Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

I think that a better look at this subject is a recent piece in The Atlantic titled, "Are Facebook, Twitter, and Google American Companies?"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/are-f...

tl;dr, this back-and-forth is unsettling to a Federalist:

>In response to a tough line of questions from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, gave two conflicting answers within a couple of minutes. Cotton pressed Edgett on Twitter’s decision to cut off the CIA’s access to alerts derived from the Twitter-data fire hose, which is provided through a company it partially owns, Dataminr, while the companies reportedly still allowed the Russian media outlet RT to continue using the service for some time.

>“Do you see an equivalency between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Russian intelligence services?,” Cotton asked.

>“We’re not offering our service for surveillance to any government,” Edgett responded.

>“So you will apply the same policy to our intelligence community that you’d apply to an adversary’s intelligence services?,” Cotton asked again.

>“As a global company, we have to apply our policies consistently,” Edgett replied. “We’re trying to be unbiased around the world.”

>Cotton then turned to WikiLeaks, which the Intelligence Committee has designated as a nonstate hostile intelligence agency, asking why it had been operating “uninhibited” on Twitter.

>“Is it bias to side with America over our adversaries?,” Cotton demanded.

>“We’re trying to be unbiased around the world,” Edgett said. “We’re obviously an American company and care deeply about the issues we’re talking about today, but as it relates to WikiLeaks or other accounts like it, we make sure they are in compliance with our policies just like every other account.”

I guess it is kind of cyberpunk-y. All we need now is for US Marshals to lay siege to some SF headquarters, facing contracted PMCs denying the validity of their warrants.

But Kumail's point isn't about whether these companies are patriotic, he's saying they lack any ethical framework of operation and presumes it's because people aren't challenging each other with ethical questions preferring to condone any behavior in favor of flexing engineering muscles and proving that, "yes, they can".

I don't think it's unrelated, and perhaps your point is that it's doubly clear no one has thought about ethics when you examine Sean's contradictory responses. But I think the lack of patriotism is more of an example.

Anyway, at the end of the day we're all people and we are the ones that depend on these companies and services. If you don't believe a company is behaving ethically, stop using their services. Make a damn sacrifice and live your virtue. Sure maybe we could argue that to some extent and in certain cases some companies have crossed the line and are harmfully exploiting customers to the extent that there should be legal ramifications, but the government does not exist to provide you an ethically sterile society. It exist to maintain and protect basic human rights--at least in the US as far as the formal documentation is concerned.

As far as I can gather based on armchair political philosophy over drinks.. most people don't actually care about privacy and rank convenience or safety (at the expense of said privacy) higher in their priorities. I find that unfortunate but at the same time I still haven't worked up the courage to totally disband my Facebook account and switch completely over to my proton mail accounts. So it's complicated.

If we could all agree that privacy is a fundamental human right which you would think would be supported by the constitution in the US then, we should actually act/rally to legislate such as other countries have done. Yet at the same time because these companies operate globally, they serve a diverse spectrum of users who may or may not share the same political and social values as we do in the US. This extends to the very employees who are "failing to ask the ethical questions" that Kumail can so obviously see are overlooked. This is globalization.

TL;DR: they do this because they can, and they can because you let them.

>TL;DR: they do this because they can, and they can because you let them.

You may be passionate and well informed enough to have the strength of conviction to take appropriate action, but most people are not.

Nothing will change unless you can affect the behavior of others. You will be fought every step of the way: for the company, this is a fight for survival.

>they can because you let them.

What does this statement reveal about your internal dialogue? You can't expect people who don't understand or who aren't involved to take action. You are delegating your responsibility. Perhaps it is good for your ego, but I can tell you how it turns out.

A more appropriate statement would be, "because I let them."

I'm not trying to deflect personal responsibility and I fortunately have not been in a position where I've had to make an ethical decision that would contradict the wishes of my employer (nor do I work for an employer in the realm of data hungry social media/advertisement) but I have come close WRT intellectual property and software patents. My comment which admitttedly digresses slightly at the end is more about the fact that I find it hard for a company or a group of people to agree on _any_ sort of ethical framework these days when we have such a wide array of cultural backgrounds. I may not like giving up privacy in exchange for auto-gifs of my photo albums, but plenty of people love it, and is it even my place to tell you how you should feel about it (different from telling you how I feel about it and why)? I and other individuals and digital rights advocacy groups do have the conversations about the fallout of letting companies run around unchecked with all the data. And I support the other individuals in arguments and the organizations financially (and as I mentioned try to lead by example). My take away from those conversations however is that privacy is not as much a concern as you or I or Kumail might agree it is right here right now. I don't see how I can have more stake in the game short of shouting louder or deciding to pivot my personal career into public advocacy or civil service... Am I really responsible for indoctrinating others into my own privacy conscious worldview? At the end of the day you have to educate yourself and form your own worldview and live out a set of virtues. If you don't do that or choose a different worldview or set of virtues than me, is that my fault? And if a group of individuals who don't care about the same virtues as I do are at the helm of a company, it's a failure on my part to have prevented that situation from happening? Maybe I'm not 100% clear on your point.

Yes, we're on the same page. It's great that you're supporting organizations and people with this.

>deciding to pivot my personal career into public advocacy or civil service

There have been worse ideas. It's worth fighting. :)

Organizations will engage in behavior if the expected risk-adjusted payoff is sufficiently large, from eroding privacy to cheating emissions tests. Unless we can change that equation we should expect to lose in the long run. This behavior is emergent, based on laws of power and organizational structure.

Organizations stand to win far more than lose, and a victory for us does not provide the same millions of dollars. They get stronger as we get weaker, and they use that strength to win people over to their position.

The social media companies (FB and Twitter) in particular seem to care nothing about the quality of their service otherwise they would be working to keep fake news and astroturfing campaigns off their platforms. I find that weird, or at least telling about how they feel about their relationship to users of the platform (yes I know 'the user is the product'). The lack of ethics need not be narrowed to a lack of patriotism as the lack of ethics is a problem globally for these companies. A sick individual could seriously fuck up any community through disinformation with enough time and resources. FB and Twitter are fully engaged enabling advertisers and care nothing about the messaging, content, or end result of any campaign as long as they get a hit off the impact.

I think user engagement is much more important to these companies than any ethical qualm about truth and fairness. It was pretty obvious when Facebook killed its human news editor program because they kept spiking viral but fake news stories from sites like Infowars and Breitbart and conservative media outlets complained about bias against them.

This is the second time that I read that WikiLeaks is classified as "hostile intelligence agency". Isn't the purpose of intelligence to gather information to gain advantage over adversaries? It sounds to me like a redundant term like "hostile military". And BTW WikiLeaks leaks are public so all other intelligence agencies and citizens can learn while state agencies try to keep things obscure as much as possible. Who's hostile?

The "hostile" framing device is a fairly naked attempt to build an ongoing narrative.

I doubt it needs pointing out that the reason WikiLeaks exists is because many (most, all?) organs of "public " service are anything but.

It doesn't seem that hard to understand? In the context of a U.S. Congressional hearing, "hostile" probably means "hostile to the U.S."

Good point! But depending on your interests/POW you could consider NSA as "hostile to the U.S." given they're spying on their own citizens.

If an American spy plane showed up over the Soviet Union, the plane would get shot at. If an American spy plane showed up over France, they wouldn't get shot at.

Of course there's an understanding that intelligence agencies are all ultimately looking at everything, but there's a degree of cooperation. Even in the current state of affairs Russian and American intel agencies work together on anti-terrorism stuff.

However, if the other group is clearly actively against you, then it's harder to work with them. It's safe to say at this point, given the evidence out ther, that WikiLeaks does work with an objective of embarassing American interests.

> WikiLeaks does work with an objective of embarassing American interests.

I think it's a contrarian media organization. I recall when the conservatives were all "kill this guy" during the Bush administration, now they they think he's the rescuer of Western Civilization.

If you have any belief in 'checks and balances' as an anti-corruption mechanism then this is a positive.

Who could regulate the 4th Estate, the academies? Not the government, they would be accused of corruption or despotism. Enter WL.

Think about it: who is 'the establishment'. It can't be the President/White House can it, not when the majority of pundits, journalists and intellectuals were against him.

Wikileaks leaks are selective. "Public" only describes the things they release. The hostility is in the choice of releases.

They only publish true stuff, yes, but that's not normally what one means by 'selective'. They're not a hacking organization, they don't go around hacking people to obtain stuff. And yes, someone gave them some Russian stuff not too long ago.

There's no denying they promote a certain narrative in their PR, but are there known examples of leaks withheld by Wiki Leaks, where the whistleblower had to go elsewhere?

Here is one example, where they refused to publish leaks from/about Russia:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-le...

I recall another case when Wikileaks itself advertised a Russia leak and then never released anything.

"Hostile" as in "currently harmful to my political party".

>I guess it is kind of cyberpunk-y. All we need now is for US Marshals to lay siege to some SF headquarters, facing contracted PMCs denying the validity of their warrants.

I think the turning point was the SOPA/PIPA thing. After that event, it felt like the tech industry seemed to collectively figure out that just through sheer technical dominance, they actually wield tons of practical political power. Possibly more then the savviest Washington insiders.

I hate wikileaks, but I honestly don't see the contradiction in Twitter's behavior on this point.

Perhaps they were naive on whether RT was actually an aperture of Russian intelligence services. OK. Their KYC game could use some upping. OTOH, would anyone be surprised if the CIA were paying some little hedge fund somewhere to let them piggyback on access to Twitter's feed?

As far as Wikileaks' uninhibited operation goes, as far as I can tell, the CIA has not had its account banned from Twitter, just its firehose access. Does Wikileaks have access to that? What would they do with it if they did?

I mean it just seems like the line of questioning is, "Hey is it fair that you let them do X and won't let us do Y?" Maybe I can't see it because my silicon valley ass has no ethics.

the core issue is the activity focused on influencing a US election, which foreign nationals and foreign corporations are prohibited from doing [1]

if Twitter cut off CIA from firehose access and then tried to sell Twitter advertising and analytic services to RT for a US election then that seems to be some poorly constructed PR staging by Twitter

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/09...

"I guess it is kind of cyberpunk-y. All we need now is for US Marshals to lay siege to some SF headquarters, facing contracted PMCs denying the validity of their warrants."

More surreal things have happened...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...

>No compensatory damages were awarded. The judge said that Steve Jackson had little involvement in SJG at the time of the raid, and the company was close to Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that Jackson's renewed involvement in the wake of the raid had turned the company's fortunes around.

Ah, the 'pockets full of fish' defense. "While my client did shove the claimant into a lake, they came out with their pockets full of fish to a net benefit. Therefore, my client is innocent."

I think this was all trash talk, nothing but an attempt to intimidate. If companies are following letters of the law then it doesn't matter who thinks/interprets what. and they better know they would be challenged in court of law.

That's a pretty ridiculous conversation. No wonder the Twitter guy was confused. Neither Wikileaks nor RT are intelligence agencies. The Intelligence Committee pretending they are doesn't change that.

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