Cowards

http://uncrunched.com/2013/06/07/cowards/

by kevinwmerritt • 13 years ago

793 225 13 years ago

jmduke• 13 years ago

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 Keith Olbermann, all bravado and empty gusto. Arrington writes:

What has these people, among the wealthiest on the planet, so scared that they find themselves engaging in these verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a simple truth?

and then acknowledges that doing so, if it meant breaking FISA, is illegal.

Because their lawyers might be telling them what they are required to do. But their soul should be telling them what they must do.

What the hell does this even mean?

Listen, I completely agree with the central premise that we need to have an actual conversation both about privacy in the age of Facebook and the Kafka-esque way the U.S. government has engineered these catch-22 gag orders. But given Arrington's experience both with AOL and with the overall notion of privacy, I'd expect something with a little more substance and perspective.

sage_joch• 13 years 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.

scythe3• 13 years 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."

bambax5• 13 years 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).

wwweston• 13 years 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.

bernardlunn4• 13 years ago

As Bob Dylan put it "to live outside the law you must be honest".

natrius• 13 years 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.

viscanti• 13 years 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.

sillysaurus2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

hamburglar• 13 years 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!

milkshakes3• 13 years 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.

philwelch• 13 years ago

If you don't want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning, don't join the Army and then violate the UCMJ. He's not some innocent private citizen they arbitrarily went after.

InclinedPlane• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

mtgx3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

primitur2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

bloaf• 13 years ago

Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?

Zuckerberg can't indict me. I don't pay taxes to Facebook.

There are powers that the government has that Facebook does not, and therefore there are things I would be comfortable telling Facebook and not the government.

grandalf2• 13 years ago

A tangential ad hominem about Arrington's personal life does not constitute a counter-argument.

mbesto• 13 years 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.

arthulia• 13 years ago

If they are indeed aware of PRISM, I have a feeling that both Mark and Larry are avoiding legal action (or threats of legal action) made by the NSA. To me, that is the most likely reason for not "standing up" and coming out about the truth. To the best of my knowledge, they do fight heavily to keep their data out of government hands because these exact kind of situations are horrible for their companies' reputations.

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

I think the diatribe is sort of right, though - if they really wanted to end these kind of problems for good all they've got to do is come clean and go public. The second they get 'disappeared' the outcry will force something to actually be done. Likewise, if they really cared about their companies, they'd realize the huge PR advantage to not telling half-truths and going along with whoever's compelling them to cooperate like sheep.

jboggan• 13 years ago

Want to be the company that people flock to for storing their information? Want to gain the trust to win the coming market conflict over digital wallets and online payments? Defect, call the government's bluff. You will be aided and rewarded.

chime• 13 years ago

What if companies that do not wish to do evil adopted unspoken signaling mechanism for silent protests? What if every time n NSLs were fulfilled since start of year, they donated to EFF? What if $1 was donated to EFF for every 1 GB of data they shared? Would that be illegal?

Semiapies• 13 years ago

What if they released remarkably similar statements that very specifically denied the specific things they're not supposed to be admitting to doing...

Or perhaps that's the charitable interpretation.

gohrt• 13 years ago

Of course it would be illegal. Same as if they said "eway eceivedray one-a ationalnay ecuritysay etterlay." Any way they intentionally communicate information is a disclosure. English language isn't treated specially.

eightyone• 13 years ago

What you're talking about is referred to as a warrant canary. There's a nice Wikipedia entry on the subject, if you're interested. [1]

Check out [2] for an example of one.

Perhaps we should be pressuring companies like Dropbox (whom was implicated as "coming soon" in the documents leaked) to implement such a system.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

[2] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

Edit: Now thinking about it, Dropbox was probably already hit with a request. Maybe we should focus on other services that may be of future interest to the government?

reeses2• 13 years ago

I'm sure an Adwords campaign offering information on FISA would net you some data on who and where requests are being made. It wouldn't be explicit and the people wouldn't have to tell you WHY they are looking for information on FISA.

However, when you saw blips from people paying $99 for your packet of case law on 4th amendment protections with respect to stewardship of online data, you'd have the start of a signal. That is, for all of about ten minutes until you couldn't find a hosting provider or payment processor on Earth who would return your phone calls.

Not that it would matter because a "Chinese PLA hacker nuked your box, your bank account, and your house from orbit."

[Insert relevant quotes regarding government requests on named individuals from Eric Schmidt here.]

prayag• 13 years ago

I can't believe that people are getting mad these private enterprises. If you want your government not to spy on you, tell THEM. The governments was made to serve the people. The companies are going to do what they think is their best fiduciary responsibility. Get mad at your representatives in congress, not your email providers.

argumentum2• 13 years ago

Amen. Perhaps it's because we expect so little of our government that we lash out at Zuck, LP etc as they at least answer to the free market, and therefore can effect change.

lesedilino• 13 years ago

Asking your government to change the laws when your government has shown you have no power over it is a waste of time.

There's a growing intellectual understanding that corporations control the governmental processes from start to finish. Therefore, asking the government to change is stupid.

If the King rules your country, petition the King for mercy.

If an oligarch rules your country, petition the oligarch for mercy.

If a corporate elite rules your country, petition the corporate elite.

Democracy is, quite simply, completely dead. Gone. Done. The government does not institute change based on democratic opinion. You have no control over your government. They aren't the real seat of power in this society.

Having said that, most of the power resides on Wall Street and in the Military-Industrial-Security complex rather than Silicon Valley corporations. But these Silicon Valley corporations are now rich enough to change the laws. They can crown themselves King with the right kind of manoeuvring, and Arrington here is trying to get them to do so.

Petitioning Larry Page or Paul Graham to have a conscience is far more fruitful than voting for the government you want.

argumentum2• 13 years ago

The corporate elite does not rule the US. We are governed by a hodgepodge of competing interests, including at least corporations, bureaucracies, states, politicians, special interests and yes the people through democratic instruments.

I'm fairly sure lp and pg have strong consciences, at least much stronger consciences that arrington, of all people.

noarchy2• 13 years ago

People have grown so cynical regarding government that they can chalk this stuff up to "business as usual". Governments have been spying on us (or trying to) for as long as we've been alive, but their ability to do so is vastly increased by new technology.

So why complain about the companies? There is a much greater possibility of change in private enterprise, but they often can't escape the mandates that government imposes, either. Some would like to think that the Googles and Facebooks can be heroes, and resist whatever nasty thing the government is doing today. It isn't that easy.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Well, who donates more to get the lobbying ears? Individuals, or huge businesses? Do you think your congressmen will listen to you, or a man donating millions to campaign funds? Politicians don't mind being hated, but I bet the likes of Page and co very much do. Reading their statements reads like they don't personally like this at all.

Pressure the people paying donations. Its the best chance you have.

mayanksinghal• 13 years ago

Yup, because instead of expecting politicians who made the laws and judges who approved the FISA orders, let's call out the CEOs.

I don't even understand the outrage that most US citizens are showing at the moment for the said firms even after realizing that any access that may have been provided was through the channels that the governments had 'legally' set up. And that at least some of the companies had resisted. It seems very unfair to me, largely as an outsider and yet a stakeholder, that the only people who are being held accountable in the piece are the CEOs who had little to do with the fiasco.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

Just because the laws, judges and politicians are not behaving well, doesn't make CEOs' behavior admirable.

The allegation is that they are deliberately misleading. I don't know if it is true but that is what they are attacked for.

Heck maybe people perceive that a single CEO like Page or Zuckerberg do have more power to change things than those in Congress or Obama. That says something as well.

It is also a battle of expectations. Maybe many expect NSA, Obama and other secret government agencies to fuck everything, but they thought, heck at least the "Do No Evil" Google will stand on our side, or my buddy Zuck will.

adventured3• 13 years ago

The private henchmen that help make police states possible, should always be called out. The government could never even remotely come close to implementing their policies without vast help from the private sector.

jmillikin2• 13 years ago

  > Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct
  > access” or “back doors” when companies are building
  > “secure portals” for them instead?

The primary argument against government agencies having direct access to private data is that it removes the data's caretaker from the decision-making process.

That is different from having an access portal for agencies to submit warrants or other legal requests. There is no obvious reason why a company should have an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.

This article would have been much better if it had focused on the ethically dubious nature of FISA, and how problematic it is to interpret the fourth amendment as applying only to American citizens.

But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

There is no obvious reason why a company should have an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.

Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts.

But that wouldn't have driven as many clicks.

Nice ad hom, but it's mistaken. Arrington is many things, but he actually feels the way he writes.

jmillikin2• 13 years ago

  >> There is no obvious reason why a company should have
  >> an ethical obligation to resist lawfully issued warrants.
  >
  > Then who will? Think about it: companies are the only
  > entity who can challenge this kind of behavior in courts.

The concept of search warrants is built into the constitution, and is supported by countless judicial decisions. Challenging the ability for the government to demand customer data would take much more than a few tech companies.

saalweachter2• 13 years ago

Courts have proven that they are a lousy place to change national security policy. Courts established the principle of keeping things secret for the sake of national security (even though it later turned out that the case establishing this had nothing to do with national security; the gov't just claimed it did to avoid liability for negligence). Whenever someone tries to challenge secret, warrantless infringements of privacy, the courts throw out the case as lacking jurisdiction: since no one can publicly acknowledge that you are being spied on, you can't sue the government for spying on you.

The only way to change the policy on this is in Congress. If you really want to make a difference, call your Congressman and yell at them for spying on you. Call them daily, call your Senator, call other people's Congressmen. It still might not help, but nothing Google or Twitter or Facebook can do is going to.

monkmartinez• 13 years ago

All it takes is one. One person with strong sense of the natural order of life and the courage to stand up. It may be scary as hell... I can appreciate that. However, everyone is born with the ability to reason. From reason we can innately sense what is right and wrong (not based on emotions). Do what is right, after all... if doing the right thing was easy, EVERYONE would do it.

zhemao• 13 years ago

The system the NYTimes article outlines is still quite different from what the original leak suggested. According to the Times article, the requested data isn't placed into the locked mailbox until the FISA request is reviewed by somebody at the company. This is nowhere near the same level of access as what the PRISM leak suggested. So if what the Times article says is true, Zuckerberg and Page's statements weren't misleading at all. They really do "review each and every request."

The fact that they've built special systems for giving the government the data is not too surprising or scandalous. If I ran a site getting the same number of FISA requests that Google and Facebook presumably get, I'd probably also design a special system to make the process more convenient and secure. Short of openly challenging the NSA in court, this is probably the best response we could hope for. It gives the company control over what data is released and is much more secure than a back door which could be compromised.

coopdog• 13 years ago

But what if the FISA request is 'everything'. Yes they're complying, someone gives it a look over then adds everything and keeps it updated in real time.

They don't have direct access to the servers, they're complying with the law, they have everyone's data.

The worst bit is that this is all kept secret. If it's all so acceptable then why didn't the public at least get told.

lawnchair_larry3• 13 years ago

You're confusing the two leaks (I did too, it's deliberately confusing). The PRISM project does not even require FISA approval. The reason it exists is to not require FISA approval. The analyst just has to check a box saying that they reasonably believe that there is a 51% chance that the target is foreign.

Achshar3• 13 years ago

Did you even read the NYT article? They said requests can be very broad, like logs for certain search terms and people staying in the company building for weeks with all the data being gathered in government laptops. That is pretty much realtime and "direct access".

danso• 13 years ago

Which NYT article are you referring to? Do you mean this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.

Where in that paragraph or the ones surrounding it does it say that Google or Facebook was the company involved? Don't you think that if these incidents involved either company, that they would be named here?

staunch2• 13 years ago

I'd think most programmers can understand their reasoning behind creating "secure portals". If you're being forced to hand data over to the government you may as well do it securely and consistently.

Rather than some ad hoc process of burned CDs or USB drives, just create some simple software that makes the process secure, reliable, and traceable.

The alternative is USB drives and Fedex envelopes, which is harder to track and probably less secure.

md224• 13 years ago

I don't know if Arrington is saying they shouldn't have built the portals... I think he just wants them to openly admit it and be transparent about the work they're doing with the government.

staunch2• 13 years ago

They've clearly stated that they're complying with laws that require them to hand over specific user data. These companies are using secure portals as opposed to envelopes filled with CDs. So what?

kllrnohj• 13 years ago

Kind of like this? http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests

wavefunction3• 13 years ago

securely, like letting the chinese up in your grill?

Don't try to play us

dylangs10302• 13 years ago

An article that waxes poetic, yet is so very hollow and devoid of realism.

What would you have these companies do? Band together in a mighty ring of technological resources and begin a Privacy Revolution?

This is unrealistic. As an American, I am saddened and angered by the recent news of the past two days. I am disgusted with what our government has done - what it has hidden from us, to take advantage of us unawares.

But we need to consolidate our anger. We have to aim it precisely, and arm ourselves against the proper enemy. It will not help the tech community to bicker amongst ourselves and be disappointed with CEOs for what the NSA has done. This community has great resources. Let those resources stand. Experts from every tech center in the country, across industries spanning finance, security, engineering, and many more - we are all pooled here. We can make an impact.

But not if we are busy attacking those whose positions we cannot possibly corroborate. Their hands were tied. In an ideal world, every man and woman would be consumed with a righteous fury and ignore whips, imprisonment and even death for the greater glory of what is right.

This is not that world. This is not idealism. The government wronged us. The government made the first move. The government forced their hands, made them cooperate by ratifying unethical conduct and making it illegal (and treasonous, as a violation of national security) to resist. Who would have acted differently in their position? And what would it have achieved?

I recognize that it is discomforting that we cannot simply believe tech leaders after what today's events have shown us. I get that. But they are not the ones who violated our privacy. They were the medium. That is not fair to them. If they made a mistake, it was only in trying to navigate perilous waters somewhere between honor and law. Unfortunately, the law is not on their side.

With Mark Zuckerberg jailed or Facebook sued by an insurmountable public agency, or Google's assets seized and its constituent leaders punished, who would be benefitted? Should we ask them to suffer and violate laws just for a truth that has come out only hours later?

If you want a takeaway from this, it's simple. It's unfair to hold people to expectations of high moral standing when they have unknown pressures put upon them. And in light of that, we need to remember who the true wrongdoers here are. If Larry and Zuckerberg have made mistakes, so be it. But know that they paled in comparison to the NSA, and that is our prime prerogative.

milkshakes3• 13 years ago

Arrington was addressing the leaders of these companies, not the organizations themselves. While corporations obviously do not have consciences nor moral compasses, his point was that humans do, or at least they should. And I think he was pretty clear about what he would have those leaders do:

Perhaps you could all get on a conference call tonight and double dare each other to do it all together, at the same time.
“The NSA makes us do things that crush our Constitution, and then they make us never talk about it.”
I hope one of them does

They don't need to lead any revolutions, or even leak classified information. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. All he's asking for is for them to not lie to us, especially when they know that we know that what they're saying is demonstrably false.

polarix3• 13 years ago

See the people who are making these statements don't know. The only people who know are the ops teams, and they really can't tell, because they could fairly easily just disappear.

bernardlunn4• 13 years ago

The conf call double dare is unlikely, but imagine the commercial benefit of the one who broke ranks. The most likely is one with least to lose eg AOL or Yahoo or Microsoft.

scythe3• 13 years ago

If there's anyone to go after, it's the ranking members of the Special Committee on Intelligence, who wrote FISA and greenlighted this policy. Sadly, the ranking members are the near-80 Dianne Feinstein and lame-duck Saxby Chambliss; their successors are probably Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins.

While I don't think single-issue voting is a good political strategy, in this particular case it seems prudent to consider that the reprehensibility of the whole affair and the complicity of those few most able to stop it calls into question their moral fiber. We can't -- and shouldn't -- hope to kick every pro-surveillance Congressman out of office, but when someone in a position of influence helps betray the country to this degree we should take notice.

yuhong• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837367

timberlane• 13 years ago

We can't -- and shouldn't -- hope to kick every pro-surveillance Congressman out of office

I strongly disagree. We are blessed with the right to vote. It's important to use it on things that actually matter.

kabdib• 13 years ago

Dear Outraged California: Please stop re-electing Feinstein, for starters. She's bad for you.

ht_th• 13 years ago

They are service companies. If they believe in a service that takes care of their customers' / clients' privacy, they should act accordingly, yes.

They could pack up and leave. Make a statement. Be true to their customers. And they could pull it off, I think, being mostly software and service companies.

Yes, they, their employees, and a lot of dependables will probably lose out, at first. But they stay true to themselves. In the end, they make the decision to choose marketshare, power, money and all that over ideals. Not a bad choice, but be honest about it.

einhverfr8• 13 years ago

This is true to a point. However, a much more appropriate response would have been "We are aware of the reports that we have been sending massive data to the NSA. If this was the case, I would not be able to confirm or deny it. I would just like you to keep that in mind as you report on this story."

Simple, straight to the point, and contains worlds of meaning behind the plausible deniability. "No sir, I did not think I was confirming the existence of the program. I believed I was operating in compliance with all gag orders and just reminding people that these orders come with gag orders, so because everyone knows that I didn't think that would violate the gag order...."

By issuing silly denials that didn't withstand more than a few hours of public scrutiny they look silly, cowardly, and dishonest.

wslh• 13 years ago

What would you have these companies do? Band together in a mighty ring of technological resources and begin a Privacy Revolution?

If I remember well Google was courageous enough confronting China.

joesb2• 13 years ago

May be, in that case, they thought the US government will still back them up. Will the Chinese government help Google in tis case against the US gov?

btilly• 13 years ago

Nice. Quote the NY Times article describing how things work, and fail to quote the bit where the employees tasked with responding to FISA orders, and who were possibly involved in the program, were legally not allowed to inform the CEO of what they were doing.

CEOs who are not informed can release statements indicating the depth of their ignorance without being deliberately dishonest.

That said, the alleged situation frankly astounds me. The government SHOULD NOT have employees at companies devoting company resources to projects that the people running those companies are not allowed to know about. But that is exactly what the NY Times claimed.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

Oh come, why do you have to spoil the confirmation bias party?

reeses2• 13 years ago

First, since we do not know the information obtained, we can't say if the CEO or CFO should be informed.

If the scope of what they were required to deliver included information that could have an impact on the financial disclosures of the company[1] then, under Sarbanes-Oxley, they are at least required to put controls in place to communicate or prevent inaccurate financial reporting. This could also be why the CFO was not involved in the denials, because they've at least separated NTK.

As for the portal, the lowest common denominator would be an ftp server. Maybe they put it on fbiguy3@gmail.com's Google Drive so he had to log in. I'd like to think I'd encrypt it with a huge whopping GPG key, email it from a gmail to a yahoo address under my control, and ask,"Did you get that?" but I know I'd just piss down my leg and give them what they wanted.

Finally, Google is rather proud of the predictions or observations it can make based on (they say) trends in search queries. For example, it is now taken as fact that "Google can predict the flu better than the CDC/WHO/etc." I would not be surprised if Google and other companies could tell at least how many FISA requests have probably been generated by segmenting requests for related searches. (Of course, LexisNexis, FindLaw, and the like would have even better information when paying customers do their due diligence on compliance with unreasonable requests.)

[1] E.g., Send us all credit card information for customers from outside the USA.

modeless• 13 years ago

"While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not."

This is the crux of the matter, but this statement is not strictly true. If a company only sent information on 1.44MB floppy disks, or started requiring NSA agents to run an obstacle course or something, they would be held in contempt of court. These requests have an implicit requirement of ease of access, and what that means is ultimately up to a judge's discretion.

mintplant• 13 years ago

Wait. That's it? That's all PRISM is--a special method of handing over information that is requested via court order?

Is this correct?

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

But it's the principle of the thing, even though we evaluate the risk of terrorism in terms of incidental probabilities, rather than the principle that you should be able to go about your life without being randomly killed. This is different because it's destructive of liberty, unlike corporations doing the exact same thing for profit.

lawnchair_larry3• 13 years ago

No, it's a way of handing it over without a court order.

Achshar3• 13 years ago

A hidden/secret court order that can at times ask for broad thing like search term logs and

In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.
In other instances, the lawyer said, the agency seeks real-time transmission of data, which companies send digitally.

That is more than what they currently do.

fredBuddemeyer• 13 years ago

arrington needs friends in silicon valley a lot more than he needs your clicks. whatever you think of the man this is an honest and indignant post and it's an example of the courage he speaks of.

it is fascinating that this concept is so difficult for an otherwise intelligent community to grasp and a reminder of why we still need journalists.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

Arrington is a drama queen IMHO, there are more important voices like the EFF, ACLU, et al to listen to on this issue. It's hard to trust where this indignation is clickbait fake, or real.

prollyignored• 13 years ago

At this point, we are just guessing.

* Backbone route

* SSL, MIM hack

* indirect access like real-time backups.

* sudo RO access via vpn

* Remote Access to BigTable queries

* Team inside the company

* What china does.

Gotto love lawyers. They harp on the most ambiguous term.

Cowardice is an accurate term to describe ferengi, not to mention unpatriotic.

Who wants to give up the Jacuzzi ?

mtgx3• 13 years ago

"What we have in our hands now is the first concrete proof of U.S.-based high-tech companies participating with the NSA in wholesale surveillance on us, the rest of the world, the non-American, you and me," he said.

- Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish software security firm F-Secure.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...

Achshar3• 13 years ago

That is the most terrifying thing to me. The US government can do anything with their people. It's their government after all and they are responsible for running it. But US government doing wholesale surveillance on everyone else? Fuck them if thats what is happening.

lawnchair_larry3• 13 years ago

I'm not even sure how "we're only spying on our friends" is supposed to make anything better. Like no one in any other country has a right to privacy.

marcamillion• 13 years ago

This is classic Prisoner's Dilemma.

If all of them come out at the same time - everybody benefits.

But if 1 of them screws everybody over, the screwed will be royally screwed.

trustfundbaby• 13 years ago

Will you do it, Marissa? Or you, Ballmer? Or you, Armstrong? Will anyone stand up and say the truth? Will anyone stand up to the secret organization with the secret courts and, simply, do what’s right? Despite the consequences? Despite what your lawyers tell you?

Silly man. Exactly how hard is it to ask someone else, with way more to lose than you, to be a martyr for a cause you feel strongly about?

polarix3• 13 years ago

Moreover, these people cannot speak the truth since they do not know it. The surgeries were done far away from the C-suite.

saalweachter2• 13 years ago

I love the guilty-until-proven-innocent angle of these personal attacks against CEOs and companies.

There is literally no evidence anyone could produce which would prove to anyone's satisfaction that (a) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc don't hand over every last shred of data they have to the NSA, the KGB, and whatever China's equivalent is, or that (b) the CEOs of the respective companies didn't personally sign off on every single violation of privacy while kicking puppies. Corporations can't have alibis. Mark Zuckerberg can't say, "Oh, I was in Cincinnati for the last 5 years, and I don't have cell coverage there, so I can't possibly have been involved."

I usually avoid defending billionaires, because they can dry their tears on their giant stacks of money, but so far this is just a he-said-she-said, and if all of the tech companies are saying they're innocent, it's the responsibility of the accusers to pony up some evidence they're guilty. Slide shows are one thing, but if you want to prove to me that the system does what you say it does, we need a document dump: millions of random emails, Facebook messages, whatever that have been illegally accessed through this system, which could plausibly not have been accessed without the kind of far reaching access that the tech giants are being accused of having provided.

polarix3• 13 years ago

The best hope for evidence would be engineering and construction documentation of the reporting mechanisms.

corresation• 13 years ago

What sort of reporting mechanism? One of the articles (the one that Arrington thinks refutes the public denials of these companies, even though it does no such thing) talks about Google trying to organize a more efficient, standards approach to responding to lawful orders for specific data. That has nothing to do with this wholesale data pipe that is supposedly in place.

joesb2• 13 years ago

And, if given those document, why would you trust it? They could still be lying. If you don't trust what they are saying now, why would you trust any document created by them?

wangweij• 13 years ago

If a company is brave enough to close its business in China, what prevents it from doing the same in US?

adventured3• 13 years ago

The fact that Google had very little market share in China, and made almost no money. Versus 3/4 of its $50 billion in sales coming from the US ad market.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

*"It is further ordered that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order."

But why is that stopping them? Do they really see themselves being dragged away, Bradley Manning style – to sit for years in a prison before even being given the dignity of a trial?

Because that’s not going to happen.

Please Google, hire Mike Arrington and task him to spill all your beans so he can put his butt behind his words instead of raindancing on the sidelines.

Aqueous2• 13 years ago

There are cowards and then there are people who willfully exaggerate. A backdoor implies unfettered access to data for batch collection and processing. That's what this story was about at the beginning - the government was indiscriminately collecting and possibly analyzing your private data using some sort of massive, sinister Big Data operation, the scale of which we can not even conceive, and these big web companies were essentially handing them the keys to their telecommunications networks and telling them to go wild. This has been downgraded again and again, now to a few websites constructing a "secure mailbox." Most of us, including Arrington, know exactly what that means. A secure portal/mailbox is exactly what it sounds like: it is the equivalent of sending someone e-mail with a curated collection of data, except for instead of sending an e-mail you are posting it to a private web page accessible through some sort of authenticated login page. And if this data is only in response to a FISA warrant or subpoena and only regarding data posted by non-citizens, suddenly your outrage begins to look a little melodramatic, and what's happening begins to look a lot like what we already knew was happening for years. Just because we've known about it for years doesn't make it right, but can we at least admit that the novelty of the original story is long gone?

wavefunction3• 13 years ago

It's more about seizing the moment of widespread outrage to effect change, rather than ho-humming like a jaded hipster.

twoodfin• 13 years ago

"Fake but accurate!"

Aqueous2• 13 years ago

The line between 'seizing' widespread outrage and 'manufacturing' it is perilously thin.

edwardunknown• 13 years ago

CNET is claiming the Washington Post & Guardian stories were wrong and the whole thing was based off a leaked Powerpoint document. James Clapper said the stories contained numerous inaccuracies but didn't specify. This whole thing is hilarious, especially HN's reaction.

tripzilch• 13 years ago

Cute speech, but if you need to rely on the honesty or courage of CEOs of huge corporations (that are in the business of trading private info, no less) to step up and protect you from your government, then I wouldn't keep too much hope.

Imagine someone urging CEOs of Big Oil / Pharma / [0] corps to do the same? Would you take it seriously? "Someone in the Oil Industry should stand up because what the US is doing in the Middle East is wrong!"

To be clear, my point is not that it's wrong to demand this, or even that it's stupid (it is naive, but understandable).

The point is that this is something that an actual democracy should be able to solve because its people demand it. Not by relying on CEOs of powerful corporations to do the right thing.

[0] or farming, weapons/steel, the US prison industry ...

fauigerzigerk• 13 years ago

"Or to put it another way, who the hell needs “direct access” or “back doors” when companies are building “secure portals” for them instead?"

The extent of his confusion is breathtaking. Apparently very few people get what this is all about. The real question is this:

Does the government (a) mine content and/or metadata in these service providers' databases for suspect activity, or (b) can it only access specific accounts after naming the account holder?

What happened at Verizon is (a). Page and Zuckerberg say it's not what happens at Google and Facebook.

What Page and Zuckerberg meant when they were talking about "scale" is that the government cannot mine their databases for suspects. Not directly, not indirectly, not through a secure portal or in any other way.

The government can and does make requests (lots of them) to have specific accounts opened, and what Google/Facebook apparently do is to make that process technically more efficient via a secure portal.

foobarqux• 13 years ago

I think the "real question" is whether people are okay with the government being capable of retrieving personal information that they thought was private. Public outrage is justified even if the nuance is not understood.

Moreover if the government is doing dragnet surveillance on telephone records it is only a matter of time before they expand the program to tech providers even if it hasn't already.

mshron• 13 years ago

I agree, this is the question. And the answer is "both". From the NY Times article:

FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.

Imagine a 2x2 matrix of intelligence requests, with one side being "narrow" vs "broad" and the other being "short" vs "long" duration. Verizon was long and broad, the worst kind.

The tech companies are trying to imply that they were short and narrow, at least most of the time, and the journalists are trying to imply that they were long and broad, but never come out and say it because they have no evidence. If we had better transparency about FISA, we could answer this question ourselves. Just knowing how many requests were for individual user's data would be extremely helpful.

djhworld• 13 years ago

I think the whole thing becomes even more of a farce when you read quotes like this on the BBC news

Meanwhile, the BBC has learned that Twitter was invited to join the Prism programme last year but rejected the approach from US authorities.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Sorry, I have not been following this thing at all but why do they think Google is lying? The new "top headline story" doesn't link to anything for me.

soofaloofa• 13 years ago

It seems like I am in the minority here but I see nothing wrong with making a required government process more efficient. The companies in question would have to provide this information anyways and streamlining the process seems logical.

rmrfrmrf• 13 years ago

Americans don't usually take kindly to the government messing with due process.

FiloSottile• 13 years ago

@Pinboard: "If any of these companies had spine, they would have sent the data they were ordered to disclose on iomega zip drives. Click click click"

This.

rasterizer• 13 years ago

Google CLO responding to the NYT et al:

We cannot say this more clearly—the government does not have access to Google servers—not directly, or via a back door, or a so-called drop box. Nor have we received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media. It is quite wrong to insinuate otherwise. We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. And we have taken the lead in being as transparent as possible about government requests for user information.

https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/TMh6gUVrwMq

bernardlunn4• 13 years ago

Danny Sullivan, who is a good source on search issues, thinks it was a check in check out system based on FISA requests. The point about not being able to mention FISA requests is then a 1st Amendment issue not 4th.

whyme• 13 years ago

Well Page and Zuck may not be able to tell the truth about the action, but they have enough clout to fight the Gag law itself. i.e. They could lead publicly rally's/protest against the gag laws and they could be really effective in this without breaking the law.... And yet still, they do not.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Rather than calling anyone a coward, I will acknowledge that standing up for freedom is never easy. I know through direct personal acquaintance people who spent hard prison time during Taiwan's transition from dictatorship to democracy, who were arrested after leading peaceful public protest demonstrations of the kind that happen every day here in the United States. I have seen what kind of sustained effort--and, yes, individual courage--it takes to move a society from a default condition of tyranny to a default condition of freedom and rule by the people.

Rather than name-calling, let's learn how to fight for freedom. I posted yesterday, to NO upvotes,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840000

a link to the free online book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

an experienced activist and supporter of people power democratic movements that originated under some of the world's toughest dictatorships. We can learn a lot more from him and his writings and those of his collaborators

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

than we can learn from anyone on Uncrunched or TechCrunch or any high-tech publication about how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators. Try it. Don't decry anyone else for lacking courage. Build up your own courage. Build up your own effective communication with other freedom fighters, so that the movement for freedom has solidarity, unity of purpose, and resilience. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. (Anyone can participate: as a foreign student in Taiwan in the early 1980s, I was able to turn Chinese-language speech contests for foreign students into opportunities to express dissent from the dictatorship in the hearing of government officials of the dictatorship. This just takes courage and preparation.)

x0x0• 13 years ago

It's a hell of a lot easier when you're rich beyond belief; have access to the best legal counsel; have an enormous media platform; have access to lobbyists; have cultivated personal connections to legislators; can pick a very public fight which the NSA dreads getting dragged into; and can threaten obama / the democrats' link to a rich, donor heavy constituency. What John Kiriakou did took courage. What these ceos need is a hell of a lot less.

edit: We've seen how these ceos can react when they care, ie when something threatens their income.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA

edit2: punctuation

pekk2• 13 years ago

Strange that you think these problems will be resolved by attacking one party.

pekk2• 13 years ago

how to win freedom even while under intense pressure from dictators.

That's a great problem and a great starting point for working on that problem.

But that isn't the problem here, because we aren't living under a dictator, not even a non-malicious dictator.

Rather, we have complaints about democratically elected officials. And many of us have given up on everything tied to that system and want to use non-democratic mechanisms (up to and including violence) to resolve our own complaints.

This has two major problems, of course. First, it means we are (illegitimately) overriding interests which should be democratically represented. Second, it opens the door to an arms race where those with competing opinions will do the same to us, and those who are peaceful will be marginalized unless they also embrace anti-democratic tactics.

brunopedroso• 13 years ago

Stop complaining, start doing something!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844582

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

What I find odd isn't that they don't tell the truth. I never expected them to. That they didn't remain silent on the issue is odd though. What can denying possibly gain them at this point other than tanking their credibility?

edw519• 13 years ago

First they came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a terrorist.

Then they came for the whistle blowers, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a whistle blower.

Then they came for the illegal aliens, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not an illegal alien.

Then they came for the hackers--and there was no one left to speak for us.

tptacek2• 13 years ago

Whistleblowers and illegal aliens might be morally equivalent to trade unionists and socialists, but terrorists are not equivalent to communists; I said nothing when they came for the terrorists because the terrorists were trying to murder my children.

throwaway420• 13 years ago

The government is trying to label just about everybody as a terrorist or suspected terrorist and using this hyped up fear of terrorism to justify a growing police state.

iandanforth• 13 years ago

Two points

1. The US has killed many many more children in its retaliation for attacks than any so called 'terror' organization has. (http://www.policymic.com/articles/20884/is-america-like-adam...)

2. The fear of your children dying is the ultimate weapon for people to control you.

There is a strange dichotomy between the pride parents of soldiers have in their child's courage to defend liberty, and the 'do-anything-it-takes-to-protect-my-babies' mindset that seems to pervade the civilian population. One leads to people standing up, the other, cowering.

tomg• 13 years ago

Even a suspected terrorist deserves a trial. If they are guilty, if they are a terrorist, then they will be given the punishment they are due.

The problem with deciding that suspected terrorists don't deserve the same rights is that those rights are/should be inalienable. If we decided to start making exceptions, then those rights are no longer inalienable and it's just a matter of degree.

What is a terrorist but a murderer with a political agenda? So perhaps we shouldn't give murder suspects a trial either. And what about a suspect who's attempted to murder? Why give them a fair trial? And so on.

The degree of heinousness of the crime should determine the punishment, not whether the accused deserves a trial.

ucee054• 13 years ago

No, the terrorists were trying to protect their children, whom the "troops" were heroically murdering.

Do you not know about the drone "signature strikes" that bomb randomly in Yemen and Pakistan, followed by targeted strikes against first responders?

And do you not know that all it takes to become a "terrorist" is to be male, medium age, and killed in such a strike? Unless proven innocent?

Or are you under the delusion that you have to actually join AlQaeda for the US government to count you as a terrorist?

Vivtek• 13 years ago

I was not aware of any terrorist attack on Chicago. Nor do I believe that any terrorists have your children on their checklists.

Hyperbole is a fun game. But this is beneath you.

Everlag• 13 years ago

Communism is revolutionary socialism that seeks to break the system from the exterior rather than fix from the interior as your standard socialism would.

Communism has the utter breaking of current society as the only method to obtaining true communism and thus is not as far from being terrorist activity as one might think.

patcon• 13 years ago

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/1010...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coor...

bambax5• 13 years ago

This quotation is over used, and in the present case it's not really appropriate, because they started to harass "hackers" before they started to run after anyone else.

They even subverted the word "hacker" to have it mean something bad.

TheCondor• 13 years ago

There are some fundamental issues here that are upsetting, to say the least. It's a dark day when telling the truths illegal and I'm pretty sure that's not what was intended by the forefathers...

Re: cowards, It's easy to say that when you don't have skin in the game. These guys do and I too expect more of them but I can't fault them, nobody wants to go to prison. Something completely legal, completely within their rights and abilities that they can do is lobby and spend and campaign to end the patriot act and they are billionaires...

grandalf2• 13 years ago

One thing to keep in mind about both Facebook and Google is that both were late arrivals to their respective markets... created by founders from elite schools who were able to get funded to build a "Cadillac" version of something that already existed.

This kind of entrepreneurial success is closer akin to being successful in finance and less about innovation than about mapping a set of ideas to a set of value props that appeal to holders of risk capital.

This is a highly "establishment" mindset... but since that doesn't make a compelling creation story, emphasis is placed on the riskiest and most personality-driven elements.

So it's perfectly expected that both firms act cautious and conservative in a situation like this.

trekky1700• 13 years ago

You can't really use the way someone frames a sentence as evidence for guilt. The terminology they used, like back door, was simply what they were accused of having. And the nitpickiness of pointing out that they said direct access rather than access is, in my opinion, crossing the boundaries of reason. We know, and have known for years that these sites provide data to the US when required by law. That would be considered access, which could easily explain the terminology.

Just because it's not the most sensational story doesn't mean it's not the true one. If we're going the conspiracy theory route: what if the documents are phony? What if the leak was made up?

Basically, rather than wildly speculating based on he said she said and the framing of a sentence, why don't we try to be intelligent and wait for some real information. None of this speculation does any good.

moultano• 13 years ago

According to Cnet, they are telling the truth, and not in some weasel word sense of it. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...;

They are already standing up for freedom in the way that we would want them to. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-depart...;

grappler• 13 years ago

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, in the WaPo story: “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect.

In the intelligence world, this is an important program. It is “among the most important and valuable” programs. That makes it a desirable project to work on. If you're in this industry, you want your name attached to this project. To get that kind of assignment, in addition to being smart and capable, you need to be seen as dedicated and loyal.

It's not impossible that a leaker will end up on such a project (indeed it seems to have just leaked). But the culture will select against anyone seen as a potential risk, in a variety of ways.

avisk• 13 years ago

All,

Can somebody compile Non-US alternatives for email, search,etc?

On top of my mind : Search : yandex.com Google Docs : zoho.com Email : fastmail.fm (Paid)

TheMagicHorsey• 13 years ago

Look this article is ridiculous. I'm embarrassed with everyone that thinks this is some sort of conspiracy to hand over information to the government without process.

Both Google and Facebook hand over data for INDIVIDUALS when the government issues a lawful request (such as by subpoena or warrant). Subpoena's do not have judicial review the way warrants do, but they are not OPTIONAL. A company MUST comply under US laws if the government issues a lawful request.

Both Facebook and Google have lawyers on staff that carefully vet requests.

If you have an issue with how our F'in government asks for too much information, then take issue with our laws. You cannot fault Google or Facebook for obeying laws that you, through your representatives, put in place.

I am fully in support with restricting the power of the state to compel private information from corporations, but I certainly won't blame a corporation for obeying the law.

Now, let us tackle the issue of the so called "red carpet" rolled out for the government. When the government requests information Google and Facebook can send them the information on disk, on paper, on anything for that matter. The issue is that they want to keep YOUR information as secure as possible while handing it to the state. They want the state to have access to it, but NOT any third party.

How secure will your information be if they don't set up a secure drop for the government? Do you want them to set up one-off FTP sites? Do you want them to put the information on disk for hand over? We've already discussed that direct access to the source servers is a bad idea.

Do you see what I'm saying? This fucking author doesn't use his brain for two seconds. What options do Google and Facebook have to obey the law, and to keep your data as secure as possible from third parties.

Some people just want to cry wolf at every turn. And then when we really need to raise a fuss (like when Google removes XMPP support from messaging) we get no traction with the public, because the community just looks like a bunch of whiners.

sneak• 13 years ago

The lack of superhuman bravery is not cowardice.

dnautics• 13 years ago

Purely hypothetical: what if the government is doing this, the CEOs are aware the government is doing this, it's only happened, say three times, and they were given the personal opportunity to review the information requests, and they felt it was justified. Then what? Would they still be cowardly?

humbleopinion• 13 years ago

there is the fear of prosecution of course, but i think that plays less a part than the threat of how the market will react to a full confession that we're giving your data away (even if it's under the pretense of "safety" or whether you trust the data given is whole or in part).

so lets say Google admits, ok we give access to the gov to sift through your contacts...the vast amount of the population will say, that's messed up but will continue to use their services...who I do see leaving are the small segment of people who value their privacy and the technically savvy individuals who can roll their own services...those people could be the taste-makers of society and depending on whether you believe their influence, could pivot the market to a competitor.

of probably greater importance are the government and corporate entity of the world who now will be concerned with whether they should use Google for their own sensitive data knowing that a third-party (and in the case of nation states, an overly meddlesome competitor) can access it, who historically are also known to have difficulty holding onto data (ie, leaks). So there would be definite loss of trust there.

from my view, those are the greater risks for those particular CEOs...it could result in killing your own baby, as they are also the founders.

_bfhp• 13 years ago

The CEO answers to shareholders, not users. A CEO of a company with shareholders is not a living organism with the possibility of having a moral compass but instead a (don't snicker) machine, one that makes deterministic (ultimately predictable) decisions.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I'm all for people getting their privacy, rah, rah. However, these leaders of companies are not free of obligations. What if you had your entire life savings in Google, Google broke the law by talking about what it is legally not allowed to do, and the stock plummeted due to the CEO being arrested? Or if the government just put a lot of oversight on them in the future and lost them a lot of business and cost them a lot of money verifying everything through lawyers (happens often after privacy violations, amusingly). Even if the leader of a company spoke with a good heart, if he broke the law and got the company in trouble, he is abandoning his duty to the company. I'd hope the board would remove him in this case, but even then there's still be a lot of damage.

Cowards

Related Stories