The Government is Silencing Twitter and Yahoo, and It Won't Tell Us Why

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security-free-speech/government-silencing-twitter-and-yahoo-and

by e1ven • 12 years ago

286 91 12 years ago

aclu.org

dfa0• 12 years ago

Why does a dog lick his balls?

yoamro• 12 years ago

"In a democracy, if your government is going to gag someone from speaking, it should publicly explain why"

It seems like even the ACLU is saying "it's okay to censor people, just please tell us why". Im not sure what to even think of this.

milesskorpen2• 12 years ago

There are legitimate reasons why the government needs to operate in secret for a short while — a sting on a suspected criminal, where they have strong evidence, but need to close the case without scaring the target into fleeing the country, for example. This usage should be firmly rooted in law and disclosed after a reasonable period of time, however.

danielweber• 12 years ago

I was thinking this. But I can't tell that from the article if this isn't what's going on in these cases. Has the government permanently stopped Twitter from talking to the customers in question about something, or only temporarily?

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

Even those "needs" need to be balanced against having an open legal process. We have both NSLs and a "no fly list." For the purpose of keeping some very high-value suspect from fleeing, the no fly list should be sufficient. This looks like an exercise of power just to maintain and expand secrecy and the supremacy of "national security" over legal process.

TehCorwiz• 12 years ago

IANAL I believe that there are valid reasons for gag orders. See http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Gag+Order

However it's fairly obvious that the purposes which a gag order is commonly used, preventing jury tampering, media distortion, or other disruption to the operations of a fair court, do not seem to apply in the instances of the article.

sitkack• 12 years ago

No they are saying, "the government might have a legitimate case for censorship but we can't even tell because they don't give a reason"

Before they would at least give some bullshit answer like, "state secrets", "means and methods" etc etc. Now they don't even put up those lies.

cordite• 12 years ago

If he public knew the why, then they'd want to know more. So far the pattern of information control is to seal it at the most root position as possible.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

This looks like another attempt by the ACLU to get the national security letter issue resolved (or undone). Its a worthwhile battle and I support them in it, but I'm not sure what this article brings to the conversation. It is yet another skirmish in the district courts.

jdp23• 12 years ago

The article talks about "grand jury subpoenas" so this is different than NSLs.

ticktocktick• 12 years ago

Think of the government as being a member of Hacker News with nearly infinite downvote power. If it doesn't like what you've said it disappears what you've said...often without even so much as an explanation.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

So, people still don't think they should prioritize getting their services from outside of EU, rather than US? It seems to me that despite all the laws and the Constitution, the government can still pretty much force any company do whatever it wants, "legally" or extra-legally (hello Amazon/Paypal/Visa/Mastercard!).

Post-Snowden, US companies don't deserve a second chance - at least not while the US government doesn't seem to have any remorse about mass surveillance and its abuse of power, and has no serious intention of reforming itself.

dctoedt2• 12 years ago

So, people still don't think they should prioritize getting their services from outside of EU, rather than US? It seems to me that despite all the laws and the Constitution, the government can still pretty much force any company do whatever it wants ....

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I imagine that most other countries' governments would do at least what the U.S. Government does, if only they had the tools.

insuffi5• 12 years ago

I find it peculiar that you still imply the US government's moral authority by using the phrase at least. What gives? What makes you think the other governments are intrinsically more evil?

Besides, your argument is rather off-topic. The other governments probably don't have the tools, so they can't be at least as evil, so the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

EDIT: I'd prefer somebody to tell me why other governments are intrinsically more evil, instead of silently downvoting me.

artellectual• 12 years ago

America is slowly turning into its own worst enemy. Is this what war on terror has lead to? "No one can terrorize our people, we terrorize our own people by slowly taking away all their rights and liberties" good job America.

Ihmahr2• 12 years ago

terrorize our own people

... and other people, but then it was okay-ish.

mtimjones3• 12 years ago

The Obama administration is the most open and transparent administration in history. Not.

venomsnake• 12 years ago

I think it is pretty transparent right now that they don't think the american public that they serve worthy of having a say in the way that they are being served. Or knowing how.

Also voting them out is not an option right now because both parties are pretty fine with extending the security apparatus rights and abilities. And the system is made almost impossible for a non partisan candidates to enter the government.

pdkl95• 12 years ago

...and so we maintain the status quo.

Worse, we are conditioning people to believe they can get away with this kind of blatant abuse. The longer this goes on without somebody being forced to answer for their role in it, we will see more and more people coming to the conclusion that they ARE actually above the law. Nobody threw the people involved in ${OLDER_PROJECT} in jail - despite being obviously unconstitutional and/or illegal at a glance - so why would ${NEW_PROJECT} be any different?

This feedback loop, I fear, is at the root of a lot of these issues. We've seen a general emboldening in many areas. In some areas, nobody is even bothering to to pretend their abuses are legal and constitutional. Without the fear of getting "caught" in some way - which would break the conditioning feedback-loop - I expect these kinds of abuses to simply get bolder and more frequent.

There was a time thought things like the legal system could reintroduce that fear. As I've learned about just how bad things have gotten, I now strongly suspect it will take more. I never wish for violence. Unfortunately, I really don't see attitudes changing until at least some heads quite literally end up on a pike. Anything less will be interpreted as still "getting away with it".

Seriously, I don't want a damn civil war. I just think it seems foolish to expect things like "the law" to fix anything, when you see people publicly announcing their intention to ignoring the law, and barely even makes the news.

binarymax2• 12 years ago

Here is what I don't understand: actions like this takes more than one person. It takes hundreds of people, complicit in actions that are the opposite of what anyone would consider 'American'. It's plainly fucking unamerican. So who the hell are these people? Why are they getting away with it? Sure covert things have always been going on to protect the public...but this is so in-your-face against what we should stand for that I cannot fathom how it is allowed to continue. I am so very angry that things like this are happening. The worst part? we can't seem to do anything about it so we just end up whining on the internet.

jbooth• 12 years ago

The hiring filters for most of the security services seem to select for people who consider following orders to be the most American thing they could possibly do.

binarymax2• 12 years ago

Ok sure, plenty of cogs in the wheel following orders. But what about the judges? What about the leaders? The people we elect into office? Where is the accountability?

lomnakkus• 12 years ago

Don't forget the Milgram experiments either. Deference to authority can be a very powerful thing.

mfisher87• 12 years ago

Yeah, but people change. Drastically. All the time. Because things happen to them.

walshemj• 12 years ago

The FBI and CIA dont seem to weed out poor quality candidates maybe they are placing to much reliance on patriotic hooha and polygraphs and not doing proper vetting checks.

The uk found out the hard way that he seems a good sort of chap belongs to all the right sort of clubs isn't agood selection criteria for the SS and SIS the hard way with the Famous 5 (Philby Maclean Burgess Blunt and Caincross)

Ihmahr2• 12 years ago

You say it is unamerican, but as a european (a non person) if I hear about these things I can only assume it were ... the Americans, or possibly the Brits.

EDIT: This seems to be a language issue, I thought as in 'Ford cars' are American.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

"It doesn't happen in America" and "it's un-American" are not the same statement. On the assumption you're being serious and not facetious, when an American uses the term "un-American," it's meant to mean that the action flies in the face of ideal American values (chiefly freedom).

It's obvious to all of us that these ideals don't reflect reality, but simply accepting that what the American government does is the ideal representation of values the American public actually holds isn't something most of us are willing to do.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

It's plainly fucking unamerican.

I'm not so sure about that. Grand juries traditionally operated in secret, and subpoenaing information on someone without tipping them doesn't necessarily violate the constitution. Now if someone is charged with a criminal offense, they have a constitutional right to confront witnesses under the 6th amendment. but that's not the same as a requirement to be notified of being the subject of an investigation where no charges have been brought.

Note that the grand jury system itself is is explicitly provided for in the Constitution - one of the less well-known aspects of the 5th amendment, which requires that prosecutors make a case before a grand jury before attempting to bring suspects to trial in serious cases. I'm not an expert on the history of grand juries, but I believe this summary from US v. Johnson (319 U.S. 503 (1943)) suts things up well:

Were the ruling of the court below allowed to stand, the mere challenge, in effect, of the regularity of a grand jury's proceedings would cast upon the government the affirmative duty of proving such regularity. Nothing could be more destructive of the workings of our grand jury system or more hostile to its historic status. That institution, unlike the situation in many states, is part of the federal constitutional system. To allow the intrusion, implied by the lower court's attitude, into the indispensable secrecy of grand jury proceedings — as important for the protection of the innocent as for the pursuit of the guilty — would subvert the functions of federal grand juries by all sorts of devices which some states have seen fit to permit in their local procedure, such as ready resort to inspection of grand jury minutes. The district court was quite within its right in striking the preliminary motions which challenged the legality of the grand jury that returned the indictment. To construe these pleadings as the court below did would be to resuscitate seventeenth century notions of interpreting pleadings and to do so in an aggravated form by applying them to the administration of the criminal law in the twentieth century. Protections of substance which now safeguard the rights of the accused do not require the invention of such new refinements of criminal pleading.

jafaku• 12 years ago

Sure covert things have always been going on to protect the public

lol

wavesounds• 12 years ago

So the Government can't limit the amount of money corporations can spend on influencing political campaigns but, when it feels like it, it can silence them without even explaining why. Yeah that makes sense.

sage_joch• 12 years ago

If Twitter and Yahoo really wanted to disclose this information, there is nothing the government could do to stop them. Civil disobedience is one of the most important tools we have against Orwellian governments. And doing the right thing is infinitely more important than following authoritarian orders.

why-el2• 12 years ago

I think fighting through ACLU is more fruitful. What you are asking for could cause both companies to shutdown, effectively killing one of the few places (Twitter in this case) through which the same distress you are feeling against governments is voiced throughout the world.

tokipin• 12 years ago

I think if Twitter was forced to shut down, a PR shitstorm of amazing proportions would erupt. There is no way the government would win that battle. And that's part of the point of civil disobedience: publicity.

marincounty• 12 years ago

The IRS could make the head honchos' lives miserable. This seems to be all their Achilles heal? And when it comes to their money--it all gets a bit fuzzy.

ensignavenger• 12 years ago

The IRS yes, but also the SEC has a history of retaliating against executives who don't cooperate with the Feds.

insuffi5• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, but that's wishful thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojS4zGDc4JI - QWest

http://www.wired.com/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifted/

Does QWEST CEO going to jail for refusing to cooperate ring any bells?

mike-cardwell• 12 years ago

This is what anonymous leaks are for

psbp• 12 years ago

Why doesn't the hacker community lionize this guy as much as they do Snowden?

cdr• 12 years ago

It helped that Nacchio was actually blatantly guilty of insider trading and all sorts of super shady behavior.

It's unlikely his prosecution even had anything to do with the NSA, as much as he likes to tell that story.

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_25488178/past-qwest-go...

cbsmith• 12 years ago

Two phrases to keep in mind: fiduciary responsibility and shareholder lawsuits... and that is assuming the government doesn't go after them.

nroach• 12 years ago

Corporations generally don't do civil disobedience but individuals do. The chief reason is that corporations are responsible to their shareholders and disregarding the rule of law makes for a very easy shareholder suit if profit is impacted. That's one reason that B-Corps now exist in many jurisdictions. They allow for officers and directors to avoid liability for "doing the right thing."

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

Corporations generally don't do civil disobedience but individuals do. The chief reason is that corporations are responsible to their shareholders and disregarding the rule of law makes for a very easy shareholder suit if profit is impacted.

And individuals run the risk of being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and killed, depending on the issue and the area. If civil disobedience was risk-free, it wouldn't be necessary.

enscr3• 12 years ago

Twitter is a godsend for unbiased news. In many developing countries, Twitter is playing a very important role of spreading the revolution against incumbents. Granted that it's penetration is a tiny fraction of print & TV media but going forward, it'll be an essential fabric for survival of society.

dublinben• 12 years ago

What kind of "unbiased" news do you find on Twitter? Its role in revolutions around the world has been greatly overstated by Western journalists and techies.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

I'd argue "unfiltered" or "less filtered" rather than "unbiased". You're going to get multiple biases, including both the party line and the opposition (either or both of which may have its own distortions).

Sorting out the truth from this is itself a challenge. Economic historian Philip Mirowski has interesting comments on how neoliberals see deliberate distortions of the media as an arguably good thing (Mirowki, and I, disagree with this). Determining credibility (and advertising who is credible) remains a challenge, even with social / decentralized media.

wdr1• 12 years ago

I question if they would receive much support from the general population if they did.

Sadly, it would be easy for the story to fit the existing narrative of "evil corporations seeing themselves as above the law."

unclebucknasty• 12 years ago

The question is, what law(s) are being used by the government to take these actions with Twitter/Yahoo? For instance, are these NSL letters?

If these are not actual laws, but rather gray-area interpretations of laws being used, then each company can decide whether to challenge them and have their days in court.

But, if the government is clearly operating within the law, then it is the law/lawmaking itself that should be challenged.

xname• 12 years ago

Chinese government can silence Twitter and Yahoo? Weird.

dm22• 12 years ago

I don't know what information they are trying to suppress but in my opinion gag orders are wrong and the US government should have to thoroughly justify any action that goes directly against the US constitution.

Say the plans for the US Navy's railgun, or advanced nuclear specifics, or advanced drone technology, or time-travel technology is leaked out, should the US government be able to do everything in it's power to wipe that information from the internet to ensure that it has the #1 military in the world?

I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that if a terrorist group got that information and used it to cause massive amounts of destruction that people would have wished the US government did more to protect it's military secrets.

The Patriot Act really messed things up.

Does anyone have a solution? Does it involve getting more ethical people into congress?

I have a solution, and it's called Online Voting. We are probably one of the few online communities that can actually make it happen, yet it's never even mentioned. Start by testing it in select states, then if it's successful move towards implementing it nation-wide. I have proposed it before but people just tell me how it's impossible because of security. There HAS to be a valid solution, being able to validate your votes, having numerous checks in place, having open-source code, I don't know, but hopefully someday we can all work together to make it a reality.

We could even work to eliminate Congress eventually, have every single thing that normally goes before Congress voted by individuals. Yes, the president could overrule votes (such as building a spaceship for trillions of dollars), but near unlimited transparency just seems to be the obvious answer. There will be a ton of resistance, because those in power don't want to give up power. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we should at least try it.

dmur• 12 years ago

We don't know what happened, that's the problem.

FTA, "To make matters worse, the government won't disclose its reasoning for requesting the gag, effectively shutting the public out of the courthouse without any explanation."

It's idealistic to think that no information should be able to be quashed by the government, but it's not idealistic to think that their motives for doing so should be made public.

dm22• 12 years ago

I had the "motives made public" line in there but moved it to the top of my comment.

Suppressing leaks of top-secret military technology is acceptable, suppressing secrets that could harm the image of the US government or individuals because they did something bad is something that shouldn't be allowed.

People must be accountable for their actions, otherwise they are cowards.

jgg• 12 years ago

The problem is a cultural one, not a technical one.

What makes you think this community of people who work for the very companies that are being gagged, backdoored, surveilled and bribed are the ones who are going to fix it with a magic voting program? This community can't even come to a consensus to admit that Dropbox quite obviously has the hands of the Powers That Be rammed firmly into its asshole now (I apologize - maybe Condoleezza Rice had a revelation after advocating for the invasion of Iraq on false premises, and now deeply cares about the security of the world's porn backups).

Besides, I'd argue the system we have now is better, because it's hard to forge votes when you have hundreds of people across many municipalities counting votes and thinking for themselves. If you implement a national voting system in software, it would be much easier to corrupt by virtue of being centralized.

pffft• 12 years ago

I think a more subtle solution (a thus politically viable) would be to attach a filter to the front of the current political system. Right now, we get sports stadium style debates filled with sounds bites, pretense, and timely rhetoric, which encourage showmanship over substance. A cooler, internet based debate system could crowd source better policies and politicians. An interactive system for judging the debates and commenting could increase exposure and decrease apathy for the "voters".

It could be a platform where people "run" and "vote" on candidates. Debates could be structured in some sort of tournament system, where winners are determined by voters who are directed to them evenly. The debate topics could be decided on before hand by the voters, once again by voting their interests. At the end of it, there would be a few filtered candidates, who would have a series of well formed and observable views on each of the topics defined by the voters. The whole system would have no legitimate political tie in, but the win there could be used to prefilter their conventional run, and provide a history to go on.

There are some substantial details I overlooked there, a big one being how to make sure the votes are legitimate. But if enacted, I think it would take our political system a long way towards a true democracy.

rainsford• 12 years ago

We don't need to speculate, the ACLU article said the gag order was about preventing the companies from revealing the grand jury subpoenas to the people who's information was requested. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with suppressing secret information or the Patriot Act. And it seems like a reasonable step for some investigations, where tipping off the target of the investigation might end it before it could really begin.

ama729• 12 years ago

I don't understand the outrage here, aren't gag orders pretty much standard police tool? I mean, if you are taping the new Al Capone/Ben Laden/Ted Bundy, then surely you don't want Twitter to reveal it no?

ds9• 12 years ago

It would make no sense to let the provider say "we're monitoring Al Capone", as this would alert Al Capone. But they're not even allowing the provider to say "certain users are subject to wiretapping at government order". On a huge service like Twitter this would not alert anyone in particular.

Even the above is not as much of a concern - but the same mechanism can silence the providere about more drastic intrusions which compromise the whole service - such as coercing private encryption keys. Lookup the whole Lavabit thing.

DanBC• 12 years ago

You should assume that all governments are hostile and trying to get your data.

You then decide if you care. If you do care you instLl and carefully use encryption software and keep your private keys under your control.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

(In one case, the government withdrew its gag order application after Judge Facciola invited Twitter's participation.)

...and? How did this play out in the context of the original subpoena?

omarhegazy• 12 years ago

I'm reading through these comments and really laughing my ass off at the bold, crazy rhetoric being used here.

Orwellian governments! Everyone is just a complacent cog! America is it's own worst enemy! No more freedom!

I mean, I admit, this specific act seems pretty dumb on the government's part. I have no idea why the government would silence Twitter or Yahoo. And given that they didn't care enough to explain, seems like it was probably a legal bug. Maybe some 60 year-old anti-Internet Congress member that thought SOPA was genius got cranky one day and sent some phone calls. I don't know; doesn't seem like anyone that truly has power in government cares, or else they'd succeed in silencing. This doesn't seem like "an extraordinary effort by the government"; this is the same government that dropped two nukes in order to end a worldwide war, so if they really cared about what your favorite anti-government Reddit liberal had to say in in a 140-character long witticism, they'd be able to really shut it down.

But I have a feeling that these alarmist and dramatic comments regarding FASCIST AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS HOLDING THE TRUE ARTISTS DOWN! have much more to do with the general reddit.com/r/technology culture of shitting on everything the government has been doing since last June. And that culture is much more retarded and out-of-hand than anything PRISM could possibly be.

It seems like what the government is doing with user data since PRISM is very similar to what advertisers have been doing with user data since Fucking Forever, the government doing it for it's ideals regarding terrorism and advertisers doing it for the moolah. But the point is the same -- massive data collection and other forms statistical analysis that you dramatic fucks label "spying" in order to seem passionate and cool has been going on for a while. Just that the government is a much bigger and more complex system than your average advertiser, so you seem like a hip and happening individual by attacking it.

Most people really don't give a shit about massive data collection. I mean, sure, everyone's a Reddit slacktivist nowadays, throwing around words like "spying!" and "privacy!" but no one really cares, or else we'd all be using rsync + ftp and BitMessage and all that idealistic free software stuff that RMS peddles. People just want to seem special and cool and smart and advanced when they post about how EVIL the government is for spying on all of us. But no one honestly cares, or else no one would use Facebook and Google and Apple products.

And should you care?

Is it really that significant, your tiny, indistinguishable contribution to our advertising overlords that isn't even tied to your personal identity? Is it really that creepy or a violation of privacy? It's not like the government knows that specifically Omar Hegazy and E1ven, they don't care about everyone's specific identities (but that would be truly creepy). I mean, even if they have your specific data tied to your real name, it's not like the NSA has people actually listening and looking at your conversation and spying on who you are and what you do. That would be statistically impossible. There are 316 million American citizens, 204 million e-mails sent per minute, and 1.26 billion Facebook users, and only 75 thousand NSA employees.

Could they really be reading all your e-mails tied to you the person, are they even capable of that? They wouldn't be able to spy on each and every one of you even if they tried, and that wouldn't make sense, either. So I'm pretty sure the only thing that knows about you you is the program transferring stuff from Google's servers to NSA servers, and you can trust that one to not be sentient enough to care.

So. They're not spying on individual people, cause they physically can't - but that would really be creepy. They're checking on aggregate statistics. And when you're just another brick in the wall of statistical analysis, is it really all that creepy? Do they really know all that much specifically about you?

But why are they looking at aggregate statistics, you ask?

Good question. Don't laugh -- I think it's terrorism ? I mean sure, that seems like such a cop-out answer from our perspective. But how do we know that the only reason that terrorism isn't a threat anymore isn't because of the American government putting it's foot down? Couldn't it be that the government's seemingly creepy obsession with fighting against terrorism is the reason Al-Qaeda and such have failed so hard that we just laugh at the possibility of them being a threat? If terrorism isn't a threat anymore, couldn't it be that shows that the government's way is working? I mean, this bin Laden guy. His family was filthy fucking rich, man. They were connected to Saudi royalty. These Al-Qaeda guys had fucking planes, man. And they reaaaaalllllly didn't like us. So obviously, if we just did nothing about it, they probably would've struck again ...

But I don't know. I haven't done enough research on this topic myself. Maybe the government's obsession with terrorism is a bit too much and while we should be worrying about this issue in order to keep it from happening, maybe 20x the military budget of the next 10 countries on the list combined is a bit too far. Or maybe it's just the right amount. I don't know, I read programming books in my free time, not political discourse.

But it's just so obvious from their alarmist bullshit that these Reddit libertarians haven't done their research either. They just want to seem like they have.

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

It is very very hard to sympathize with the companies involved. If they wanted to, they could implement secure communication where ephemeral keys or user-controlled keys are used, and open source clients would guard against the placement of "bugged" client software. Then they could hand over cyphertext on demand, and not take on the job of supposedly protecting people who in their estimation merit protection. Protect all the bits.

hadoukenio• 12 years ago

Stupid but serious question...

If I get a National Security Letter am I allowed to show it to my lawyer? If so, is there any limit to the number of people in my legal council? If NOT, what's stopping having everyone in the country as my legal council. Then, as I can only show the National Security Letter to my lawyers, I can then host the NSL on my website for everyone to see.

Crazy or illegal?

gknoy2• 12 years ago

I'd say that you'd have a hard time arguing that you had made the entire world your legal counsel. There's no contract in place, etc.

scintill76• 12 years ago

Ladar Levison claimed, "There's information that I can't even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public."[0] I'm not familiar enough to say whether this level of gag is legally documented, or has been upheld, etc.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/lavabit-founder-u...

The Government is Silencing Twitter and Yahoo, and It Won't Tell Us Why

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