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Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

thehill.com

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Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#71

Post by JumpCrisscross »

munk-a wrote: post #51
hyperbovine wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two{four, five, ten} wrongs do not a right make...

Absolutely, I'm waiting for a real leader to get into office who will actually strike these recent security theatre laws down. My comment wasn't greatly worded, but in no way is Obama innocent or deserving of defense here - but at the same time Bush definitely deserves the biggest blame, Obama and Trump share blame equally.

> * I'm waiting for a real leader to get into office who will actually strike these recent security theatre laws down.*

Why not work to pass laws at the state level? Or have your state ratify an amendment to the Constitution? Not all roads lead to Washington.

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#72

Post by resters »

mfatica wrote: post #64
resters wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone is free to draw a line in the sand to claim that my statements are hyperbole. I don't consider them so. When we read about China, the narrative of American Exceptionalism tells us that it is reasonable to think that China would seriously implement a social credit score but America would not. I think it is foolish to believe that kind of stuff. Let's just look at the facts. We must ask how a social credit syste…

Controlling the news feed on one site is not nearly comparable to a universal firewall... Many people already have stopped using Facebook

> Many people already have stopped using Facebook

Yet it is important enough to public opinion that congress undertakes days of hearings with Zuck to try to control the news feed algo?

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#73

Post by EnFinlay »

dymk wrote: post #49
resters wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that my comment is pretty much the relevant thing to discuss based on the article. If you disagree please explain why.

1) Asserting the presence of an "American Great Firewall" 2) Asserting the development of an American "social credit system" 3) Describing America's political atmosphere as an "authoritarian regime" 4) Describing Facebook as a "defense contractor" Come on, you know what you're doing

I am very surprised by the reaction you're getting.

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#74

Post by gizmo385 »

OrgNet wrote: post #57
munk-a wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, I'm waiting for a real leader to get into office who will actually strike these recent security theatre laws down. My comment wasn't greatly worded, but in no way is Obama innocent or deserving of defense here - but at the same time Bush definitely deserves the biggest blame, Obama and Trump share blame equally.

Obama is more to blame because he did the opposite of what he promised during his campaign... I don't recall Trump making any promises to reduce spying on citizens... Actually, I voted for Trump because I thought that he would make the breaking point come sooner rather then later (because the way it's going, that's how it's going to end anyways).

> Actually, I voted for Trump because I thought that he would make the breaking point come sooner rather then later (because the way it's going, that's how it's going to end anyways).

I'm a bit confused here. You voted for Trump because you thought he would be, effectively, a cherry bomb to blow up the status quo? And you think that's working? I'd argue that what is actually happening is that people are rushing to define the cherry bomb as the status quo rather than actually shift the status quo back to something a bit more reasonable and responsible.

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#75

Post by munk-a »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
munk-a wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, I'm waiting for a real leader to get into office who will actually strike these recent security theatre laws down. My comment wasn't greatly worded, but in no way is Obama innocent or deserving of defense here - but at the same time Bush definitely deserves the biggest blame, Obama and Trump share blame equally.

> * I'm waiting for a real leader to get into office who will actually strike these recent security theatre laws down.* Why not work to pass laws at the state level? Or have your state ratify an amendment to the Constitution? Not all roads lead to Washington.

Sorry, have a state pass a law defying the PATRIOT ACT? That would be ineffective as my voting state has very little NSA infrastructure to effect and no states could effect the more troubling portions of the Act. As an aside my state has joined the NPVIC[1] already, and tends to be more reasonable than the national level - but there are real pieces of change that can only happen nationally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... if your state isn't green, I'd encourage you to lobby locally to influence it towards signing on[2].

[2] It is depressing that there is a lot of alignment between this map and the GOP/DEM traditionally safe states - voter suppression is a serious strike against personal liberties.

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#76

Post by godelski »

Dangeranger wrote: post #34
resters wrote: post #3

Facebook is the defense contractor that is building America's Great Firewall and social credit system, so it makes sense that there is a revolving door with the authoritarian regime.

We already have a social credit score. It's called FICO and it's been doing a great job of making life difficult for people who don't fit the mold for over sixty years.

Can we stop making this comparison? At best it is naive at worst you're purposefully misrepresenting the argument.

When people say "social credit score" they distinctly mean something different than "credit score" (you may get this hint by the extra word, "social").

A social credit system not only includes your finances, but as well as much about your behavior. Such as "do you buy cigarettes? How often?" FICO doesn't care about this, they just care about if you're likely to pay back debt (based on your track record of doing exactly that). FICO doesn't care if you're Muslim, black, white, Christian, etc. But a social credit system DOES.

Rather than putting a score on your likelihood of paying back debt, a social credit score scores you on how "good of a citizen" you are. Not just legally, but morally. And that's the danger. Morals shift and vary a lot (more so in the US than most countries). There's a general belief in most first world countries that your skin color, religion, gender, etc should not play a role in how the government of businesses treat you. Social credit systems (even if they don't explicitly add those factors: ie implicit) will use these factors to rate you.

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#77

Post by resters »

lkrubner wrote: post #52
dymk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The original comment is relevant and very much on the topic, so what are you complaining about? The above article is about Facebook hiring a lawyer who worked on a law that took the USA in an authoritarian direction. The original comment simply emphasizes what is already implied.

This is the key point.

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#79

Post by belorn »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #8
resters wrote: post #3

Facebook is the defense contractor that is building America's Great Firewall and social credit system, so it makes sense that there is a revolving door with the authoritarian regime.

I’m not familiar with either of those two projects. Perhaps the latter is the aggregation of numerous “good customer” scores, plus actual credit rating, plus the no-fly list. But I haven’t heard about an actual program that implements a social credit score that FB is implementing.

"I was having a conversation with a senior government official I have know all these many years who work in the White House and I said you're changing American society. He said well we realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States. I said, you mean the United States Government is from now on going to keep a list of everybody every American knows, do you think by any chance that should require a law? And he just laughed." - talk in 2012 by Eben Moglen

Why do we think the government, almost 10 years ago, wanted a robust social graph of every citizen in the United States?

Re: Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

#80

Post by taurath »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65
Dangeranger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a social credit score. It's called FICO and it's been doing a great job of making life difficult for people who don't fit the mold for over sixty years.

> We already have a social credit score. It's called FICO There is a material difference between FICO and what China and, potentially, Facebook are building. FICO looks at financial factors. It's a model to estimate likelihood of repayment. Being brown or gay or female might correlate with factors that reduce the likelihood of repayment. But if those systemic problems were fixed, and FICO were left unchanged, it shou…

There's not really such thing as an unbiased result, especially as it deals with economics. Thats kind of the point of the concept of systemic margininalization.
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