cases the programmer should strive to balance those concerns as exactly as possible: the administrator of the system should have no unnecessary access to the user's personal information, and the user should have no unnecessary control over the system's operation. All interactions with the system should faithfully represent both the intent and authority of the operator.Participants in the DRM debate implicitly hold the view that the ownership of your operating system, your personal information, and your media is a complex, joint relationship between you, your operating system vendor, the authors of the applications you run, and the owners of any media that pass through that application. Prevailing wisdom is that the way any given software behaves should be jointly determined by all these parties, factoring in all their interests, and that the argument is simply a matter of degree: who should be given how much control, and by what mechanism.I don't like to think of myself as an extremist, but on this issue, I can find no other position to take. When I hear lawmakers, commercial software developers, and even other open source programmers, asking questions like, "how much control should we afford to content producers in media playback programs?", I cannot help but think of Charles Babbage.The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently,wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it.Computer programmers need a socially, and legally recognized code of professional ethics, to which we can be held accountable. There have been some efforts in this direction, the most widely-known one being the Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice . As long as I'm being extreme: this code of conduct is completely inadequate. It's sophomoric. It's confused about its own purpose. It sounds like it was written by a committee more interested in promoting "software engineering" techniques, as defined by the ACM, than in ethics. I'll write a bit about exactly what's wrong with it after I describe some similarities in existing professional codes of conduct which themselves have legal ramifications.Although there are many different codes of ethics for medical doctors, a principle which echoes through them all is one which was formulated in ancient history, originally by Hippocrates but distilled into a catch-phrase by Galen : "First, do no harm."The idea is that, if you are going to be someone's doctor, you have to help them, or at least, you shouldn't ever harm them. Doctors generally regard this as a sacred responsibility. This basic tenet of the doctor-patient relationship typically overrides all other considerations: the doctor's payment, the good or harm that the patient has done or may do, and the advancement of medical science all take a back seat to the welfare of the patient.In this modern day and age, where doctors often perform general anesthesia on their patients to prepare them for surgery, this understanding isto the credibility of the medical profession as it stands. Who would knowingly submit themselves to a doctor, knowing that they might give you a secondary, curable disease, just to ensure they got paid?Lawyers have a similar, although slightly more nuanced, principle. Anybody who has watched a few episodes ofknows about it. A slightly more authoritative source than NBC, though, is the American Bar Association, who in their Model Code of Professional Responsibility (the basis for the professional responsibility codes of most states' Bar associations in the United States) declare:For criminal defense lawyers, these "compromising influences and loyalties" may include a basic committment to the public good. A lawyer who represents a serial murderer who privately admits to having committed heinous crimes, to the best of their ability, represent the sociopath's interests and try to get them exonerated, or, failing that, the lightest sentence possible. Low as we as a society might consider a lawyer who defends rapists and murderers, we would think even more poorly of one who gave intentionally bad advice to people who he personally didn't like, or sold out his client's interests to the highest bidder.A doctor's responsibility is somewhat the same. If a doctor is treating a deeply evil person, they are still obligated by the aforementioned sacred patient/doctor pact totreat that person, not use their position as a doctor to proclaim a death sentence, or cripple them. They are obligated to treat that person equitably, even if that person's evil extends to not paying their medical bills.This pattern isn't confined to professional trades. Catholic priests have the concept of the " seal of confession ". If you confess your sins to a catholic priest, they are not to reveal those sins undercircumstances, regardless of the possible harm to others. A priestshouldn't threaten their flock with knowledge of their confessed sins to increase contributions to the donation plate, even if one of them has confessed a murder.In each case, society calls upon a specialist for navigating a system too complex for laymen to understand: the body, the law, and the soul. In each case, both society at large and individuals privately put their trust completely into someone allegedly capable of navigating that system. Finally, in each case, the trust of that relationship is considered paramount, above the practitioner's idea of the public good, above the practitioner's (and other's) financial considerations.There is a good reason for these restrictions. Society has systems in place to make these judgements. Criminal defense lawyers are not allowed to judge their clients because that's the judge's job. Doctors aren't allowed to pass sentences on their clients because that's the legal system's job. Catholic priests don't judge their confessors because that's God's job. More importantly, each of these functions may only be performed with the trust of the "client" - and it is important for the client to know that their trust will not be abused,, such as social welfare, because notions of social welfare differ.I believe that computer programmers are a fourth such function.Global telecommunications and digital recording are new enough that I think this is likely to be considered a radical idea. However, think of the importance of computer systems in our society today. Critical functions such as banking, mass transit, law enforcement, and commerce would not be able to take place on the scale they do today without the help of computer systems. Apropos of my prior descriptions, every lawyer and doctor's office has a computer, and they rely on the information provided by their computer systems to do their jobs.More importantly, computers increasingly handle a central role in our individual lives. Many of us pay our bills on a computer, do our taxes on a computer, do our school work or our jobs on computers. Sometimes all of these things even happen oncomputer. Today, in 2005, most of those tasks can be accomplished without a computer (with the exception, for those of us with technical professions, of our jobs) but as the public systems we need to interact with are increasingly computerized, it may not reasonable to expect that it will be possible to lead an average modern life in 100 years without the aid of a personal computing device of some kind.If that sounds like an extreme time frame, consider the relative importance of the automobile, or the telephone, in today's society versus 1905. It's not simply a matter of convenience. Today it is considered atoday for accused criminals to make a phone call. Where was that right when there were no telephones?Another way to think of this relationship with technology is not that we do a lot of things with computers, but that our computers do a lot of things on our behalf. They buy things. They play movies. They make legal claims about our incomes to the federal government. Most protocol specifications refer to a program which acts on your behalf (such as a web browser) as ato reflect this responsibility. You are not buying a book on Amazon with your computer; you click on some links, you enter some information, and youthat your computer has taken this information and performed a purchase on your behalf. Your computer could do this without your help, if someone has installed a malicious program on it. It could also pretend to have made a purchase, but actually do nothing at all.Here is where we approach the intersection between programming and ethical obligation. Every time a user sits down to perform a task with a computer, they are, indirectly, trusting the programmers who wrote the code they will be using to accomplish that task. Users give not only the responsibility of performing a specific task, they trust those programs (and thereby their programmers) with intensely personal information: usernames, passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers - the list goes on and on.There may be a technological solution to this problem, a way to limit the amount of information that each proram needs, and provide users with more control over what different programs can say to each other on their own computer. Some very smart people are working on this, and you can read about some of that work on Ka-Ping Yee's "Usable Security" blog . Still, one of the experts there contemplates that perhaps, given the abysmal state of software today, perhaps the general public shouldn't even use the internet DRM is definitely a problem , but the real problem is that it's the top of a very long, very slippery slope. Its advocates point at the top of that slope and say "See, it's not so bad!" - but where will it end? While I am annoyed, I'm not really that concerned with the use of this kind of technology to prevent copyright violations. It's when we start using it to preventsorts of crimes that the real fear sets in.Today, it's considered(but not quite) acceptable that Sony installs the digital equivalent of a car-bomb on my computer to prevent me from copying music. As I said at the beginning of this article - they don't think that the practice is inherently wrong, simply that there are some flaws in its implmentation. Where will this stop? Assuming they can perfect the technology, and given that my computer has all the information necessary to do it, will future versions of Sony's music player simply install themselves and lie in wait, monitoring every download, and automatically billing you for anything that looks unauthorized, not telling me about it until I get my credit card statement?Whether unauthorized copying should be a crime or not, preventing it by these means is blatantly wrong. Let me be blunt here. It is simply using a technique to wring more money out of users because the technique is there. Much like the doctor who cuts off your nose and won't reattach it until he gets paid for his other (completely legitimate) services, this is an abuse of trust of the worst order. It doesn't matter how much money you actually owe the doctor, or Sony: in any case, they don't have the right to do violence to you or to your computer because of it.What of "terrorism"? Will mandatory anti-terrorism software, provided to Microsoft by the federal government, monitor and report my computerized activities to the Department of Homeland Security for review? From here, I'll let you fill in the rest of the paranoid ravings. I don't see this particular outcome happening soon, but the concern is real. There is no system in place to prevent such an occurance, no legal or ethical restriction encumbent upon software developers which would prevent it.This social dilemma is the reason I termed the IEEE/ACM ethics code "sophomoric". With the directionless enthusiasm of a college freshman majoring in philosophy, it commands "software engineers" to "Moderate the interests of [themselves], the employer, the client and the users with the public good.", to "Disclose to appropriate persons or authorities any actual or potential danger to the user, the public, or the environment", to "Obey all laws governing their work, unless, in exceptional circumstances, such compliance is inconsistent with the public interest." These are all things that a good person should do, surely, but they are almost vague enough to be completely meaningless. These tenets also have effectively nothing to do with software in specific, let alone software engineering. They are in fact opposed to certain things that software should do, if it's written properly. If the government needs to get information about me, they need a, and that's for good reason. I don't want them taking it off my computer without even asking a judge first, simply because a helpful software engineer thought it might be a "potential danger to the public".Software developers should start considering that accurately reflecting the user's desires is not just a good design principle, it is a. Much as it is not the criminal defense lawyer's place to judge their client regardless of how guilty they are, it is not the doctor's place to force experimental treatment upon a patient regardless of how badly the research is needed, and it is not the priest's place to pass worldly judgement on their flock, it is not the programmer's place to try and decide whether the user is using the software in a "good" way or not.I fear that we will proceed down this slippery slope for many years yet. I imagine that a highly public event will happen at some point, a hundred times worse than this minor scandal with Sony BMG, and users the world over will angrily demand change. Even then, there will need to be a movement from within the industry to provide some direction for that change, and some sense of responsibility for the future of software.I hope that some of these ideas can provide direction for those people, when the world is ready, but personally I already write my code this way.I've written about this a couple of years ago , and I think there's more to the issue, but I feel like this key point of accurately relaying the user's intent is the first step to anything more interesting. I don't really know if a large group of people even agree on that yet.So, like I said, this post isn't about Divmod - exactly - but when we say "your data is your data"... we mean it. Tags: code, drm, essay, ethics

Current Mood: quixotic

