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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Translation: if you turn down our "invitation", we'll misuse our legal power to seize your internal documents and then publish them to embarrass you.

Accurate?

To be clear, I'm not saying that they can't seize and investigate or even punish if the law was broken. That's the job of government. But this just seems like a petty attempt to embarrass. However, I'm American and haven't been following the story closely, so I may be missing context.

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> I'm American [...] I may be missing context.

You are missing context: look up "Parliamentary Privilege" and "Parliamentary Sovereignty" which do not have US equivalents. The "invitation" was effectively a subpoena.

But is the legal ramification for ignoring the invitation anything they can think of? If a British citizen did the same, could they claim that they were investigating them, barge into their home unannounced and seize all devices, and then later publish any nude photos found under the justification of “hey, you should have come when we invited you?”

Why not just prosecute for whatever law was broken?

Didn't the fact that is not a UK citizen also basically safe him from being dragged to Parliament by the police?

Im pretty sure, if you are an UK citizen and they summon you, they will eventually just grab you and put yourself in front of Parliament.

No, since the person who's documents were seized was in the UK on a trip. Except for special cases where immunity is granted, physical presence in a country means that one is subject to the laws and jurisdiction of the country. In this case, the UK Parliament had the authority to compel the production of the documents in question, by threat of imprisonment if necessary.

A question for any legal scholars out there: the seizure of the documents would be contempt of court in the US, could it not? The person who was threatened with arrest has the defense of duress, so could the US court charge the MPs who ordered the seizure? I don't think the UK would extradite, but if the MPs were to visit the US without immunity, could they be arrested for violating US law (even though their actions are apparently within their rights under UK law)?

Again, the seizure isn’t the problem, the public disclosure is.

Is it misuse, or does it serve their ultimate purpose, which is to act in the best interest of their constituents? You could easily take the stance that parliament was being generous to give fb the opportunity to become part of the dialog beforehand (provide that context that was supposedly lacking), and that zuck was foolish to turn them down.

they cannot misuse their legal powers, as parliament is Sovereign in the UK.

Facebook took the risk by not complying with the wishes of a sovreign state, and that state then takes legal action against facebook.

facebook arrogance in this matter is staggering, and by some could even be seen as a direct confrontation with parlaiment.

If parliament did not respond, it would look weak and in some sense even delegitemize its sovereignity. If they backed down on facebook's apperent arrogance, what is stopping other companies from trying the same.

Let's not forget mark zukerberg was summoned before the parliament. Ofcourse he could decline (mainly because he is not a UK citizen), but being summoned is quite a big deal considering they (uk parliament) is literally asking you to come over and explain what your doing..

don't be suprised there are rammifications when a state asks for your presence, and you arrogantly decline it.

they cannot misuse their legal powers, as parliament is Sovereign in the UK.

Wow. So anything they do can’t be a misuse of power as long as it’s technically legal? And if it’s not legal, can they just change the laws and then do it?

My issue is not with retaliation, but if Facebook did something wrong, why not investigate and prosecute? Instead they’re going to just try and embarrass them. Which indicates that they don’t actually have any legal case.

This is the world's smallest violin playing just for Mark Zuckerberg.

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