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Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

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Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#181

Post by madaxe_again »

benologist wrote: post #5
joshavant wrote: post #3

Weren't these requests, which Yahoo objected to, intended to stay secret, by the wishes of the government? Consider if Yahoo refused to honor the requests, and began accruing the fines. Presumably, if they didn't pay the huge bill for their fines, what would happen? Surely, $250k/day would rack up fast... As I see it, eventually Yahoo would rack up such a bill that they couldn't afford it, and any collection of the f…

I was thinking about that because it seemed like a cost they could just afford to ignore ($91m/yr), this was probably not the limit of the penalties they could have faced.

They'd lock up the execs for "embezzlement".

I could tell you a story about this squeaky clean guy I know who's in prison for fraud, because he refused to comply with a secret court order... but I can't, because I don't want to join him.

I could tell you another story about a barrister I know who had his career destroyed and his wife "suicided" for refusing to do certain things around a trial in the UK - but again, I fear repercussions should I say anything.

In fact, this is probably too much.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#182

Post by jamespo »

jdimov wrote: post #171
zimpenfish wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's minimised because a) politics is very much a personal thing which b) tends to explode very quickly into name-calling and sniping and c) there's already about 8 jillion political discussion places on the intertents.

Fuck those 8 jillion blabbing places. WE are the only ones who can do something about it! WE, the hackers, the creators of our reality, the readers of this site. Those discussions belong HERE.

Indeed, you'd better get going on your World Peace As A Service startup.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#183

Post by beedogs »

comrade1 wrote: post #27

I wish there was a way to post anon here. I create a new id every now and then and post but no one sees the posting because it's new... I wish more people would be outraged by where the u.s. Is going and just leave. If you're educated, have desirable skills, you can just come to Europe. If you think you can change what's happening in the u.s. I do not agree with you. You will lose to the political class. They have 10…

I left. And the country I moved to has lurched even further into the realm of "authoritarian police state" than the US.

I'm of the opinion that all Western governments are headed down this path, inevitably. It's going to take a lot of violence and bloodshed (read: murdering the rich in their sleep) to "fix" this.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#184

Post by IanDrake »

idlewords wrote: post #170
IanDrake wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is still full of good people and so long as those people are allowed to have guns, I'm staying. Once the government disarms us, I'll probably leave. That will be the final nail in freedom's coffin.

I can't wait to disarm you, brother. And the country will be better for it. Hand over those guns!

Sure. Let's make sure only the government has guns. That always works out well, nothing bad ever happened with that.

Our democratic government has never used force illegally, violated our rights, and has never exceeded its Constitutional authority. That's why there are so many popular posts on HN lauding the US government for its benevolence.

Let me ask you, specifically, why would you want to disarm me?

Take away guns, I have knife. Take away knifes, I have fertilizer and diesel fuel. Take those away, I have propane tanks and model rocket engines. Take those away, I have beer bottles, gasoline, and rags.

Take all that away and we can't have BBQ's because no one has fuel to get there, propane to grill, beers to drink, knives to cut meat, and rags to clean up. I don't want to live in your "safe" world.

Bother, you have effect confused with cause. Guns don't cause violence. People cause violence and will use what ever tool is at their disposal to have that effect.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#185

Post by tptacek »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #106
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reprising a comment from a long time ago: Nacchio was convicted of running a pump-and-dump insider trading scam that netted him ~$100MM at the expense of common public shareholders. If there's an award for "most obnoxious implication of NSA's wrongdoing", it should go to the attempted rehabilitation of people like Nacchio. Here's the indictment. It's quite straightforward. http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/…

You of all people should know better than to give any credence to indictments . You know what purpose they serve, right?

The indictment contains stipulated facts, which I took pains to pull out. You've ignored that, and instead chosen to beat up a straw man: the idea that I give credence to everything in the indictment, and that my argument depends on the reader believing the prosecutors.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#186

Post by tptacek »

dmix wrote: post #172
eli wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wasn't he found guilty?

Presenting an indictment as fact is dangerous and highly questionable, whether or not the person got convicted. That doesn't mean the indictment is accurate, it is written at a point where it hasn't been scrutinized by the courts. They are pretty much always written as the very extreme position of what could have happened. They always present the offender as having clear intentions of breaking the law, when reality i…

The overstated it by using the wrong metric: proceeds, not profits. The facts of the case, which demonstrate Nacchio selling out of his position in his own company based on private information unavailable to his common shareholders, remain (so far as I can see) unimpeached.

Why are you defending this person?

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#187

Post by tptacek »

agscala wrote: post #19
swartkrans wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was he actually guilty of insider trading?

My understanding is that since he told major stakeholders what was about to happen, he gave them inside information to trade on and went to jail for that instead of making trades himself.

Isn't that an interpretation refuted by the source material I just provided?

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#188

Post by dredmorbius »

idlewords wrote: post #149
dredmorbius wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The NSA would find the crime and communicate it to the FBI. But if your point is that the NSA have no law enforcement role, that's salient. Also: check your mail WRT http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm I've posted a few fixes to that (excellent piece BTW) from my gmail account.

I will never check my email. Mwahahahaha!

http://i.imgur.com/NgmuHGn.jpg

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#189

Post by dredmorbius »

tptacek wrote: post #186
dmix wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presenting an indictment as fact is dangerous and highly questionable, whether or not the person got convicted. That doesn't mean the indictment is accurate, it is written at a point where it hasn't been scrutinized by the courts. They are pretty much always written as the very extreme position of what could have happened. They always present the offender as having clear intentions of breaking the law, when reality i…

The overstated it by using the wrong metric: proceeds, not profits. The facts of the case, which demonstrate Nacchio selling out of his position in his own company based on private information unavailable to his common shareholders, remain (so far as I can see) unimpeached. Why are you defending this person?

Not GP, but:

⚫ Defendants are entitled to defense. You might even say it's in the name.

⚫ People are entitled to exploration and speculation of both history and legal issues. Legally guaranteed that right in some places.

⚫ Why are you so intent on prosecuting him? For that matter, I note a pretty pronounced pro-Spook bias in many of your posts.

⚫ The circumstances which lead to Qwest's precarious financial state were largely, some might say entirely, the result of the Government's actions against the company for failure to comply with NSL and other intelligence requests.

⚫ I see nothing even in the prosecution's case which establishes that the sale of stock 1) wasn't part of a longer-term asset sale, that 2) it wasn't part of a pre-planned asset divestiture plan. Quite common, there's been previous discussion on HN, I believe, on planned sales by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft stock.

⚫ If some of the "material, non-public information" related to surveillance requests, Nacchio was pretty much in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Specifically: he was culpable if he disclosed the reason for target undershoots, or if he didn't.

The point remains that the document you've provided as definitive evidence is anything but.

Re: Feds Threatened to Fine Yahoo $250K Daily for Not Complying with NSA's PRISM

#190

Post by ufmace »

smcl wrote: post #168
josefresco wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soo the rockets fired by Hamas into Israel are ... imaginary? fabricated? - I'm not there so I haven't seen them with my own eyes, but to classify the conflict as just "Israeli aggression" seems inaccurate given what I see and read in the news. Update: Agree with smcl, disengaging ;)

It seems pretty obvious to me that "aggression" refers to the the parent's opinion that the Israeli response to the rockets was a little heavy-handed and unwarranted. We're getting really offtopic here however, HN is not the place to spar over the Israel\Palestine conflict. There's plenty of places on the web you can engage in this if you want, but be warned that doing so will end up resolving nothing and will leave…

I'l agree that HN isn't the best place to debate it. But if we all agree on that, why does it seem so one-sided on here? Flame-bait assertions that Israel has what the Nazis could only dream about are just fine and highly upvoted, as are vague and unjustified claims that Israel's response is heavy-handed. Meanwhile, just pointing out that the conflict is more complex than that and Israel has reasons for what they're doing too is apparently considered unacceptable off-topic debate. Is this place a Hamas propaganda site or something?

Keeping out of the debate entirely is fine, but if we're doing that, let's downvote and reject posts like the ones in this thread by yamayb and jdimov that are packed with inflammatory rhetoric that has nothing to do with the original topic here.

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