Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> I know they're private companies and they _can_ do it, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Actually, if you look at the image, Slack is beholden to US law, export regulations and economic sanctions - companies doing business with countries they shouldn't are in big trouble. See also: Huawei, who despite sanctions continued to do business with Iran, which caused the US to give them a huge fine. I don't know how that works given how Huawei is a Chinese company, but there you go.

To clarify: private companies are not and should not be above the law.

View on HN

This is another strong case for open source software development along with open, publicly available, standards and protocols.

This isn't about Slack, it isn't about US sanctions law. It is about any private entity creating closed sourced, remotely hosted software. Everyone knows that APIs can be pulled at any time (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) Spying can be mandated whether it is the US government, China, or anyone else.

As end users it is never clear what is going on behind the curtain. It is never certain the product will be here tomorrow - whatever the reason. No one would build a high rise where all of the elevators could suddenly vanish, yet we are increasingly putting the critical pieces of our businesses and our lives in the hands of entities that only need to flick a switch and everything instantly vanishes.

> No one would build a high rise where all of the elevators could suddenly vanish

You also wouldnt build a highrise where all elevators are built by a random Joe, who you arent even sure if thats his real name

To put a finer point on it: open communications protocols driven by free software and end-to-end encryption both are and should be above the law, at least where the law purports to create national boundaries on the internet.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

That's a nice fantasy but the reality is that humans and computers still have to physically exist inside national boundaries. Flesh and steel still count for a lot.

That's why free/libre software advocates talk so frequently about technologies that could abstract flesh and steel away.

How exactly would that work?

Tor, bittorrent, bitcoin and other decentrialized open source software are great examples. No government can control what no one controls.

Buying and installing your own permanent elevators is too difficult and expensive. Think of what happens in 25 years when they need to be replaced. You'd be a fool not to pay a monthly fee for elevators-as-a-service.

No they aren't above the law.

But to clarify, they gave a service to people/teams who maybe they shouldn't have. Did the people signing up/using Slack know that? Maybe. Who's responsible to ensure it's enforced?

Slack.

This is not about blocking accounts of people in Iran, which is a totally legit thing to do. This is about blocking someone who is of Iranian origin, but claims to live in Canada for years and has no business connections with Iran whatsoever. Probably it's some automatic filtering hitting a false positive, but question is how that works, what criteria they use to search for "suspicious" accounts? Have they been given the list of accounts by some US agency or they track and profile their users? There's a lot of confidential business info floating through Slack channels, so it's a huge deal for all of us if they data-mine on that in some way.

"maybe" shouldn't have. So not "certanly" shouldn't have, just "maybe"?

The law isn't a magical paragon of morality.

When the law is as clearly wrong as this one is, it should be violated.

What is so clearly wrong about trade sanctions between two countries? Do you think foreign trade is always a moral good?

> What is so clearly wrong about trade sanctions between two countries?

What trade sanctions have been applied to Canada?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Canada doesn't have anything to do with this. Amir's account was closed because of his Iranian ties, not his Canadian ones.

The part that's clearly wrong is stopping innocent people from engaging in harmless trade. If it weren't for the sanction, it would probably be illegal for slack to deliberately block Iranians just because of the country they're from.

And something doesn't have to be morally good for stopping it to be morally bad. For example, playing chess is morally completely neutral, but it would be morally bad to attempt to ban chess.

Likewise, Iranians using slack isn't obviously morally good, it seems morally neutral, but enforcing a slack ban against Iranians is obviously morally bad.

> I don't know how that works given how Huawei is a Chinese company, but there you go.

If Huawei didn't care about doing business with American companies or companies that adhere to American regulations, it wouldn't matter at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com