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The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

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Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#51

Post by Communitivity »

It's possible the answer is more prosaic than conspiracy, and technical in nature. If FB Messenger uses a central server for discovery only and communication is strictly Peer to Peer, as is the case in a number of messenging apps, then there is nothing to wiretap without altering the FB Messenger client to copy received texts and phone them home. And that would add a backdoor that would make it less secure for everyone. I found a link from 2019 that indicated FB Messenger uses the Signal protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol) for their encrypted chats using the mobile client, so that makes the P2P theory more plausible.

An interesting experiment: set up daily FB messenger chat with a buddy and discuss in depth some product of narrow class of products you don't usually search or discuss (Nike shoes for example). Do this for a couple a weeks and keep track of the ads online that you and your buddy see. Did the number of adds for shoes or Nike shoes go up?

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#52

Post by zenhack »

unhomedcoder wrote: post #41

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/stor... FBI/DOJ wiretapped the Facebook comms of 19 illegal aliens who were MS-13 gangsters in North Hollywood. the wiretaps spanned 2017-2019. the gang murdered 6 people. the last murder was a random killing of a homeless guy as an initiation ritual to get into the gang. i happened to be 50 yards away from that murder when it happened. i didnt hear a thing beca…

> thank god the FBI was able to order Facebook to hand over the comms of that MS-13 gang.

I think you may have misunderstood the article? It says Facebook won the case, and did not have to wiretap the app.

I don't see what is to be gained by the public not knowing why.

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#53

Post by xxpor »

rand_r wrote: post #50
xxpor wrote: post #10

Why can't these news articles link to the briefs or provide a case number or anything? They didn't even say what freakin' court they were in directly! I know it's the 9th circuit based on the description, but where was the original case heard? Arg! Edit: Fortunatly the 9th circuit is actually pretty good with youtube, which made this easy to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6SeGJQjqyA 19-15472 ACLU Foundation v…

It somewhat makes sense for articles to be vague. As frustrating as it is when you want to go deep on a story, these articles are not providing a knowledge graph service. They’re condensing a story down to only the most important information. In effect, providing a summarization service for real-world events. When it works well, it lets you efficiently absorb the gist of a story. Of course, it’s a bit of a subjective…

That was true in the newspaper era. Now that we're in the web era, they can do both. They could have improved the article immensely without changing any of the prose, while adding links to the underlying documents. WaPo and the NYT do this regularly.

Don't forget the power of hypertext :)

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#54

Post by lioeters »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #21
xxpor wrote: post #10

Why can't these news articles link to the briefs or provide a case number or anything? They didn't even say what freakin' court they were in directly! I know it's the 9th circuit based on the description, but where was the original case heard? Arg! Edit: Fortunatly the 9th circuit is actually pretty good with youtube, which made this easy to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6SeGJQjqyA 19-15472 ACLU Foundation v…

It doesnt seize to amaze me why news orgs dont provide sources in addition to claiming another org claimed it first. In the hype about trying to be real news maybe you should take it much more seriously. I can prolly find independent researchers who arent part of huge news orgs who do link to sources.

Grammar tip: seize -> cease. The latter basically means "stop". Similar expression: "It never fails to amaze me".

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#55

Post by jiveturkey »

xxpor wrote: post #53
rand_r wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It somewhat makes sense for articles to be vague. As frustrating as it is when you want to go deep on a story, these articles are not providing a knowledge graph service. They’re condensing a story down to only the most important information. In effect, providing a summarization service for real-world events. When it works well, it lets you efficiently absorb the gist of a story. Of course, it’s a bit of a subjective…

That was true in the newspaper era. Now that we're in the web era, they can do both. They could have improved the article immensely without changing any of the prose, while adding links to the underlying documents. WaPo and the NYT do this regularly. Don't forget the power of hypertext :)

that would be a lot more expensive

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#56

Post by kyuudou »

seph-reed wrote: post #8
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #2

My conspiracy theory hat comes out every time a large US company seems to stand up against the government for the privacy of their users and wins. I always assume the company secretly gave the government what they asked for, and the government agreed to play along for marketing purposes. I suppose that the boring truth is that Facebook just used it's vast financial resources to protect itself in a way that lavabit ne…

The former seems so much more likely to me. Probably because my German teacher had us watch ["The Lives of Others"]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others ) and at this point it would be absolutely insane to imagine that the obsession with power that exists in the government would fail to find a way to read data that's literally stored on someone else's computer where you could never tell if it's been rea…

Thanks for fitting "Das Lieben der Anderen" into a comment thread! One of my favorite movies of all time. I think the Stasi would be thrilled with the amount of power they could have nowadays. May all FB and gov employees be the Good Man.

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#57

Post by dang »

rmrfstar wrote: post #49
dang wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you guys. The GP comment was just the sort of flamebait that we don't want on HN, regardless of flavor. We'd moderate it just the same the other way [1]. Big denunciatory rhetoric is just not what this site is for. Repetition and indignation are the two things that most kill curiosity, so repetition of indignation is the worst. [2] An arbitrary link doesn't prove anything except that we may not have seen a post. T…

There is some irony in claiming that the GP comment kills curiosity. Nothing kills curiosity faster or more completely than the concealment of relevant facts. Legal opinions in this case. See e.g. USSR.

I don't agree that the comment was primarily factual (it was ranty-rhetorical), nor that the material was relevant (most readers would regard jumping to copyright law from this article as a massive leap off-topic). Even granting all that, though—nothing about copyright is concealed on HN. It's a well-discussed topic here. In fact, #1 thread on HN the very same day as this one was largely about copyright:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28

... , and you can find endless debate about every aspect of copyright and copyright law in HN's archives. If that's the USSR, I'm Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Re: The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

#58

Post by rmrfstar »

dang wrote: post #57
rmrfstar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some irony in claiming that the GP comment kills curiosity. Nothing kills curiosity faster or more completely than the concealment of relevant facts. Legal opinions in this case. See e.g. USSR.

I don't agree that the comment was primarily factual (it was ranty-rhetorical), nor that the material was relevant (most readers would regard jumping to copyright law from this article as a massive leap off-topic). Even granting all that, though—nothing about copyright is concealed on HN. It's a well-discussed topic here. In fact, #1 thread on HN the very same day as this one was largely about copyright: https://news…

I wasn't suggesting that HN or its moderators kill curiosity.

I was suggesting that legal secrecy and related problems do.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, though.

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