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Cowards

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Re: Cowards

#61

Post by rayiner »

polarix wrote: post #50
milkshakes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrington was addressing the leaders of these companies, not the organizations themselves. While corporations obviously do not have consciences nor moral compasses, his point was that humans do, or at least they should. And I think he was pretty clear about what he would have those leaders do: > Perhaps you could all get on a conference call tonight and double dare each other to do it all together, at the same time.…

See the people who are making these statements don't know. The only people who know are the ops teams, and they really can't tell, because they could fairly easily just disappear.

Do you really believe the U.S. government is "disappearing" people?

Re: Cowards

#62

Post by scythe »

treeface wrote: post #47
scythe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'know, I'd like to believe I'd do that in this situation, too. But people are more generous in theory than in practice. You have to realize: Mark Zuckerberg isn't just looking out for Mark Zuckerberg by posting what he did. He has a family, a social life, and a whole lot of people at Facebook who depend on him. To whom, perhaps, it would not be fair for Zuck to martyr himself on the great gallows of the United State…

I think the point the OP is making is that if it were someone like Mark Zuckerberg, the protest wouldn't be futile. It would likely trigger a nationwide debate about the constitutionality of the program and it would possibly be overturned in court.

The point of my post is that these people are surrounded by other people to whom they have obligations. You can't respond to two words without considering the context of the paragraph! It should be obvious that even a so-called "successful" action comes with extreme stress on one's associates. It means subjecting other people to risk. This cannot be considered lightly.

Re: Cowards

#63

Post by milkshakes »

polarix wrote: post #50
milkshakes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrington was addressing the leaders of these companies, not the organizations themselves. While corporations obviously do not have consciences nor moral compasses, his point was that humans do, or at least they should. And I think he was pretty clear about what he would have those leaders do: > Perhaps you could all get on a conference call tonight and double dare each other to do it all together, at the same time.…

See the people who are making these statements don't know. The only people who know are the ops teams, and they really can't tell, because they could fairly easily just disappear.

The people who are making these statements aren't just winging it. They wouldn't actually make the statements before finding out if there was any substance to it. Both statements stopped well short of actually denying that the government has been wholesale mining their users data, and called for policy changes from the federal government. What do you think they found out?

Re: Cowards

#64

Post by mtgx »

jmduke wrote: post #2

There's a meme on Reddit that revolves around 'so brave': basically calling people/posts/comments out for obvious pandering. This reads like a pastiche of Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes: What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth? and then acknowledges that doing so,…

His point is basically this:

“All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing...”

― Edmund Burke

That's so true. If they came out now, the country would be better for it. But they are deciding to be accomplices of the out of control and abusive government. I thought Google, at least, would be better than this, after the whole China situation.

Re: Cowards

#65

Post by saalweachter »

I love the guilty-until-proven-innocent angle of these personal attacks against CEOs and companies.

There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on every single violation of privacy while kicking puppies. Corporations can't have alibis. Mark Zuckerberg can't say, "Oh, I was in Cincinnati for the last 5 years, and I don't have cell coverage there, so I can't possibly have been involved."

I usually avoid defending billionaires, because they can dry their tears on their giant stacks of money, but so far this is just a he-said-she-said, and if all of the tech companies are saying they're innocent, it's the responsibility of the accusers to pony up some evidence they're guilty. Slide shows are one thing, but if you want to prove to me that the system does what you say it does, we need a document dump: millions of random emails, Facebook messages, whatever that have been illegally accessed through this system, which could plausibly not have been accessed without the kind of far reaching access that the tech giants are being accused of having provided.

Re: Cowards

#66

Post by Qz »

scythe wrote: post #41
sage_joch wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the hell does this even mean? It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.

Y'know, I'd like to believe I'd do that in this situation, too. But people are more generous in theory than in practice. You have to realize: Mark Zuckerberg isn't just looking out for Mark Zuckerberg by posting what he did. He has a family, a social life, and a whole lot of people at Facebook who depend on him. To whom, perhaps, it would not be fair for Zuck to martyr himself on the great gallows of the United State…

The whole reason we even know about all this is because someone did have that courage.

Re: Cowards

#67

Post by bambax »

sage_joch wrote: post #6
jmduke wrote: post #2

There's a meme on Reddit that revolves around 'so brave': basically calling people/posts/comments out for obvious pandering. This reads like a pastiche of Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes: What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth? and then acknowledges that doing so,…

> What the hell does this even mean? It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.

Exactly. Just because it's "illegal" doesn't mean it can't be done -- just as, just because what the government asks is "legal" (??!?) doesn't mean it has to be complied with.

"What will happen?" is an excellent question that is not even asked. Certainly not everything is an acceptable risk; if Larry Page seriously believe he would risk spending the rest of his life in prison for publishing national security letters, then sure, we'd all do the same.

But is this the case? How do we even know if nobody's testing it?

Besides, why can't Google or Facebook be a little creative, and (for example) declare that the only way they'll be able to send information is by fax...?

That's kind of what HN is doing (it will only accept DMCA requests via fax or regular mail).

Re: Cowards

#68

Post by yuhong »

scythe wrote: post #51
dylangs1030 wrote: post #23

An article that waxes poetic, yet is so very hollow and devoid of realism. What would you have these companies do? Band together in a mighty ring of technological resources and begin a Privacy Revolution? This is unrealistic. As an American, I am saddened and angered by the recent news of the past two days. I am disgusted with what our government has done - what it has hidden from us, to take advantage of us unawares…

If there's anyone to go after, it's the ranking members of the Special Committee on Intelligence, who wrote FISA and greenlighted this policy. Sadly, the ranking members are the near-80 Dianne Feinstein and lame-duck Saxby Chambliss; their successors are probably Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins. While I don't think single-issue voting is a good political strategy, in this particular case it seems prudent to conside…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837367

Re: Cowards

#69

Post by polarix »

saalweachter wrote: post #65

I love the guilty-until-proven-innocent angle of these personal attacks against CEOs and companies. There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on…

The best hope for evidence would be engineering and construction documentation of the reporting mechanisms.

Re: Cowards

#70

Post by saalweachter »

sillysaurus wrote: post #17
jmillikin wrote: post #13

> Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct > access” or “back doors” when companies are building > “secure portals” for them instead? The primary argument against government agencies having direct access to private data is that it removes the data's caretaker from the decision-making process. That is different from having an access portal for agencies to submit warrants or other legal requests. There is n…

There is no obvious reason why a company should have an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants. Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts. But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks. Nice ad hom, but it's mistaken. Arrington is many things, but he actually feels the way he writes.

Courts have proven that they are a lousy place to change national security policy. Courts established the principle of keeping things secret for the sake of national security (even though it later turned out that the case establishing this had nothing to do with national security; the gov't just claimed it did to avoid liability for negligence). Whenever someone tries to challenge secret, warrantless infringements of privacy, the courts throw out the case as lacking jurisdiction: since no one can publicly acknowledge that you are being spied on, you can't sue the government for spying on you.

The only way to change the policy on this is in Congress. If you really want to make a difference, call your Congressman and yell at them for spying on you. Call them daily, call your Senator, call other people's Congressmen. It still might not help, but nothing Google or Twitter or Facebook can do is going to.

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