Exactly. I'm very happy with this turn of events. In repeatedly turning down the British Parliament's request to testify, Zuckerberg displayed a stunning level of arrogance, and brought this upon himself.
I could imagine that there are implications for tech companies now operating in the UK if they’re subject to raids by the British police force. It sets a dangerous precedent.
Facebook in the UK is wholly subject to the decisions of Facebook in the US. He may not be a British subject, but his business operates in the UK. All business in the UK should be subject to UK law and regulation and the officers accountable. It should not matter if the law is old or the company has a head office elsewhere. Same for companies operating in other countries.
If I choose to start operating my business in the USA I would reasonably expect to be subject to US law, and accountable to it.
And before you ask what's wrong with that, let's not forget that Saudi Arabia, China, and I'm sure 5 other countries have forced Facebook/Google/Microsoft/... to hand over data and then used it to execute gays and dissidents. Even in the UK case, it's pushing hard for these companies to just hand over all data they have to their secret service (not even limited to UK citizens).
You know, to "protect the children".
It's like how your little website may do things that are not ok in country X and you don't care, but if you want people and businesses from country X to be able to spend money on your website then you need to care.
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.)
Don't you think the U.S. would not have done the same (probably would've done much sooner) if a company was repeatedly turning up its nose and thumbing it?
I don’t think a dangerous precedent has been set. I think foreign tech should be aware right from the start, if you break the law you and your staff will be punished.
It’s the same deal for UK firms working in US. HSBC was quite rightly punished for money laundering in the US.
This is kind of tautologous; if you're in the UK, suspected of having committed a crime, or certain other infractions (health and safety etc), you can be raided. It's more surprising when the FBI managed to do a raid in New Zealand.
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.
As the only body capable of updating the text of the law they have ultimate power. That they chose to constrain it was an altruistic act of a sovereign body. But only they (and their predecessor the continental congress) had the power to restrict themselves. The courts can only hold them to the text they themselves wrote.
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.
1) Parliament is supreme, not the PM. So extreme acts require the consent (in advance) of both the Commons (which has a built-in government majority but does sometimes have its own opinions - see Brexit) and the Lords (which can be unpredictable).
2) Norms are powerful in the Westminster system (sometimes in the form of so-called constitutional conventions) and surprisingly effective at stopping bad behaviour.
3) We've developed fairly strong judicial review, so the courts restrain illegal behaviour by the government. Although the law can be changed, it turns out this still stops a lot of abuses.
4) The evil PM would still have to successfully govern, which requires either the consent of the governed or massive force (at which point they'd need the active support of the military as well, and the military in Britain have stayed out of active politics since the 17th Century - another strong norm).
5) The Queen retains reserve powers, including the right to veto bills (she's theoretically the third 'house' of Parliament). She probably gets to do this exactly once before being deposed, and an attempted auto-coup is one of the more likely outcomes.
It's an odd system, but historically it actually works well. I spent some time interning in the US Congress expecting to find the system much better than ours, but I came away believing that a strong separation of powers in a Presidential system may create more problems than it solves.
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.
Anybody who has been following the DCMS Committee's work in the UK knows what the cause is - Facebook has been lying through its teeth to the committee and refusing to cooperate.
Hell, the Committee has had to organise an international super-committee with half a dozen other national legislatures in order to pressure Facebook to testify.