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I'm a judge in Brazil. Even tough I'd pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is

• hvis 11y ago
  > Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? Do you mean _alleged_ criminals? Yes, they do. Convicted criminals, on the other hand, don't have that right already.
  • pqdbr 11y ago
    No they don't. Your argument doesn't make any logical sense. Wiretapping is needed during the investigation phase, which you need to gather evidence BEFORE trialling and convicting anyone. And is only authorized if you have strong evidence that a crime or criminal organization is in place. If only convicted criminals didn't have right to privacy, how would you get them convicted in the first place ? Also, you really got it 100% backwards. Convicted criminals have right to privacy after they are convicted, because we don't assume they will commit new crimes. Everybody is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. We must have new evidence that convicted criminals are commiting crimes to start a new wiretap.
    • djhn 11y ago
      You convict them by having proof. Not by fishing for something you can construct into proof.
    • evook 11y ago
      Wiretape your politicans. How would you get them convicted in the first place otherwise?
    • _jgdh 11y ago
      Its absurdly simple to make someone an alleged criminal. You simply need to accuse them of a crime. There are many countries where the government does exactly this - they accuse people such as human rights activists of crimes like "fomenting discord" and "promoting unrest" and lock them up. Under your enlightened regime of revoking the human right of privacy from alleged criminal, these people would have no recourse. So no, your argument doesn't make any logical sense.
      • bzxbot 11y ago
        No, it's not, at least not in Brazil. As mentioned above, wiretapping need to be authorized by a judge. The police must provide a reasonable justification. If the provided justification is weak or deemed unlawful, a lawyer can exclude all the data collected in trial. If privacy is a human right that cannot be violated ever, how are going to deal with criminals that use services such as WhatsApp?
        • jacquesm 11y ago
          > If privacy is a human right that cannot be violated ever, how are going to deal with criminals that use services such as WhatsApp? By finding evidence that does not rely on services such as WhatsApp. How did anybody ever get convicted before the age of WhatsApp, or for that matter the invention of the telephone. It's not as if wiretaps and cell phone messages are the only kind of incriminating evidence that can be found on the vast majority of crimes. And if that is the evidence that stands between a free man/woman and their conviction then maybe it is better that they go free because it is all too easy to forge such evidence or to plant it.
  • caio1982 11y ago
    The ones involved in the crimes of this case had been convicted already but then they were released recently after a habeas corpus, but are still under investigation and being prosecuted.
  • marcosdumay 11y ago
    Whatever you think, our Law says that if the police has enough evidence to strongly suspect somebody, a court can restrict his right of privacy to gather extra proof. You may hold any opinion you want, but the above is in Brazilian Constitution, and not even contested by anybody.
    • khgvljhkb 11y ago
      I don't know brazilian law, but in my country (Sweden. I'm ashamed...) the Military office for Radio Communications (FRA) is recording all data crossing the border (which of course includes the data of all citizens, since the internet is borderless). They certainly do not have evidence that every citizen and every foreigner (total 7 billion people) is a pedophile, terrorist or even a jaywalker. I for one have lost any faith in governance in the information age, and will happily encrypt my communication. If I can sabotage for the organisations spying on me, that is a net win.
      • marcosdumay 11y ago
        Well, as far the it's publicly known, Brazil does not monitor data that crosses its border, nor has implanted capacity to do so. What I don't understand is why you bring that point to a discussion about WatsApp hiding information about an specific crime.
        • khgvljhkb 11y ago
          The discussion turned into what rights a government should be able to take, and that is what I tried to reply to.
• airza 11y ago
  I mean, yes, we don't think that criminals should have the right to privacy, but to me large companies and governments have abused the shit out of a lack of complete privacy for everyone to the point where I don't trust them to make this reasonable compromise. I would rather the rest of us have this right protected in spite of the fact that some criminals will get it as well.
• jdmichal 11y ago
  I love these two parts: > Also, the judge must specify a single phone number or single e-mail account and the decision must be reviewed every 15 days, otherwise it expires. Also, there's a national database of wiretaps that every judge must feed by the end of the month, specifying how many wiretaps there are currently running. Great way to apply natural negative pressure on continuing wiretap operations. It's not impossible to have a wiretap span a long period of time, but it will create work for the judge and (possibly?) the officers, so in general it will hopefully only happen when it's actually useful. Kudos.
  • varjag 11y ago
    Nothing there that can't be automated with a simple shell script. Not saying the oversight system in Brazil is unreasonable, but you can't rely on the natural disincentives alone.
    • Aissen 11y ago
      Yeah we know that but for some reasons most jobs don't automate anything. Certainly not a POST request or filling an excel sheet line.
    • jdmichal 11y ago
      At that level, I would actually guess that it's more likely that an assistant would prepare the documents to be rubber stamped. It's not perfect, but at least something has to be done.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• d_theorist 11y ago
  The point of secure communication is that nobody except the sender and receiver can read it. It's not that we all agree not to read it unless we really really think the people are bad. That is not security. So, you either have secure communication systems available for everybody, and accept that the government is not always going to get what it wants, or you don't. There is no such thing as a secure system that a third-party can read if it chooses to. By definition.
  • Puts 11y ago
    I'd say the point of security in communication is being able to verify that all participants are who they say they are. More so than hiding the content from third party. ;-)
    • Majestic121 11y ago
      That's a debatable definition, to say the least. I'm not saying authentication is not an important part of security, but saying it is the only important part is quite a stretch, don't you think?
      • Puts 11y ago
        I was only trying to make a point because d_theorist seemed to only think security is about hiding the message from third party. Secure communication could even mean not to get a electric shock from your phone while using it.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That would be the first system like that available to public ever. "It's not that we all agree not to read it unless we really really think the people are bad" is pretty much the definition of the secrecy of correspondence we had since pre-digital era.
    • d_theorist 11y ago
      We do not live in the pre-digital era. We do now have the technology to make secure communication possible. The question is whether it should be legal. I think it is overwhelmingly the case that it should be.
• sneak 11y ago
  > No right is absolute What about the right to life, or the right to not be tortured?
  • noir-york 11y ago
    Right to life is not absolute, otherwise there would be no army; nice thought, but not going to happen. Right to not be tortured is debatable No right is absolute, and there is no single hierarchy of rights. Read Isaiah Berlin's seminal Four Essays on Liberty on why.
    • sneak 11y ago
      If the right to not be tortured is debatable, why do you refuse to debate me when I assert that it is absolute?
      • noir-york 11y ago
        I'd love to debate you on it, but first I need to formulate my own thoughts. Prima facie, there may be a case for there to be an absolute right not to be tortured, but depending on the moral framework - utilitarian, say - one can make a case for allowing torture in specific circumstances. Hence, not an absolute right.
• tw04 11y ago
  If you think this is going to do anything other than cause criminals to develop their own secure apps, quite frankly you're delusional. With the amount of money the drug cartels have, it will be trivial for them to simply hire developers to write them a secure messaging app.
  • rmc 11y ago
    Because infosec is so easy.
    • tw04 11y ago
      What does the ease of infosec have to do with anything? They've got literally an unlimited budget, and there are countless open source apps they can build on top of to get started. FFS they've built their own cell networks, their own submarines, I'm confident they can have a secure messaging app commissioned.
  • d_theorist 11y ago
    They don't even need to build anything. The code exists. The secret is out, my friends! All you do by restricting things like WhatsApp is deny secure communication to law-abiding people and make the criminal's life slightly more inconvenient if he wants to be able to communicate securely. But you can't stop it.
  • kbart 11y ago
    Exactly. Cartels build their own radio networks[0], compared to that, building secure communications out of the available OSS projects is trivial. 0. http://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/ http://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/
• jacquesm 11y ago
  You reap what was sowed. Yes, what the NSA was (is!) doing is completely absurd. The net effect of that is a backlash against all information gathering by authorities and the practical effect of that is that companies will now be differentiated to greater or lesser extent by the amount of privacy their communications platforms give to ordinary citizens. This is what drives https anywhere and other such efforts. That 'well meaning judges' have a harder time obtaining evidence in those cases where wire-taps are authorized with sufficient reasons and specificity (sp?) is a direct consequence of that. But you shouldn't complain about the companies that merely provide what the market now wants. Technology is strange that way, we, technologists can relatively easily make boxes that we ourselves can no longer open and those boxes can be used to transport information from one private individual to another. Yes, the existence of such boxes may be an obstacle to law enforcement. But the rights of ordinary citizens are trampled to such an extent that I'd be willing to live in a society where those rights are restored if the consequence of that is that the police will have to work that much harder to gather evidence or that some criminals will get away with their crimes. Authorities have overstepped their bounds to such an extent that this is now an acceptable compromise.
  • rubidium 11y ago
    First time I've read something by you I completely disagree with. "If they want to provide a communication service here, the law is clear that they must abide by judicial orders that allow wiretapping in very specific cases." I didn't the grandparent to be complaining. Simply stating that they are upholding the law of the country, which WhatsApp decided to ignore. The fact that it had massive popular adaption means WhatsApp may decide it should play ball, or the citizens of the country will get the laws changed. All of this is GOOD and indicates a WELL functioning society. Nothing is broken or bad because an App gets banned.
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      > First time I've read something by you I completely disagree with. That's scary. Well, there is a first time for everything. > Simply stating that they are upholding the law of the country, which WhatsApp decided to ignore. Have a read: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/brazil https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/brazi... Brazil is not exactly a paragon of virtue when it comes to police force and legal affairs. Let's give the GGP a free pass for being entirely of 'good intentions', that still leaves you with a police apparatus that is involved in, amongst other things, unlawful killings and the use of torture, they rank 69th on the world corruption index, roughly around the region of such examples of upstanding morality with the authorities of Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Italy. If this were North-Korea or China everybody would be cheering on Whatsapp and FB for making a stand and not cooperating with the authorities. Companies can make it easy on themselves by avoiding hard choices on which regimes to support in their quest for wire-tapping and which not by not having a footprint in a jurisdiction where such abuses are common and at the same time make it has hard as possible technically to actually cooperate in the first place. What you can't do you also can't be compelled to do. The people of Brazil then have the option to make the use of such software illegal or not.
• Cakez0r 11y ago
  > Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? If you already have proof that somebody is a pedophile, terrorist or drug dealer, why would you need to wire tap them and invade their privacy anyway?
• Kenji 11y ago
  Privacy that relies on trust in the state is no privacy at all. You are an opponent of privacy. A shame.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Society relies on trust in the state. If people have none, then you have bigger problems than police seeing your dick pictures.
    • Kenji 11y ago
      Trusting in the state blindly is like waiting for fascism and totalitarianism to happen.
• kbart 11y ago
  "No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it." The problem is, that by definition, you can't take away privacy from criminals without taking it away from everyone else. Especially when term criminal varies from country to country -- in this case it might be a drug lord, but i.e. in Russia it might be an opposition leader or journalist that dug too deep.
  • siculars 11y ago
    ...or a gay person. Or a Jewish person. Or a Christian. Or a woman. Take your pick, somewhere on this planet it's against someone's law to be that and communicate freely.
    • caskance 11y ago
      Then fix the real problem of the bad law. Deflection only makes things worse.
    • datburg 11y ago
      Muslims or Arabs should be there too., unless you want to ban them!
• rlpb 11y ago
  > In Brazil, only a judge can authorize someone to be wiretapped In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10749400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10749400, it is claimed that "It says basically that police can require records of visited CONTENT without a court order and the ISP is required to supply that without informing the user." He is corrected by someone saying the text means metadata and not content. Which is true? Do you not consider grabbing metadata to be a wiretap?
  • visarga 11y ago
    This distinction between metadata and data is getting old. Metadata is personal, revealing information to a large degree. The analogy with envelopes and the address written on the outside is absurd. There is a huge difference between that and the huge electronic logs they create from our mobile phones and internet activities (such as cell tower based location, search keywords on http sites, etc) Metadata is still privacy infringing personal data.
    • rlpb 11y ago
      That's my point. He said a judge's order is required for a "wiretap", but other commenters have said (and provided text) that metadata is available without a judge's order. So unless that statement is incorrect and a judge's order is actually required, the entire argument that there's a high bar to wiretap is false. He's just redefined "wiretap", that's all.
      • beothorn 11y ago
        Other commenter here. The text says that any autority (autoridade policial ou administrativa -> police force or administrative power) may require that the metadata be recorded for a period of time , but access to this metadata needs the judges order. For example, if the cops starts investigating John Doe they may ask the service provider to keep metadata for a fixed period of time, stated on the Marco Civil (six months IIRC). But access to this metadata can only be authorized by a judge. Edit: Reread the Marco civil an refreshed my memory. What I said is not entirely correct. All metadata is kept by default and needs a court order to be accessed. What authorities may ask without a court order is for the service provider to keep the metadata for a time longer than specified on the Marco civil. Also, as I said on my previous comment, the intention of the bill was that only metadata was recorded, but the term "registros de conexão -> connections log" is vague enough to be interpreted in other ways :(
• teekert 11y ago
  "No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it." You determine who is a criminal so you determine who has the right to privacy? Maybe you are a reasonable person but I think it is naive to operate under the assumption that governments/judges will always be reasonable. I think indeed that you may be spied upon when you are suspect of a crime but to force Whatsapp to store all messages (diminishing everyone's privacy) due to a couple of criminals sounds like a bad idea to me. So the right to privacy should be absolute, until you disrespect other people's rights (the only thing that should be a crime). So do good policing, don't take privacy away from innocent, free (wo)men.
  • EGreg 11y ago
    I think the right to privacy should not be absolute, it must be balanced against other rights. Same goes for the right to free speech. For example, if someone is broadcasting to 1 million people, their message should adhere to some standards. If something is really a popular message, it can be spread using "totally protected" speech to up to 1000 people at a time. I think giving a platform to ISIS and others to easily spread their mind virus and continually infect some susceptible 0.1% is irresponsible. Inciting violence on public television would have been unacceptable and regulated. It's an economic concept known as the free rider problem. If you guarantee total protection to speech for ANY number of recipients, people and organizations will find ways to abuse it. The free tier should be limited. Ideas replicating, on the other hand, is only limited by the amount of attention / allegiance any given person has. The only way we'll get a free rider problem there is when computers spread ideas among each other like computer viruses. And for that, we need to secure our protocols and implementations.
    • Karunamon 11y ago
      if someone is broadcasting to 1 million people, their message should adhere to some standards. I don't agree with that statement at any level! Those 1 million people have absolute freedom to listen or to not listen. This puts you in the position of telling people they can't hear something they want to hear. As a bonus, those standards you mention can easily become a cudgel against people the government wants to implicitly or explicitly silence.
• julioneander 11y ago
  By blocking WhatsApp nation-wide you are putting the burden of losing the main means of communication on the backs of 100 million Brazilians, for a matter that concerns only to a few people. Of course WhatsApp and Facebook are not above the law, but was the decision reasonable at all?
• JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  > But that's because you are good people and see the matter with those eyes... Good point. Similar thing can be said about law enforcement. They see bad all the time, so they are more likely to see everything as bad and push for legislation that is privacy restrictive because of that. Good people who see good need to be vigilant so that their rights are not diminished.
• erik14th 11y ago
  Wouldn't it be more reasonable to ask for communication services to start recording after someone is suspect instead of wiretapping everyone? Isn't that's how it works with phone calls?
• gotchange 11y ago
  > Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? I have to disagree with you on this Sir. Criminals have the essential uncontested right to privacy like everybody else. However, law enforcement have the right too to collect and gather info on subjects to prepare a case and prosecute in a court of law but that gathering and collecting should only be limited to the scope of investigation and suspected criminal activities without going after their personal lives and tiny details of their intimate relationships and also without feeding the shameless media these bits of information because if you cross that line, you'd gradually but assuredly lose the moral high ground for your position and then those suspects/criminals would look like victims in the eyes of the public and you guys as the bad guys and trust me you don't wanna lose the public opinion battle.
• arthur_debert 11y ago
  While you're right that as a judge you must respect the law, we as a society must re-evaluate it's usefulness and purpose. You're looking at this the other way round. It's not that privacy makes it harder to foster a civilized society, but removing makes it totally impossible. Is amuses me that you would see this as post Snowden or even American issue. As a Brazilian I know our state is much more corrupt and inapt, and the risks are an order of magnitude higher for us, Snowden or not. See here for some of the rational: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...
• dharmach 11y ago
  > "No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it." Unfortunately, no technology can differentiate between criminal and innocent, only human can. The implication is to decide the priority: privacy for criminals or no privacy for innocents.
• loceng 11y ago
  Do you share data with foreign governments, who then could perhaps side-step your local laws? Just curious as it sounds like a loophole I've seen people talking about.
• whatever_dude 11y ago
  Incorrect. WhatsApp could not deliver what the judge requested, even if they wanted to. Messages are encrypted end to end and not kept in their servers. The Judge requested something impossible. predictably, WhatsApp and Facebook did not comply. The Judge threw a hissy fit and decided to block the service, affecting everyone who uses it (95% of the Internet users in the country). A similar thing happened years ago when a Brazilian actress tried to get a paparazzi video out of YouTube. The heavy-handedness of Brazilian government got the whole website blocked. Mark Zuckerberg's complaint is about how any local judge can just order a country-wide order (which is something I also find baffling). This was not a supreme court decision.
  • personjerry 11y ago
    Banning the middleman in this communication here is kinda like banning pen and paper because people are writing notes to each other.
    • whatever_dude 11y ago
      "Hey someone committing a crime is writing notes to each other! Quick, order all pen manufacturers to send us copies of everything people are writing!" "Sir the pen manufactures said they can't comply" "Ok that's it, stop the sales of all pens" Then everyone starts using pencils.
      • bduerst 11y ago
        Seems okay if the pencil manufacturers are complying? I guess I don't get the analogy.
        • kijin 11y ago
          Pencil manufacturers can't comply, either, because their pencils are not equipped with sensors and antennas. None of the mass-market writing instruments do. To extend the analogy, the government might order all manufacturers to build sensors and antennas into every writing instrument. That might work, until people start smuggling cheaper, foreign-made, non-spying pens into the country.
• bmelton 11y ago
  > No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. I know nothing of Brazilian law, but in America, criminals have rights, including the right to privacy. Convicted criminals and convicted felons do not, but that is an entirely different category, and your wording seems woefully imprecise. > Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy ? I don't. Alleged pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the full panoply of rights available to them as anyone else until such time as enough supporting evidence may be provided that the police can say that a) a crime has been committed, b) the alleged had the means to have committed the crime, c) the alleged had the motive to have committed the crime, d) the alleged had the opportunity to have committed the crime, and often e) the alleged is very likely to have committed the crime. Only after THAT hurdle is cleared may the rights of the alleged criminal be intruded upon by the state, and without a grand jury, even those intrusions must be minimally invasive. At least in America, a judge cannot issue a warrant for the wiretaps you described on the mere accusation that "so and so is a {pedophile,terrorist,drug dealer}."
  • Retric 11y ago
    In the US convicted criminals still have privacy rights after release. They are slightly less than a non criminal, but after probation ends cops can't just enter a criminals home on a whim.
    • bmelton 11y ago
      Correct, but they do have other rights-restrictions. Regarding privacy though, I think we're in agreement that the only people who don't have it are those that are currently incarcerated as a result of due process.
  • Brakenshire 11y ago
    > I know nothing of Brazilian law, but in America, criminals have rights, including the right to privacy. I think your post rests on uncharitably interpreting what he means by absolute rights. Your post itself is a demonstration that the right to privacy is not absolute - if the criteria you describe are met, a wiretap can be permitted. He was talking about the fundamental question of whether or not a state has the right to set and apply those criteria (at least, within reasonable limits) within its borders.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• EGreg 11y ago
  By being developed and run internationally by foreign companies, WhatsApp and Facebook are, in a sense, not bound by local law in many countries. Even if Facebook, Inc. had a subsidiary branch in Brazil, the branch is hardly the entity developing and deploying the app. This is part of the problem, in a way, and why - for example - Russia and China are developing their own versions of operating systems, so as not to have all their communications be snooped on by Microsoft and its host government's spooks. The latest Windows is a notorious privacy hog with nary a way to opt out anymore. But notice the difference: facebook and WhatsApp are centralized by design and all traffic goes through their servers. Windows, on the other hand, is installed locally and only "phones home" as an auxiliary feature (for now). So, theoretically, once it is set up, you can install a DNS proxy between you and servers out-of-the-country and it will still work. We need MORE open source software that anyone can install, inspect and administer. Perhaps Free software in the sense of FSF. We need this kind of software to run our social networks, on our own servers under our control. There is very little reason why messages between people in an African village or a cruise ship have to bounce halfway around the world through Facebook's satellites to its headquarters before going back. Also, a lot of document collaboration in classrooms would be faster if it used IPFS and intranets instead of Google Docs. And so forth. Decentralize all the things! Then, the developers of the software would indeed not be bound by the law, but only the hosts. And the hosts would be small and distributed enough that only warrants issued to a specific host would be effective, and not general sniffing of all traffic on a social network! If you want this future, we are building it: http://qbix.com/platform http://qbix.com/platform
• dovereconomics 11y ago
  I'm Brazilian (not a shaddy judge though) and this comment is baffling. It reminded me why I left it in the first place. > No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy Indeed true. That's why you see Brazilian politicians embezzling billions of dollars and running away with it. At the same time, impoverished individuals are imprisoned for years after stealing a basket of eggs (literally). No, it's not the same as in the U.S. Many innocent Americans are put in jail because they didn't know their rights. Impoverished Brazilians are not even given that choice. The law isn't the same for everyone. If a Brazilian with a college education is arrested, he goes to a different, more pompous, prison "by law".
• bsbechtel 11y ago
  Isn't blocking a form of communication for millions of citizens also a gross infringement on freedom of speech? I don't know what legal rights the Brazilian Constitution reserves for its citizens vs the U.S., but blocking a service individuals use to communicate with others on seems to fall within that realm.
• morgante 11y ago
  > Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. At least in the US we presume innocence. Defendants are not criminals and their rights must be respected.
• emergentcypher 11y ago
  First, every person has rights, even criminals. Those rights are limited in some way after having been convicted of a crime. But your real mistake is in the _presumption_ that somebody is a criminal. Convicted pedophiles shouldn't have a right to privacy. But we're talking about the general population. Everybody who has not been convicted does have full rights to privacy, and you cannot violate that right simply to "check" if every person has committed a crime or not... that is the literal definition of a police state. I doubt that you're actually a judge.
• fulafel 11y ago
  > Do you guys think that pedophiles, terrorists and drug dealers have the right to privacy? Yes until they do something illegal.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• razster 11y ago
  Well I hope this ban bites the Judge who ordered it in the rear. This is a stupid thing to do and should never happen again.
• Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Rights must be absolute. One only needs to see how every post here ignores the difference between someone born with an attraction harmful to act on and someone who does act on it to see why we must afford all people their basic human rights. To say nothing that governments, including the judges that are part of them, cannot be trusted.
• AbraKdabra 11y ago
  > No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. I'm glad you're not a judge in my country. I'm sorry if it sounds to violent, but that phrase...
• holografix 11y ago
  "The injunction was sought by a plaintiff before a criminal court in São Paulo state whose identity was kept secret."[1] So let me get this straight. The president is risking an impeachment, there is renewed discontent with the unprecedented levels of corruption... And some unknown judge, representing an unknown plaintiff, bans a mass communication tool used by 93 million Brazilians daily, by requesting something the people responsible for the tool are capable of producing...? That sounds like an awful lot of bullshit to me.