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re: your edit - My downvote was to indicate that I reject your implication that there are legitimate reasons to keep his communications with government officia

by catapart 11mo ago

re: your edit - My downvote was to indicate that I reject your implication that there are legitimate reasons to keep his communications with government officials private. "Government" is, in most instances, replaceable with "Public". If you don't want your private business to be public knowledge, do not do business with the public. And if you do business with the public, expect that business to be public. There are mechanisms to protect "private" information that do not require government secrecy or redactions. Private businesses use them all the time. They are fallible, sure, but so is everything. More importantly, they are subject to subpoena and other legal remedies so they can be made public if necessary, but they are otherwise private (unlike email). And no, it doesn't matter to me what levels of harm can be done by the lack of secrecy; that's not a reason to be secret, that's a reason to not provide so much harm exposure. Government should be minimizing risk, not providing mechanisms that engender it. Besides, if my refusal to show ID to a cop with no RAS can still get me arrested, obviously the state understands the law as a "do the bad thing, sort it out later" kind of setup. So show us the emails and let's start working to fix the fallout.

notahacker 11mo ago
Thanks for explaining the downvote. But the position that because an institution works on behalf of the public, every communication it receives should be public seems naive. The entire publicly funded criminal justice service depends on secrecy to function, for example. Similarly, the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory or how to build a Falcon 9 any more than it needs to know the identities of whistleblowers, and if you don't redact that information, you don't get people blowing whistles or sharing their expansion plans with governors or IP with NASA. Without the ability to deliver suitcases full of cash in response to a private conversation being inconvenienced in the slightest. As you've already pointed out, we have such things as subpoenas already to deal with the actual criminal conduct. This is a better approach than "don't write anything you wouldn't share with everyone", not least because the latter actually normalizes every interaction with government officials being a request for an off-the-record in-person conversation.
- inerte 11mo ago
  > the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory Putting aside your other sensible comments, this one is true from Tesla's side, but false from the government side. I don't "need" to know what Tesla is doing, but I "need" to know what the government is doing. Let's say Tesla is weighing its options where to open the next factory, I want to know what governments are doing to attract (or not) their business.
  - notahacker 11mo ago
    I mean, the impact of that usually fairly public anyway, especially if it involves subsidies or legislative changes. Companies are free to whinge about legislators they consider obstructive too; Elon loves it! I'll put it another way. Florida is quite happy to send state officials very publicly to small events explicitly focused in reeling in businesses, do a very public presentation about how they don't do socialist things like handouts but do offer them material support in building out their US base in Florida, and then hang around for networking. It's very much part of their jobs, and it's advertised and reported on, and in at least some cases open to the general public. So if I'd wanted to sidle up to Jared Purdue and explain why Florida's state investment fund should underwrite part of the cost of a space propulsion facility near Cape Canaveral, I was at a small event nowhere near Florida where I totally could have done that recently. But if I have no expectations that commercially sensitive data will be protected I'm almost certainly not going to consider following up by sharing financial projections and plans and evidence for his staff to review (and yet would be free to proceed if he can make things happen based purely on 5 minutes conversations or suitcases stuffed with cash) . I suspect Florida voters would prefer their DOT to be able to have that proper follow-up though (or would if the plant was likely to happen in the next 2 years and likely to end up in Florida...) If the public wants more insight into what governments are doing to attract business you get that from budget transparency, formal review processes, publicised state support thresholds, independent anti corruption monitoring etc and of course PR about success stories, not by placing all written correspondence with businesses into the public domain, a measure which will severely limit their ability to [selectively] attract business. First thing I'd want the government to do to attract business is to respect the same confidences everyone else does, and that means where the new plant might be is non public information. Likewise Elon can threaten or offer campaign contributions to a governor over the phone and probably does so, but if he wants to actually do the responsible thing and email lots and lots of arguments and evidence to try to persuade a governor that vetoing a bill is a bad thing, it's probably reasonable to assume that some of that is commercially sensitive (ironically if it's financial or technical details redacted from long emails is actually material to changing the governor's mind, it's probably because the case is better than the generic "yay Gigafactory, yay looser autonomous test regimes" arguments that get trotted out). Better to have a paper trail only suitably cleared people can see than nobody prepared to leave any paper trail at all. And yeah, it's Elon, so there's probably other stuff that has nothing to do with his companies redacted too, but that's another issue entirely

notahacker 11mo ago

Thanks for explaining the downvote. But the position that because an institution works on behalf of the public, every communication it receives should be public seems naive. The entire publicly funded criminal justice service depends on secrecy to function, for example. Similarly, the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory or how to build a Falcon 9 any more than it needs to know the identities of whistleblowers, and if you don't redact that information, you don't get people blowing whistles or sharing their expansion plans with governors or IP with NASA. Without the ability to deliver suitcases full of cash in response to a private conversation being inconvenienced in the slightest. As you've already pointed out, we have such things as subpoenas already to deal with the actual criminal conduct. This is a better approach than "don't write anything you wouldn't share with everyone", not least because the latter actually normalizes every interaction with government officials being a request for an off-the-record in-person conversation.

inerte 11mo ago
> the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory Putting aside your other sensible comments, this one is true from Tesla's side, but false from the government side. I don't "need" to know what Tesla is doing, but I "need" to know what the government is doing. Let's say Tesla is weighing its options where to open the next factory, I want to know what governments are doing to attract (or not) their business.
- notahacker 11mo ago
  I mean, the impact of that usually fairly public anyway, especially if it involves subsidies or legislative changes. Companies are free to whinge about legislators they consider obstructive too; Elon loves it! I'll put it another way. Florida is quite happy to send state officials very publicly to small events explicitly focused in reeling in businesses, do a very public presentation about how they don't do socialist things like handouts but do offer them material support in building out their US base in Florida, and then hang around for networking. It's very much part of their jobs, and it's advertised and reported on, and in at least some cases open to the general public. So if I'd wanted to sidle up to Jared Purdue and explain why Florida's state investment fund should underwrite part of the cost of a space propulsion facility near Cape Canaveral, I was at a small event nowhere near Florida where I totally could have done that recently. But if I have no expectations that commercially sensitive data will be protected I'm almost certainly not going to consider following up by sharing financial projections and plans and evidence for his staff to review (and yet would be free to proceed if he can make things happen based purely on 5 minutes conversations or suitcases stuffed with cash) . I suspect Florida voters would prefer their DOT to be able to have that proper follow-up though (or would if the plant was likely to happen in the next 2 years and likely to end up in Florida...) If the public wants more insight into what governments are doing to attract business you get that from budget transparency, formal review processes, publicised state support thresholds, independent anti corruption monitoring etc and of course PR about success stories, not by placing all written correspondence with businesses into the public domain, a measure which will severely limit their ability to [selectively] attract business. First thing I'd want the government to do to attract business is to respect the same confidences everyone else does, and that means where the new plant might be is non public information. Likewise Elon can threaten or offer campaign contributions to a governor over the phone and probably does so, but if he wants to actually do the responsible thing and email lots and lots of arguments and evidence to try to persuade a governor that vetoing a bill is a bad thing, it's probably reasonable to assume that some of that is commercially sensitive (ironically if it's financial or technical details redacted from long emails is actually material to changing the governor's mind, it's probably because the case is better than the generic "yay Gigafactory, yay looser autonomous test regimes" arguments that get trotted out). Better to have a paper trail only suitably cleared people can see than nobody prepared to leave any paper trail at all. And yeah, it's Elon, so there's probably other stuff that has nothing to do with his companies redacted too, but that's another issue entirely