Probing? Penetrating? Analyzing? Holes?
If this Microsoft help-wanted ad sounds a bit like the "Men Seeking Men" ads you'll find in the back of this paper, you aren't imagining things. During the last week in March--around the same time Microsoft was abandoning gays in Washington State by caving to Evangelical minister Ken Hutcherson and withdrawing its support of the Democrats' anti-gay-discrimination bill in Olympia--the $37 billion Redmond-based software giant sent three recruiters to a gay club in Amsterdam during the week of the Black Hat Conference (an annual confab for computer security geeks). The recruiters were cruising for potential employees.
Indeed, according to the April 4 edition of the Register, a UK-based online science and technology publication, Microsoft recruiters made their pitch at an invite-only Microsoft party at an Amsterdam club called Digital Darkness. Guests at the racy event mingled against a backdrop of shackles and pixilated porn before being propositioned with help-wanted fliers like the one quoted above.
I hope a gay Dutch hacker who showed up at Digital Darkness last month was wooed by Microsoft's recruiters, applied for a job, and wound up interviewing in Redmond last week when our story broke. (Two days later, the news made the front page of the New York Times.) I can just imagine the closing part of the job interview, when Microsoft, pleased with their outstanding candidate, wrapped up with the traditional interview question, "And so, do you have any questions for us?"
"Why, yes," the gay Dutch hacker would begin, "I do. Why should my boyfriend and I leave the Netherlands--a country with an unimpeachable record on gay rights (for example, it was the first country to legalize gay marriage)--to move to a state where we can be discriminated against in housing, banking, insurance, and employment without legal recourse?"
The Microsoft interviewer would respond, as they have to the press all week, with a scripted line about Microsoft's gay-friendly internal policies.
The Dutch hacker would rightfully bring the interview to a close, telling the company he's not interested in "changing millions of lives by making Microsoft's products more secure," when Microsoft isn't interested in making the lives of gays more secure.
