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U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

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Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#61

Post by jlgreco »

nly wrote: post #44
jlgreco wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything on Youtube is publicly indexed. That is not actually the case. Youtube has a concept of both private and unlisted videos. Unlisted videos work similarly to how you describe Megaupload: "Unlisted videos Making a video unlisted means that only people who have the link to the video can view it. To share an unlisted video, just share the link with the people who you’d like to have access to it, and they’ll t…

Ok, put another way... all videos on Youtube are videos and relatively transparent, easy to view and inspect. On a file locker your files are opaque mysterious entities that the site can't hope to inspect.

So like Google Drive?

Not to incriminate myself or anything, but I have been given copyrighted documents with Google Drive. (Though I've ingested many orders of magnitude more copyrighted documents through youtube...)

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#62

Post by tptacek »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full text of Mega emails are included in the indictment. If Viacom could have quoted anything of a similar magnitude, they absolutely would have. You should read the indictment. It's damning. And fun reading!

I remember enjoying reading the indictment, but I don't recall all of Mega's emails being there, that's what I was getting at. Given a sufficiently large sample - I'm sure you could find exonerating material.

How do you exonerate the guy who has one of his users complain that a pirated Dexter video has poor quality and then complains to his team about the low quality of the pirated Dexter videos on his site? He's been caught red handed.

The only argument I've ever heard that could exculpate Schmitz is that "perhaps the video uploads could have been authorized." But that beggars belief. No reasonable person on a jury would buy that Schmitz seriously entertained the idea that those videos were authorized uploads.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#64

Post by eliasmacpherson »

tptacek wrote: post #62
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember enjoying reading the indictment, but I don't recall all of Mega's emails being there, that's what I was getting at. Given a sufficiently large sample - I'm sure you could find exonerating material.

How do you exonerate the guy who has one of his users complain that a pirated Dexter video has poor quality and then complains to his team about the low quality of the pirated Dexter videos on his site? He's been caught red handed. The only argument I've ever heard that could exculpate Schmitz is that "perhaps the video uploads could have been authorized." But that beggars belief. No reasonable person on a jury would…

Well I've set the bar low to mean exonerate the guy to the extent that he's only as bad as the youtube crowd:

"On September 23,2005, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley emailed YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, stating: "can we remove the flagging link for 'copyrighted' today? we are starting to see complaints for this and basically if we don't remove them we could be held lìable for being served a notice.

it's actually better if we don't have the lìnk there at all because then the copyright holder is responsible for serving us notice of the material and not the users. anyways, it would be good if we could remove this asap."

Their only mitigating behaviour is the moral dilemma they exhibit, I'm sure something similar could be pulled from Mega's email archives - again my point being the FBI/DOJ are better at making a case than Viacom.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#65

Post by aspensmonster »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #49
aspensmonster wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked me if I would let myself off the hook for blowing the whistle because I told my employer in advance that I would do so. I wouldn't characterize it as letting myself off the hook, because there shouldn't be a "hook" in my clavicle mandating unethical behaviour in the first place. I'd characterize it as doing the right thing if for no other reason than being ethically obligated to do so. Blowing the whistle s…

> Why on earth would asserting that I would behave ethically Let me construct a parallel scenario that might make it obvious to you. Let's suppose you're hiring a nanny to care for your children while you are away at work (not that you or I could necessarily afford such a thing). You tell the candidates your requirements for how the children should be treated while you are away, including what food they may eat, what…

Seems like a very interesting example to choose. Hiring a nanny for your child is one of those cases where you would absolutely want to fully vet each candidate. Are you suggesting you'd sooner leave the nanny's ethical and moral compass as a question mark than fully investigate what his or her ethics and morals are? This seems like a case where someone's ethics and morals are absolutely required to be known, not left as an exercise. Of course, most people rely on friends and family for such jobs for precisely these reasons. And if I had to hire a stranger, I'd absolutely be interested in knowing about their ethics and morals. Given my limited ability to get to know every last person, I'd prefer to hire from a reputable agency (so much as you can trust their reputation, in any case).

The reality of course is that every candidate will follow your orders up until he or she feels they violate his or her ethics/morals. Whether they're open about it or not is irrelevant. If you ordered them to abuse your own children (of course you wouldn't, but we're both being good-heartedly facetious here) you could reasonably expect them to turn you in, whether they were up front about it during an interview or not. Playing coy about the matter during an interview is a recipe for disaster on both ends.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#66

Post by minor_nitwit »

nostrademons wrote: post #14
mrt0mat0 wrote: post #10

I honestly didn't expect much from this. The part that scares me about all of this is this: if the government can't read our emails, listen to our phone calls, or see our web traffic but they have the ability to... what stops them from outsourcing the work to another country, where there is no constitutional restraint. we outsource everything else, why not our domestic spying?

The intelligence community works on the principle that it's valuable to have information that other people do not. If they outsource the spying, then other people have that information, right?

Australia, UK, New Zealand, Canada, and the US are all part of the 5-eyes, which have a broad agreement on sharing intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

While they may not share information with say - China - they will share it with one of the other eyes, who could also lend a helping hand in domestic spying.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#67

Post by jamesaguilar »

aspensmonster wrote: post #65
jamesaguilar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why on earth would asserting that I would behave ethically Let me construct a parallel scenario that might make it obvious to you. Let's suppose you're hiring a nanny to care for your children while you are away at work (not that you or I could necessarily afford such a thing). You tell the candidates your requirements for how the children should be treated while you are away, including what food they may eat, what…

Seems like a very interesting example to choose. Hiring a nanny for your child is one of those cases where you would absolutely want to fully vet each candidate. Are you suggesting you'd sooner leave the nanny's ethical and moral compass as a question mark than fully investigate what his or her ethics and morals are? This seems like a case where someone's ethics and morals are absolutely required to be known, not lef…

That is a fair point. But I take it you understood what it is that makes it hard to hire a candidate when their ethics go against what a company believes is ethical, and/or what a company is legally bound to do.

Also, don't worry about what you say to me. I'm nowhere near important enough for that to matter.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#68

Post by rhizome »

nostrademons wrote: post #14
mrt0mat0 wrote: post #10

I honestly didn't expect much from this. The part that scares me about all of this is this: if the government can't read our emails, listen to our phone calls, or see our web traffic but they have the ability to... what stops them from outsourcing the work to another country, where there is no constitutional restraint. we outsource everything else, why not our domestic spying?

The intelligence community works on the principle that it's valuable to have information that other people do not. If they outsource the spying, then other people have that information, right?

Current revelations aside, when agencies are prohibited by law from engaging in certain kinds of surveillance, looping other countries in can be a way of purifying the information they desire. In other words, it's not illegal for the UK to spy on US citizens (and vice versa), so if the US maintains good relations they can get backchannel data all they like.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#69

Post by rhizome »

sinemetu11 wrote: post #31

Probably naive, but what would happen if Google, Facebook, MS just started disclosing everything? What are they going to do shut them down? Seems silly to me that these huge companies can't just give them the middle finger and show them that they're not going to be bullied any longer.

It would proabably start with something like IRS and SEC audits.

Re: U.S. Opposes Tech Companies’ Requests to Disclose Surveillance

#70

Post by lukifer »

CurtMonash wrote: post #7

There was a time when the trade-off was: 1. The government lied and pretends not to engage in domestic espionage. 2. To support that lie, the government didn't do much bad stuff with the results of its domestic spying. 3. Thus, the domestic spying wasn't a big deal. I think we're past that point now.

I agree with your core premise, but #2 is distributed extremely unevenly.
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