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U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#41

Post by mLuby »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #35
sneak wrote: post #4

Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass…

Hypothetically, a terrorist group could use private DMs on Twitter to coordinate an attack. If the US captured a low-level terrorist that didn’t know all the details of a plan but knew that the remaining details had been sent to other Twitter users, it would be a legitimate national security request if the government asked Twitter for copies of a user’s private DMs. The hypothetical situation above would be an invasi…

I thought a clear signal of something lacking E2E encryption is if a web browser can display messages without a client-only password. That is, if the company can render your messages in plaintext server-side, they can read them server-side and do anything with the plaintext.

Now I realize the client-side password could be saved and retrieved in the browser for ease of use, but I don't think that's going on.

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#42

Post by tehjoker »

hf8665 wrote: post #11

Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? It seems in general like they have a clear bias toward "taking the security system at its word", even when common sense would dictate otherwise in any particular case. It's sincerely puzzling to me why national security entities seem to get treated so differently and I wonder if there's some legal precedent or consideration I'm not aware of.…

Okay, you rule against the CIA and try sleeping well at night. Also, the judges that get these cases were undoubtedly picked (at some point of elevation in their career) for how "reasonable" they would be on these issues. You gotta remember that "national security" became a thing decades ago (Truman? Eisenhower?), so the system has gone through many several generations of selection pressure.

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#43

Post by pinkfoot »

1f60c wrote: post #23
choward wrote: post #14

Could Twitter set up a warrant canary for every user? Append "/canary" to URLs and make it 404 if the data has been compromised.

But couldn't they force Twitter to keep updating the canary as part of the gag order?

Yes, you are not allowed to take any action to circumvent the gag order. Changing the status of the canary included.

[From memory from some ancient HN thread]

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#44

Post by op03 »

cryptica wrote: post #5
sneak wrote: post #4

Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass…

What's more disturbing and I simply can't get my head around is that Americans feel that they can trust big corporations more than their own government. I don't trust US corporations at all and I thought that there was some kind of corporate conspiracy to discredit the US government to allow corporations to gain more power... Now I'm thinking that the situation in the US is even worse than that; not only are corporat…

I dont know what kind of Americans you are running into but thats just not true -> https://www.people-press.org/2019/09/19/why-americans-dont-f...

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#45

Post by detaro »

choward wrote: post #14

Could Twitter set up a warrant canary for every user? Append "/canary" to URLs and make it 404 if the data has been compromised.

I'd be very surprised if the courts would follow the extremely narrow definition of "speech" required for this to work. Is there any legal precedent otherwise?

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#47

Post by nabla9 »

gonzo41 wrote: post #39
notmarkus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with anything?

It's understandable because of Corporate law in the US that a public business wouldn't stand too firm against government overreach because it may impact future business, apple can do it because apple isn't a desktop provider to the government and doesn't have a market in danger in that space.

Apple was/is commercial partner in PRISM.

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#48

Post by mLuby »

sneak wrote: post #38
parsimo2010 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, a terrorist group could use private DMs on Twitter to coordinate an attack. If the US captured a low-level terrorist that didn’t know all the details of a plan but knew that the remaining details had been sent to other Twitter users, it would be a legitimate national security request if the government asked Twitter for copies of a user’s private DMs. The hypothetical situation above would be an invasi…

I cannot envision any terrorist attack that poses an existential threat to the United States. Fighting terrorism is not a national security matter. Even the largest terrorist attack in the history of the world (not counting the atomic bombings of Japan, which were terroristic by definition but generally excluded from that classification as being carried out during a declared war by a with-a-return-address nation) was…

Well put.

Furthermore the damage from terrorist attacks is primarily self-inflicted; the cost of political, economic, and military overreactions far exceeds loss of property and life. Truly, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#49

Post by bladegash »

ken wrote: post #37
bladegash wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No judge wants to be responsible for a future terrorist attack or degrading intelligence capabilities against other foreign adversaries, regardless of whether the threats are real, perceived, and/or imagined. In this case, releasing the numbers might shine light into their capacity for investigations. In other words, sometimes security/capability gains more from perception than reality.

I can’t imagine what “terrorist attack” would depend on knowing the exact number of requests, and fails if only a rounded number is known. Can you suggest any possible scenario?

It’s not about a specific attack or their being a direct connection between the number and an attack taking place. It is about concealment of the capability/capacity the Government has to counter those attacks. I could see releasing the number giving insight into the limited capability the government has to initiate, process, and follow-up on these types of Orders. Who knows, though.

Re: U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests

#50

Post by searchableguy »

m_a_g wrote: post #13

I wish there is a Twitter employee like Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning to leak those surveillance requests. Leaking documents seems to be the only way forward in the U.S.

Would you leak it if you worked at twitter? Just curious
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