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Zelensky Compound NDA
- c3534l 5y agoIIRC, two American Senators shared photos from their zoom call with Zelensky on Twitter. Cruz being one of them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KarlKemp 5y agoI hate the guy just as much as anyone can, but I would consider the possibility that they staged a photo op and cleared it for release.
- c3534l 5y agoNo, I brought it up specifically because they were specifically told not to do that and signed the NDA. He was heavily criticized by other members of congress for endangering Zelensky.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoWhy would you consider that possibility when it is known not to be true? Those are not the kinds of possibilities it makes any sense to consider.
- deepsun 5y agoNo, other senators said that they were explicitly asked by Ukrainian Ambassador to not share anything on social media. Cruz and Rubio then just went and shared.
- l33t2328 5y agoIs it at all possible that other senators were asked to not share anything but that the two people you mentioned made some special arrangement, perhaps to drum up American popular support?
- JustResign 5y agoNever assume Ted Cruz is operating in good faith.
- abofh 5y agoNo - the two don't have popular support in America, so it's unlikely they were 'specially selected' to drum up support.
- tablespoon 5y ago> Is it at all possible that other senators were asked to not share anything but that the two people you mentioned made some special arrangement, perhaps to drum up American popular support? No, that idea doesn't pass the smell test. They're minority party representatives, and my understanding is Cruz (at least) has a reputation for being obnoxious and selfish, even among his co-partisans. There's no reason to think those two would get some kind of special permission, and plenty of reason to think they were being careless and/or selfish.
- deepsun 5y agoLol no :) I lived in both Ukraine and US. They barely know what "senator" even means, yet alone know their names. Most people cannot say how many major political parties there are in US, they have their own parties. I'm pretty sure even Ukrainian president doesn't really care about US internal politics, only about external.
- tablespoon 5y ago> I'm pretty sure even Ukrainian president doesn't really care about US internal politics, only about external. Ukrainian people: maybe; Ukrainian president: absolutely not (and there's was a great example of how the two can intersect just a couple of years ago). An understanding of a country's internal politics is vital to understanding, predicting, and influencing its external politics.
- l33t2328 5y agoYou misunderstood me. I meant support in the US for the Ukraine cause. A smart Ukranian politician would consider American sentiment since they want our help
- captainmuon 5y agoYou might be confusing it with this photo here, as I did initially: https://time.com/6170256/blinken-austin-visit-kyiv-ukraine https://time.com/6170256/blinken-austin-visit-kyiv-ukraine Which was indeed a staged photo. But in this case, Cruz and Rubio shared a picture of their screens on Twitter, while on a call, revealling at the very least that Zelenskyy was on a video call at that moment in time.
- c3534l 5y agoI'm not: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/597018-two-gop-senators-share-photos-from-zoom-call-with-zelensky-despite-requests/ https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/597018-two-gop-senators-... (however, I was confusing Cruz for Rubio)
- helge9210 5y ago> I don’t know who would enforce the NDAs for Zelensky’s bunker Leaking this information would be enforced by court under "Leaking the state secrets". I'm not a lawyer, but if I remember correctly, in Ukraine you can't be prosecuted for leaking the secret information unless it's clearly labeled as secret and you signed a consent to access it. If you don't sign, you are not supposed to get access. So this is the case, where to access the secret bunker they have to know what is the secret and sign they understand the implications. Edit: in some cases before the war it was better to not consent. This would limit access to certain data, but would also give more freedom in case you want to travel or work abroad.
- baybal2 5y ago
- formerly_proven 5y agoIsn't this exactly the right use case for an NDA? Making sure everyone understands what's secret and what isn't?
- jdrc 5y agogiven that it's impossible to enforce it, no. but it s a great way to communicate a message
- doikor 5y ago> given that it's impossible to enforce it For some foreign journalist or diplomat sure but against a local journalist, maintenance crew, cleaner, etc who all most likely sign the exact same NDA for sure Ukraine can enforce it if the person is unable to escape the country (which for males aged 18 to 65 is really hard at the moment for example) edit: Also as a journalist if you actually do leak such information after signing a piece of paper saying you would not who would actually trust you with any kind of secret information in the future?
- jdrc 5y agoif you are a journalist and leak out endangering information you should never be trusted again, with or without an NDA
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- b112 5y agoYet the NDA gives additional guideance as to what is sensitive.
- jdrc 5y agoFor Ukrainian willingly endangering the pres would amount to treason
- ch_123 5y agoI suspect many potential visitors would appreciate the need to maintain secrecy, but not appreciate just how much needs to be made secret. For example - the article refers to food. This may seem like an innocuous detail, but could allow an adversary to poison the food before its delivered to the bunker. The NDA servers to spell out exactly how little a visitor should tell the outside world.
- kemitchell 5y agoThat’s an important point that I didn’t bring up in my post. The story mentions specific items of secrecy. But most NDA forms provided by lawyers speak only in broad generalizations about what information must be kept confidential. The best terms would be tailored to the specific situation. But the cost of legal help is high and people’s empowerment to write for themselves is low.
- bombcar 5y agoEven just afterwards saying “they served Pepsi with lemon” leaks information - Pepsi and lemon are both available to the bunker, which may be enough to determine the area it is in, if you know that only one shipment of Pepsi got through.
- throwaway4good 5y agoZelensky is going to do a civil lawsuit if he looses the war ... makes sense.
- konart 5y agoI find it really hard to believe Ukraine can loose this war though.
- cargotoml 5y ago
- throwaway4good 5y agoThat is another discussion; this is looking more like a war with Russia where the outcome the west is pursuing is the end of Russia as it is known today. Probably not going to be over that quickly. Anyway. An NDA is silly and unnecessary when you have far more powerful laws governing state secrets, treason etc. than anything under civil law.
- simonh 5y agoI agree with the other comments that this NDA serves a very useful purpose, by detailing all the non obvious forms of information that could be a risk, impressing on people the seriousness of keeping that information confidential, and ensuring they have no excuse to claim they were not fully informed. It also provides a route to prosecute someone who might be caught sharing information they shouldn’t maliciously, but where treason etc could not be proved.
- hnaccount_rng 5y agoI think you overestimate the amount of due process that will be applied in this kind of situation...
- simonh 5y ago
- paganel 5y agoMost probably the Russians already know where the bunker is located, the same as the Ukrainians know where Putin is at any one moment, the ties between the Russians and the Ukrainians are so mingled that it's impossible for spies/undercover agents not to exist on both sides, close to the highest levels. It's just that the Russians blowing up Zelensky's bunker would not help them all that much, at least for now. I'd say the inverse is also true, killing Putin at this exact moment won't bring peace and a Russian surrender (whatever that might mean) immediately.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- simonh 5y agoI’m not sure about that. I don’t see how anyone else in Russia has a personal stake in this war. The problem is Putin being killed is not the same as Putin dropping dead. Whoever took over would have an imperative to take vengeance on whoever killed Putin, just on general principle, so it very much depends how it was done, who did it and what information was out about that.
- paganel 5y agoThe "fortress under siege" mantra has had a long life in Russia (and in now the former USSR), maybe the 1990s were a short reprieve in that respect (when parts of the Russian elites genuinely wanted to integrate the Western institutions) but generally speaking I'd say that ever since 1917 most of the Russian elites have seen the outside world as "them", as the "other that wants us down". It's not a "one man thing". This "hitlerification" of Putin hides a lot of facts on the ground, to the detriment of the West, which is why maybe they've dialed that discourse down a little in the last two weeks or so.
- simonh 5y agoI agree the mind set is there, but this particular war is a debacle. With Putin gone they might find it a lot easier to disentangle from it.
- tokai 5y agoHow is this less enforceable that any other kind legal issues involving non-citizens? You ask to get them extradited. Ukraine is a member of Interpol.
- CraigRood 5y agoI'm really not a lawyer but would any domestic US law help protect? Given that Ukraine is at war, it is a state secret, and Ukraine is friendly?
- deepsun 5y agoSorry cannot see why the law should be US? Don't see how US stance to Ukraine is relevant to court prosecution. Ukraine has pretty functional courts, and during martial law it's even faster to prosecute.
- johnson98 5y ago[flagged]
- hnbad 5y agoSorry to rant about the presentation rather than the content, but this blog is another great example for horribly inaccessible typography. Unlike other sites I've seen linked on HN this one uses a reasonable body font size of 16px, i.e. the browser default font size. However it uses a font that at 16px renders as the equivalent of the Windows default sans-serif font at 14px. What's worse, block quotes are rendered at a calculated 13.6px, which makes it the equivalent of the default font at a minute 11px! I know most HN users will likely not care about this as HN comments are set to a mere 12px (making HN the only site on the web I regularly visit that I have to zoom in to at least 150% to use comfortably) but this just borders on cruelty. It's not even good from an aesthetics point of view as at a fixed width of roughly 30rem (working out to roughly 70 characters per line) the article occupies less than 1/3rd of the screen. There's clearly some intent behind the design as it uses a non-standard font and makes other seemingly deliberate choices but every choice seemingly just compounded on making the site harder to look at.
- kemitchell 5y agoBlog author here. I appreciate this comment. For many years, I did set font-size. And now I can't exactly remember why I stopped. Taking a look at some browser previews across OS'es and and browsers, I do see that it's too small. I'll bump it.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoIt may only be a ceremony but in case you never met a human before, ceremony is a non-trivial thing with them. It procuces real effects which matter. Nobody thinks a document protects a president from a spy or assasin directly. Obviously a spy will sign an nda without blinking. But the document and the ceremony around it absolutely does produce a real world effect on everyone else, and one that matters, both in explicitly defining things that you absolutely can not leave up to most people's simple judgement, and in getting them to classify what this document says differently than the 5 different terms of service they probably agreed to that week. Enforcement is almost the dumbest aspect to even talk about. The threat of enforcement (in this case) is a token. But that does not make the formality a token. And even the threat of enforcement is more than a token for most of the people involved, since they are all local. It's only a token for the exception case of a visitor.
- jacquesm 5y agoGiven that a Dutch journalist had to have spelled out to him what exactly is meant by not giving targeting information in near real time to the Russians I can totally see the need for this. Some people are too dumb to appreciate the effects of their actions and will through stupidity (often hard to tell from malice) create serious problems in the pursuit of their personal goals.
- dgellow 5y agoDo you have a source? Not that I’m doubting you, just curious
- jacquesm 5y agoSure: https://nltimes.nl/2022/04/04/dutch-journalist-expelled-ukraine-sharing-state-secrets-report https://nltimes.nl/2022/04/04/dutch-journalist-expelled-ukra... He was asked politely first to remove the content, refused because 'it was his right', then was asked officially, still refused, then was arrested and expelled from the country after his Ukrainian press accreditation was revoked. His employer claims that they did not know that this was forbidden, whereas war zone journalism 101 is pretty much 'don't share targeting info with the enemy'. The rocket attack that he covered has missed their intended target and within minutes he put a bunch of pictures online of where they had landed. Pretty bad episode, and ND (the newspaper he worked for) lost a ton of credibility with their positioning around this, they should have just admitted their mistake and move on, instead they focus on how the guy was treated. As far as I'm concerned he was pretty lucky, they could have easily believed he was spying for the Russians directly rather than just being monumentally stupid. I guess he couldn't wait to get his War Photo prize or something to that effect.
- zx85wes 5y agoPlacing him in chokehold and putting a gun to his head is a bit extreme, no? Security people seizing journalists' phones and deleting pictures seems to be pretty much routine. https://twitter.com/sethharpesq/status/1519849084286386177#m https://twitter.com/sethharpesq/status/1519849084286386177#m
- aaron695 5y ago[dead]
- gumby 5y agoWhat a strange position for a lawyer to take. Contracts primarily keep honest people honest: hey, we agree to do these things, and if either of us is unsure we can look back and see what we agreed to. If you don’t agree up front, don’t sign.* And NDAs have plenty of value (oh, I can’t talk about what I’m working on? Good thing you let me know!). Yes, they can also be abusive and that is worth addressing, but they can also enable a lot of valuable things. * in some cases, such as employment, this kind of negotiation isn’t meaningfully possible, which is where legislation is useful.