Twitter drops lawsuit, saying summons has been withdrawn | Hacker News Reader

Twitter drops lawsuit, saying summons has been withdrawn

reuters.com

176 pointsanigbrowl44 comments

> The Justice Department, which defends federal agencies in court, declined to comment. The Homeland Security Department, which issued the summons, had no immediate comment.

I hate that these kind of cases almost always end up getting the silent treatment. I'm not an American, but I think governmental institutions and agencies should be bound by law to provide an answer to the public for some of their actions, and I think this is such a case. It is important that people get to know why the government wanted this information and who is responsible for issuing the order in the first place, but I guess that's never gonna happen when politicians and officials doesn't want to answer for their actions like the rest of the people has to do.

I think there is something in this. At the company I previously worked for, we spent an incredible amount of money and time reminding the government of the law, only for them to stop talking to us. There came a point where I thought, hmmm, y'all should probably have to explain why the f you thought you could send this to us in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that would have actually been the case here, if Twitter had not initiated litigation themselves.

This was a summons, not a warrant or subpoena. I believe–but invite correction if wrong–that the summons itself does not have immediate legal force. Ignoring it would require the government to seek a court order, or drop the matter.

I'd almost wager that they had already tried, and failed, to get some sort of court order. At the very least, someone, somewhere, did their job–either a judge, or some government lawyer who refused to even try.

I wonder if the backstory could be discovered via, for example, a FOIA request? But who knows if getting into the spotlight wouldn't have consequences for this unsung hero. Maybe better not drag some unknown rebel out into the open, lest this all ends with the most ironic way to get fired, ever.

Usually, the agent (I've never seen or dealt with DHS/CBP, mostly FBI) just keeps pestering you until you involve lawyers, often they tell you that you cannot involve lawyers (and you involve them anyway) - but you'd be amazed at how persistent they are. Sometimes as you're alluding to, it's a random agent trying a pot shot at seeing if anyone will notice them using some legality they cannot, and mostly they go away when you tell them no. Often it's misapplied MLAT you're dealing with, and then the rest is search without warrant or court order (usually trying to misapply an agency spesific power as you see in this twitter instance). We really cared about doing the right thing by the customer and paid$$ to do so, I'm not sure how many other companies follow that ideal.

Is there no accountability for the agent? I can guess the answer.. but it's kind of sad. They keep testing the waters to see what they can get away with. And when they find out, they test the waters to see what more they can get away with.. is what it sounds like from your post.

There is not and you are correct. Obviously when you have a business to run it's not like you have the time or resources to go one degree further and try and become enforcement. You shake your head and move on to the next. Sadly, I could have bought 10 senior engineers per year for the cost of legal compliance and policy (around 1.5MM a year).

I think in the US that mostly happens through elected representatives. On the small side, it's known as "constituent services": http://www.npr.org/2014/10/28/359615965/constituent-services...

And on the larger scale, you'll often see elected representatives writing to ask pointed questions. As sehug mentions below, Sen. Wyden wrote today to ask about this:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3540301-040717-RW-Le...

He clearly does this sort of thing a fair bit:

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/library

On that large scale that you're talking about re: Wyden - it's called "congressional oversight". Wyden does this a lot because, as that letter you linked noted, he's the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over CBP (as well as over the more directly finance-related issues he's written on). Note also that the letter is printed on Finance Committee letterhead, not on his own - he's writing on behalf of the committee, not only out of his own personal interest.

FWIW, Sen. Wyden wrote a letter to CBP asking WTF: https://theintercept.com/2017/04/07/sen-ron-wyden-government...

I know we'd all prefer a heartfelt apology when the government beuracy mistreats us, but dropping it isn't such a bad thing.

The worst thing that can happen is that they don't ever reconsider things, never back down, and they dig in even harder every confrontation no matter the circumstances.

All in all, I think the outcome is on the good side of the spectrum.

Well, dropping it may or may not be a bad thing, but it's really the only option that Twitter had anyway.

If the government withdrew the summons, and Twitter went ahead with their suit, the case would have been mooted by the summons withdrawal anyway, and would have been dismissed.

They could potentially amend the suit for damages to recoup the cost of compliance with an erroneous and arbitrary action, but given qualified immunity, it would be a very high bar indeed, and would almost certainly set the wrong kind of precedent (which is to say that it would reinforce existing precedent.)

Why would it be so bad if the government dug in and doubled down? I'd love to see a company like Twitter fight the US government.

Perhaps obviously, the problem is typically political appointees who don't know relevant law and regulation, but have too much authority to be ignored. Going over one's report's head is dangerous. So this is what we get.

Needless to say the Streisand effect[1] hit hard here. The account[2] had apparently under 40K followers before all of this; now it clocks north of 160K followers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

[2] https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis

On the other hand: "We are taking a break! The past few days have been extremely difficult and full of anxiety. Thank you again America!"

Chilling effect achieved.

There is no way they didn't see that one coming and if there was they are even more incompetent than they seem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14058290

If I could predict that so could just about everybody else.

So, obviously they won't be trying this particular avenue again, is there a list of such accounts?

Here's a list, though I don'tk now how maintained it is: http://www.core77.com/posts/60230/Heres-a-List-of-All-the-US...

Thank you.

I checked all of them quickly, there are a few duds in them but most seem legit, but quite a few are not too active (last tweet a while ago). So likely that list is not actively maintained but it's a good starting point.

This could have influenced Twitter's decision to sue: to get more positive publicity for themselves.

A bit of a non-story but I felt obliged to follow up after the initial discussion attracted more interest than I expected yesterday.

This is actually an excellent service. Many times I see some news item come by and then months later I find myself wondering whatever came of it. At least in this case there is some follow-up, plenty of times there is no follow-up at all. The people consuming the media have a short attention span, but the media themselves also have a short attention span.

There ought to be a 'google news' like facility that you could go to in order to see what came of something that was in the news. We could call it dejanews ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events sort-of manages that, but also highlights the limitations of the linear/textual.

I have a vision of a better way to organize information for the 21st century and beyond, but alas this comment box is too small to contain it.

> but alas this comment box is too small to contain it.

At the lower right there is a little triangle that you can use to drag it larger ;)

There actually is a size limit to HN comments.

That said a link to elsewheere can work as well.

To both you and jacquesm, I may be reading too much into it but that sounded like a riff on the famous last part of Fermat's Last Theorem.

"It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers.

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain."

Of course it was a riff on that. No need to spoil the joke by explaining it (twice, at that).

In all seriousness I am not yet ready to write it up, nor am I sure that that would be the best medium...I might be better doing it in pictures, a la Alan Kay's demonstration.

See Fermat's Last Theorem.

Yes, I got the reference, see that little ;) at the end is a 'wink' ;)

As a side note, I really like that Wikipedia page. Does anyone know of an RSS feed that scrapes these links day by day or does Wikipedia provide one directly?

That's actually a good idea. I used to write down stories and check up on them after a few months. You learn how sloppy initial reporting is that way, and just how credible "sources close to X says" are actually are. You know, just in case you needed another reason to distrust the news.

What if HN could have a "related post" option? If you remembered (or searched for) the older post, you could then link a given post to some other post.

Oh! And then you could have people rate the relationships, just like they can rate comments!

Oh! And you can put it into the API, making everything into a linked list of stories!

Yes, let's make the schema even more complicated 8-)

Edit: To be clear, I do like the idea.

You just invented the semantic web. :-)

And then we could use an algorithm to use these connections to determine the importance of articles! Name it something catchy, like PageRank

This case reminds of what Turkey has become under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Knowing how these things go, this guys never stop. They failed this time. Next time, they'll try harder until insulting the president becomes a criminal offence. It won't happens all at once, but we're heading in that direction.

By the way, The Turkish govt will come after you, no matter what country you live in, if you dare insult their leader.

Reminds me of the FBI backing down in the San Bernardino iPhone case... like, we tried a bully tactic, we got called on it, let's back down to avoid any legal precedent being set.

Tho IANAL so, not sure if there is the same sort of legal precedent issues involved here?

Why would Twitter need to file a lawsuit? Couldn't they simply not comply and wait for the government to file a lawsuit? And isn't the latter what happened with Apple and the encrypted iPhone?

Maybe this solves the matter more quickly. Also gets it out to the public, who they expect to be on their side.

> Why would Twitter need to file a lawsuit? Couldn't they simply not comply and wait for the government to file a lawsuit?

I believe that certain government orders have criminal consequences for non-compliance, which creates a powerful motive to seek to have the order ruled invalid proactively.

This way they get choice of venue?

I'm still left wondering why they were so interested in this one particular account. It seems like there has to be more to the story than they will ever let be known.

Maybe they really did have the evil intent of attempting to chill all criticism of the government, but there is so much of it everywhere, could that have really been effective?

Or was it more to do with the appearance of this one twitter account being from someone on the inside?

Guess we'll never really know.

> Or was it more to do with the appearance of this one twitter account being from someone on the inside?

That's the best theory I've come up with: given the general panic about leaks and that agency's particular aura of entrenched us-vs-them thinking it seems likely that there's a serious effort to find out whether an employee is behind it.

I envy these large companies. If they get an unfair, unconstitutional, or just unlawful "request" from the government they can fight back with their legal counsel.

The rest of us? Good luck staying out of jail.

Posted a few hours ago here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14062305

Reply on news.ycombinator.com