Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers

Nations, including and often starting with the USA, want internet companies to obey their laws. That shouldn't still surprise.

In the case of less savoury regimes I would prefer that Facebook, Google or whoever would respond ethically and choose to withdraw rather than compromise thousands of people to make a few extra dollars. Better yet I'd prefer that data sharing with such places was legislated against.

They are registered companies. They have head offices. They have regional offices. They own entire datacentres. They are traded on stock exchanges. They trade for money with customers in countries all over the world. They are not above the law.

Legally, is Facebook any different than say, 3M or IBM? Both are US corporations with offices, manufacturing and distribution facilities in the UK. They are obviously subject to UK law. The precise location of particular data stored by the company, and servers accessing the data, seems a very odd criterion upon which to argue that the company is not subject to the rule of law. The company exists as a legal entity in the UK, it has offices and employees, and customers. It does have a presence. And it should absolutely be required to obey the law of the land.

(A few years ago, I might have had a slightly different view. But companies like Facebook and Google have taken such gross liberties with the law, and even the fundamental functioning of democracy itself, that I think there's an urgent need for them to be reigned in, harshly. They brought it entirely upon themselves.)

Indeed they can, the Supreme court merely interprets the law. If congress decides to change the law then the Supreme Court's interpretation is moot.

These days changing the constitution is politically infeasible so it may seem this way - but ultimate power rests with Congress.

So if it chooses to have someone's head removed for spurious reasons it does in principle have the power (this would be an Act of Attainder, not used since the 18th Century, I think, and held to be so oppressive it's outlawed specifically in the US Constitution).

In practice, it's quite a lot more nuanced than that. Parliament is constrained by both politics (the public would be outraged by an Act of Attainder), international commitments (our EU membership, in particular, comes with supervening law which would make that a very costly action at a minimum), and historical practice.

The Facebook thing is a good example of these constraints. There's no question that Parliament could vote itself powerful and enforceable subpoena powers. And it has in centuries past. But it's also not used them recently, and done various other bits of legislating (e.g. the human rights act) which aren't compatible with arbitrary action. If the Commons tried to use its inherent power of imprisonment to enforce a subpoena, it might be overturned by a judge issuing a writ of Habeus Corpus on the grounds that the power is obsolete and in breach of the HRA. In principle, Parliament as a whole could pass an Act to prevent this, but it hasn't. So a lot of the checks that are constitutional in the US are conventional and institutional in the UK.

Finally, there are absolutely legal checks on the powers of the executive, which are enforced by the courts much as they would be in the US, though the source of these is basically law rather than constitution.

The limits on the U.S. government exist because we put them in our organic law (the Constitution) which is not solely the prerogative of the federal congress (or any lone state).

Remember this the next time someone questions the fact we're a federal republic in the context of a short-term setback.

I agree it seems this was a pretty major incident and people are letting their hatred of Zuckerberg blind them to it.

In essence the 643 guy was threatened with UK jail if he didn't produce the documents. And threatened with US jail if he did. Over something that he did not own or had any part in creating. I'm no expert but it seems like a rights violation. He didn't do anything illegal.

Do embassies really step in in this case? If not, what would be the correct process to untangle oneself.

I mean, I see women showing their hair and ankles in public all the time, does that mean I can take a stick to them like mutawwi'a? No, because those laws simply do not reach the US.

If you're only referring to the SixWhatever guy's liabilities within US law, then I suppose we'll see how that plays out.