This close to November 6 you might be expecting a post with a title like the above to be about election tampering. This is not that post, folks…at least not in the way you might be expecting. This is a story about the first lesson I ever learned about ethics in computing.
I learned this lesson when I was fairly young. I first put hands to keyboard was when I was 6. By the age of 10 or 12 I was writing DOS batch files and programs in BASIC. My dad drove a dump truck for an excavation company at that time and he came to me with a peculiar request.
I’ll try to paraphrase the conversation as best I can remember (it was a Long Time Ago):
Dad: Can you write a program that draws a random name “out of a hat”? …but not too random? …and can you do it in such a way that it isn’t obvious that the results aren’t completely random?
Me: What do you mean, dad?
Dad: Well. Here’s the deal. At work we have to randomly select a handful of drivers to take a drug test. And…well…Big Jim, he’s got a bit of an addiction. It’s not a “problem”, mind you - he never uses at work, he’s not driving while he’s high - but…well, I don’t know if he can pass, and Jim’s got a family to feed…
I honestly don’t recall what my reaction was at the time. I probably had at least some idea that the request was suspicious - some inkling that we were treading in dangerous territory here - but I doubt that my under-developed 12-year-old moral compass picked up on all of the implications. I suspect that I was likely more focused on the challenge of writing a program that was “random, but not too random.”
At this point I want to put aside whether or not it’s “okay” to ask a 12-year-old to do something of questionable legality, although I’m pretty sure it’s not (sorry, dad). I also want to put aside the legality of the program itself; whether or not a thing is legal has absolutely zero bearing on ethics. What I want to get at: is a program that would explicitly (and discreetly) exclude an individual from a “random” drug test because “he ain’t hurtin’ nobody, and he needs this job because he has a family to feed” ethical? Is it moral?
This is the point where I leave you disappointed, gentle reader…because I don’t know. I can provide no direct answer. Like many memories, I pull this one out from time to time. I turn it about - I shake it up - I inspect it from different angles - I think about it in different ways at different times and in different states of mind…and then I file it back away for The Next Time.