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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

#61

Post by denton-scratch »

graperapist1480 wrote: post #37
arisAlexis wrote: post #36

Alternative title could be: Twitter sued for discrimination and low personel diversity

you can just sue for discrimination though? That is common. It is considered legally dangerous to have an all white (or, less fantastically, 30% Jew 30% Asian 20% white 0% hispanicblack), but the mode of enforcement would be employment or hiring discrimination, not this...

"Discrimination" is what sensible people do all the time. It means "distinguishing things that are different", and if you don't discriminate, bad stuff is likely to happen. For example, it can be bad for your digestion if you fail to discriminate between a hamburger and a house-brick.

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

#63

Post by denton-scratch »

rendall wrote: post #38

> ...to appease a neigh beneficial owner... Has anyone seen this use of neigh before? Is it a legal term? What does it mean?

Perhaps the OP meant "nigh", which is archaic, and means the same as "near".

Even then, "nigh beneficial owner" and "near beneficial owner" are awkward constructions that would have broken the continuity of my reading comprehension.

But surely one is or is not a "beneficial owner". Being nearly a beneficial owner is the same as not being a beneficial owner at all.

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

#64

Post by homo_ergaster »

l33t2328 wrote: post #25
SMVS wrote: post #21

The tech industry is chock full of spies working for one side or the other. FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning. The only bullshit here is targeting KSA, when everyone's involved.

Why do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?

There is a reason AWS’ first and largest region is in Northern Virginia

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

#65

Post by d23 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
sneak wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Front suggests secret ownership/control. More likely is that they are simply compelled by the state to spy, willingly or not.

How is "the state secretly compels them to do things" different from "they are secretly controlled by the state"?

As another commenter suggested: it's absurd beyond parody and a flagrant abuse of language to conflate being a "front" with being compelled by a third party (especially one with legal authority) to do some action(s). Being a "front" suggests an entire business model created by and built around propping up that third party such that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level.

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

#66

Post by evgen »

CyanBird wrote: post #35
l33t2328 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?

Because it has[1] As for the rest, it is just a matter of checking funding from inqtel and associated groups The UK has information warfare agents on Twitter as well [2] None of this is a disputed topic, back on the 70s with operation mockingbird US intelligence agencies bragged that they had an agent/asset on every important editorial board on the country [3] which all goes back to the church committee [1] https://m…

So your proof is one bullshit story made up by someone who wants to claim Google was created by the CIA but lacks any real evidence. The fact that a mid-level exec at twitter was an Army reservist, and an claim that TLAs were controlling newspapers that is even more poorly sourced than the Google claim. Did you even read the first and third story you cite to see the level of innuendo and hand-waving suggestions without supporting evidence that this 'reporting' was using? Try again paranoia troll.

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

#67

Post by curryst »

yardstick wrote: post #47
tester34 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities e.g 1k - 1 000 (of gold) 1kk - 1 000 000 (of gold) 1kkk - 1 000 000 000 (of gold) >I can't say I would recommend the practice. Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk... damn, but with number in front of it it's just like yet another unit - I guess?

Not in any of the games I’ve played. Why not use use m for million and b for billion? That’s the standard that everyone understands.

I see it rarely, but almost exclusively in games that feature exponential growth, like mobile idle games. Growth is so explosive that you typically entirely ignore the actual numbers, and you measure progress via orders of magnitude (i.e. my currency/second in the game is 5.6*10^47, I'd just call it 47).

The repeating k scale is better than m, b, t, etc because it still preserves a sense of scale. 2m does not look 1/1000000th the size of 2t. 2kk does look a lot smaller than 2kkkk. You can also still easily convert to real number by substituting each k with 3 0s.

And lastly, I don't know the letters going all the way up to 10^47th. That's nearly enough to wrap the alphabet twice, and it's not even that high for that style of game.

The scale is fine, it's just the letter that's unfortunate. M is the Roman Numeral for 1,000; they could just use that. The worst thing I can associate with any number of M's is someone enjoying their food entirely too much once you hit like 7 of them.

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

#68

Post by curryst »

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 think that depends on the organization we're talking about. There exist organizations where spies getting in probably should be per se negligence. The CIA and NSA are indisputably in this list. We just don't punish them via lawsuits, because there are better mechanisms for public groups.

The question at hand is whether Twitter belongs in that group. In the general case, I tend to believe no. Twitter has no deterministic means to tell whether a candidate is a risk or not, and they cannot be held liable for actions they couldn't know were illegal.

I do believe they can be held responsible for espionage in the event that they knowingly hired a spy, which seems to be the case here.

If the government believes it is important to national security to prevent Twitter from even unknowingly hiring spies, I think the onus is on the government to nationalize whatever parts need protecting. In this case, they could probably just nationalize the background check portion via security clearances. It doesn't sound like we're at that point, though.

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

#69

Post by curryst »

denton-scratch wrote: post #63
rendall wrote: post #38

> ...to appease a neigh beneficial owner... Has anyone seen this use of neigh before? Is it a legal term? What does it mean?

Perhaps the OP meant "nigh", which is archaic, and means the same as "near". Even then, "nigh beneficial owner" and "near beneficial owner" are awkward constructions that would have broken the continuity of my reading comprehension. But surely one is or is not a "beneficial owner". Being nearly a beneficial owner is the same as not being a beneficial owner at all.

I think "nigh" is meant to modify "owner", not "beneficial". I think the lawyer saying is saying that the KSA figuratively owns Twitter, and that Twitter benefits from that relationship. Golden handcuffs, basically.

That is the most awkward phrasing I've seen in a long time. I'm not even sure it's grammatically correct. I would've expected "beneficial nigh-owner" or something like that.

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

#70

Post by eternalban »

bpodgursky wrote: post #15
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.

Please elaborate on this impossibility and eluded catastrophes. Unless a candidate has a deep pocket and backers it is “impossible” to field a discrimination lawsuit based on a boilerplate rejection letter. If corporations were actually this scared of lawsuits, there would be no age ceiling in software hiring.

Twitter’s CEO is on the record being cozy with deep pocketed Saudi investors in Twitter. It was certainly not the fear of discrimination lawsuits that permitted Saudi agents gaining access to Twitter’s systems.

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