When Men with Guns Tell You to Send the Message: The Impossible Ethics of Emergency Alerts
And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
In 2011, Vodafone Egypt complied with government orders to send pro-regime texts during the revolution, citing legal compulsion. Years later, the UK's emergency alert system raises the same dilemma: can networks refuse to send government messages? The law is vague, and the trade-offs between safety and abuse are stark. This personal reflection explores the design challenges of a system that must be both powerful and resistant to misuse, concluding that perfect safeguards are impossible.
But we're technologists, right? We can build fail safes and cryptographic proofs and simply build infrastructure that can't be abused. And then the men with guns come and tell you what to do.