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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

#141

Post by scarface74 »

cercatrova wrote: post #130
scarface74 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the government that has a history free of bribery and corruption?

None, of course, that is true of any organization of incentive-driven autonomous agents, such as humans. However, governments are not explicitly designed to make money, whereas corporations are literally explicitly designed to make as much money as possible. Money equals power to some extent, so corporations cannot be as useful as governments if you're optimizing for the wellbeing of citizenry.

Governments are far from optimized for the well being of all it’s citizens. It’s optimized for the majority. Just like the “War on Drugs” turned into “treating it like a disease” when drugs started hitting “rural” America.

France passed a law to make the Burkini illegal - targeting Muslims. This isn’t just the US.

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

#142

Post by ceejayoz »

scarface74 wrote: post #108
ceejayoz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What social safety net? You mean like universal healthcare? Paid parental leave? Decent unemployment benefits?

Are you under the impression the USA is the only country in the “developed world”?

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

#143

Post by DenisM »

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.…

My first guess would be that they are following the law as written, as is their job.

And it's hard to challenge such law as unconstitutional because no right to privacy is explicitly written into the constitution.

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

#144

Post by cmurf »

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…

I think the case of tobacco companies is equally damning to the free market as it is to governments. This is wholesale exploitation, profiting off the suffering and death of others. Nothing so far has stopped tobacco companies. The one thing that could stop it is expressly illegal: the art of vengeance. In effect, government betrays its citizens by protecting a regime of exploitation. It's not reasonable to completely trust either system.

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

#145

Post by scarface74 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #142
scarface74 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What social safety net? You mean like universal healthcare? Paid parental leave? Decent unemployment benefits?

Are you under the impression the USA is the only country in the “developed world”?

Well seeing that that the title of the submission is “US judge blocks Twitter’s bid..”, I think it’s fair to discuss the US government.....

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

#146

Post by cercatrova »

scarface74 wrote: post #141
cercatrova wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None, of course, that is true of any organization of incentive-driven autonomous agents, such as humans. However, governments are not explicitly designed to make money, whereas corporations are literally explicitly designed to make as much money as possible. Money equals power to some extent, so corporations cannot be as useful as governments if you're optimizing for the wellbeing of citizenry.

Governments are far from optimized for the well being of all it’s citizens. It’s optimized for the majority. Just like the “War on Drugs” turned into “treating it like a disease” when drugs started hitting “rural” America. France passed a law to make the Burkini illegal - targeting Muslims. This isn’t just the US.

Of course, you can't please everyone. The distinction is, at least governments try to. Corporations do not, by design, as they are only incentivized to collect money and funnel it to the top X% of the company, not even the company as a whole which includes workers.

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

#147

Post by _gccu »

chmod775 wrote: post #127
_gccu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So your response to a well laid-out argument is "but there are people who disagree! Go find them!" followed by an attempt to discredit your parent commenter by claiming they can't possibly understand what they are talking about. Not exactly convincing.

My argument that you missed, is that this is the poster's personal subjective opinion from the POV of someone who doesn't have skin in the game.

My "there are other people who disagree" happen to have skin in the game (US people on US soil who suffered the 9/11 attacks). Look up Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

If you're gonna say that US people's opinions are also subjective personal opinions, then I'd argue that their subjective opinion still has stronger claims that 9/11 is a national security issue, because they have concrete provable injuries. Compared to someone far away who doesn't have skin in the game and didn't lose anything.

Check your biases and conflict of interests, maybe.

p.s. Plenty others here have added well laid out arguments so I didn't want to just add more of the same.

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

#148

Post by ceejayoz »

scarface74 wrote: post #145
ceejayoz wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the impression the USA is the only country in the “developed world”?

Well seeing that that the title of the submission is “US judge blocks Twitter’s bid..”, I think it’s fair to discuss the US government.....

Re-read the thread you’re commenting on.

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

#149

Post by aspenmayer »

tehwebguy wrote: post #89
appleshore wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you referring to

Anderson Cooper: After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on?

Dan Maynard: That's right. Yeah. After the trial we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson, less than three weeks before the attack, to him "Tear up Texas." Which to me was an encouragement to Simpson.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/terrorism-in-garland-texas-what...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack

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

#150

Post by scarface74 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #148
scarface74 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well seeing that that the title of the submission is “US judge blocks Twitter’s bid..”, I think it’s fair to discuss the US government.....

Re-read the thread you’re commenting on.

Seeing that I started the “thread I am commenting on” and specifically asked is this the same government that should be regulating tech....
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