Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel | Hacker News Reader

Facebook taps lawyer who helped write Patriot Act as new general counsel

thehill.com

198 pointszachguo119 comments

To those unsure as to why this is particularly relevant: the Patriot Act is notable for drastically expanding the surveillance powers of the US government [1]. I wonder what this lawyer will do at Facebook?

[1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/privacy-and-su...

It isn't relevant, though. The PATRIOT Act had pretty broad support. Just because she helped write it doesn't mean that she supports it more than other lawyers – just that she's a talented enough lawyer to be working on such major projects. It's the same as complaining about individual multi-millionaires who optimize their taxes.

I think you can deduce some things from the projects people are willing to work on. If I was a lawyer say, I wouldn't have worked on it (and I categorically reject work on privacy violating systems as a software engineer), because it would feel to me like doing my part in enabling a surveillance system that is very, very, objectionable. So at least what we can say I guess is that she doesn't mind doing that.

And I think the same goes for multi-millionaires. I would not hire a tax-dodging rich individual (optimization is a nice euphemism), and particularly not when I run a business where that is in conflict with the alleged values of the business.

A popular poor decision is still a poor decision. We censure plenty of actions in history that were popular at the time. We should require people in positions of power and influence to be guided by an inner moral compass--not merely whatever is profitable, popular, or personally advantageous.

> The PATRIOT Act had pretty broad support.

By whom? Congress, constitutional lawyers, or the people?

Sadly, both Congress and the people at the time [1][2]. It was full-on panic mode in response to 9/11. I don't remember much about the constitutional lawyer side at the time. A couple years later the public started changing its mind [3], though Congress arguably still isn't even close.

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/107-2001/s313

[2] http://www.sheldensays.com/debating_the_usa_patriot_act.htm

[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/9205/public-little-concerned-ab...

"I wonder what this lawyer will do at Facebook?"

Connections with powerful govt people?

Any time I see arguments to effect of "lawyer X lawyered for Y, and Y is bad, so lawyer X is bad," I remember an episode from Star Trek: TNG called "The Measure of a Man," in which Picard is chosen to defend Data's right to self-determination as a sentient being, and Riker is chosen to make the opposite case for the character that wants to treat Data as a machine, a weapon that can be reallocated freely like a Jeep or a rifle. Riker struggles with this, but ends up giving the best case he can so the matter can be settled without any doubts. Doing a bad job on purpose leaves room for doubt and summary judgement, which is far from ideal.

I think the PATRIOT Act is complete bullshit, but I'm not going to hold a grudge against anyone that worked on it, only those who passed it and continue to vote to renew/strengthen it, who also refuse to listen to arguments against it.

This doesn't convince me, because 1) in the real world there are often major monetary asymmetries in law, meaning one team has access to much more lawyers' time 2) your example is mostly irrelevant since it's not like the lawyer was a defense attorney, she voluntarily wrote an oppressive law and then spent much of her time afterwards defending/upholding it.

If you read the article you see that not only did she write the law, the Bush administration gave her major credit for leading the patriot act project. How is that at all similar to playing devil's advocate?

There is also the argument that the PATRIOT Act was flawed not for its stated intent, but for the nuance (or lack thereof) of its implementation. And the designer of the bill is the one responsible for said nuance, especially considering that she designed it at a time when it would have been political suicide for many lawmakers to oppose it for its nuance. She could have taken the opportunity to create something in keeping with civil liberties, and instead she did quite the opposite.

Absent additional context, it is very reasonable to expect her to disregard civil liberties in the remainder of her career.

That is a beautiful argument, but Star Trek is wishful fantasy. The reality is probably, most of the time, Riker was the only guy left after all the others, who could afford to, declined the case.

But this is not even this kind of case, not in terms of need, nor in terms of service to a greater principle. And we do actually need to hold people to account for their actions. There can be mitigating factors, but just doing your job has not been a defense for quite some time.

I think there were a lot of interesting first ammendment cases fought to defend less high-minded situtions.

Aside from that, I think that a lot of developers are in a terrible position to blame that lawyer.

How often have you added morally dubious scripts or features to your company products/websites?

didn't realize that wasn't a rhetoric..

have you actually added gray-area features ? any anecdotes without giving away your trench position ?

Damn that was a good episode. Thanks for the nostalgia.

Anecdotally, my father was a criminal defense attorney. There clients he didn't want to represent for personal reasons but did due to financial obligations, part of the profession. Lucky for him later in his career he was able to pick and choose more freely.

But I agree, the "lawyer X lawyered for Y" argument is a farce in most cases.

Unrelated, "The Inner Light" episode still hits me in my soul, even after all this time. For those that have not seen it, you owe yourself to watch it.

"How can we possibly form a legal case that justifies mass surveillance?"

'I think I know just the guy...'

Edit: I was going to pre-emptively delete this as a joke/low-effort comment, but I think it's a tad useful in highlighting what Facebook "use case" this lawyer would be good for.

I don't see your comment as joke/low-effort in this context. Facebook has repeatedly shown itself to be so morally bankrupt that such "jokes" reflect reality, and aren't jokes anymore. With impending regulation that will attempt to control and/or break up Facebook, this move is yet another sign that the company has no soul left in it.

> John Yoo called her the "day-to-day manager of the Patriot Act in Congress."

I'm surprised they didn't hire John "Torture Memo" Yoo himself. Was Newstead really that much of a bargain? I know this is snarky, but these people lawyered some pretty serious evil into the world.

Facebook is the defense contractor that is building America's Great Firewall and social credit system, so it makes sense that there is a revolving door with the authoritarian regime.

Only if you are forced to use facebook. Its more of a problem in developing nations. I'm glad Myanmar finally gave Facebook the boot as the default portal to the internet.

When the day comes that we are forced to use a social media platform... heh, we'll all just roll over and start using it. Revolution takes too much effort.

Unfortunately Facebook does its best to track those of us who don't use it as well (even if their information on us ends up being less comprehensive than the information they have on their actual users).

And you can be pretty effective at that tracking if your contacts use facebook. Since they have access to your call logs they know how frequently you communicate with someone. And people that communicate frequently share general interests.

I’m not familiar with either of those two projects. Perhaps the latter is the aggregation of numerous “good customer” scores, plus actual credit rating, plus the no-fly list. But I haven’t heard about an actual program that implements a social credit score that FB is implementing.

Facebook's social graph and engagement data combined with data already obtained by governments makes an elaborate social credit score easy to generate.

As for the great firewall, Facebook has been in talks with lawmakers who want Facebook to do more to prevent "fake news" which is another way of saying that lawmakers want to use Facebook to control the news narrative.

So far, Facebook has been extremely complaint with both of these areas. This new hire is further evidence that Facebook plans to support user privacy only after offering the government plenty of reassurance that its interests and patriot act powers will not be adversely impacted.

I've been concerned/cynical about Facebook's stance on this stuff for a while, but this hire is really chilling. If anyone reading this hasn't read the Patriot Act, give it a read. It is shocking both in how stupid and technologically naive the wording is, as well as in its blatant disregard for the bill of rights. It's definitely the most shameful piece of legislation passed in my lifetime.

I’d say it’s the media and general public that want Facebook to curb “fake news”, more so than Washington.

See the tit for tat between Facebook and lawmakers:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-made-m...

Zuck is losing on purpose here by admitting they screwed up, so that he can pivot into a negotiating stance to determine what level of control government will get. This is not all decided yet, it is still in play but this hire suggests that some progress was made in the negotiation.

'The Media' includes The Daily Mail and Fox News. The general public on average don't want facebook to curb 'their' news, perhaps those other people's.

Washington has been shouting fake news from both sides for a while. Is worth noting that Trump just copied something already being said by others and mashed the definition.

"I was having a conversation with a senior government official I have know all these many years who work in the White House and I said you're changing American society. He said well we realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States. I said, you mean the United States Government is from now on going to keep a list of everybody every American knows, do you think by any chance that should require a law? And he just laughed." - talk in 2012 by Eben Moglen

Why do we think the government, almost 10 years ago, wanted a robust social graph of every citizen in the United States?

It's called sarcasm

Or "speculation"

It's actually just synthesis.

What are you referring to?

Why do we need a social credit score when we already have money?

Money has inconvenient qualities for those in power:

1. Actually using it results in parting with it (rather than being able to merely present it over and over)

2. Money held by outsiders is just as valuable as money held by insiders (giving outsiders independent power)

#1 is mitigated by the inflationary treadmill policy, and #2 is mitigated by oxymoronic "money laundering" regulations. But the authoritarians in power are always seeking new ways of eroding distributed paradigms.

We already have a social credit score. It's called FICO and it's been doing a great job of making life difficult for people who don't fit the mold for over sixty years.

Can we stop making this comparison? At best it is naive at worst you're purposefully misrepresenting the argument.

When people say "social credit score" they distinctly mean something different than "credit score" (you may get this hint by the extra word, "social").

A social credit system not only includes your finances, but as well as much about your behavior. Such as "do you buy cigarettes? How often?" FICO doesn't care about this, they just care about if you're likely to pay back debt (based on your track record of doing exactly that). FICO doesn't care if you're Muslim, black, white, Christian, etc. But a social credit system DOES.

Rather than putting a score on your likelihood of paying back debt, a social credit score scores you on how "good of a citizen" you are. Not just legally, but morally. And that's the danger. Morals shift and vary a lot (more so in the US than most countries). There's a general belief in most first world countries that your skin color, religion, gender, etc should not play a role in how the government of businesses treat you. Social credit systems (even if they don't explicitly add those factors: ie implicit) will use these factors to rate you.

I think in the past, credit reporting agencies did want to make things equivalent to social credit, or make social credit type things apply to your financial credit score, but were stopped by legislation.

Do you have evidence? Or is this just speculation?

It's a vague memory that I remember reading somewhere in a news article I couldn't find. Maybe it's a good enough hint for someone to else to find the source?

Do you not see any parallels between the two? FICO scores are borderline discriminatory because it turns out that social behaviors and group membership is correlated with those scores.

FICO doesn't "care" if you're Muslim or black, but FICO scores can be absolutely used to discriminate against those groups.

This is a fair argument. But there were other factors in my argument. That social credit scores are used to determine more than "can you pay back your credit?"

It isn't hard to argue that FICO can be abused. But what's being argued here is that we don't need, nor want, a system that is more imposing than FICO. One that affects much more of your life, such as "can I use an airplane?"

FICO can be and is used to discriminate in job applications. You also seem to be missing the point that debt financing is a huge part of the ability to live a standard American life, much more so than in a country like China. For example, if you can't buy a car, there are many places in America where you simply won't be able to get around. This social-financial reliance system makes credit scores in America a lot closer to a social credit system than you seem to think.

If a score prevents you from using transportation (a needed car), living in decent housing, and getting a decent job, I'd say that score is pretty tightly tied to your social well-being.

You realize I'm trying to distinguish a "social credit system" from a "credit system", right?

I will agree that there's problems with a credit system. No argument there. But I'm (we're?) arguing that these problems are exacerbated when adding the social element.

> We already have a social credit score. It's called FICO

There is a material difference between FICO and what China and, potentially, Facebook are building.

FICO looks at financial factors. It's a model to estimate likelihood of repayment. Being brown or gay or female might correlate with factors that reduce the likelihood of repayment. But if those systemic problems were fixed, and FICO were left unchanged, it should yield an unbiased result.

Social credit scores, on the other hand, directly incorporate biases. Introduce a social credit score into an economically equal society and it will redistribute from the "undesirable" to the "desirable" based on zero economic facts. (Same with ad-driven social networks like Facebook and Instagram.)

It's subtle. But it makes a world of difference in terms of effect and the moral culpability of those who choose to support its development and deployment.

There's not really such thing as an unbiased result, especially as it deals with economics. Thats kind of the point of the concept of systemic margininalization.

What alternative would you propose?

For what goal?

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think that my comment is pretty much the relevant thing to discuss based on the article. If you disagree please explain why.

1) Asserting the presence of an "American Great Firewall"

2) Asserting the development of an American "social credit system"

3) Describing America's political atmosphere as an "authoritarian regime"

4) Describing Facebook as a "defense contractor"

Come on, you know what you're doing

Anyone is free to draw a line in the sand to claim that my statements are hyperbole. I don't consider them so. When we read about China, the narrative of American Exceptionalism tells us that it is reasonable to think that China would seriously implement a social credit score but America would not. I think it is foolish to believe that kind of stuff. Let's just look at the facts.

We must ask how a social credit system would be useful to any government and wonder how any government would turn down the chance to obtain one. There is already hard evidence that the US Government wants to influence FB's news feed algorithm. Strictly speaking that is not a firewall, but the effect (censorship) is the same.

So feel free to belabor the difference between government meddling in the news feed algorithm to promote/demote various ideas and the technology known as China's great firewall. In my view that is a tangential and distracting discussion.

Controlling the news feed on one site is not nearly comparable to a universal firewall... Many people already have stopped using Facebook

> Many people already have stopped using Facebook

Yet it is important enough to public opinion that congress undertakes days of hearings with Zuck to try to control the news feed algo?

This is easily explained by the desire of politicians to grab some time on the news. I didn't see much Congressional behavior or followup that suggests they actually cared about (or understood) the privacy issue.

It’s not a privacy issue, it’s a censorship issue.

Your comment is disingenuous to a degree that’s comical. You complain about the use of the phrase Great American Firewall. Unless you’ve been living under a rock since 2016 you should be aware of the fears in Congress regarding “Fake News” and the extent to which Congress is trying to outsource the work of censorship to Facebook and other social media outlets. There are multiple articles, each week, that make the front page of Hacker News, on this very topic.

Some of the other stuff (the firewall) is clearly incorrect, but after thinking about this a long time, I think it's fair to label the current administration as having some fascists or fascist-curious/adjacent/whatever people. Authoritarian works too.

Often, the term gets thrown around too freely by those on the left when they want to disparage someone on the right whose ideas they dislike, so it gets overused.

But I think with the disdain for the rule of law, friendliness and admiration of rulers who are certainly authoritarian, and the push to "believe in me, rather than your lying eyes", the term has a place in the conversation.

Firewalls don’t only block traffic, they throttle it, log it, and shape it. The US/Facebook firewall is further up the stack than China’s and is more stealthy so rarely blocks any content.

What you're doing is far worse

I am very surprised by the reaction you're getting.

Some large subset of the HN crowd isn't interested in being civil, or preferring realistic comparisons to hyperbole, when talking about Facebook anymore.

The two above comments I made are sitting at moderately positive vote counts, so it makes me happy that at least > 50% of HN is bored of the way we've been discussing this topic for the last few years.

It takes awhile before people gain the ability to downvote, so an aggregate vote of 1 does not imply a 50% split. There is a bias toward positive vote totals, since people can upvote but not downvote when they join Hacker News. On any thread there are more people who can upvote than downvote.

It would be useful if Hacker News would either make a magnitude number available or the actual up and down votes. A comment that gets 3 upvotes versus 2 downvotes will have the same total as a comment that has 412 upvotes versus 411 downvotes, but clearly one comment was ignored while the other struck a nerve.

It’s not fair to call my comment uncivil.

I don't think the civil comment was directed at you specifically

It's a bunch of vague analogies, asserted without evidence. This isn't useful. We already know lots of people hate Facebook.

The original comment is relevant and very much on the topic, so what are you complaining about? The above article is about Facebook hiring a lawyer who worked on a law that took the USA in an authoritarian direction. The original comment simply emphasizes what is already implied.

This is the key point.

Someone tell these yahoos that optics is a thing.

I expect the next statement to be about transparency and connecting communities. Just like the last one. And the one before.

for facebook optics is not a thing.

they know they have a stranglehold on people addicted to their products, and advertisers who pay through the nose to sell things to those addicts.

Honestly, why bother with optics? No one's going to like the company ever again except their employees, but no business or politician or organization is going to not take facebook's call.

^ this HN reader has it right. And we'll see the extent of that truth tomorrow when FB announces their earnings. Most of the problems in the world can be solved with robust revenue growth. It's only when you're on the decline that "optics" begin to matter, and FB is most certainly not in decline, at least outside the HN bubble.

I disagree strongly with this, if FB manages to continue pissing off politicians they'll get the full unjust wrath of the US government turned on them for petty reasons. Just a little while ago Zuckerberg got schooled on why he should've been paying a lot more money to lobbyists.

But that's not the "optics" you're likely to see. Those kinds of things only come to light much later, and FB has historically shown itself to be very amenable to such backroom deals: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-...

It depends on how the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal goes.

Gawker closed up despite it's billion-dollar Unicorn status because of a $140M verdict. A multi-billion dollar suit like the Cambridge Analytica could be devastating.

You're missing one simple fact: people in the House, Senate, and Oval Office (irrespective of administration) need FB to get elected nowadays. They also need docile/agreeable Zuck. FB isn't going anywhere.

Why bother with optics? Well, for one thing, presumably they still need to recruit people once in a while (including people with lots and lots of options).

Anyone who will work for facebook now doesn't care about optics.

They solve this problem with large wads of cash and FB stock. A couple of my friends there make close to a million dollars a year each in total comp just being middle managers. FB has no problem whatsoever with recruiting or retention of top talent.

IMO, the kind of people who work for and who would join Facebook are the ones who're self-selected to not care about morals or the ill effects of their work on billions of people. So optics doesn't come into the equation for Facebook to recruit people. Those who do care about optics would never even dream of working at Facebook.

You're exaggerating. What are those ill effects exactly?

Consult the N apologies Zuckerberg has issued on things like privacy for some examples.

Normal people outside the tech bubble still like Facebook. Even inside it there are people who do (I like Facebook).

Facebook is absolutely terrible at optics, and I'd love it if someone with weak enough morals to be involved with the PATRIOT ACT was unable to find work again but... I honestly don't care that much, this is just a drop in the water compared to the revolving doors between the government and defense firms.

Optics don't seem to matter as much in some cases. There was a big hue and cry in 2014 when Condoleeza Rice was appointed to the board of directors of Dropbox. She's still around on the board. [1] All the protests with #DropDropbox, the threats to ditch the service and actions by many to ditch it didn't achieve much.

I doubt if many people understand the deep implications of The Patriot Act as much as they may understand water boarding and other tactics.

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/about

I dont consider Facebook inherently evil and even their more recents f-ups around user privacy and security I had attributed to incompetence of the employees (anyone working at a large co would know - this is all very common).

But when they hire people like this, I dont know how to excuse them anymore...

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19725489 which was discussed yesterday?

Unfortunately that story was sinkholed by mods and this one too seems to be experiencing the same fate (it's dropping way faster than normal).

Tech people should get it out of their heads that the stewards of industry follow the same virtuous passions that got these techies into tech in the first place.

I became so disgusted by "leadership qualities" showcased in the past 3-4 years that I am now setting up multiple federated servers with all kinds of FANG-functionality replacements so that the new generation of techies is still allowed to dream about better world freely, instead of taking xyz-pill everyday, turning them into cynics.

You'd think if nothing else their PR department would've caught this. These headlines just write themselves.

OT: What a pathetically annoying case of autoplaying, non-dismissable, autoplaying video (mobile).

Completely destroys a decent story.

I thought rats are meant to flee sinking ships rather than board them!

Sorry - could not resist the joke!

Am I the only one who read this title and immediately thought of a wiretap?

I for one don't let Facebook use me. This makes little difference to me.

You should look up "shadow profiles". Facebook knows almost everything about you from people you interact with by collecting that data into your shadow profile. Also, regardless of what you do, Facebook (along with other big tech companies, but Facebook in particular) is a menace for society and should be treated as such.

The key to this is that you need to think of your "online identity" as something that is not directly controlled by you, ever. It's like a collection of related "behaviors" and heterogeneous data points on the internet that can be associated together with some amount of confidence that they are all from the same person, through a myriad of tracking processes.

You actually creating an account (username data point), and logging in and using the service (actions) are actually minimally relevant to the process of ad targeting. All they do is slightly bump up that "confidence" score I mentioned earlier, and even then only for that specific set of behaviors/data for that page/service.

Your user accounts are only transient links between sets of behaviors and targeted ads. The actual account is easily replaced by just making it a generic "entity" not related to accounts and then link any accounts that do end up being created to these "higher level" entities that you already have.

For a simple example: "A web client hit our tracking pixel on X service from the same ip address as a hit on our tracking pixel on Y service, so let's assume these two behaviors are the same person for ad targeting purposes, and we'll just use that address as the unique indicator, regardless of any existing (or not) user accounts on either service. If we get a user signup action that originates from the same address, then we can link in the specific service account/username to our existing tracking entity for this person."

Facebook probably has a lot of data on you regardless. Are you in any friends' address book? Do you use a loyalty card at the grocery store? Ever walk in a mall? Own a car? Pay property tax? Have a mailing address?

Futility is a terrible reason to stop fighting.

100% but just not using Facebook is not a very effective strategy. And thinking that not using Facebook protects you from Facebook could be dangerous.

Legally, it does. If they use my information in a way that is not allowed, I am not required to use arbitration. I can sue. Users cannot.

Good luck with that.

I didn't say the person should stop fighting or that fighting is futile. I was saying they are being naive if they think Facebook has no data on them.

Also, all those mobile ad companies which sell their data to investors will be guaranteed to have Facebook as a client, possibly also by proxy so that they don't appear on their client list.

Does it? No matter how much I try block it, they always manage to get information about me; location, preferences... Thanks, "Facebook for Developers".

"First they came for the Facebook users, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Facebook user."

Good for you. I also do not agree to their terms of service. It's good to see others standing up for what is right.

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