U.S. judge blocks Twitter's bid to reveal government surveillance requests • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

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…

Is the vague concept of national security that you raise the legal foundation for the actions the government is taking?

(of course the answer is no, it is not)

Sliding into Twitter DMs and baiting fools to say they are going to use fake explosives aren't particularly productive things for the government to be doing, but there's probably a reasonable legal foundation for most of it.

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

#72

Post by mrmonkeyman » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

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…

Corona and the mishandling of it by your government has already unnecessarily killed more citizens than all terrorists in the world combined could ever hope to achieve. I'd worry about my own government if I were you guys instead of being frightened by the big bad world.

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

#73

Post by mike50 » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

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…

United Fruit Dutch East India Company

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

#74

Post by rendall » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

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…

"There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people."

If we look at historical instances of single entities causing 10M+ deaths and oppressing millions of people, since corporations were invented, I think we will find that a corporation is driving the death and oppression more often than you might think. Jardine Matheson, Dole Pineapple, Dutch East India Trading, myriad tobacco corporations, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, for just a few famous examples are each definitely responsible for oppressing millions of people at least, and some of them are responsible for 10M+ deaths. Sure, governments generally claim a monopoly on violence, and in these cases it was a government that actually did the wet work, but they were doing the bidding of specific corporations.

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

#75

Post by appleshore » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

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…

Yet an FBI agent can literally encourage the first ISIS attack in the US and it’s covered on 60 Minutes but no one bats an eye. We’re left just to assume this is the only time it’s happened. While the 3rd terrorist arrested months later assumed the FBI agent died in the attack — which is how involved he was.

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

#76

Post by Mary-Jane » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #28

Mary-Jane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when? Governments have a history of greed, corruption, and trampling on the rights of it's people for it's own gain. Ref: any history book on any country, ever

The same is true for unregulated business.

I agree! The biggest difference is that your interaction with any given businesses is not compulsory.

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

#77

Post by roenxi » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

mike50 wrote: post #73

sneak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

United Fruit Dutch East India Company

If we are going to use the Dutch East India company as an example of an unreliable corporation; what exactly is stopping the comparison being with the good old days of Communist China? Both of these are extreme examples of the worst of corporations and governments respectively.

Probably better to stick to currently existent companies and compare them to governments in the 21st century.

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

#78

Post by roenxi » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

rendall wrote: post #74

sneak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people." If we look at historical instances of single entities causing 10M+ deaths and oppressing millions of people, since corporations were invented , I think we will find that a corporation is driving the death and oppression more often than you might think. Jardine Matheson, Dole Pineapple, Dutch East India Trad…

> Sure, governments generally claim a monopoly on violence, and in these cases it was a government that actually did the wet work, but they were doing the bidding of specific corporations.

What about this inspires any form of faith towards governments? You've got an entity that controls/is the army and it is weak-willed enough that some company with money and a good story persuaded it to 'do the wet work' and kill or suppress millions of people.

What in this story makes you think that only corporations will direct that sort of power in a way you don't like? Are people with bad intentions only found on the boards of large corporations such as Dole Pineapple?

And even if they were why are you then defending the idea that the entity holding the knife, as it were, is the more credible and trustworthy of the two? Surely the government has some accountability for its actions?

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

#79

Post by tzs » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

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…

> 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?

Are we? The article just mentioned grave or imminent harm to national security, not an existential threat.

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

#80

Post by sneak » Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #79

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…

> 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? Are we? The article just mentioned grave or imminent harm to national security, not an existential threat.

What is national security other than the continued existence of a nation? Any other sub-existential attacks can accurately be classified as "crime", which is a police matter, for which we already have a legal framework. They have to inflate it into something big and scary otherwise people would say "hey, wait a minute, that's not constitutional..."

Don't get it twisted: it's just a cover for domestic criminals inside the US government who have become accustomed to getting to break the law as much as they want for the last two decades. By making it seem special or important (it's not) they get support in suspending basic human rights such as publishing.