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Ruling that wikipedia's traffic is insignificant when it is one of the largest and most trafficed websites ever is so absurd that it's hard to interpret the rul

by c3534l 11y ago

Ruling that wikipedia's traffic is insignificant when it is one of the largest and most trafficed websites ever is so absurd that it's hard to interpret the ruling here as anything other than motivated.

rhino369 11y ago
It takes sense in context. The court accepted that the NSA has some upstream capability, but says there is no proof that it happens everywhere. Wikileaks says it is so large that it almost definitely gets caught up. The judge didn't accept that argument. The sum up the holding of the judge, Wikipedia has no evidence to show that the NSA is actually spying on their data transfers beyond mere speculation.
- deleted 11y ago
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jcranmer 11y ago
The headline in question is pure clickbait as far as its relevance in the document is concerned. The argument in question was that Wikipedia was so large, and NSA so pervasive, that they had to be snooped on at some point. To which the judge pointed out three things: 1. Sure 1 trillion and .00000001% chance of chance leads to a ridiculously certain chance of interpretation. But if you add three 0's to the latter number, you get a mere 10% chance. Without any explanation of those numbers, this reads like they chose the smallest number that gave a ridiculously high number--in other words, the argument is an attempt at pure statistical bullshittery. (I do like the judges retort in particular: "The "speculative" reasoning foreclosed by Clapper cannot be avoided by dressing "a chain of possibilities" in the clothing of mathematical certainty when the calculation lacks a statistical basis." 2. This is only a footnote, but this also assumes that all communications are equally likely to be intercepted, which a priori reasoning would suggest is not the case. 3. It's actually irrelevant if their numbers are correct, because the numbers and thread of argument relies very heavily on a mere supposition that the NSA is using all of their tools in exactly the ways that they suppose, and this can't be used to show that the injury is "real and immediate" instead of "conjectural or hypothetical." The most troubling part of the ruling to me is something that no one appears to have talked about in any comment section yet: the judge asserts that in these sorts of standing cases, a false negative (rejecting an actual injury as untrialable) is less damaging than a false positive (accepting as trialable something that didn't happen), and that judges should be inclined to err on the side of false negatives rather than false positives.

by c3534l 11y ago

rhino369 11y ago

It takes sense in context. The court accepted that the NSA has some upstream capability, but says there is no proof that it happens everywhere. Wikileaks says it is so large that it almost definitely gets caught up. The judge didn't accept that argument. The sum up the holding of the judge, Wikipedia has no evidence to show that the NSA is actually spying on their data transfers beyond mere speculation.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

jcranmer 11y ago

The headline in question is pure clickbait as far as its relevance in the document is concerned. The argument in question was that Wikipedia was so large, and NSA so pervasive, that they had to be snooped on at some point. To which the judge pointed out three things: 1. Sure 1 trillion and .00000001% chance of chance leads to a ridiculously certain chance of interpretation. But if you add three 0's to the latter number, you get a mere 10% chance. Without any explanation of those numbers, this reads like they chose the smallest number that gave a ridiculously high number--in other words, the argument is an attempt at pure statistical bullshittery. (I do like the judges retort in particular: "The "speculative" reasoning foreclosed by Clapper cannot be avoided by dressing "a chain of possibilities" in the clothing of mathematical certainty when the calculation lacks a statistical basis." 2. This is only a footnote, but this also assumes that all communications are equally likely to be intercepted, which a priori reasoning would suggest is not the case. 3. It's actually irrelevant if their numbers are correct, because the numbers and thread of argument relies very heavily on a mere supposition that the NSA is using all of their tools in exactly the ways that they suppose, and this can't be used to show that the injury is "real and immediate" instead of "conjectural or hypothetical." The most troubling part of the ruling to me is something that no one appears to have talked about in any comment section yet: the judge asserts that in these sorts of standing cases, a false negative (rejecting an actual injury as untrialable) is less damaging than a false positive (accepting as trialable something that didn't happen), and that judges should be inclined to err on the side of false negatives rather than false positives.