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, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.
Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.
What the hell does this even mean?
Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.
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 States of Atrocity in futile protest of its horrifying surveillance subterfuge.
It's very easy to ignore this sort of thing when it's not your ass on the line. Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt. The feds turned Sabu, the infamous LulzSec hacker, by threatening his three-year-old daughter. The United States government is not above such tactics.
I don't, frankly, believe that Arrington himself would behave much differently in the same situation. Life is not that easy.
Whoah, hold on, I don't think anyone is saying this is easy or there aren't risks for Zuckerberg. However to say he shouldn't stand up against tyranny and abuse of government power because he has responsibility to parties x, y and z is exactly the line of thinking that allows totalitarian governments to thrive. Government power is not absolute, that power is derived from the people. No one person can stand up to the government, but the government can't fight everyone, and if Google, Facebook, et al stood up to them and signed some light on this issue it would not be so easily papered over by the spooks.
Beyond that, in terms of public surveillance, Zuckerberg has real power in this sphere. You could even argue that he has more power than any individual has ever had. Certainly there is no bigger global database of personal information than Facebook.
It doesn't matter if Arrington is being a hypocrite. It doesn't matter if I'm being a hypocrite. Zuckerberg, and indeed all technologists should stand up on this issue. If we love what computers can do, we owe it to the world to fight so that they don't become the Orwellian tool of control that totalitarian regimes have always dreamed of. We can't put the genie back in the bottle—data is going to be out there—but we can force the government to be more transparent. We can stand up and say that a handful of isolated terrorist attacks is not justification to ratchet up governmental power to something a thousand times more terrifying than any homicidal extremist ever could be. This is fundamentally one of the most important issues of our time, certainly far more important than the fate of any one company.
Risking one’s own well being to help the community is basically a definition of an altruistic behaviour. Nobody and i mean NOBODY can reach and keep the position of CEO of big international corporation by exhibiting altruistic tendencies. The environment is too competitive and it promotes egoism and punishes altruism. (BTW, The same reasoning stand for political leadership too). So, I don’t think we can really expect this call to be heard…
Okay, let's not call on powerful people to do the right thing then. I mean they were the ones with the ambition to influence the world, so it's pointless to even ask them to have some morals.
Properties of the world can still be problems to be solved. Gravity is a problem solved by rockets. What is the solution to the gravity of human avarice?
I'd say it is basic game theory and statistics.
If we have population of individuals who exhibit three types of behaviour:
A - altruistic (1% of population)
E - egoistic (1% ...)
N - Normal (randomly A or B 98% of population)
Let's them play a game where E - type has muuuuch better chances to win....
It is obvious that the proportion of E - types in the winner population will grow during the tournament.
This explain the current state of world affaires: Usually 'Supreme Leader' is the "biggest bastard of them all"...
It's basic extrapolating-without-data is what it is. You have a theory, well, let's call it a hypothesis ("a person who reaches CEO level is someone who will not behave altruistically"). You even have a simple model which mostly agrees with the hypothesis (not completely, I'll note) and which relies on several more untested hypotheses. Both the hypothesis and the model predict certain things about the world. You can check! Are those predictions borne out in reality? (˙˙˙ʎʃʃɐǝɹ ʇoᴎ :ɹǝʍsu∀)
Dan Carlin (more known for his Hardcore History podcast), also does a show called "Common Sense" and has been a political journalist for ~20 years. With this show, he seems to be fairly non-partison, railing against any side of the aisle that lies on hypocrisy (Left, Right, Libertarian, it doesn't matter, he tries to push at the "logic" or underlying issues and relates them to past political fallouts or successes).
Could a Martin Luther King Jr. even exist today? Could an activist "rise" pulling together masses for protests with the amount of surveilance and data scored on people (this is from 2011). It speaks to the issue of whether or not any individual could in this day and age lead such a large-scale movement, and when/how they would be curtailed nearly immediately due to infiltration and "dirt" that is so easily obtained, etc.
Also of note:
http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi...Description: Another news story highlighting the growing "wealth gap" between the rich and poor in the USA has Dan discussing countermeasures. What if the rich and powerful made fixing that imbalance a priority?
I can't recall if the subject I am speaking to is the above, or below episode (probably below, his show notes are not linked to his site).
Dan Carlin goes into a very pessimistic (and somewhat realistic) description of why money in politics can only be solved by money, in politics. How if HE were to change policies, he would need (or wish to) see a cabal of billionaires. Ready to back actual reformists, and immediately cut them out of any re-elections if they are not holding to the reformist promises made (the below Ep). A political contract per se, with the most "good intentioned" billionaires. He also notes, this is rather unrealistic, as ones "good intentions" can be diametrically opposed to another (simplisitic example, The Koch brothers and Soros).
I'm not describing it well, but his premise is that you only change the top-levels by voting out the House/Senate that change their tune once in office, thus you need the consequences of uber-rich who can, and have the ability, to oust them in a semi-quick (election cycle) function.
Pretty sure its the below Ep.
http://dancarlin.com/dccart/index.php?main_page=product_musi...Description: The only way Americans can change federal government policy is by voting for new political candidates. But what if those candidates ignore the positions they ran on once elected? Also: the implementation Gordian knot.
I wonder if we will have a Bill Gates type billionaire who dedicates the power of his/her mind to reforming politics in such a fashion. I use Bill Gates as an example, re: his ruthless and intelligent business acumen, turning towards solving philanthropical concerns. That "moving of the cannons" would be stellar (searching is broken for older articles, their was a fantastic Reuters, or FT on Bill Gates when he stepped down from MS to turn towards philanthropic causes, and (paraphrasing), "it will be of awe to see the change his business mind, fundamental efficiencies in solving problems, will do for the world of [disease, whatever].")
I also think its silly to assume that though a billionaire has immense power/influence/'stability" to withstand more pressures by the government, this is still the US government which can bring down countries, much less a rascally tech billionaire.
(I am on meds for post-surgey, apologies if this is rambling or incoherent).
It's not too hard to draw a line between using information your company collects for business purposes and government surveillance.
Also, it's worth noting that one of the key features that helped Facebook take off was much better privacy controls than anything that existed at the time.
> 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 States of Atrocity in futile protest of its horrifying surveillance subterfuge.
He also has over a billion people who would raise hell if the US Government came down hard on him for doing nothing more than tell the truth about a government program and laws that few people would agree make sense.
Having him put it all on the table to defend his user's privacy would say more about the company than any marketing or press release ever could.
We, as individuals, are utterly powerless against our government. That's a fact. Just try to go up against the IRS or even your local Labor Board.
People like him have the ability to really disrupt the surveillance state in ways we cannot. What would happen if all major 'net CEO's and founders agreed to tell the government to stuff it? They are going to arrest all of them? They woukd have angry mobs burning down Congress. These CEO's have real power. Perhaps it's high time they start exercising it.
I'm pretty sure most of the one billion people you are referencing wouldn't give a shit if Mark Zuckerberg was in jail so long as Facebook was still up and running.
To be fair, Khodorkovsky was a billionaire, too. He'll get a third prison sentence on more trumped-up charges shortly. The existence of various kangaroo courts ("military tribunals") in the US security apparatus since the Bush 43 administration suggests that Zuckerberg's money and influence are nowhere near enough to protect him.
The buck for such decisions stops at the Oval Office, and its current occupant has no reelection campaigns to worry about.
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.
I don't get your point on obligations. He has a family ok, but nothing would prevent him from resigning from Facebook and writing a post explaining his reasons for doing so(unwillingness to spy on its users). He would still be a rich man able to provide for his family and there are tons of others who could step into his place.
I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out. This means other FB directors could be held liable, shareholders could sue him for breaching his fiduciary duty, his life could be made hell even if PR wise it's impossible to arrest him, etc. We are talking about the most powerful monopoly on force humanity has even seen here, a group of people who consider it their right to kill people or detain them indefinitely without a trial.
I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
>The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out.
You honestly think the government is going to go after a multibillion dollar international corporation? Doing that is what gets the government into trouble, because the corporation has the resources to defend itself. And they're clearly not going to destroy Facebook and Google in any event -- can you imagine the public outrage, to say nothing of the economic damage?
Governments retain power through leverage. They don't actually have the power to destroy everyone, but they have the power to destroy one person, and the power to threaten everyone with the risk of being that one person. When the government is wrong, this relies on everyone being too afraid to do the right thing, and people not talking to each other and working together.
This is pretty basic stuff. If you stand up and no one else does, you die now. If no one stands up, you die later. If everyone stands up, you win. Which would you rather do?
More likely though they'd go after corporate officers for real or alleged criminal behavior (think of the "honest services fraud" charges against Jeff Skilling, reversed by the Supreme Court on the basis that the law was being stretched well beyond breaking point) and refer to the SEC for investigations....
The government has in the past gone after some extremely powerful corporations and when they had the endurance patience, and care, they have succeeded. We should remember that the government spent 50 years trying to destroy AT&T's monopoly on long distance telephone calls and eventually they succeeded.
Again, corporate officers of large corporations generally have the resources to defend themselves. They can harass you if you're the only one, which is why everyone needs to do it.
>AT&T's monopoly
They spent 50 years trying to break them up and within 20 years after that they had pretty much bought each other back up again and continue to do so as time passes.
You should also note that the public hated AT&T because they were the prototypical example of an abusive monopolist. It's a different story when the reason for the campaign is that the corporation is going to bat for the public against government overreach.
There is also the matter of Citizens United -- it's extremely unfortunate when the government legitimately wants to attack oil companies or other evildoers, but it works just as well (if not more so) when the corporation is doing right and the government is wrong.
Actually I think the breakup of AT&T was one of those moments when policy changed because all of the businesses got scared. When you look at the long history there, and it is a long history, it was right after that, that the government backed off from being aggressively pro-competitive.
We see a shift thus under Reagan from pro-competition to pro-oligopoly which continues and accelerates under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It is an indication that in class warfare the elite always win.
As for AT&T getting back together, they still don't own a record label, broadcast/entertainment media, the Japanese telephone system or the major manufacturers of phones in the US and abroad to an extent anywhere near what they used to..... People forget just how big Ma Bell was at its zenith.
There is no evidence of anyone taking longer term approaches. There is much evidence of Zuckenberg, Page and other just surrendering.
It works the other way around than you say. Surrendering is short term win at the price of long term loss. Taking short term win at price of dooming us all is not nice behavior, even if being a dick might be intelligent.
"First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me."
That's a reply to who you should fight for things that don't effect you (or your group), not for when individuals don't want to join a greater fight for the sake of their dependants.
But that's kind of the point; if you don't speak out, it WILL happen to you anyway. As they say, if you don't deal with politics, politics will deal with you.
And this summarizes everything that's wrong with the current ethos. We expect everything to be safe, and we expect everything to be easy. Nothing is above our comfort level and safety. Maybe the knife hasn't cut deep enough, or maybe we don't have the stamina to get off our couch. Either way, sad.
I see nothing with this ethos and I'm a full blown anarcho-capitalist so it's not a lack of scepticism towards government that is to blame. The reason is that internet is winning over the state, which is now forced to a reactionary role adapting with regards to new technologies that come out at an accelerating pace.
Some examples: Youtube and social media make war crimes more difficult to hide, Silk Road makes the war on drugs irrelevant, Bitcoin will make monetary policy irrelevant, open transactions will make the law system irrelevant, 3D printing will make border tariffs irrelevant, etc. Every software commit is a sign of progress, a log of someone trying to make the world a more voluntary, peaceful and decentralized place.
Given all of this, please excuse me in not caring about the idiots in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Moscow and Bejing who want to make me believe they are worth my time and emotional investment.
Isn't this exactly the reason why these companies, which are infinitely more influential than the person who leaked it, have a civic obligation to take a stand?
Not a bad quote in context considering how things go for the Pandavas after the great battle that follows the Gita. That really is the sort of turning point from the harsh but adventurous world of the virtuous heros to the fallen world when the Pandavas fall from Dharma. Even Yudhisthira cannot stand by his principles to win the battle, and they suffer greatly as a result.
Or they simply know more than we do. Maybe they've gotten the answers to "Why?" that we want and that convinced them? That's the "conspiracy" that almost worries me more. Not that I hold any real faith in such a thought.
That conclusion requires three things to be true simultaneously:
1) The government has some actual legitimate reason to do all of this which outweighs the danger of excessive government power.
2) Disclosing the reason to the public would eviscerate its effectiveness.
3) Allowing the government to say "trust us, we're the government" about anything from now on and get a free pass, because it could be this situation, will not result in the outrageous atrocities that governments have been known to commit when government accountability to the public is literally prohibited by law.
I don't even buy the first two as being especially plausible, but the third is why this cannot stand.
I 100% completely agree with you. Everything else aside, as I said elsewhere, I'm tired of being treated like a child and told to shut up and not question things. That's what repressive governments do. "Just trust us, we know what's best for your "safety"".
I don't think it looked quite so good. The "no direct access to our servers" line spoken by all four CEOs sounded like something out of North Korea, but they all also had the option to send this message through a relatively faceless spokesperson instead of throwing their own credibility on the pyre.
None of them addressed the incongruity of having all the major news outlets contradicting them, after apparently finding the major points of the story supportable.
It makes sense to me that Zuckerberg and Page came out personally. The idea that all their data is open to snooping is an existential threat to their companies. If true, their user bases (and thus revenues) would plummet. They absolutely had to deny it in the strongest terms possible.
Isn't it too late to prevent the coming impact? Unless the news outlets backed down on the PRISM powerpoint, trust for American technologies and services for anything more serious than cat pictures is dead. Which prompts the question of why Facebook should be bothered by this at all.
They should have at least remained silent. By issuing grossly misleading denials they look silly and dishonest. And yes, cowardly.
Had they said, "We do not comment on matters of national security," such would have been honest, careful, and truthful and it would have been darned hard to prosecute them or put them at risk for effectively revealing that the press was right.
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).
The whole business model of Silicon Valley is based on not obeying the law. It's called "disrupting", and how it works is "let's break laws and regulations we disagree with until they're either changed or recognized as obsolete".
This is how Uber works, or AirBnB... but not only. Facebook or Google routinely ignore European privacy laws. Twitter ignores European laws about free speech (which you and I may consider "bad" laws, but which are laws nonetheless).
So why is it that suddenly everyone hides behind the "law"?
I don't think we have enough information to come to that conclusion. Plain old FISA orders are lawful and constitutional. There's no good reason to disclose them, but there is a good reason to push for a limited term on their secrecy. As described, PRISM is far from a plain old FISA order. It sounds like they're collecting data broadly. If that's the case, that's worth leaking. Someone thought so.
Also consider this. They have a 51% confidence that the target is foreigner.
In the case of gmail, "please send me a random 10 users' info, data, and emails" gives you over a 70% chance that any given one in that sample is a foreigner. With Facebook it is closer to 85%.
So think about that. It means the filters could deliberately overinclude Americans and still meet their standards.
"Plain old FISA orders are lawful and constitutional."
Maybe that is currently true; jailing Japanese Americans also passed court muster. Secret orders from a secret court doesn't square with the ideals of America I was taught in civics class.
> It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.
The time for these companies to fight was before they gave away their user's info, not after they got caught doing so. If they weren't going to standup and do the right thing then, it's unrealistic to expect that they'd somehow find the courage now.
“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.
Yes, if Google don't stand up to the US government over this blanket gag order, it sort of invalidates their efforts over censorship with the Chinese government.
To challenge immoral behavior in court may be much harder than you think, and TBH I don't think it's even needed here (though IANAL so this is me speculating). I think it's enough to claim that what NSA did is unconstitutional.
>to have an actual conversation both about privacy
Let us have a conversation about that:
Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the very thing which represents You, the People, have as much information about you as, "They", the Corporations, do?
After all, Mr. Z, et al., can quite easily tell you things about yourself which, 3 words into the sentence, would give the government a lot of information it needs to optimize itself. To Serve You.
Whereas, the corporate stance is "we will own the consumers, all the consumers, and we will encourage them to endless consume our product", the government stance is: "how do we keep 240million people from cannibalizing themselves".
Mr Z., et al., are being mighty disingenous with this position, because the fact of the whole matter is, the Government would be the absolute BEST customer for him/them/et al., there is no better way to feed a consumer than to get the Government on your side, as we see with Pharmaceuticals, Farming, Oil, etc.
There are multiple points of view in this argument, is all I am trying to say, and by setting the above in word I hope to have at least set the scene for my real, tl;dr, which is this:
Privacy is a trap. Those who are fully exploiting the nature of the system, simply keep no secrets .. and trade never willingly with those who do.
> Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
1. Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov.
2. The gov has many more powers than FB. If FB knows something about you that "may be suspicious" they can't put you in jail for it, maybe even without a trial.
3. If some FB employee is able to steal data, it would have bad consecuences for the FB stock, so there is probably all kinds of barriers in place to stop employees to do just that. If some bureaucrat manages to sell off you data there is no consecuene for them.
> Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov.
This is not quite true. Facebook can make profiles even on people that don't have facebook and that have never logged in to facebook.
The tracking works just fine on a per-browser level. The practical upshot of this is that there is a good chance that facebook has data on you from before you joined and is able to track you after you leave.
1. You also chooose your participation in government.
2. Right, so because Mr. Z. et al., don't have a 'license to kill', there is a difference. This is the only difference.
3. Which do you trust more, McDonalds or Congress?
>1. You also chooose your participation in government.
If I don't want to be subjected to any country's taxes or laws, let me know how I can opt-out of this. You can relocate to a different country, but it is up to them to allow you to enter and/or settle, so the problem hasn't been circumvented.
On the other hand, I can choose to not have a Facebook account, and can use various browser plugins to stonewall their efforts to track me on the web.
The question is, trust more to do what? Not kill or imprison innocent people on a mass scale? I'm going to go with McDonalds on that one. But I wouldn't eat their food -- and notice that I have the choice not to.
>Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?
Zuckerberg can't indict me. I don't pay taxes to Facebook.
There are powers that the government has that Facebook does not, and therefore there are things I would be comfortable telling Facebook and not the government.
I especially liked the fake incredulity: why would some of the richest people on earth not want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning? Well gee, I simply can't imagine their motivations!
I, for one, would love to see the government try to Bradley Manning Mark Zuckerberg for telling the truth. It would at least be more interesting than the current Orwellian dialogue we are having with our government and corporate leaders, and it would probably be more substantive too.
Although I agree with your point, Khodorkovsky is likely guilty as charged; Russia probably was just selectively enforcing the law until he started to threaten American oil interests.
(The real outrage in Khodorkovsky's case isn't that he has been repeatedly convicted while still imprisoned. The real outrage is that ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco found a way to destroy their Russian competition.)
The whole premise is that the NSA is protecting the USA of terrorism by spying and that the USA is in a war against terrorism. Then the one who go against NSA is a traitor in a war time. Stop any rational argument here. BTW, I think you look slightly traitor to me...
On a side note, I see the whole xenophobia that's implied by all this. The NSA exists only to strip foreigners of their privacy, without any due process or supervision, and the only accusation here is that they might have stripped some of the 5% of the global population of their privilege of due process and constitutional rights. And there is a lot of suspicion that the NSA was used for economic spying in the war between Boing and EADS, and probably other cases.
If you don't want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning, don't join the Army and then violate the UCMJ. He's not some innocent private citizen they arbitrarily went after.
Why has this program been secret for more than a day, or a month? Are we to believe that the leaders of the most technologically advanced companies on Earth are so unsophisticated they can imagine the only way to let the world know a secret is to tell it directly?
Governments and companies know how to leak. The only logical conclusion is that these surveillance programs are not actually significantly upsetting to most of these folks.
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, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.
Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.
What the hell does this even mean?
Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.