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Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

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Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#11

Post by thaumasiotes »

hluska wrote: post #10
thaumasiotes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit. If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe. Otherwise, no. We already know that Twitter specifically tried to deal with one of these spies when he came to their attention, shortly before he escaped. There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. L…

If Twitter could assess penalties this wouldn’t be a legal system. Courts and judges assess penalties. Companies can sue for damages but they don’t assess penalties. With all due respect, this is the second ignorant thing you’ve said on this article. You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please stop…

Sorry, I responded to "this is a good idea" with "in case of X, it might be, but in reality, it isn't", and you think "but X is not true" undermines that argument?

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#12

Post by jkaplowitz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #8
jkaplowitz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only read the article and not the text of the legal complaint, but according to the article, he is specifically not basing his complaint on them being a victim of espionage and is making more specific allegations: > "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of rat…

The allegation you quote is not an espionage allegation . It's saying that because this activist's Twitter account received unfavorable treatment from Twitter, we should assume that the unfavorable treatment of his account is evidence that Twitter is an arm of the Saudi government, and therefore the separate incident involving espionage must have happened with Twitter's cooperation or at least without Twitter's objec…

I didn't say it was an espionage allegation. It's quite possibly not. The quote alleges complicity among other terms. I don't know if that's legally a type of misconduct - my guess is that the legal terms for both are more precise and this is just the press release version. But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Not necessarily in espionage specifically.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#13

Post by thaumasiotes »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #12
thaumasiotes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The allegation you quote is not an espionage allegation . It's saying that because this activist's Twitter account received unfavorable treatment from Twitter, we should assume that the unfavorable treatment of his account is evidence that Twitter is an arm of the Saudi government, and therefore the separate incident involving espionage must have happened with Twitter's cooperation or at least without Twitter's objec…

I didn't say it was an espionage allegation. It's quite possibly not. The quote alleges complicity among other terms. I don't know if that's legally a type of misconduct - my guess is that the legal terms for both are more precise and this is just the press release version. But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Not ne…

> But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad.

Let's say this guy's Twitter account was shut down because Mohammed bin Salman personally called Jack Dorsey and asked for a favor. That would be complicity, in shutting down the Twitter account. It would not be complicity in espionage.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#14

Post by jkaplowitz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #13
jkaplowitz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it was an espionage allegation. It's quite possibly not. The quote alleges complicity among other terms. I don't know if that's legally a type of misconduct - my guess is that the legal terms for both are more precise and this is just the press release version. But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Not ne…

> But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Let's say this guy's Twitter account was shut down because Mohammed bin Salman personally called Jack Dorsey and asked for a favor. That would be complicity, in shutting down the Twitter account. It would not be complicity in espionage.

Agreed. Nothing you are saying is contradicting anything I am saying, nor anything in the quote we're discussing.

I'm not sure why you're spending so much time to emphasize that the quote in the article doesn't allege espionage by Twitter when nobody is claiming it does, but indeed we are in full agreement that it doesn't. (Having not read the legal complaint itself, I express no opinion on what that alleges.)

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#15

Post by bpodgursky »

onionisafruit wrote: post #9

Whether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.

It's also pretty much impossible for a big tech company to filter against this during hiring without risking catastrophic discrimination suits.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#16

Post by imajoredinecon »

onionisafruit wrote: post #9

Whether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.

I'm sure this is true to a certain extent, but it'd be interesting to see how it varies in degree. For instance

* do some companies have good enough insider risk controls to make it expensive or risky to access particular kinds of sensitive data?

* not all nation state actors are equally well-resourced (and not all of them have equally large populations of computer science grads from which to recruit potential spies): is there a difference between what (say) KSA or Iran could get, vs US/UK/China/Russia?

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#17

Post by colinmhayes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #2

The argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes per se negligence seems like a stretch. For spies to exist at all, they need to fool whatever supervision is in place. For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. When a warbler feeds a cuckoo chick and lets his own chicks starve, is that because he's a bad parent who could be fixed with a lawsuit, or is it jus…

I imagine the argument is that twitter was negligent in allowing employees access to the security tool this guy used to track Saudi dissidents without oversight and shouldn't have warned him that the FBI was investigating him?

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#18

Post by thaumasiotes »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #14
thaumasiotes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Let's say this guy's Twitter account was shut down because Mohammed bin Salman personally called Jack Dorsey and asked for a favor. That would be complicity, in shutting down the Twitter account. It would not be complicity in espionage.

Agreed. Nothing you are saying is contradicting anything I am saying, nor anything in the quote we're discussing. I'm not sure why you're spending so much time to emphasize that the quote in the article doesn't allege espionage by Twitter when nobody is claiming it does, but indeed we are in full agreement that it doesn't. (Having not read the legal complaint itself, I express no opinion on what that alleges.)

You used that quote to support that claim that he is not basing his complaint on Twitter being a victim of espionage.

That claim is incorrect. Your quote does not state a cause of action against Twitter. Its only purpose, in the lawsuit, is to support, through innuendo, the claim that Twitter was complicit in an espionage "attack" against themselves. The complaint is based only on the espionage incident.

The quote is mostly irrelevant, which is the type of support you'd expect this complaint to be able to muster.

That's what I'm saying.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#19

Post by hluska »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #11
hluska wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Twitter could assess penalties this wouldn’t be a legal system. Courts and judges assess penalties. Companies can sue for damages but they don’t assess penalties. With all due respect, this is the second ignorant thing you’ve said on this article. You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please stop…

Sorry, I responded to "this is a good idea" with "in case of X, it might be, but in reality, it isn't", and you think "but X is not true" undermines that argument?

Look, if you’re going to engage with me, cut the shit. You wrote:

“If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe.”

If Twitter could assess a huge penalty, it would violate absolutely every single tenet of both the western justice system and all principles of natural justice. Companies don’t get to assess penalties when they think they’ve been wrong. Companies can sue for damages and Twitter has the right to do that here. However, companies don’t assess damages - JUDGES DO!

This is so simple that I can’t believe I just had to explain it on Hacker News. Tune in next time, when we do “Hello world” in Python.

Re: Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

#20

Post by jkaplowitz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #18
jkaplowitz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Nothing you are saying is contradicting anything I am saying, nor anything in the quote we're discussing. I'm not sure why you're spending so much time to emphasize that the quote in the article doesn't allege espionage by Twitter when nobody is claiming it does, but indeed we are in full agreement that it doesn't. (Having not read the legal complaint itself, I express no opinion on what that alleges.)

You used that quote to support that claim that he is not basing his complaint on Twitter being a victim of espionage. That claim is incorrect. Your quote does not state a cause of action against Twitter. Its only purpose, in the lawsuit, is to support, through innuendo, the claim that Twitter was complicit in an espionage "attack" against themselves. The complaint is based only on the espionage incident. The quote is…

You're misunderstanding the quote, from what another HN commenter said (in a way that makes sense to me). Whether it includes everything necessary to state a cause of action or is at all legally critical to the complaint is not a relevant consideration when lawyers are talking to the court of public opinion rather than to the court of law, as in this quite.

The espionage is something Twitter was unaware of, as was the status of the spies at Twitter. Nobody is saying that Twitter committed espionage. But if they knew that the employees were doing or enabling something severely shady (without knowing specifics) in a way that they should have investigated or mitigated more than they did, but chose not to investigate or mitigate for an inappropriate reason like wanting good commercial outcomes from Saudi Arabia, they're choosing to be negligent in stopping the thing from happening. This is easily described in a press statement as complicity in something, even if they didn't know the something is espionage. In other words they negligently facilitated a bad thing that to their surprise turned out to be espionage.

So if I understand how this quote fits into the allegations: according to the plaintiff, the plaintiff was a victim of the espionage by the spies and not by Twitter, but Twitter's negligence enabled the espionage and they should have known something wrong was facilitated by their choices, therefore Twitter indirectly contributed to the espionage against plaintiff without having committed espionage themselves. Since Twitter made the situation worse and met the bar of negligence regardless of knowing that the specifics involved espionage, they allegedly should be liable. (I am not citing laws here because, again, I have not read the complaint and don't know the specific relevant laws.)

So, yes, it's based on the espionage incident, and yes Twitter was probably a victim of the espionage as well. But the plaintiff's argument doesn't depend on Twitter's status as victim of the espionage.

I've already stayed up far later than I should tonight to reply to lots of rapid-fire text from you, so this is my last one for now and hopefully for this subthread at all. Good night and be well.

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