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Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company

138 points by snomad 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago
The argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes per se negligence seems like a stretch. For spies to exist at all, they need to fool whatever supervision is in place. For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. When a warbler feeds a cuckoo chick and lets his own chicks starve, is that because he's a bad parent who could be fixed with a lawsuit, or is it just a fact about the ecosystem?
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  I get what you’re saying, but one way or another personal data twitter was entrusted with was leaked and people were murdered as a result. I don’t know if twitter was actually negligent here, but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit. If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe. Otherwise, no. We already know that Twitter specifically tried to deal with one of these spies when he came to their attention, shortly before he escaped. There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. Lawsuits aren't cost-free; the off-chance that, against all expectations, you might find something that almost definitely isn't there is not a good reason to entertain one.
    - hluska 5y ago
      If Twitter could assess penalties this wouldn’t be a legal system. Courts and judges assess penalties. Companies can sue for damages but they don’t assess penalties. With all due respect, this is the second ignorant thing you’ve said on this article. You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please stop…
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        Sorry, I responded to "this is a good idea" with "in case of X, it might be, but in reality, it isn't", and you think "but X is not true" undermines that argument?
        hluska 5y ago
        Look, if you’re going to engage with me, cut the shit. You wrote: “If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe.” If Twitter could assess a huge penalty, it would violate absolutely every single tenet of both the western justice system and all principles of natural justice. Companies don’t get to assess penalties when they think they’ve been wrong. Companies can sue for damages and Twitter has the right to do that here. However, companies don’t assess damages - JUDGES DO! This is so simple that I can’t believe I just had to explain it on Hacker News. Tune in next time, when we do “Hello world” in Python.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        There's nothing unusual about private parties being able to assess penalties against other private parties. Your bank does it all the time. It does not make a mockery of the justice system. The justice system frequently does make a mockery of the justice system by assessing penalties, such as when someone is arrested, proves to have been someone other than the target, and then gets charged for the time they spent in jail. If a failed frivolous lawsuit against Twitter automatically gave Twitter a claim on the plaintiff's assets, that would in fact not violate every tenet of the western justice system, nor would it violate all principles of natural justice. It is a system that has obtained elsewhere and that people frequently advocate for.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > There's nothing unusual about private parties being able to assess penalties against other private parties Absent a contract, there is, and even with a contract there are limits. > Your bank does it all the time. Within a contractual relation and governed by the contract, sure. But that's not what you are talking about. > It does not make a mockery of the justice system. Outside of the bounds of contract, it would, as it would amount to private parties making and adjudicating public law. > If a failed frivolous lawsuit against Twitter automatically gave Twitter a claim on the plaintiff's assets, that would in fact not violate every tenet of the western justice system, Yes, it would. Now, if merely a failed lawsuit did, it might not, as the failure itself is the conclusion of an adjudication, leaving no private determination to be made. > It is a system that has obtained elsewhere and that people frequently advocate for. No, its not, nor is it Twitter assessing a penalty. Loser pays is civil lawsuits is a thing, but it involves the court, not the offended party, assessing the penalty. Loser pays for frivolous lawsuits only (but not all failed lawsuits) is also a thing, and is common in US jurisdictions, but requires a separate court determination that the claim was frivolous as well as the court assessing damages.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. Why do they ask for personal information in the first place? Why are DM messages not e2e-encrypted? That's plenty of wrong already. If you're building a public/global microblogging platform, enable nicknames for all and never ask for any personal information. If you're building a private messenger, enable e2e encryption (or at least at-rest inbox encryption). If you're building both, and ignoring all security best practices, and encouraging people to give away their phone numbers, i would hold you responsible to any harm that comes their way because of this.
- quartesixte 5y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Sometimes you will lose the cat and mouse game and often the spies just have a huge upper hand on you.
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  I have only read the article and not the text of the legal complaint, but according to the article, he is specifically not basing his complaint on them being a victim of espionage and is making more specific allegations: > "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint. I have no idea if their allegations are correct, but the argument you're dismissing is explicitly not what they're saying.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    The allegation you quote is not an espionage allegation. It's saying that because this activist's Twitter account received unfavorable treatment from Twitter, we should assume that the unfavorable treatment of his account is evidence that Twitter is an arm of the Saudi government, and therefore the separate incident involving espionage must have happened with Twitter's cooperation or at least without Twitter's objection. Note that the quoted allegation does not even allege any misconduct on Twitter's part! The only purpose is to ask you to draw an adverse inference about what Twitter was thinking when they became the victim of espionage.
    - jkaplowitz 5y ago
      I didn't say it was an espionage allegation. It's quite possibly not. The quote alleges complicity among other terms. I don't know if that's legally a type of misconduct - my guess is that the legal terms for both are more precise and this is just the press release version. But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Not necessarily in espionage specifically.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Let's say this guy's Twitter account was shut down because Mohammed bin Salman personally called Jack Dorsey and asked for a favor. That would be complicity, in shutting down the Twitter account. It would not be complicity in espionage.
- hluska 5y ago
  Yes, the argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes negligence is a stretch. However, that’s not what Mr. Al-Ahmed’s suit alleges - it alleges they were victims of espionage because of their negligence. I have a suggestion. In the future, keep the analogies to yourself and talk about facts.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  I imagine the argument is that twitter was negligent in allowing employees access to the security tool this guy used to track Saudi dissidents without oversight and shouldn't have warned him that the FBI was investigating him?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Not even close: > The claim filed Thursday in California alleges [among other things] that Twitter should have known that these two men were unfit employees
- vmception 5y ago
  eh they were indicted by the Federal Government and so the civil suit by this person has a lot of ammunition already that they otherwise would not have mayyybe they went amateur hour with the negligence angle, but maybe they didn't
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. Well it is! Tech companies should not act as surveillance/intelligence companies: stop gathering personal info on people, and suddenly you've raised the bar considerably for spies to harm your users. Sure, an insider spy could probably still setup a special-cased JS payload to infect a specific user, but that's more convoluted and more easily detected during review, compared to simply accessing one of the many troves of data companies keep on their users.
- curryst 5y ago
  I think that depends on the organization we're talking about. There exist organizations where spies getting in probably should be per se negligence. The CIA and NSA are indisputably in this list. We just don't punish them via lawsuits, because there are better mechanisms for public groups. The question at hand is whether Twitter belongs in that group. In the general case, I tend to believe no. Twitter has no deterministic means to tell whether a candidate is a risk or not, and they cannot be held liable for actions they couldn't know were illegal. I do believe they can be held responsible for espionage in the event that they knowingly hired a spy, which seems to be the case here. If the government believes it is important to national security to prevent Twitter from even unknowingly hiring spies, I think the onus is on the government to nationalize whatever parts need protecting. In this case, they could probably just nationalize the background check portion via security clearances. It doesn't sound like we're at that point, though.
onionisafruit 5y ago
Whether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  It's also pretty much impossible for a big tech company to filter against this during hiring without risking catastrophic discrimination suits.
  - _8j50 5y ago
    Discrimination is for protected classes.
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    That’s the big problem. It’s absolutely insane that tech companies can’t keep foreign nationals and people with foreign ties from sensitive positions.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - vagrantJin 5y ago
      Please elaborate on what the insanity is.
    - tester34 5y ago
      You're kinda right, but on the other hand how I'll get visa and steal some faamg jobs if they'll not accept foreigners? /s ok, just kidding, now serious take: US population: 330kk Rest of the World: 8kkk Delta (8kkk-330kk) Even if we assume that distribution of highly skilled people is not uniform (lack of decent higher edu places, harder access to computers/internet) then you still lose shitton of outliers edit. ops I misread.
arisAlexis 5y ago
Alternative title could be: Twitter sued for discrimination and low personel diversity
- graperapist1480 5y ago
  you can just sue for discrimination though? That is common. It is considered legally dangerous to have an all white (or, less fantastically, 30% Jew 30% Asian 20% white 0% hispanicblack), but the mode of enforcement would be employment or hiring discrimination, not this...
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    "Discrimination" is what sensible people do all the time. It means "distinguishing things that are different", and if you don't discriminate, bad stuff is likely to happen. For example, it can be bad for your digestion if you fail to discriminate between a hamburger and a house-brick.
    - graperapist1480 5y ago
      yeah I’d rather hire 7 skilled and well oiled Jews than an “equal opportunity” ratio mixture of 4 whites : 1 black. but there is a “civil rights act” and a lot of creative, anti-hegemonic jurisprudence enduring that my militant ascetic coding-Shtel will never be a reality. :(
      - gremIin 5y ago
        Your comments read like someone who just did a large amount of drugs. All over the place.
SMVS 5y ago
The tech industry is chock full of spies working for one side or the other. FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning. The only bullshit here is targeting KSA, when everyone's involved.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  Why do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Because all of Silicon Valley has a strong/long history with the military industrial complex and various intelligence services? It's not exactly a secret... Now take a look at how many ex-intelligence run tech companies (may i remind you that former NSA head is on Amazon board?) and how many tech companies happily collaborate with intelligence services (Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir).
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    PRISM would seem to support that idea.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Front suggests secret ownership/control. More likely is that they are simply compelled by the state to spy, willingly or not.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        How is "the state secretly compels them to do things" different from "they are secretly controlled by the state"?
        d23 5y ago
        As another commenter suggested: it's absurd beyond parody and a flagrant abuse of language to conflate being a "front" with being compelled by a third party (especially one with legal authority) to do some action(s). Being a "front" suggests an entire business model created by and built around propping up that third party such that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level.
rendall 5y ago
> ...to appease a neigh beneficial owner... Has anyone seen this use of neigh before? Is it a legal term? What does it mean?
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  Huh, that’s a new one to me. I found a couple of usages in academic publications, but they don’t give me any more context as to meaning. That leads me to believe that it’s not a legal term. I can’t find any meaning other than the “sound a horse makes” in any dictionary, either. ETA: Apparently, the old English “nēah” meant “near”. That seems to be the the root of the work “neighbor”. Interestingly, it looks like “neigh” (like a horse) and “neighbor” both came into use in English in the 12th Century. Perhaps coincidental.
- wpearse 5y ago
  née, perhaps? Possibly something for r/BoneAppleTea
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Perhaps the OP meant "nigh", which is archaic, and means the same as "near". Even then, "nigh beneficial owner" and "near beneficial owner" are awkward constructions that would have broken the continuity of my reading comprehension. But surely one is or is not a "beneficial owner". Being nearly a beneficial owner is the same as not being a beneficial owner at all.
  - curryst 5y ago
    I think "nigh" is meant to modify "owner", not "beneficial". I think the lawyer saying is saying that the KSA figuratively owns Twitter, and that Twitter benefits from that relationship. Golden handcuffs, basically. That is the most awkward phrasing I've seen in a long time. I'm not even sure it's grammatically correct. I would've expected "beneficial nigh-owner" or something like that.
mickjagger 5y ago
The biggest lesson here is the threat is within, but most security strategies focus on the concept of external threat.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  That's one of the teachings of feminist privacy classes, that the biggest threats are usually very close to you, such as a jealous lover setting up spyware on your phone to track your movements.
vadfa 5y ago
The dangers of diverse hiring.

138 points by snomad 5y ago

The argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes per se negligence seems like a stretch. For spies to exist at all, they need to fool whatever supervision is in place. For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. When a warbler feeds a cuckoo chick and lets his own chicks starve, is that because he's a bad parent who could be fixed with a lawsuit, or is it just a fact about the ecosystem?

onionisafruit 5y ago
I get what you’re saying, but one way or another personal data twitter was entrusted with was leaked and people were murdered as a result. I don’t know if twitter was actually negligent here, but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit. If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe. Otherwise, no. We already know that Twitter specifically tried to deal with one of these spies when he came to their attention, shortly before he escaped. There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. Lawsuits aren't cost-free; the off-chance that, against all expectations, you might find something that almost definitely isn't there is not a good reason to entertain one.
  - hluska 5y ago
    If Twitter could assess penalties this wouldn’t be a legal system. Courts and judges assess penalties. Companies can sue for damages but they don’t assess penalties. With all due respect, this is the second ignorant thing you’ve said on this article. You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please stop…
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Sorry, I responded to "this is a good idea" with "in case of X, it might be, but in reality, it isn't", and you think "but X is not true" undermines that argument?
      - hluska 5y ago
        Look, if you’re going to engage with me, cut the shit. You wrote: “If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe.” If Twitter could assess a huge penalty, it would violate absolutely every single tenet of both the western justice system and all principles of natural justice. Companies don’t get to assess penalties when they think they’ve been wrong. Companies can sue for damages and Twitter has the right to do that here. However, companies don’t assess damages - JUDGES DO! This is so simple that I can’t believe I just had to explain it on Hacker News. Tune in next time, when we do “Hello world” in Python.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        There's nothing unusual about private parties being able to assess penalties against other private parties. Your bank does it all the time. It does not make a mockery of the justice system. The justice system frequently does make a mockery of the justice system by assessing penalties, such as when someone is arrested, proves to have been someone other than the target, and then gets charged for the time they spent in jail. If a failed frivolous lawsuit against Twitter automatically gave Twitter a claim on the plaintiff's assets, that would in fact not violate every tenet of the western justice system, nor would it violate all principles of natural justice. It is a system that has obtained elsewhere and that people frequently advocate for.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > There's nothing unusual about private parties being able to assess penalties against other private parties Absent a contract, there is, and even with a contract there are limits. > Your bank does it all the time. Within a contractual relation and governed by the contract, sure. But that's not what you are talking about. > It does not make a mockery of the justice system. Outside of the bounds of contract, it would, as it would amount to private parties making and adjudicating public law. > If a failed frivolous lawsuit against Twitter automatically gave Twitter a claim on the plaintiff's assets, that would in fact not violate every tenet of the western justice system, Yes, it would. Now, if merely a failed lawsuit did, it might not, as the failure itself is the conclusion of an adjudication, leaving no private determination to be made. > It is a system that has obtained elsewhere and that people frequently advocate for. No, its not, nor is it Twitter assessing a penalty. Loser pays is civil lawsuits is a thing, but it involves the court, not the offended party, assessing the penalty. Loser pays for frivolous lawsuits only (but not all failed lawsuits) is also a thing, and is common in US jurisdictions, but requires a separate court determination that the claim was frivolous as well as the court assessing damages.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. Why do they ask for personal information in the first place? Why are DM messages not e2e-encrypted? That's plenty of wrong already. If you're building a public/global microblogging platform, enable nicknames for all and never ask for any personal information. If you're building a private messenger, enable e2e encryption (or at least at-rest inbox encryption). If you're building both, and ignoring all security best practices, and encouraging people to give away their phone numbers, i would hold you responsible to any harm that comes their way because of this.
quartesixte 5y ago
My thoughts exactly. Sometimes you will lose the cat and mouse game and often the spies just have a huge upper hand on you.
jkaplowitz 5y ago
I have only read the article and not the text of the legal complaint, but according to the article, he is specifically not basing his complaint on them being a victim of espionage and is making more specific allegations: > "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint. I have no idea if their allegations are correct, but the argument you're dismissing is explicitly not what they're saying.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  The allegation you quote is not an espionage allegation. It's saying that because this activist's Twitter account received unfavorable treatment from Twitter, we should assume that the unfavorable treatment of his account is evidence that Twitter is an arm of the Saudi government, and therefore the separate incident involving espionage must have happened with Twitter's cooperation or at least without Twitter's objection. Note that the quoted allegation does not even allege any misconduct on Twitter's part! The only purpose is to ask you to draw an adverse inference about what Twitter was thinking when they became the victim of espionage.
  - jkaplowitz 5y ago
    I didn't say it was an espionage allegation. It's quite possibly not. The quote alleges complicity among other terms. I don't know if that's legally a type of misconduct - my guess is that the legal terms for both are more precise and this is just the press release version. But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Not necessarily in espionage specifically.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > But in everyday parlance, calling someone complicit does suggest some active form of inappropriate knowing participation in something bad. Let's say this guy's Twitter account was shut down because Mohammed bin Salman personally called Jack Dorsey and asked for a favor. That would be complicity, in shutting down the Twitter account. It would not be complicity in espionage.
hluska 5y ago
Yes, the argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes negligence is a stretch. However, that’s not what Mr. Al-Ahmed’s suit alleges - it alleges they were victims of espionage because of their negligence. I have a suggestion. In the future, keep the analogies to yourself and talk about facts.
colinmhayes 5y ago
I imagine the argument is that twitter was negligent in allowing employees access to the security tool this guy used to track Saudi dissidents without oversight and shouldn't have warned him that the FBI was investigating him?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Not even close: > The claim filed Thursday in California alleges [among other things] that Twitter should have known that these two men were unfit employees
vmception 5y ago
eh they were indicted by the Federal Government and so the civil suit by this person has a lot of ammunition already that they otherwise would not have mayyybe they went amateur hour with the negligence angle, but maybe they didn't
southerntofu 5y ago
> For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. Well it is! Tech companies should not act as surveillance/intelligence companies: stop gathering personal info on people, and suddenly you've raised the bar considerably for spies to harm your users. Sure, an insider spy could probably still setup a special-cased JS payload to infect a specific user, but that's more convoluted and more easily detected during review, compared to simply accessing one of the many troves of data companies keep on their users.
curryst 5y ago
I think that depends on the organization we're talking about. There exist organizations where spies getting in probably should be per se negligence. The CIA and NSA are indisputably in this list. We just don't punish them via lawsuits, because there are better mechanisms for public groups. The question at hand is whether Twitter belongs in that group. In the general case, I tend to believe no. Twitter has no deterministic means to tell whether a candidate is a risk or not, and they cannot be held liable for actions they couldn't know were illegal. I do believe they can be held responsible for espionage in the event that they knowingly hired a spy, which seems to be the case here. If the government believes it is important to national security to prevent Twitter from even unknowingly hiring spies, I think the onus is on the government to nationalize whatever parts need protecting. In this case, they could probably just nationalize the background check portion via security clearances. It doesn't sound like we're at that point, though.

onionisafruit 5y ago

Whether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.

bpodgursky 5y ago
It's also pretty much impossible for a big tech company to filter against this during hiring without risking catastrophic discrimination suits.
- _8j50 5y ago
  Discrimination is for protected classes.
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  That’s the big problem. It’s absolutely insane that tech companies can’t keep foreign nationals and people with foreign ties from sensitive positions.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    Please elaborate on what the insanity is.
  - tester34 5y ago
    You're kinda right, but on the other hand how I'll get visa and steal some faamg jobs if they'll not accept foreigners? /s ok, just kidding, now serious take: US population: 330kk Rest of the World: 8kkk Delta (8kkk-330kk) Even if we assume that distribution of highly skilled people is not uniform (lack of decent higher edu places, harder access to computers/internet) then you still lose shitton of outliers edit. ops I misread.

arisAlexis 5y ago

Alternative title could be: Twitter sued for discrimination and low personel diversity

graperapist1480 5y ago
you can just sue for discrimination though? That is common. It is considered legally dangerous to have an all white (or, less fantastically, 30% Jew 30% Asian 20% white 0% hispanicblack), but the mode of enforcement would be employment or hiring discrimination, not this...
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  "Discrimination" is what sensible people do all the time. It means "distinguishing things that are different", and if you don't discriminate, bad stuff is likely to happen. For example, it can be bad for your digestion if you fail to discriminate between a hamburger and a house-brick.
  - graperapist1480 5y ago
    yeah I’d rather hire 7 skilled and well oiled Jews than an “equal opportunity” ratio mixture of 4 whites : 1 black. but there is a “civil rights act” and a lot of creative, anti-hegemonic jurisprudence enduring that my militant ascetic coding-Shtel will never be a reality. :(
    - gremIin 5y ago
      Your comments read like someone who just did a large amount of drugs. All over the place.

SMVS 5y ago

The tech industry is chock full of spies working for one side or the other. FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning. The only bullshit here is targeting KSA, when everyone's involved.

l33t2328 5y ago
Why do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Because all of Silicon Valley has a strong/long history with the military industrial complex and various intelligence services? It's not exactly a secret... Now take a look at how many ex-intelligence run tech companies (may i remind you that former NSA head is on Amazon board?) and how many tech companies happily collaborate with intelligence services (Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir).
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  PRISM would seem to support that idea.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Front suggests secret ownership/control. More likely is that they are simply compelled by the state to spy, willingly or not.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      How is "the state secretly compels them to do things" different from "they are secretly controlled by the state"?
      - d23 5y ago
        As another commenter suggested: it's absurd beyond parody and a flagrant abuse of language to conflate being a "front" with being compelled by a third party (especially one with legal authority) to do some action(s). Being a "front" suggests an entire business model created by and built around propping up that third party such that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level.

rendall 5y ago

> ...to appease a neigh beneficial owner... Has anyone seen this use of neigh before? Is it a legal term? What does it mean?

Ancapistani 5y ago
Huh, that’s a new one to me. I found a couple of usages in academic publications, but they don’t give me any more context as to meaning. That leads me to believe that it’s not a legal term. I can’t find any meaning other than the “sound a horse makes” in any dictionary, either. ETA: Apparently, the old English “nēah” meant “near”. That seems to be the the root of the work “neighbor”. Interestingly, it looks like “neigh” (like a horse) and “neighbor” both came into use in English in the 12th Century. Perhaps coincidental.
wpearse 5y ago
née, perhaps? Possibly something for r/BoneAppleTea
denton-scratch 5y ago
Perhaps the OP meant "nigh", which is archaic, and means the same as "near". Even then, "nigh beneficial owner" and "near beneficial owner" are awkward constructions that would have broken the continuity of my reading comprehension. But surely one is or is not a "beneficial owner". Being nearly a beneficial owner is the same as not being a beneficial owner at all.
- curryst 5y ago
  I think "nigh" is meant to modify "owner", not "beneficial". I think the lawyer saying is saying that the KSA figuratively owns Twitter, and that Twitter benefits from that relationship. Golden handcuffs, basically. That is the most awkward phrasing I've seen in a long time. I'm not even sure it's grammatically correct. I would've expected "beneficial nigh-owner" or something like that.

mickjagger 5y ago

The biggest lesson here is the threat is within, but most security strategies focus on the concept of external threat.

southerntofu 5y ago
That's one of the teachings of feminist privacy classes, that the biggest threats are usually very close to you, such as a jealous lover setting up spyware on your phone to track your movements.

vadfa 5y ago

The dangers of diverse hiring.