Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 196 posts

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

#61

Post by robin_reala »

sneak wrote: post #34
cryptica wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. There are lots of recorded occasions of single governments doing this. Governments are seen as having authorities that corporations do not, and thus are to be viewed much more skeptically as a general policy. Companies can't raid your house with machine guns, or toss you in jail for publishing an integer on y…

“Smoking was the second leading risk factor for early death and disability worldwide in 2015. It has claimed more than 5 million lives every year since 1990.” [1]

“6 Mega Corporations Control Almost the Entire Global Cigarette Industry” [2]

25 years × 5M people / 6 corporations = 20.83M deaths per corporation (leaving out pre-1990 / post-2015 deaths).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5439023/

[2] https://www.mic.com/articles/81365/6-mega-corporations-contr...

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

#62

Post by ceejayoz »

notmarkus wrote: post #58
cercatrova wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is all large organizations strive for power. One can be more easily changed than the other, at least in democratic republics. Corporations are more like autocracies, their leadership can't be changed. One can say that corporations derive power from customers, but this is not necessarily so. As they grow larger, they can necessarily control user habits through psychological means. The government can too bu…

What meaningful changes have people affected in democratic republics in the recent past? Companies that don't keep up with customers' desires go out of business all the time.

Every aspect of the social safety net in the developed world?

Political power shifts happen all the time in democratic republics as the populace gets fed up with the party/parties in power.

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

#63

Post by oosh0Jai »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #59
sneak wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

National security threats don’t have to be existential to be legitimate threats. Threats to American lives can be national security threats, even if they don’t threaten to kill 300 million people. ISIS could never threaten the existence of the USA, but they have killed several innocent people, and it should be the government’s responsibility to prevent attacks. The government should practice restraint with how they d…

Furthermore, ironically, terrorism may actually be existential threat to democracies precisely because it leads them to adopt human right violating measures under cover of national security.

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

#65

Post by postingawayonhn »

pluc wrote: post #7
scarface74 wrote: post #6

Obligatory: And this is a branch of the same government that HN users want to “regulate tech”. Why would anyone want to give government more power?

Because normally a government does smart thing for its people. It hasn't done that in some time in the US.

If we're talking about surveillance then that's true for just about every country in the world.

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

#66

Post by roenxi »

sneak wrote: post #34
cryptica wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. There are lots of recorded occasions of single governments doing this. Governments are seen as having authorities that corporations do not, and thus are to be viewed much more skeptically as a general policy. Companies can't raid your house with machine guns, or toss you in jail for publishing an integer on y…

Corporations are also fairly rational beasts when it comes to incentives - they want to capture wealth, or failing that they create more wealth then capture some of the it. They are a known quantity. It is somewhat possible to anticipate what they will do. They tend towards not discriminating irrationally.

Governments are comparatively hard to read. They are by and large not motivated by anything specific and are often possessed by destructive short-term zeitgeists (how many demographics haven't been targeted as a matter of government policy at some point?). It is difficult to anticipate where the hammer will fall next.

Over the short term the only thing making the government trustworthy is inertia. Over the medium and long term they are much less trustworthy than a corporation.

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

#67

Post by senderista »

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…

The fact that Twitter refuses to enforce its TOS when the POTUS issues a call to armed insurrection against state governors is an existential threat to the United Ststes.

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

#68

Post by Zenst »

I can accept many reasons for not revealing at the time, jeopardising a criminal investigation and that could cover national security investigations. So I can see how the judge has angled this.

What I can not understand or appreciate is that such requests can not be made public after said investigations are closed. Alas that approach is now also curtailed and would have to be raised as a separate avenue now. Which with this judgement, will now make that a little more harder to pursue. Been nice if the Judge had allowed that avenue of release, but that was not catered for in the scope of how this case was put forward.

Maybe if Twitter had approached with - what is a fair and reasonable amount of time until we can make such requests public? Or along those lines, then that avenue of release would of been within the judgment remit. Though I'm no lawyer, and may well that this approach they have taken is the best as it allows two bites of the cherry and an angle to appeal.

One just hopes the matter is not as clear cut and settled as it stands.

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

#69

Post by nabla9 »

Zenst wrote: post #68

I can accept many reasons for not revealing at the time, jeopardising a criminal investigation and that could cover national security investigations. So I can see how the judge has angled this. What I can not understand or appreciate is that such requests can not be made public after said investigations are closed. Alas that approach is now also curtailed and would have to be raised as a separate avenue now. Which wi…

Twitter requested permission to reveal exact number of requests.

Companies are allowed to reveal gagged legal process in ranges of 1000, starting at 0, for six-month periods. Combined FISC and NSL requests can be revealed in ranges of 250.

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

#70

Post by dahart »

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 we’re being asked to believe is that the government doesn’t want you to see their backdoor search queries on Twitter’s database. That I do believe, regardless of whether there’s probable cause to think national threats among Twitter users exist. And hey, maybe it’s true... exposing government surveillance overreach probably is considered a threat by the people doing the surveillance, right?

OTOH, there probably are at least a few investigations into real cases of abusive or criminal activity. This may be getting used to watch what’s happening in other countries. There are a lot of possibilities for gray area questions that are neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal, and Uncle Sam knows that exposure could cause things to lean toward clearly illegal.

Let’s not pretend that privacy of Twitter messages is a human right, though. It’s a for-profit business that was already monitoring your traffic, and the government is asking for what Twitter already has access to. While the government may have a very different agenda, using Twitter doesn’t come with any privacy guarantees in the first place. Twitter’s not going to come arrest you, but they were never under a legal obligation to help protect you from the government or anyone else, and Twitter DMs are not private in a legal sense.

Post reply on HN