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There's a meme on Reddit that revolves around 'so brave': basically calling people/posts/comments out for obvious pandering. This reads like a pastiche of Keit

• sage_joch 13y ago
  > What the hell does this even mean? It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.
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  • scythe 13y ago
    Y'know, I'd like to believe I'd do that in this situation, too. But people are more generous in theory than in practice. You have to realize: Mark Zuckerberg isn't just looking out for Mark Zuckerberg by posting what he did. He has a family, a social life, and a whole lot of people at Facebook who depend on him. To whom, perhaps, it would not be fair for Zuck to martyr himself on the great gallows of the United States of Atrocity in futile protest of its horrifying surveillance subterfuge. It's very easy to ignore this sort of thing when it's not your ass on the line. Bradley Manning had a different kind of freedom, the kind that comes with nobody around you who can get hurt. The feds turned Sabu, the infamous LulzSec hacker, by threatening his three-year-old daughter. The United States government is not above such tactics. I don't, frankly, believe that Arrington himself would behave much differently in the same situation. Life is not that easy. Or, in the timeless words of Robert Oppenheimer: "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
    • treeface 13y ago
      I think the point the OP is making is that if it were someone like Mark Zuckerberg, the protest wouldn't be futile. It would likely trigger a nationwide debate about the constitutionality of the program and it would possibly be overturned in court.
      • scythe 13y ago
        The point of my post is that these people are surrounded by other people to whom they have obligations. You can't respond to two words without considering the context of the paragraph! It should be obvious that even a so-called "successful" action comes with extreme stress on one's associates. It means subjecting other people to risk. This cannot be considered lightly.
        • cerebrum 13y ago
          I don't get your point on obligations. He has a family ok, but nothing would prevent him from resigning from Facebook and writing a post explaining his reasons for doing so(unwillingness to spy on its users). He would still be a rich man able to provide for his family and there are tons of others who could step into his place. I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
          • peterjancelis 13y ago
            The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out. This means other FB directors could be held liable, shareholders could sue him for breaching his fiduciary duty, his life could be made hell even if PR wise it's impossible to arrest him, etc. We are talking about the most powerful monopoly on force humanity has even seen here, a group of people who consider it their right to kill people or detain them indefinitely without a trial. I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
  • bambax 13y ago
    Exactly. Just because it's "illegal" doesn't mean it can't be done -- just as, just because what the government asks is "legal" (??!?) doesn't mean it has to be complied with. "What will happen?" is an excellent question that is not even asked. Certainly not everything is an acceptable risk; if Larry Page seriously believe he would risk spending the rest of his life in prison for publishing national security letters, then sure, we'd all do the same. But is this the case? How do we even know if nobody's testing it? Besides, why can't Google or Facebook be a little creative, and (for example) declare that the only way they'll be able to send information is by fax...? That's kind of what HN is doing (it will only accept DMCA requests via fax or regular mail).
    • threeseed 13y ago
      Because CEOs need to act like adults not petulant little children. You obey the law. Period. And if you don't agree with it you lobby directly or encourage your users to do so.
      • wavefunction 13y ago
        Not if the law is immoral, but run along little authoritarian.
      • bambax 13y ago
        The whole business model of Silicon Valley is based on not obeying the law. It's called "disrupting", and how it works is "let's break laws and regulations we disagree with until they're either changed or recognized as obsolete". This is how Uber works, or AirBnB... but not only. Facebook or Google routinely ignore European privacy laws. Twitter ignores European laws about free speech (which you and I may consider "bad" laws, but which are laws nonetheless). So why is it that suddenly everyone hides behind the "law"?
      • chii 13y ago
        you don't have to obey the law, you choose to obey. When you decide to not obey the law, you also decide to face the consequences. When the law doesn't sit well with you, you should indeed choose to not obey, then fight the consequences.
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  • wwweston 13y ago
    > It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law. Personally, I think they found a way to tell the truth without breaking the law. They apparently said what they were required to say, to the letter. People found it transparently suspicious. Now the secret appears to be out. Could be an accident, I suppose.
    • einhverfr 13y ago
      They should have at least remained silent. By issuing grossly misleading denials they look silly and dishonest. And yes, cowardly. Had they said, "We do not comment on matters of national security," such would have been honest, careful, and truthful and it would have been darned hard to prosecute them or put them at risk for effectively revealing that the press was right.
    • Zigurd 13y ago
      I don't think it looked quite so good. The "no direct access to our servers" line spoken by all four CEOs sounded like something out of North Korea, but they all also had the option to send this message through a relatively faceless spokesperson instead of throwing their own credibility on the pyre. None of them addressed the incongruity of having all the major news outlets contradicting them, after apparently finding the major points of the story supportable.
      • waterlesscloud 13y ago
        It makes sense to me that Zuckerberg and Page came out personally. The idea that all their data is open to snooping is an existential threat to their companies. If true, their user bases (and thus revenues) would plummet. They absolutely had to deny it in the strongest terms possible.
        • samsonasu 13y ago
          Their data /is/ open to snooping. We'll see if their user bases plummet. For some reason I doubt it.
        • 13y ago
  • bernardlunn 13y ago
    As Bob Dylan put it "to live outside the law you must be honest".
  • natrius 13y ago
    I don't think we have enough information to come to that conclusion. Plain old FISA orders are lawful and constitutional. There's no good reason to disclose them, but there is a good reason to push for a limited term on their secrecy. As described, PRISM is far from a plain old FISA order. It sounds like they're collecting data broadly. If that's the case, that's worth leaking. Someone thought so.
    • einhverfr 13y ago
      Also consider this. They have a 51% confidence that the target is foreigner. In the case of gmail, "please send me a random 10 users' info, data, and emails" gives you over a 70% chance that any given one in that sample is a foreigner. With Facebook it is closer to 85%. So think about that. It means the filters could deliberately overinclude Americans and still meet their standards.
    • asmithmd1 13y ago
      "Plain old FISA orders are lawful and constitutional." Maybe that is currently true; jailing Japanese Americans also passed court muster. Secret orders from a secret court doesn't square with the ideals of America I was taught in civics class.
  • viscanti 13y ago
    > It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law. The time for these companies to fight was before they gave away their user's info, not after they got caught doing so. If they weren't going to standup and do the right thing then, it's unrealistic to expect that they'd somehow find the courage now.
• sillysaurus 13y ago
  It means that people should at least be willing to challenge immoral behavior in a court, even if it's legal. We don't need to have a "conversation". We need to challenge this behavior in courts, and win.
  • jd007 13y ago
    To challenge immoral behavior in court may be much harder than you think, and TBH I don't think it's even needed here (though IANAL so this is me speculating). I think it's enough to claim that what NSA did is unconstitutional.
    • mtgx 13y ago
      I don't think he meant challenging Google and Facebook in Court, but challenging the government and the Patriot Act and hew new FISA in Court.
• hamburglar 13y ago
  I especially liked the fake incredulity: why would some of the richest people on earth not want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning? Well gee, I simply can't imagine their motivations!
  • milkshakes 13y ago
    I, for one, would love to see the government try to Bradley Manning Mark Zuckerberg for telling the truth. It would at least be more interesting than the current Orwellian dialogue we are having with our government and corporate leaders, and it would probably be more substantive too.
    • adventured 13y ago
      Nobody really wants to end up as the first Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the new fascist America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
      • sounds 13y ago
        Although I agree with your point, Khodorkovsky is likely guilty as charged; Russia probably was just selectively enforcing the law until he started to threaten American oil interests. (The real outrage in Khodorkovsky's case isn't that he has been repeatedly convicted while still imprisoned. The real outrage is that ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco found a way to destroy their Russian competition.)
    • nraynaud 13y ago
      there are other ways to handle a lone wolf, even if powerful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko The whole premise is that the NSA is protecting the USA of terrorism by spying and that the USA is in a war against terrorism. Then the one who go against NSA is a traitor in a war time. Stop any rational argument here. BTW, I think you look slightly traitor to me... On a side note, I see the whole xenophobia that's implied by all this. The NSA exists only to strip foreigners of their privacy, without any due process or supervision, and the only accusation here is that they might have stripped some of the 5% of the global population of their privilege of due process and constitutional rights. And there is a lot of suspicion that the NSA was used for economic spying in the war between Boing and EADS, and probably other cases.
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Why has this program been secret for more than a day, or a month? Are we to believe that the leaders of the most technologically advanced companies on Earth are so unsophisticated they can imagine the only way to let the world know a secret is to tell it directly? Governments and companies know how to leak. The only logical conclusion is that these surveillance programs are not actually significantly upsetting to most of these folks.
• pfortuny 13y ago
  Do you understand what a conscience is? Only if you do you can understand that post. Really. "Legal" is worthless if it is inhuman. So one MUST stand against inhuman laws.
• mtgx 13y ago
  His point is basically this: “All it takes for evil to succeed is for a few good men to do nothing...” ― Edmund Burke That's so true. If they came out now, the country would be better for it. But they are deciding to be accomplices of the out of control and abusive government. I thought Google, at least, would be better than this, after the whole China situation.
  • vorg 13y ago
    Yes, if Google don't stand up to the US government over this blanket gag order, it sort of invalidates their efforts over censorship with the Chinese government.
  • StavrosK 13y ago
    > If they came out now, the country would be better for it. It's easy to ask for other people to fight for your rights. What are you doing about it?
    • protomyth 13y ago
      Nice... Getting the run-around for the IRS and the media seems to be the lot for those trying to get it together.
• primitur 13y ago
  >to have an actual conversation both about privacy Let us have a conversation about that: Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't? Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the very thing which represents You, the People, have as much information about you as, "They", the Corporations, do? After all, Mr. Z, et al., can quite easily tell you things about yourself which, 3 words into the sentence, would give the government a lot of information it needs to optimize itself. To Serve You. Whereas, the corporate stance is "we will own the consumers, all the consumers, and we will encourage them to endless consume our product", the government stance is: "how do we keep 240million people from cannibalizing themselves". Mr Z., et al., are being mighty disingenous with this position, because the fact of the whole matter is, the Government would be the absolute BEST customer for him/them/et al., there is no better way to feed a consumer than to get the Government on your side, as we see with Pharmaceuticals, Farming, Oil, etc. There are multiple points of view in this argument, is all I am trying to say, and by setting the above in word I hope to have at least set the scene for my real, tl;dr, which is this: Privacy is a trap. Those who are fully exploiting the nature of the system, simply keep no secrets .. and trade never willingly with those who do.
  • yaix 13y ago
    > Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't? 1. Because the user decided to give their own info to FB, but not to the gov. 2. The gov has many more powers than FB. If FB knows something about you that "may be suspicious" they can't put you in jail for it, maybe even without a trial. 3. If some FB employee is able to steal data, it would have bad consecuences for the FB stock, so there is probably all kinds of barriers in place to stop employees to do just that. If some bureaucrat manages to sell off you data there is no consecuene for them. etc.
    • primitur 13y ago
      1. You also chooose your participation in government. 2. Right, so because Mr. Z. et al., don't have a 'license to kill', there is a difference. This is the only difference. 3. Which do you trust more, McDonalds or Congress?
• grandalf 13y ago
  A tangential ad hominem about Arrington's personal life does not constitute a counter-argument.
• mbesto 13y ago
  It's pretty simple, Arrington is stirring the pot, and the bees are coming in. In this case bees are good for his business.