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I wouldn't find a website where professional lawyers opine on startups and programming especially compelling. I don't find HN threads where tech folk opine on

by dotBen 5y ago

I wouldn't find a website where professional lawyers opine on startups and programming especially compelling. I don't find HN threads where tech folk opine on what their opinion of how the law should be interpreted to be especially compelling either. This is especially true here where I note that the author of the post folks are commenting on has an incredibly notable credentials and frankly it's somewhat ridiculous for lay-folk to be arguing with someone with such bone fides: Riana [Pfefferkorn] was the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining Stanford, Riana was an associate in the Internet Strategy & Litigation group at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she worked on litigation and counseling matters involving online privacy, Internet intermediary liability, consumer protection, copyright, trademark, and trade secrets and was actively involved in the firm's pro bono program. Before that, Riana clerked for the Honorable Bruce J. McGiverin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. She also interned during law school for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Riana earned her law degree from the University of Washington School of Law and her undergraduate degree from Whitman College."

BoorishBears 5y ago
I expected the appeal to authority to be followed up with some counterpoint but no... No one needs to question the law portions of this to question the underlying premise. Saying things like "this is bad because Cellebrite is currently being used on rioters" right after you claim what Signal may or may not have done will have no effect on evidence is a flimsy argument you don't need a law degree to oppose. Ditto for implying Cellebrite should somehow be seen in a positive light because by... enabling and normalizing the invasion of privacy it... somehow preserves privacy? As if politicians aren't more likely to wave the successes of Cellebrite as exactly why backdoors should be required than the opposite? And even worse, wave the failures that naturally occur as reasons for backdoors?
knaik94 5y ago
Arguments and opinions should be up for discussion regardless of who the author is. No one is questioning the validity of the author's interpretation of the law itself. It sounds like you're making an appeal to authority rather than an actual point about the article. The discussion isn't about how a law is being interpreted. This blog article is about how the Signal article can be interpreted by a tech informed lay person vs a judge and the security theater surrounding it.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
It's sad that with all her credentials she still thinks the US is a regime which "respects the rule of law" while it sends billions yearly to Israel and Saudi Arabia, countries who clearly only care about repression and not at all any kind of law.
cormacrelf 5y ago
She framed it as a personal opinion from the very start, where she sought to impress upon us that she may never be hired again by Signal after this post. I thought in this case the in depth legal analysis didn’t add anything to the arguments she was trying to make, though maybe helpful background for some. I don’t think anybody seriously thought Moxie was trying to or had any chance of getting any criminal convictions thrown out, especially not anything concluded before the hack was public! So most of it was pretty moot. HN is well within its lane talking about the substantive points she was going for. And on those, I found her a bit heavy on appeals to “duh” like the following: > Basically, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” That is not generally how vulnerability disclosure works, and AFAIK, Cellebrite has not taken them up on the offer so far. This was not an attempt at responsible disclosure, nor was it a specific exploitable disclosure at all. It was a wake up call to everyone, her included, that law enforcement tech is just as shitty as every other kind of tech. Her ideas about how things generally work are not really relevant, but that was literally all she had to say about that. Then back to the perfectly good lawsplainer which formed the vast majority of this opinion piece. Also, what judges are going around being offended on someone else’s behalf, on the not-court-appropriate cutesy language used outside court in the course of vigorous public debate, by someone who is not even a party to the hypothetical proceedings she discussed? Yes, judges don’t like it when you get cute with them. We get it, you know judges, but this was not the same thing at all, the blog post was not a court filing. It just demonstrated the proposition that Cellebrite evidence was unreliable until proven otherwise. It said: “all ye who are affected by this, start your engines”. It certainly made her run around in circles trying to analyse the implications. That was the point.
feanaro 5y ago
I disagree with this. I think it's very important what tech people think about tech laws and, more generally, what people think about laws. After all, laws are here to protect what the people consider important. Credentials are not necessarily the most important factor here.
salawat 5y ago
Appeal to Authority. Just because you have credentials, does not mean you infallibly know your ass from your elbow. It means you know how to apply a process to an end, and can be relied upon to reproduce someones idea of that process. Meanwhile, real and substantive contributions come from those never priveleged with having someone else in a position to vouch for them. Let the facts and results speak for themselves. Which in this case, won't hapen til the first case gets exercised well. Regardless of how it resolves, everyone else has room to opine, as the law has stake held in it by all of us.
- dotBen 5y ago
  Appeal to Authority - "a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument" Absolutely, and you realize that when it comes to legal matters that's exactly why we have lawyers (like the OP post author) and why lawyers spend years becoming lawyers so we pay them stupid amounts of money to interpret and opine for us on what a judge (or jury) will think of a given case? And why we don't consult people who flip burgers or drive taxis what their opinion about the same case is. Where people are getting confused here is the difference between having an opinion on what you think legislation should be around evidence tampering (public policy) vs how a judge or court would decide on this specific issue given the laws as they are on the statute today (law). What the OP wrote about is about is this specific case. How lay-people in this thread think a court would decide on Moxie and Signal's actions, if bought to court, is frankly irrelevant and especially when arguing with someone who is highly qualified! That fact that people here don't get this is the very point I'm making - you're not lawyers. Matters of the law are all about Appeal to Authority, I don't understand what the problem is with that (have you never paid for a lawyer before??). Matters of public policy are for the public, there's a subtle difference. Sorry to be just replying to your thread salawat but this applies to most of the comments here.
  - knaik94 5y ago
    Laws aren't a black box that only lawyers and judges are allowed to discuss and interpret. The difference you're making doesn't make sense especially when you look at criminal law and the concept of having a jury. The fact that a significant criminal trial involving Signal, Cellebrite, and the CFAA would call in an expert witness also is worth remembering. The kind of expert witness that would be needed to break down and explain the "hack" and who also would visit this thread to read or comment. The situation hasn't been tested in court and no helpful precedent exists, otherwise it wouldn't really be something that needs a discussion.

by dotBen 5y ago

BoorishBears 5y ago

I expected the appeal to authority to be followed up with some counterpoint but no... No one needs to question the law portions of this to question the underlying premise. Saying things like "this is bad because Cellebrite is currently being used on rioters" right after you claim what Signal may or may not have done will have no effect on evidence is a flimsy argument you don't need a law degree to oppose. Ditto for implying Cellebrite should somehow be seen in a positive light because by... enabling and normalizing the invasion of privacy it... somehow preserves privacy? As if politicians aren't more likely to wave the successes of Cellebrite as exactly why backdoors should be required than the opposite? And even worse, wave the failures that naturally occur as reasons for backdoors?

knaik94 5y ago

Arguments and opinions should be up for discussion regardless of who the author is. No one is questioning the validity of the author's interpretation of the law itself. It sounds like you're making an appeal to authority rather than an actual point about the article. The discussion isn't about how a law is being interpreted. This blog article is about how the Signal article can be interpreted by a tech informed lay person vs a judge and the security theater surrounding it.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

It's sad that with all her credentials she still thinks the US is a regime which "respects the rule of law" while it sends billions yearly to Israel and Saudi Arabia, countries who clearly only care about repression and not at all any kind of law.

cormacrelf 5y ago

She framed it as a personal opinion from the very start, where she sought to impress upon us that she may never be hired again by Signal after this post. I thought in this case the in depth legal analysis didn’t add anything to the arguments she was trying to make, though maybe helpful background for some. I don’t think anybody seriously thought Moxie was trying to or had any chance of getting any criminal convictions thrown out, especially not anything concluded before the hack was public! So most of it was pretty moot. HN is well within its lane talking about the substantive points she was going for. And on those, I found her a bit heavy on appeals to “duh” like the following: > Basically, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” That is not generally how vulnerability disclosure works, and AFAIK, Cellebrite has not taken them up on the offer so far. This was not an attempt at responsible disclosure, nor was it a specific exploitable disclosure at all. It was a wake up call to everyone, her included, that law enforcement tech is just as shitty as every other kind of tech. Her ideas about how things generally work are not really relevant, but that was literally all she had to say about that. Then back to the perfectly good lawsplainer which formed the vast majority of this opinion piece. Also, what judges are going around being offended on someone else’s behalf, on the not-court-appropriate cutesy language used outside court in the course of vigorous public debate, by someone who is not even a party to the hypothetical proceedings she discussed? Yes, judges don’t like it when you get cute with them. We get it, you know judges, but this was not the same thing at all, the blog post was not a court filing. It just demonstrated the proposition that Cellebrite evidence was unreliable until proven otherwise. It said: “all ye who are affected by this, start your engines”. It certainly made her run around in circles trying to analyse the implications. That was the point.

feanaro 5y ago

I disagree with this. I think it's very important what tech people think about tech laws and, more generally, what people think about laws. After all, laws are here to protect what the people consider important. Credentials are not necessarily the most important factor here.

salawat 5y ago

Appeal to Authority. Just because you have credentials, does not mean you infallibly know your ass from your elbow. It means you know how to apply a process to an end, and can be relied upon to reproduce someones idea of that process. Meanwhile, real and substantive contributions come from those never priveleged with having someone else in a position to vouch for them. Let the facts and results speak for themselves. Which in this case, won't hapen til the first case gets exercised well. Regardless of how it resolves, everyone else has room to opine, as the law has stake held in it by all of us.

dotBen 5y ago
Appeal to Authority - "a form of argument in which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to support an argument" Absolutely, and you realize that when it comes to legal matters that's exactly why we have lawyers (like the OP post author) and why lawyers spend years becoming lawyers so we pay them stupid amounts of money to interpret and opine for us on what a judge (or jury) will think of a given case? And why we don't consult people who flip burgers or drive taxis what their opinion about the same case is. Where people are getting confused here is the difference between having an opinion on what you think legislation should be around evidence tampering (public policy) vs how a judge or court would decide on this specific issue given the laws as they are on the statute today (law). What the OP wrote about is about is this specific case. How lay-people in this thread think a court would decide on Moxie and Signal's actions, if bought to court, is frankly irrelevant and especially when arguing with someone who is highly qualified! That fact that people here don't get this is the very point I'm making - you're not lawyers. Matters of the law are all about Appeal to Authority, I don't understand what the problem is with that (have you never paid for a lawyer before??). Matters of public policy are for the public, there's a subtle difference. Sorry to be just replying to your thread salawat but this applies to most of the comments here.
- knaik94 5y ago
  Laws aren't a black box that only lawyers and judges are allowed to discuss and interpret. The difference you're making doesn't make sense especially when you look at criminal law and the concept of having a jury. The fact that a significant criminal trial involving Signal, Cellebrite, and the CFAA would call in an expert witness also is worth remembering. The kind of expert witness that would be needed to break down and explain the "hack" and who also would visit this thread to read or comment. The situation hasn't been tested in court and no helpful precedent exists, otherwise it wouldn't really be something that needs a discussion.