I think the attitude here that most tech companies are rolling over and just complying without a single ethical consideration is misplaced.
The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders.
You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companies in the same position. Most your legal team probably doesn't get to know what's going on. You can't take your case to the public without being held in contempt.
I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair.
Well, they've already "made an example" of the only company to truly stand in their way. Look at Qwest - you talk to the average citizen and their takeaway was that justice was served | A corrupt CEO ran the company into the ground and went to prison. Hurrah!
Don't pay attention to the fact he denied installing what he considered unconstitutional wire taps for the NSA resulting in the government pulling almost a billion dollars worth of contracts from the company. That example alone proved that the government can tell any narrative they want; they own the media, they'll own private companies too.
The media is mostly controlled and distributed by private companies that collude with the government for their own benefit, Google and Yahoo are exactly such companies.
if by collude you mean do so under threat of legal action and possible end of your business, then perhaps you are right.
for a site like this I am always amazed at how many people think it is easy to stand up to the full brunt of the government. the US government not only has the capability to do any business and person on US soil what it wants, it has people within it who relish in that power and who won't bat an eye to use it. if there is a legal issue the laws can simply updated "for the people".
this is not to say its any different elsewhere, the government controls the laws, the weapons, and through those can end your ability to do business if not simply through confiscation.
Well, since most media is advertising dependent, they're dependent on access to information to give you something of value, to in turn sell ads. If investigating or reporting on something shady means, a press operative can no longer be allowed access to an election campaign, or means their correspondents get snubbed at press conferences. They'll cooperate or not report on something, or follow the delivered narrative in lieu of their long term business interests.
It's much simpler when you stop trying to pretend the people who run these companies are benevolent angels out to do good in a scary scary world. These companies are run by the same class of people that run the government, they have the same interests and they collude in order to further their interests. Very simple.
The Joseph Nacchio story is very complicated and not the best example of the point you are making, sadly. Qwest was undeniably naughty with the books on his watch and they had a case. I agree it sucks, just saying he's not the best example.
Thats the entire point he is making. Blackmail and other forms of influence and control are their modus operandi, they used knowledge of his illegality (which they had most likely got unconstitutionally) to try to bend him their way, and the prosecution was vengeance for defiance.
If anyone wants to have a serious discussion of the control structure, lets start with Milners Kindergarten and the round table groups. Even the NSA has a shadowboss.
Which isn't to say that government organizations only ask companies with unquestionably above board accounting to engage in legally dubious initiatives.
Plainly, there's no reason to take a company's compliance as a sign that they 'have nothing to hide'. Likelier, it was in part because they did that they complied.
No, it just means, if you're going to dig in and take on the government make sure your house is clean. That's all it means. That applies to dealing with anyone with power, really, not just the government.
I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. They had a case, and while the conclusion I was responding to is extreme, Qwest's accounting fraud ran into the billions and they had a pretty strong case that Nacchio profited from that. I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree nor am I saying I don't think Nacchio is notable for taking on the feds, just that Qwest is not a good example of what happens when you do because the government had a legitimate gripe with the books.
Being clean is not an adequate defense. First off, no one is perfectly clean. If you were by some freak of nature actually clean, they would just throw a bucket of mud in your face before accusing you of being dirty.
The way the experts play is by mutually assured destruction. You get enough blackmail material on someone to assure their cooperation, and you leak just enough to them for them to think they have some leverage over you.
That's why fraternity initiation rituals are usually at least embarrassing, sometimes humiliating, and maybe even illegal. Rather than ensuring cooperation using intimidation by strength and the constant threat of swift and certain retribution, as with organized crime's code of silence, that mutual blackmail ensures that whomever it is that acts against the group first loses most. The renegade can be dogpiled, discredited, and disavowed, and the damage to the group is minimized, because no one person can know all the dirty secrets.
If you want to take on the government, you have to be as clean as possible, while also knowing where a few of the bodies are buried. But in that case, it may be easier for the government to recruit you to switching to their side. So you also need the moral fortitude to put principles over huge, heaping piles of money. And in that case, how did you get to be CxO of a big company, again?
Lots of other companies, especially lots of other investor-driven telcos in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were guilty of the same and worse, and were never charged.
The proliferation of fake crimes like insider trading gives the state discretion to imprison anyone for basically political reasons. Any executive who owns financial instruments that refer to the firm that employs her can be found guilty of insider trading, if federal prosecutors wish.
The Palantir witchhunt against Peter Thiel is another example -- threatening to invalidate government contracts because of some imagined discrimination due to Thiel's political views.
I wonder what the actual personal consequences are for someone going public that there is an NSL requested. I seriously doubt they'd destroy a major public company with lots of employees/voters/users; fines, maybe, and going after execs, but the Government loses most of its power to threaten things once the act is done and everything is public.
I think you win in the court of public opinion if it's a broad program like this (and IMO clearly unconstitutional). If it's an NSL about, say, an order to specifically target UBL, you probably hang in public opinion. If it's an NSL about, say, finding Snowden, you might be ok. This is an interesting check and balance vs. government overreach.
I'd be a lot more comfortable with someone going public in a live press conference in DC (maybe releasing a key to a file which is pre-distributed), than someone running off to Russia or doing it anonymously, though.
Apple got a mixed response when they pushed back on the FBI, but certainly not a clearly negative one. Lavabit's rather alarming case earned them substantial respect in the tech circles that learned about the matter.
Certainly whistleblowers have faced immense consequences, but they've been government or military employees engaged in major disclosures. To jail a 'captain of industry' for reporting that the government handed her a sheet of paper would be spectacularly bad optics, attacking a respected private citizen over an intuitively absurd legal mandate.
I suppose the details of the account in question would become important. If the public can be persuaded that you blew up an important investigation, you probably lose all support; we've certainly seen the government disclose a surprising amount of formerly-secret material to turn public opinion against whistleblowers. Even there, though, you could test the gag order by disclosing the fact of an NSL without the content.
If they can't show overwhelming importance, though? If it's just a cartel bust or a leaker or something similarly non-terrorist-y? I'm trying to picture the government bringing the hammer down on Cook or Mayer for going up on stage at a conference and unashamedly violating an NSL. It doesn't seem like a good fight to pick.
NSLs are likely not the case here with Yahoo (and in fact are not the most significant privacy threat, IMHO). An NSL is a demand from the FBI, not a court order. NSLs also have unique First Amendment vulnerabilities that would help a company choosing to publicize receiving one.
A FISA court order, which can force you to do much more than NSLs, is the more significant operational threat to Internet companies. These court orders typically have "do not disclose" provisions. Willfully violating that court order will almost certainly result in contempt charges.
What if you had all your mail scanned or OCRed to remove certain phrases such as "do not disclose" and then the resulting message was delivered to you.
The key here being that you will never have any knowledge of such requirements and therefore cannot act with intent to violate such requirements. Basically, can you eliminate mens rea as an element of the crime of contempt?
The burden is on the deliverer to make sure you receive, open, read and acknowledge the entire message instead of a partial message.
> What if you had all your mail scanned or OCRed to remove certain phrases such as "do not disclose" and then the resulting message was delivered to you.
Willful blindness is (as one might expect) evidence of willfulness of an act, rather than a way of displaying an absence of willfulness.
The fact no-one has done this means the consequences must be absolutely devastating. Probably jail time for executives and potential financial collapse.
Probably the only time an executive would go to jail for breaking the law in the US...
I remain unclear on the consequences. I don't think they're tested. 18 USC 2709(c) is what the government cites when they invoke nondisclosure. You win a prize if you find the consequences for violating that statute. Also, NSLs can be upgraded to court orders if the recipient is noncompliant. 18 USC 3511 discusses that:
> the Attorney General may invoke the aid of any district court of the United States within the jurisdiction in which the investigation is carried on or the person or entity resides, carries on business, or may be found, to compel compliance with the request. The court may issue an order requiring the person or entity to comply with the request. Any failure to obey the order of the court may be punished by the court as contempt thereof.
So they can upgrade to a court order and then hold you in contempt if you do not fulfill the terms of the court order. I am not clear if that includes the nondisclosure term. This is the closest I've ever come to identifying "what would legally happen if someone published an NSL?" Honestly, and I'm not extremely comfortable saying this and please do not get ideas, after a lot of research I don't think there is a federal punishment defined in legislation for doing it.
Usually laws have a punishment immediately after them. As in, section A is what's illegal, section B is how to punish violations of section A. 18 USC 2709 and 18 USC 3511 don't have that, so I honestly have no idea what would happen, and I half wonder if the federal government doesn't either.
It's entirely possible a highly-paid legal counsel like Apple or Google has finds out the emperor is wearing no clothes and NSL's are unenforceable.
The question is: who is willing to find out? There's all kinds of nasty stuff the gov can do to you personally for trying to fight an NSL - loss of gov contracts, detention at custom and border control, no-fly list, etc.
It's an experiment that I would personally be willing to try were I a high-visibility C-level exec. Been to jail, not that bad, mostly just boring; and certainly the jail that CEO me goes to would likely be better than the jail the real me has been a guest of. But the kind of person willing to tweak the nose of the government doesn't usually get to be C-anything.
As you point out, best to wisely pick your battle as you'll want public opinion behind you. And remember that as popular as she is, Martha Stewart still went to jail.
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned over something very different: she was a US soldier, not a private citizen, and she made public internal government documents, not a letter explicitly addressed to her.
Different standards do (and, IMO, should) apply to leakers who are government employees or members of the armed forces with a security clearance and to private citizens who are not 'leaking' something but rather sharing something they did not explicitly and voluntarily (through a contract or NDA) agree not to disclose.
And yet the non-military CJ system can be brutal and harsh. I'd imagine it's certainly possible the first person to disobey a NSL might be made an example of, especially depending on who is in charge of the executive branch at the time. You could be locked in solitary for years until you lose your mind. You could be assigned to prisons in such a way the authorities ensure you would be repeatedly beaten and raped. You could be indefinitely detained without trial or attorney -- the crime is national security related, after all. There is a horde of horribly nasty things that could be done to you even if you aren't military or security clearance. It's worse for the military, but it's bad enough for the rest of us.
For one, it depends where you come from. If you earn in the neighborhood of $25M a year it's likely you will find jail less comfortable than your home.
Secondly, breaking the law or even challenging NFLs carries a personal risk of going to jail, while silently complying carries almost zero personal risk, and a small risk of damaging the company's reputation if/when someone finds out. If you're not very strongly principled, the choice is really easy to make.
Is it possible that the board would simply remove the CEO in time for the government to have its way with the company, in hope of averting financial Armageddon?
The most damning part of this story is that Mayer decided to comply without telling her chief security officer. That really does make it look like Yahoo rolled over without a fight.
Since it had a gag order, she likely wouldn't have been allowed to tell him. The government doesn't care about the security implications of these backdoors, they just want the data.
Also, Yahoo spent many years fighting similar requests (I think before anyone else did) and won nothing.
She also was obviously being advised by Ron Bell, the GC. If she didn't tell Stamos, it was probably based on the guidance of Mr. Bell. I'm not sure we can fault Mayer much on this one.
How do you slip something like this past a corporate security team? Stamos and @bcrypt never struck me as individuals that were "asleep at the wheel".
Surely there was evidence somewhere? If Stamos wasn't briefed as to the situation and a security engineer found the rootkit on their own how could they be bound by the terms of an NSL / gag order?
Whether Mayer went around him willingly or by legal requirement is basically unanswerable, except to note that the email team chose to do the same. There's not much to say when we can't tell collusion from compulsion.
The question of accidental discovery, by contrast, is a fascinating one. A gag order couldn't possibly compel someone who made the discovery on their own (for the simple reason that they wouldn't know about it to be compelled). So circumventing the security team, instead of simply including them in the NSL, raises an interesting discussion about the nature of the NSL and why the matter was kept from Stamos' team.
> A gag order couldn't possibly compel someone who made the discovery on their own (for the simple reason that they wouldn't know about it to be compelled).
If the company was gagged, I don't see how it would matter whether company employees knew about it in advance or found it by accident. Either way, the company is still gagged.
Also, while your comment makes common sense, national security restrictions don't have to make sense to be legal. For example there is information that is "born classified," meaning that even if it is independently developed, totally separate from the defense apparatus, it's still considered classified!
That particular employee may not be. Obvious solution is to have a page ran by some reasonably trustworthy organisation where people can report these breaches before passing them on to their superiors.
I don't know any more about this than you do; I'm learning about it from the same Reuters story. But according to the story, the decision to implant the backdoor wasn't discovered by Yahoo security; rather, the backdoor itself was discovered, weeks after it was deployed.
So is the speculation that Stamos' departure was related to this? The timing would seem suspicious otherwise.
If so, one wonders if he would take a similar principled stance a second time at Facebook. Much harder to jump ship for greener pastures while already riding the biggest rocketship in town.
I do not believe Stamos would remain at Facebook after something like this.
But we're not much more than acquaintances (we both worked at NCC, and were prior to that former business rivals or whatever you call two people with similar roles at competing firms). I like him.
I just want to be clear that I'm not speculating about Stamos's motives.
> Yahoo execs deliberately bypassed review from the security team when installing the backdoor. In fact, when members of the security team found it within weeks of its installation, they immediately assumed it had been installed by malicious hackers, rather than Yahoo’s own mail team. (This says something about what the backdoor code may have looked like.)
In a large pipelined, distributed architecture, there's probably dozens of consumers of the databases that all look rather similar: they do some queries and pack up some reports for internal consumption. Marketing, ab testing, user experience, etc. Yet another consumer sharing 99% of the same code might not stand out.
At the risk of being downvoted for possibly being pedantic...
Knowing Yahoo's mail architecture very intimately, your analogy here isn't very accurate unless you get very abstract with your usage of the words "database" and "queries".
Add it to the spam filter? The security team probably reviews the spam filter code, but perhaps not the particular weights and measures it uses on a daily basis. So you set up a parallel filter for "arabic spam" that generally looks like regular filter, just tuned a little differently.
I agree. I'll go further to hold the U.S. citizens responsible for the apathy in dealing with rampant deceit and abuses of power by intelligence companies. One set of those were what led up to secret courts, mass surveillances, etc. Any number of leaks showing they were full of crap wasn't enough for citizens to take action. They took action on many inconsequential matters, though.
So, if citizens continuously allow or even create (surveillance supporters) a police state, then the companies operating in it are under no ethical obligation to take risk to protect them from that police state's activities. Those companies would actually be putting in more effort and taking more risk than most of the citizens themselves. That's an unreasonable expectation.
U.S. citizens need to get their shit straight in this country. Interestingly, the vast majority are pushing for the two most corrupt candidates imaginable for this election who have each mocked the Constitution and support the police state apparatus. Trying to protect them is a lost cause. Better to invest that effort into a different democracy whose people actually give a shit vs this one.
isn't the whole premise that the Big Companies actually control the government? "They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders."
full weight? You mean like a small fine ? That's what happened to Wells Fargo. The govt . seems really angry about it, but what can they really do to a corp that is considered an entity?
Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds.
It's so important that these leaks go public for two critical reasons:
1) with that type of financial regulatory environment for public companies, the only way to create incentives for that type of consumer protection play is when it has monetary consequences if they do nothing (customers shutting down their accounts)
2) court docs from an earlier Yahoo trial in a secret court were already released when the NSA requested a huge trove of emails and Yahoo challenged it. I read the judges ruling and the TLDR is that the judge said the customers will never know their email is being read so how can you claim that a privacy violation has occurred?
The twisted logic here is that there's no damage to the customer/company as long as the intrusion is conducted in total secrecy.
So that's why Yahoo is so willing to fold here. This is what they are dealing with.
Side note: Imagine the same logic was applied to police a search warrant that allowed police to enter hundreds of houses, a type of warrant that could never be challenged by these homeowners defence attorneys. "They'll never know police broke into their house and went through all of their drawers and personal belongings. They'll come home the next day and everything will seem exactly. the same. So what claim to privacy violation could do they have?"
The need for secrecy in FISA courts goes well beyond protecting state secrets like NSA tech. This type of judicial rationalization would never withstand scrutiny in open courts which is why total secrecy is the key.
> Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds.
Will this meme never die on HN? There is an obvious counter-example: Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request.
The idea that "maximizing shareholder value" is some sort of inescapable Faustian bargain is just not supported by the facts. People who run corporations might choose to act unethically, in order to maximize a certain outcome, but they are not forced to do so by the mere fact of running a for-profit corporation.
To the extent there is a structural problem in public corporations, it is one of executive incentive, not shareholder obligation.
> Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request.
The FBI went public with the case, not Apple... and the warrant was signed by a public criminal courts judge not a FISA court. That's a critical difference. There are no examples of successful challenges to NSLs, don't downplay the seriousness of doing so.
"Going public" is not really an option for the stuff we're talking about (as the Yahoo case I mentioned made clear, the whole warrant is predicated on secrecy ). If they do they could face serious financial penalties or face their CEOs going to jail where yes shareholder value will take a hit. The markets are very sensitive to large lawsuit liability and CEO changes.
So I don't see how you could challenge these laws as a public corporation without knowing full well you will damage the share value.
Their obligation to maintaining the stock value is only part of the issue here. You're expecting these businesses to be heroic martyrs when the state has stacked the chips extremely high against them. There's no question who is responsible for this mess.
Yet the US is on track to vote in another president whose primary national security strategy on her website is to expand NSA power and increase domestic and foreign intelligence gathering.
> Yet the US is on track to vote in another president whose primary national security strategy on her website is to expand NSA power and increase domestic and foreign intelligence gathering.
> > Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds.
> Will this meme never die on HN? There is an obvious counter-example: Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request.
This is a poor example to use to disprove the claim; Apple used the FBI encounter to prove to customers that they were tough on security, a component of their value proposition to a segment of the customer base.
>I read the judges ruling and the TLDR is that the judge said the customers will never know their email is being read so how can you claim that a privacy violation has occurred?
What?! That's like saying my home wasn't actually burgled until I arrive home to see that it was, absolutely ridiculous
> the TLDR is that the judge said the customers will never know their email is being read so how can you claim that a privacy violation has occurred?
Really? A judge really said that? So if I place a camera in my neighbors' bathroom, and they never find out about it, everything's okay? Does it work with other crimes? If I steal millions from a company, but they never figure it out because their accounting department is sub-par, then I'm fine??
Centralised powers have capabilities, but also weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and Yahoo in particular is an exceptionally vulnerable technology company.
Companies can influence specific laws, and sometimes work in concert to achieve specific aims (see the totalitarian plutonomic pact, a/k/a TPP, backed by virtually every major infotech and comms company: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Verizon, among others). But they're also vulnerable to specific legal threats, investigations, and withdrawals of contracts.
Where corporations influence governments most effectively is where the collective interests of political and industrial leaders is furthered. Where corporations successfully oppose governments is where the corporations have some level of political leverage, often through influence on key elements of local economy. Where government has influence over corporations is where there's little financial upside, and often only a vague and long-term benefit to the company, and where national security or mass popular interest plays strongly against the companies.
Yahoo had no leverage and considerable downside in trying to stand up against this order. The long-term downside to compliance is what's emerged here: disclosure of the project and a possible scuttling of Yahoo's announced purchase by Verizon. The best case for Yahoo without the Verizon takeover is that it's dead. With the takeover, some of the investors and executives recoup a small amount of the long-term loss of value in the company.
Yahoo had little to gain by fighting (it would have been executively decapitated and entered immediately into a likely fatal legal fight with the US Government), and something to gain by playing along.
Mayer took the easy, and unprincipled, decision to play along.
> I will defy you and in the process cost 10k+ people their jobs without them having any say or knowledge of this
There's no way the govt. would do anything more than skewer (or attempt to) a few sacrificial lambs for violating a gag order. There's no political win otherwise.
"The US government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day if it refused to hand over user data to the National Security Agency, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday."
"The size of the daily fine was set to double every week that Yahoo refused to comply, the documents show."
Yahoo challenged it in FISA court, not open court.
"Yahoo took its case to the foreign intelligence surveillance court, also known as the Fisa court, which oversees requests for surveillance orders in national security investigations. The secretive Fisa court provides the legal authorities that underpin the US government’s controversial surveillance programmes. Yahoo lost its case, and an appeal."
Advocate for reality: they don't mean shit in bigger scheme of things since virtually nobody uses them. So secret groups put less effort into them. Yahoo, Gmail, Lavabit, various IM's... all were in the Snowden leaks as SIGINT-enabled through taps, black bags, or "FBI coercion." If Whisper got that important, I think we'd see bad stuff happen to the company or Moxie.
So, enjoy the added protection from nation states of low uptake if you're using it. :)
Yes. It's worth noting that the former CEO of now-defunct telco Qwest claims that he spent 4 years in prison because he refused to comply with illegal NSA demands. [0]
If only he had taken the high road and not dumped millions of dollars in stock shortly before it tanked, we wouldn't have to wonder about why he's in prison.
Yeah, that's what I said. It seems so many of these leakers or government examples would almost perfectly illustrate the point of activists if they just didn't do something incredibly illegal, naive, or debatable on top of the solid contributions. Then, we have to wonder why whatever happened to them really happened. Would the connection still be there if they just did the one or two good things? Can't prove it to skeptics.
I always encourage those in the future resisting police states to make sure whatever they do is beyond doubt A Good Thing. Even Constitutionalists on pro-surveillance side should pause to reconsider their views. They won't if they think person got canned for being a traitor or running financial schemes. (sighs)
Right, they didn't make up this case. Everyone who has worked in a publicaly traded company knows you can't trade until a few days after the earnings release. It's double so for the CEO! How could he have not known that? I am sympathetic to the possibility that the govt my go after someone that didn't work with them, but he committed a separate illegal act, selling that stock. They didn't go after Martha Stewart for talking about the cia.
If that were the case, then Apple would've caved in, too.
Mayer was probably too new and too scared to deal with this, especially when she had to think about her new baby.
My point is it has less to do with "Yahoo being scared about being destroyed by the US government" and more with Mayer's own personal fear of the US government, and easily caving to such threats, whether it was because of her baby, because of weak character, or because she was inexperienced as CEO didn't know how to handle this.
EDIT: Also Yahoo's response to the story is such bullshit:
> “Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.”
What's the law you're abiding with that says you need to implement such a backdoor? Name it. Even the FBI named the law or laws it thought would help it force Apple to put a backdoor in its phones.
So if Yahoo can't even name the law, then that law or the gag order saying they can't name it are unconstitutional. Period. It also proves once again how easily Yahoo caved.
"What's the law you're abiding with that says you need to implement such a backdoor? Name it. Even the FBI named the law or laws it thought would help it force Apple to put a backdoor in its phones."
A court order to enable warrantless wiretapping per FISA provisions. That's what they were doing with others per the leaks. The Sentry Eagle leaks, highest classification they had, indicated the FBI "compelled" domestic firms to "SIGINT-enable" their stuff with FISA mentioned repeatedly. It didn't define the methods they used to compel companies.
So, they have some way of leaning on them with the Patriot and FISA Acts as legal support. It shouldn't surprise you given it's happening in an active, police state with apathetic citizens who haven't forced Congress to roll back the legislation. Media has been fairly complicit, too, as they're not pushing the angles that would stir people into action. They watered down the previous debates.
Until these legislations are killed, there's secret courts, secret consequences, and gag orders that all these companies are faced with. Unlikely anybody will help them if they violate the rules that serve the state. So, it's on the citizenry to modify those rules so there's accountability. They mostly don't care. So, compliance with the court orders is rational choice by a company with no rational alternatives unless it intends to shutdown and make everyone jobless. Which will likely just shift business to competitors that secretly cooperate with the State. Like with Lavabit.
Note: Apple got to be lucky exception since FBI publicized the case and tried to fight in court of public opinion on top of an actual court. Terrible thing is we still don't know if they backdoored stuff for them with that being a show. Especially that HSM. It's illegal to know in the U.S..
> Mayer was probably too new and too scared to deal with this, especially when she had to think about her new baby.
OK, I normally think misogyny claims are over-blown and people are way too sensitive.
But your comment positively reeks of misogyny.
Rather than go for a down-vote, because you're able to edit your comment, I think you should reconsider the phrasing and delete the misogyny. If your comment doesn't stand without it, I believe deleting it would add to rather than subtract from, the discussion.
> > Mayer was probably too new and too scared to deal with this, especially when she had to think about her new baby.
> OK, I normally think misogyny claims are over-blown and people are way too sensitive. But your comment positively reeks of misogyny. Rather than go for a down-vote, because you're able to edit your comment, I think you should reconsider the phrasing and delete the misogyny.
Having newborn twins at home could certainly be a factor in any CEO's willingness to make an ideological stand in the face of jail time, regardless of the CEO's gender. Plus there's a wealth of feminist writing about the potential for gender disagreement when it comes to this very question, going back to Kohlberg, Gilligan, and an imaginary guy named Heinz.[1]
FWIW, I do agree that any privileged group should be conscientious when discussing others who might sometimes feel like or be seen as outsiders, and that this applies to guys in tech. But your comment seems a bit over the top and risks shutting down discussion about an important topic... whether the government took advantage of the fact that Mayer had newborns at home when they pressured her to comply.
Men can also have new babies. I'm chuckling rather heavily at the fact that you are the person who brought the sexism to the discussion in an attempt to white knight a bit.
But let us just do a thought experiment. Suppose your bank suddenly locks up your money tomorrow, and when you ask for it back, they say: "Well, there was an unexpected event in some sector of the economy which happened behind the scenes which we cannot tell you about. However, what we can tell you is that we were sufficiently pressurized by the government that it was for the good of the entire economy to not give money back to the depositors. Also, you should know that we didn't take this decision lightly but spent many many hours agonizing over it. Please come back in a year. And you might have to take a little haircut on your money as well."
Would you say, "Oh, I didn't realize you gave it so much thought. Besides, its all for the good of the economy. Tell you what, why don't you just keep the money?"
Does the fact that the decision was actually genuinely hard, or even possibly justifiable in some sense, make you any less likely to get mad? Your justification of the hardness of the decision is a poor excuse, because many of these companies are trustees of a lot of money from the public who have some expectations about how their data should be managed and secured (not explicitly, sure. But they wouldn't agree to random strangers searching through their email if told beforehand, either). To borrow a cliche, great power comes with great responsibility. In the field of software unfortunately the only thing which comes with great power is a tendency to turn a blind eye and simply try and acquire even more power.
I have no objection to anger or even conclusions that the CEO made the wrong decision.
My objection was entirely to how the first commenters in this topic treated the situation as obvious and the CEO as the clear moral antagonist of this story.
One of my life mottos is seek first to understand. Another is that very few things in life are as simple as they appear.
I will forever object to vilification and simplification.
Very few people would put the blame mainly on companies like Yahoo or Google as they are forced by their government to do this.
But it still makes using their services dangerous to you and your company or the company you are working for.
I would even go so far and require any politician running for any office to not have used any foreign email, messenger or social network in the last X years except for reaching out to voters.
There's a high risk that they could be blackmailed with their private communication being in the hands of foreign governments and I don't want compromised people like that anywhere near public office.
I used to work for a govt contractor. The only chance freedom has is for people to say shit like this to signal some of the bs I witnessed under those circumstances. Nuff said.
Public companies have no real ethical consideration other than the warped perception of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. Some companies may be managed by good people, but people are ephemeral, tomorrow anything can happen.
You have to criticize and a spew abuse at these companies, whether or not they are secretly resisting these orders, because their resistance is secret. Only by damaging entities responsible for implementing government policy can you affect change.
> I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair.
Actually you are giving them a pass because your comment contains nothing but apologetics for these companies. Whether their decision to spy on their customers and invade their privacy was easy is irrelevant and all of your apologetics are worthless speculations based on nothing whatsoever.
I'm not saying they made the right decision. I'm saying that people treating this as if it were an easy place to be are likely over simplifying the situation.
The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders.
You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companies in the same position. Most your legal team probably doesn't get to know what's going on. You can't take your case to the public without being held in contempt.
I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair.