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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

Ok, that discussion made it clearer for me, and I am kind of behind @cciresi at that point:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5555#not...

They have a customer that required the personal data they'll give to Gitlab not be handled by people living in Russia and China. Could be a group doing humanitarian or journalistic work.

That's actually an interesting conundrum: you want to hire a company, need to trust it for handling sensitive material, and can't afford it to fall between specific states' hands.

I don't think there is an objective process to do that. I know that USA and France and probably many other countries have laws to authorize seizure of data they consider linked to a variety of vaguely labeled activities (from "trouble to public order" to "terrorism"). You may end up excluding 80% of the world if you use objective criterion there.

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Honestly I don't understand @cciresi's position. As far as a I know anti-boycott regulations have primarily (only?) been used to prevent US companies from not doing business with Isreal. China & Russia are geopolitical rivals to the US and I don't see any sort of risk of anti-boycott regulations being applied in restricting business with residents of those countries. I guess you could say there is a risk that could change, but that seems hypothetical to the extreme and realistically irrelevant to worry about from a risk perspective.

And this isn't discriminating on nationality or national origin, it is on the nation you currently live in. Employers decide not to hire employees living in other countries all the time, it's the most prevalent choice (i.e. US companies only hiring employees living in the US). I don't see why doing this because a customer you've considered critical has asked for it is any more legally risky that having done it for other reasons, assuming we discount the anti-boycott argument.

This is all with the huge caveat of I'm not a lawyer, just giving my perspective based on how I've seen these laws/regulations applied in the past.

Anti-boycott regulations are highly hypocritical because indeed, they are designed for Israel but pretend to apply to all countries.

Thing is, even if it is just country of residence, it is still a discrimination on hiring and could very well be illegal unless there are strong legal reasons. E.g. "we have to do things that are illegal under the laws in country X, so we can't hire people there".

I think the main point of her position is that one should have an objective criterion to add countries into a blacklist and that none can realistically been done over privacy issues that would include China and Russia but not USA.

National borders are a strong legal reason. It's silly to have to write that down. Absent a treaty between nations, national borders are the borders of laws! The US government is currently in a trade war with China. Is that illegal discrimination? Regulating internatiinal relations is a core government responsibility.

No government would make it illegal for a company to choose not to do business in a non-ally foreign country. Millions of business already don't engage in many foreign countries, by default. Including yours, I bet. Why should they be required to do so?

>Could be a group doing humanitarian or journalistic work

They speak about revenue, so I'm sure that's not the case. I bet it's a commercial company with sensitive data, probably gov/mil contractor with strict obligations to their customer.

And someone at their management doesn't understand Intelligence 101: they don't reach for your data from the country of origin.

If I understood it correctly, this should be a nationality block, not country-of-residence.

This would be even more ridiculous.

Why is it ridiculous? The espionage laws in question apply to individuals / nationality, and are explicitly aimed at persons living abroad.

Journalists and humanitarian organizations do have revenues.

I doubt a mil contractor would add Russia and China but not embargoed places like Iran.

And yes, I think this is a misguided attempt at security. Companies that handled crucial data that need to stay private really should spend the resources on managing these data themselves.

True. You have to decide what level of security is necessary for you. In some countries like China privacy from the government is basically nonexistent. In some like Australia backdoors are mandated by the government. In others like the US secret FISA courts exist and can demand data from companies and gag them at the same time. Off the top of my head I don't really know any ideal developed countries to do business in where privacy is concerned.

See QA with Angelo Codevilla:

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-ne...

Search for "You were directly involved in the drafting of the original FISA law in 1978."

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