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All this conspiratorial thinking is all very X-Files "I Want to Believe" and stunningly short on rational thinking. Consider: 1. Let's accept that Facebook, Go
by abalone 13y ago
All this conspiratorial thinking is all very X-Files "I Want to Believe" and stunningly short on rational thinking. Consider:
1. Let's accept that Facebook, Google, Yahoo et al are rapacious profit-oriented corporations who could give a crap about anything but their own self interest. Fine.
2. At this point, given the statements made, in order for there to still be some kind of "back door" direct access to all of their DBs by the NSA, it would involve direct, bald-faced, massive lies to the public about its existence by top management.
3. What would the cost be to these companies be if these were revealed to be massive lies? I'm not talking about the government granting immunity from prosecution, which most commentary seems to focus on. I'm asking, how would customers react?
Answer: Their business would blow up. Revelations of lying at this scale, completely destroying their credibility, would literally threaten the entire existence of their companies. It would be a stupendous business risk to take on.
4. What is the probability that such a massive lie would be revealed? Consider that to facilitate broad access to company datasets there would need to be a bunch of technical staff in on the conspiracy -- and not just at one company. This allegedly involves most of the major Internet companies. A whistleblower at any one of them would blow it for everyone.
So, in order for any one company to participate in the conspiracy, they would need to take a bet-your-company risk that all the other companies would keep a lid on it.
5. Finally, now that we've reviewed the downsides, what's the upside? What would the benefit to these companies be of lying? Some commentary has suggested they obtained privileged information about competitors or foreign attackers (e.g. Google & China). Ok. How does that benefit compare to the risk of nuking billions of dollars in value overnight if your company's credibility with customers is utterly destroyed?
I am all for more public oversight of the secret courts governing these requests for data. The Verizon order is extraordinarily broad, and we can't have much confidence that even the relatively small number of monitored Facebook accounts aren't abuses. But this idea that Facebook, Google etc. are lying to the public about their role just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
- _phred 13y agoHackers built Facebook. They hire hackers. If there's a group that's hardest to pigeonhole in terms of beliefs it's hackers. The idea that a company composed if hackers could have not a single whistleblower, no single person that objects so strongly that they must speak up regardless of their personal situation is betting against human nature. Nay, hacker nature. Freedom ain't looking good nowadays, but this is not the vast conspiracy it may seem.
- ianstallings 13y agoLarge companies keep government secrets every day. What do the employees have to gain? It's called not going to prison. There are ~4M cleared individuals in the US right now. They keep secrets every day. It would not be hard to put a team into place of cleared workers and literally seal them away in contained rooms and tell everyone else to go away. They're called SCIFs. You go in and leave your cell phones outside with any other electronics and do your top secret work. On the outside they appear as normal offices. My point is, this industry already knows how to work without you knowing anything. You're basing your hunches on faith and naivety about how intelligence agencies work.
- imbriaco 13y agoGoogle and Facebook are not intelligence agencies.
- ianstallings 13y agoYes I'm aware of that. Verizon isn't either, yet they do plenty of intelligence work.
- abalone 13y agoI think frankly it is you who doesn't understand how intelligence agencies work. Massive conspiracies have leaks. No agency would set up something as broad and involving as many people as you describe and expect it to stay secret. Also problematic is your theory about motivation. That Mark Zuckerberg and his chief legal officer are compelled to take bet-the-company risks and lie to their shareholders under threat of prison. There is no such law. They are only restricted in how much they can reveal about the requests for info.
- ianstallings 13y ago1. It wouldn't have to be a massive conspiracy. It would just require access to the data through a few people. It's called compartmentalizing and it's how they work. 2. There certainly are laws that govern classified information and the gathering of it. Leaking US government secrets is against the law, period. Are you arguing that's not the case? Verizon was required to assist the government by law. What makes FB and Google+ exempt from the same rules? You can dig further and find out I'm not just making stuff up. This really is how they work, frankly.