The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case | Hacker News Reader

The ACLU wants to know why Facebook beat a 2018 wiretap case

bloomberg.com

178 pointspseudolus56 comments

Why can't these news articles link to the briefs or provide a case number or anything? They didn't even say what freakin' court they were in directly! I know it's the 9th circuit based on the description, but where was the original case heard? Arg!

Edit: Fortunatly the 9th circuit is actually pretty good with youtube, which made this easy to find:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6SeGJQjqyA

19-15472 ACLU Foundation v. USDOJ

It doesnt seize to amaze me why news orgs dont provide sources in addition to claiming another org claimed it first. In the hype about trying to be real news maybe you should take it much more seriously. I can prolly find independent researchers who arent part of huge news orgs who do link to sources.

It's surprising that partisan tabloids (Breitbart, Daily Beast, etc) provide clickable hyperlinks to the original reporting and source documents more often than major media outlets do.

Maybe it's due to their reblog origins, they're less afraid of losing traffic to competitors? Or because of their reputation they have more to prove? Regardless, it should be done by everyone.

> partisan tabloids ... major media outlets

Don't buy into the propaganda. Most major media outlets are partisan as well.

Sometimes the party is simply the 'increase state authority and support war' party, they simply color it red or blue for your personal preferences.

Not sure why people are downvoting you as if you're attacking their news source, at least here in America I can name two news orgs for which people would easily agree lean on opposite ends: Fox and CNN. The difference in their focus is night and day when you think of how they report on the President. It is astounding. Then there's the lack of following up on sources like the MAGA high schoolers media fiasco.

Regardless of how right or wrong he is, it's a digression into partisan-ness unrelated to the topic of hyperlinking practices. HN tends to downvote when that happens.

I honestly have to wonder if in this case it's because the article is designed to be primarily viewed on Bloomberg Terminals, and the website is secondary.

It's almost like they want you to depend on the news orgs for... the thing they're selling you (or, the thing they're giving you for free because you're the product).

Grammar tip: seize -> cease. The latter basically means "stop". Similar expression: "It never fails to amaze me".

My beef is articles about patent infringement issues that don't cite patent numbers. The storage and transmission costs of text data are essentially free (they burn more on javascript bloat) and such information could be excluded for publications that still have dead tree editions.

It somewhat makes sense for articles to be vague. As frustrating as it is when you want to go deep on a story, these articles are not providing a knowledge graph service. They’re condensing a story down to only the most important information. In effect, providing a summarization service for real-world events.

When it works well, it lets you efficiently absorb the gist of a story. Of course, it’s a bit of a subjective art and unable to serve all audiences.

That was true in the newspaper era. Now that we're in the web era, they can do both. They could have improved the article immensely without changing any of the prose, while adding links to the underlying documents. WaPo and the NYT do this regularly.

Don't forget the power of hypertext :)

that would be a lot more expensive

I don't understand how it's possible that the _public_ government can make precedent-setting judgements like this and classify the rationale from the public. Like, I'm not asking for Facebook's trade secrets or classified info. Redact that, and then share the entire case that we funded with our tax dollars.

We do not know who asked for this to be sealed yet. It is possible FB asked because it had to make presentations that included IP.

> I'm not asking for Facebook's trade secrets or classified info. Redact that...

My conspiracy theory hat comes out every time a large US company seems to stand up against the government for the privacy of their users and wins. I always assume the company secretly gave the government what they asked for, and the government agreed to play along for marketing purposes.

I suppose that the boring truth is that Facebook just used it's vast financial resources to protect itself in a way that lavabit never could

The former seems so much more likely to me. Probably because my German teacher had us watch ["The Lives of Others"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others) and at this point it would be absolutely insane to imagine that the obsession with power that exists in the government would fail to find a way to read data that's literally stored on someone else's computer where you could never tell if it's been read. Seems like a no brainer, but without proof most people would rather just call it a grey area. Which is a fine enough narrative. Doesn't change much either way.

Except that we have proof, at least as far as the US Government is concerned. Snowden provided us with proof in abundance that they will "find a way". How anyone can consider this a gray area in 2020 is beyond me.

This comment thread really is nonsense. So Facebook and the government are secretly working together in a conspiracy to falsify court records while secretly they cooporate the whole time and the case was never actually tried? What planet are you on?

And the proof is Snowden, because... ???

Or are you all just agreeing you have your own conspiracy theories, and aren't directly commenting on what each other are saying?

>secretly working together in a conspiracy to falsify court records

A simple & plausible scenario: a governmental agency requests Facebook conducts a broad surveillance sweep. Facebook resists for obvious reasons, goes to court. Somebody at the middle level of one talks to somebody at the middle level of the other, figure out what the agency really wants - a small, well specified chunk of data - which gets requested separately & promptly delivered. Having gotten enough data now, the agency lets the original, big case falter simply by limiting the efforts and expenditures.

That's not even conspiracy, that's just a bunch of people figuring out how to quickly get done with their mundane responsibilities. #BanalityOfEvil

And this is how it's done unfortunately.

> So Facebook and the government are secretly working together in a conspiracy to falsify court records while secretly they cooporate the whole time and the case was never actually tried? What planet are you on?

That's, ummm, not my point at all, and I honestly don't see how you took it from what I wrote.

What I meant was just that Snowden's revelations revealed a bunch of 'alternative' methods, beyond a court-ordered wiretap. Collusion, cable tapping, shipping intercepts ... all seem to have been on the table for the NSA and GCHQ.

My point was just that I'd be very surprised if this court result prevented the type of interception that was being requested.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are. Lashing out like this convinces no one, and only discredits your case—which, if you know more of the truth than others, is a bad thing.

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

Thanks for fitting "Das Lieben der Anderen" into a comment thread! One of my favorite movies of all time. I think the Stasi would be thrilled with the amount of power they could have nowadays. May all FB and gov employees be the Good Man.

Why would that be so?

Why wouldn't they just skip the annoying charade and the anti government precedent, and just give over the info secretly in the first place, least work for everyone?

And don't you think at some point one of the retired engineers or execs would leak the truth?

"Hey Joe, look at the news! If we use Messenger, we can't get wiretapped!"

That's a limited ruse because at some point evidence has to be entered into the record at trial, and if the fact that the government could reach Messenger after all came out, this scheme wouldn't work again. Of course, often investigators can back-reconstruct evidence that they can present -- and if in some case they can't, well, maybe next time. Other times trial evidence might not even be a goal. So a limited ruse, but not that limited.

Is it plausible? I think so. Is it likely? No idea.

> I suppose that the boring truth is that Facebook just used it's vast financial resources to protect itself in a way that lavabit never could

This is the accurate take :)

Facebook, like Google, was very unhappy about the wholesale tapping of cables revealed in the Snowden docs and rapidly moved to encrypt all the things formerly assumed safe/inscrutable.

If you give an inch to a government you then have to deal with every other government wanting their inch too. The easiest way to deal with this is to vigorously fight every request from a government.

You can't do a secret backdoor that bypasses this because it will get discovered eventually and then same problem occurs.

Conjectures: The method required to MitM the MS-13 gang Messenger would require writing a special set of code (a la Apple iPhone incident), which fails the burden test. Some legal justification why Facebook is not a carrier, in case of voice com.

It's possible the answer is more prosaic than conspiracy, and technical in nature. If FB Messenger uses a central server for discovery only and communication is strictly Peer to Peer, as is the case in a number of messenging apps, then there is nothing to wiretap without altering the FB Messenger client to copy received texts and phone them home. And that would add a backdoor that would make it less secure for everyone. I found a link from 2019 that indicated FB Messenger uses the Signal protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol) for their encrypted chats using the mobile client, so that makes the P2P theory more plausible.

An interesting experiment: set up daily FB messenger chat with a buddy and discuss in depth some product of narrow class of products you don't usually search or discuss (Nike shoes for example). Do this for a couple a weeks and keep track of the ads online that you and your buddy see. Did the number of adds for shoes or Nike shoes go up?

Do Facebook and others use pre-quantum encryption? Is it reasonable to say that if and when the NSA (presumably doing full take of these comms) has a quantum computer capable of performing Shor’s algorithm, that they will be able to decrypt all of these comms?

When would FB and others move to quantum-resistant encryption if they aren’t already?

What is the possibility that radically advanced tech including quantum computers well beyond what’s currently available already exists in secret?

Anyone a fan of Dave Brubeck/take five?

Addressing your second to last question, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility, though the more likely solution for the government is throwing money at compute power to break encryption which is reasonably secure if millions of dollars isn't thrown at it.

I love Dave Brubeck/Take Five, check this out: https://soundcloud.com/juanchov182/radiohead-fivestep

The Dave Brubeck comment was tongue in cheek, referencing recent quantum computing developments (not classified)

You're losing me - what developments?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/chance-discovery-bri...

Andrea Morello was on the team. Joe Morello was the t5 drummer. Just a play on last names.

What if the NSA has not only known about this phenomenon but has already built a large scale qubit quantum computer? Could be.

https://archive.md/eT2bg

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/stor...

FBI/DOJ wiretapped the Facebook comms of 19 illegal aliens who were MS-13 gangsters in North Hollywood. the wiretaps spanned 2017-2019. the gang murdered 6 people. the last murder was a random killing of a homeless guy as an initiation ritual to get into the gang.

i happened to be 50 yards away from that murder when it happened. i didnt hear a thing because i was sleeping and it was rarely raining in LA that night. those gangsters could have randomly picked me to kill instead of the other homeless guy. i was woken up by a cop politely asking me to move. i looked over and there was a tarp tent over the body of the victim with a dozen cops standing guard.

i may have even helped to open the case because 1 year prior, i emailed the Chief of the NoHo LAPD to tell him i was seeing MS-13 graffiti all over that park where the murder occured. he replied back within an hour thanking me for the tip and the graffito was removed the next day. so MS-13 activity in that area was certainly on LE's radar.

i am an obsessive reader of Snowden leaks and am pretty anti-NSA, but i thank god the FBI was able to order Facebook to hand over the comms of that MS-13 gang. those gang bangers were so stupid that they were literally coordinating murders over Facebook Messenger and boasting about their 100's of crimes spanning years on Facebook.

ACLU is in the wrong here and i support not unsealing the wiretap documents. because think of how many other idiot MS-13 gangsters across America will also broadcast their murders and crimes on Facebook? if they all know for a fact that yes, the FBI is using Facebook to track them, then they will all go dark. that means the next time MS-13 attempts to ramdomly murder a guy like me, then FBI won't be able to so easily convict them.

i have read every page of every Snowden leak. my views on mass surveillance have evolved since 2013. at first i was horrified because of the shock that it was happening. but over time i have come to realize there is no closing Pandora's box. every year the CPUs get faster, storage doubles, bandwidth triples and the software gets smarter. there is no way to freeze computing progress in time. which means every year, mass surveillance gets cheaper like Moore's Law. i now see it is entirely naive and unrealistic to stop mass surveillance. there is no technical solution to a political problem. you can't un-invent the machine gun.

all we can do is demand our Intel Overlords only apply mass surveillance to legit protection of our society, like for busting murderers and rapists and MS-13 and cartels. and we must force FBI/DOJ to stay the fuck out of abusing mass surveillance for corrupt political purposes, like spying on Presidents, or wiretapping 37 Congressmen, or bugging SCOTUS for 12 years, or blackmailing Presidents and Congress with sex tapes, or harassing antiwar activists, or persecuting whistleblowers and legitimate joirnalists who publish leaked top secrets.

this FBI operation to crush a murderous MS-13 cell hit pretty close to home for me--it was terrifying to realize i only got lucky that night being in the right place and right time to avoid being the sacrificial victim. this experience definitely changed my perspective on FBI surveilling Facebook. everyone is opposed to FBI surveillance until they almost get murdered. then it's "great job FBI, do more gumshoe police work and less political meddling!"

> thank god the FBI was able to order Facebook to hand over the comms of that MS-13 gang.

I think you may have misunderstood the article? It says Facebook won the case, and did not have to wiretap the app.

I don't see what is to be gained by the public not knowing why.

Because you live in a lawless oligarchy that has been rubber stamping the rich's laws for 2 straight centuries. See the endless extension of copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...

Interesting choice since the extension of copyright ended in 2019 and works have started entering the public domain again.

I'll believe that if mickey mouse becomes public domain. Currently slated for 2024, apparently.

Copyright for pre-1972 recordings was effectively extended in 2018 an additional 25 years, depending on your state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Modernization_Act#Title_...

State-based copyright for recordings in California, for example, was 70 years. The extension of federal copyright to cover pre-1972 recordings ensures a 95-year duration--longer for some earlier works.

Is there a government in existence now or at any time in the past that didn't solely exist to rubberstamp the rich's laws? The peasants republic of Dithmarschen?

I mean, yeah. There have been a lot of revolutions in world history. They did not exist _solely_ to rubber stamp the laws of the rich.

Even those revolutions that were overtly for the people were subvertly actually for elevating and empowering the inner circle of the revolution leaders. I'd love to find an example of a national government that prioritizes the well being of the majority rather than the personal profits of the oligarchy, but I don't believe one exists or has existed for some time.

"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

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012844.

This isn't necessarily an unrelated controversy.

Excessive record sealing, secret legal opinions, pay-walled public records, and the fact that Federal courts are only available to large businesses while the rest of us are forced into arbitration, are all closely related issues.

There is a good faith argument that copyright term extensions are but another example of the common thread connecting those issues.

No reasonable person would say som33's comment was an "unrelated controversy," it's a clear response to the question "Why was a case involving a wealthy corporation sealed?" The way HN is moderated does not welcome this line of questioning, though. You're not allowed to suggest that VC-funded tech might be a source of evil or bad ethics.

Proof? Here's a similar "flame-baity" comment under this topic that sits on the other side of the argument, but dang doesn't care enough to respond or detach it from its parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23013083&goto=item%3Fi...

Oh you guys. The GP comment was just the sort of flamebait that we don't want on HN, regardless of flavor. We'd moderate it just the same the other way [1]. Big denunciatory rhetoric is just not what this site is for. Repetition and indignation are the two things that most kill curiosity, so repetition of indignation is the worst. [2]

An arbitrary link doesn't prove anything except that we may not have seen a post. That's the simplest explanation, and the likeliest [3]. HN gets millions of comments a year. We don't come close to reading them all, and we can't moderate what we don't see.

We rely on community members to flag the posts that most require moderator attention. You haven't flagged any, including the one you're complaining about here, so it's not clear to me how much you care about this. It sort of spoils the game of get-the-moderators when the mods finally show up and sweep the floor or whatever. For a while it was a sport on Twitter to pass such links around ("see what horrors the Hacker News moderators approve of!") but I hear that's mostly died out.

[1] By the way, the last time you were upset about moderator bias, I ended up giving you an extremely detailed reply. You may not have seen it, though, because it took me a couple days to get back to the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602. Read those links—"The mods here are radical liberals", "socialist-leaning mods", "far-left social justice agenda" and the rest—and see how much evidentiary value you still think these gotcha games have.

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There is some irony in claiming that the GP comment kills curiosity.

Nothing kills curiosity faster or more completely than the concealment of relevant facts. Legal opinions in this case. See e.g. USSR.

I don't agree that the comment was primarily factual (it was ranty-rhetorical), nor that the material was relevant (most readers would regard jumping to copyright law from this article as a massive leap off-topic). Even granting all that, though—nothing about copyright is concealed on HN. It's a well-discussed topic here. In fact, #1 thread on HN the very same day as this one was largely about copyright:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010435

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-04-28

... , and you can find endless debate about every aspect of copyright and copyright law in HN's archives. If that's the USSR, I'm Vladimir Mayakovsky.

I wasn't suggesting that HN or its moderators kill curiosity.

I was suggesting that legal secrecy and related problems do.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, though.

It was a generic tangent, though, as your comment makes clear by outlining the genera. Since the rule says "and", I didn't feel the need to edit it.

As for flamebait, flamewar topics, and not having anything genuinely new to say, the comment had all that covered mightily, so this was not a borderline call.

Blunt, but accurate.

Was there any state governor in the first 100 years of this country that wasn't on somebody's payroll? They didn't even bother to hide it.

Read about the Hawaii coup sometime if you want to see ugliness. Notice how all those tall buildings in downtown Honolulu are named after Westerners?

Is it any different today?

I hope in time people who think the government can be used for Good will see how it's merely a tool for the rich.

Although maybe you need a government to take 30% of everyone's income to fund a military or someone else will.

Rant time: Is it really impossible to write a literate, coherent headline? No, the ACLU does not want to know why. They want to know how. It's literally the second sentence of the article. FFS.

> Now the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to find out how.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com