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An "October surprise". A time-honored tradition in US presidential elections. Done by both sides. In the past, covered by all major news outlets.

Now if Twitter wants to not allow tweeting of October surprises, I suppose that's their business. But if so, block it for both sides.

I also think it's totally counterproductive for them to (try to) do so. Block links to the NY Post article? Great, but then what? Block links to the BBC article? To the HN discussion? To every random blogger who writes up a post about it, with links to the BBC article, the NY Post article, and the HN discussion? Twitter might be able to stay on top of that, but it's going to be hard, it's going to leak, and it's going to look really bad. It's going to give the story far more legs than it otherwise would have had (Streisand effect). It's going to spawn a whole bunch of new conspiracy theories, with Twitter as part of the bad guys. The net effect of all this is not going to be what Twitter wants...

1. That the FBI subpoenaed the laptop is sort of interesting. That usually requires a grand jury, doesn't it? But this is really weird:

>During the subsequent summer and fall, Mac Isaac said he became alarmed after browsing through the computer's files. He claims he then spoke with an associate more versed than him in the law and in current events.

>That unnamed person then contacted the FBI, Mac Isaac said.

>Federal investigators from Wilmington and Baltimore then subpoenaed the laptop in December, Mac Isaac said.

>Shortly after, they called Mac Isaac asking him to assist them, technically, in viewing the files on the damaged hard drive, he said.

>Mac Isaac admitted that the request raised his own suspicion, given that the FBI has its own technical staff.

2. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing a reputable shop would be doing with someone's property (poking around inside, sending it to Giuliani). Could it have violated the law?

3. The stories tell what we already knew: Hunter tried to cash in on his dad, while living the loser life of an addict. Won't change my vote.

Racists will do what they are wont to do.

racists?

lol the world we are in now...

I honestly was just trying to understand what the person was trying to get across.

And, soon after:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/feds-exam...

>Federal investigators are examining whether the emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The story is light on details.

Giuliani said the computer shop guy was a fan of his and given he saw the Biden sticker on the laptop, probably led him to be interested in what was stored on the computer.

Literally the same thing that happened with the FBI announcing that they were "reopening" the Clinton investigation right before the election and then promptly deciding that they found nothing afterwards.

History might not repeat, but it does rhyme.

Yes, it's sketchy. I'd rate it as slightly more plausible than the gang rape allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, which Twitter had no problem with.

Unlike the Kavanaugh accusations, no one has yet testified under oath to Congress to any of this.

The media has been pedaling the Russian collusion story for 4 years and you don't seem to care because it fits your priors and political agenda. The bigger lesson here is that everybody is ready to accept censorship as long as they are not bearing the (immediate) costs of it.

Well, multiple members of the Trump campaign have literally pleaded guilty to lying about involvement with Russia; that story does have that going for it :)

You sir are the problem.

Lol. Although I guess that’s true in a “not letting Trumpers forget he is a Russian stooge” kind of sense.

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN. We're trying for curious conversation here.

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

Telling the truth is a problem? What times we live in!

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN. They're tedious and we're trying for curious conversation here.

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

You're right. Sorry dang!

Appreciated!

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.

If you don't want to be banned, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html over, and you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

You'd think that after 4 years of intense scrutiny by the media, with a 2-year Special Counsel Investigation, people would finally let this go. If you don't see the parallel between this pipe dream and the QAnons of the world, I can't help you.

Well, it doesn’t help that the “infamous dossier” literally states that a sitting President can’t be charged for the crimes that were investigated. And the author explicitly stated that he did not find Trump or his campaign innocent of the described crimes.

You don't have to be found innocent of the crimes...you are presumed innocent until proven guilty (except in the court of public opinion).

Note: this opinion is independent of the current president, and I'm not stating any opinion on President Trump's conduct.

This seems like a really bad standard to apply to the president. I'd argue that morally there are two relevant factors when it comes to finding someone guilty: the damage that would be done to others by failing to punish the perpetrator, and the damage that would be done to the alleged perpetrator by punishing them. We choose different standards depending on those two factors. For example, in civil cases, someone specific has lost something and someone else has gained at their expense. And you're not seeking to imprison someone, but to take away some of their wealth. So we pick a standard of evidence (preponderance of the evidence) that's lower than in criminal cases (with a very high injury to the perpetrator and typically lower injury to the community).

In contrast, an impeachment is not a prison sentence. It would injure a president only insofar as that president would no longer keep the most prestigious title and position of power in American society. And failing to impeach for serious corruption or crimes (say, if a president were conspiring with China to weaken America's standing overseas) could be catastrophic. So I think a much weaker presumption of innocence is in order.

We had like what? 6 congressional committees over finding Mr. Ben Ghazi for years? And what, we can't have our own go at it?

If you're talking about Flynn, he was entrapped by the FBI, his lies weren't material, his lawyer had a conflict of interest, when his new lawyer uncovered all of that in discovery, the prosecutor moved to dismiss (because they had committed misconduct), Sullivan, in AN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE, appointed his own Amicus to say they couldn't dismiss the case.

Flynn was then charged for lying when he plead guilty, because ht wasn't actually guilty. Seriously. This is a Kafka trap.

On top of that, it's now clear Sullivan was getting e-mail, exparte, and ENTERING THEM into evidence!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFMk48KA608

Exactly all the sheep follow and believe what their side says.

To me from pizzaGate to RussiaGate to the impeachment to this Hunter Biden thing is all junk ... arbitrary distractions to the issues that are important ... the economy, healthcare, equality, etc.

Each side will do whatever it takes/strategy to try and win and too many sheep follow along/get soaked up in the soap opera drama.

For me it's all transparent and tiresome!

I'm not American, but the same thing is happening in many countries. A stable country where the citizens trust the government and judicial systems is resistant to corruption. If you can destabilize those countries by spreading lies, hate, disinformation, etc. there's an opportunity for the most corrupt morally bankrupt scumbags on the planet to come in and seize control of important assets and infrastructure.

Just watch closely for a while and you'll see it happening everywhere. There are lies and misinformation and hate and fear directed _everywhere_ no matter what "side" you're on and the volume of it is massive. Then the media and influencers and regular people amplify it and spread it and debate it until they all hate each other and don't trust anyone.

It's working too. America is imploding. The UK got duped into Brexit. Several countries have a growing following of citizens that think immigrants and minorities are the cause of their misfortune even though those tend to be vulnerable groups that are exploited the most. Cancel culture is dialed up to 11. It's crazy and scary.

There's a conflation of issues whenever someone comes along claiming the "Russia collusion" story is fake news. Russia did meddle in the election and did hack the DNC. Russia also had close ties to high level members of the Trump campaign. It is not reasonable to dispute these facts. The question of whether Trump personally colluded with Russia is in doubt. But I don't see this specific claim made much at all from legitimate news organizations. The dishonesty is how people want to cast doubt on Russia's efforts to elect Trump by conflating it with the issue of whether Trump personally colluded with Russia.

> But I don't see this specific claim made much at all from legitimate news organizations.

You really missed all of 2017-2018. My wife is a never-Trumper and this issue got her to tune into Rachel Maddow and all the podcasts and the idea that the collusion was two-sided and went to the highest levels in the Trump campaign was pervasive.

See: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russ...

Yeah, I meant to add 'recently', as in after the Mueller report didn't find any specific evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.

The evidence that there was some kind of attempted coordination between the Trump campaign and various Russian individuals is actually stronger than you give credit for. I feel like you didn't actually read the Special Counsel report.

"The media has...", really? There's no coordinated media, there are several media corporations (like Twitter, BBC, News Corp (NY Post owner)) with their own bias and their own audience.

>there's no coordinated media

Ahem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=x6U2Un5kEdI

> even though it's most likely false, by the time it has flown around the internet unimpeded the damage will have already been done.

"A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots." — Mark Twain

Giuliani says they have a receipt with Hunter's signature on it

Hunter's lawyer has allegedly emailed the store asking for the laptop back

If those two things can be corroborated and they aren't forgeries, it should dispel all speculation about who dropped it off and who it belonged to.

Doesn't matter if the story reeks or not. This is about censorship and even application of "community standards."

Twitter has never once censored any of smears or leaks against the Trump campaign.

Also, your criteria for this story to reek shows your bias. It's not like Joe Biden himself bragged about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired with the threat of holding back a billion dollars. It's on video, just Google it. And Hunter Biden is an admitted drug addict. So nothing that has been exposed from that laptop reeks too much.

You want to say Hunter was set up? Okay, I'll go down that rabbit hole, but to say this is all false? Well, again, your bias is showing.

> Twitter has never once censored any of smears or leaks against the Trump campaign.

Of course not. It's selective interference. They're just getting more brazen about it as we get closer to election day.

Also telling is that they have a pinned story at the top of the empty search page with the link titled, "Joe Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor for investigating his son, The Washington Post reports"

EDIT: Here's a link showing the WaPo headline that Twitter is adding: https://twitter.com/RepLeeZeldin/status/1316523575373893632

Worth noting is that WP have officially endorsed Biden.

I'm sure nobody saw that coming!

You don't get to jump up and down and claim that corporations should have the same rights as citizens and then turn around and say they don't have a right to control what they own.

And it is Twitter and Facebook’s role to censor it? I don’t remember appointing these guys are the official fact-checkers.

So? Other fake stories are certainly not censored in this manner. To demand the White House press secretary delete a tweet? To censor the U.S. House Judiciary Committee? I mean all parties hold their hot stories to close to the election for the greatest impact, but Twitter is certainly not even trying to appear partisan at this moment. It's quite clear this is not "hacked information", and if it wore, then it would be also an admission of guilt from Hunter Biden.

> So? Other fake stories are certainly not censored in this manner. To demand the White House press secretary delete a tweet?

Frankly, they should do this much more when officials lie (which the current administration has demonstrably done ad infinitum for four years). There's no reason at all for them to help officials lie about important matters.

As a private platform, it's certainly a matter of whether or not they are helping you do something rather than whether or not they are preventing you from doing something. If we want a reliable avenue for public communication, Silicon Valley ain't gonna give it to us, and they shouldn't.

It would be another thing to prevent people from stating that someone else had said something (given that the statement did actually happen). Sometimes, Twitter does block all posts that even mention a topic. This is definitely a bad approach, and I think they do tend to rectify it when this happens, but they still screw it up pretty often.

I think we're seeing Twitter and Facebook draw a line in the sand about behaviors that cause damage. Note that Twitter and Facebook removed comments hoping for the worst when the president was diagnosed with Covid which they hadn't done for AOC or other liberals who were receiving death threats.

Things are changing, I don't think we can point to prior behavior of these companies as the line they're going to hold in the future.

> It’s quite clear this is not “hacked information”

Setting aside the speculation at the end, this summarizes the issues with the story: https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/14/suspect-provenance-of-hunt...

Did you see the photos?

Probably an FBI agent that dropped it off. Could even be a copy of the one they have. There's a lot of people that would be motivated to leak something like this, especially since Trump got impeached over this.

Anyway, would not invalidate the story, just because of the way it was leaked.

1) Ad hominem

2) Conspiracy theory

3) Lie by omission (it was sent to the FBI in December, he sent a copy to Giuliani)

Your debunking is objectively poor

> Something like this, even as absurd as it is, will take weeks to thoroughly debunk.

It's hard to learn when you've already made up your mind.

A modern macbook pro has a T2 security chip and disk encryption on by default. It's possible that a random repair shop owner could read your emails if you turn off disk encryption or disable password auth, but that's even more far fetched.

edited It seems this particular mac doesn't have the T2 chip. It would still have disk encryption on by default.

I thought of this. The serial number of the laptop is included in the grand jury summons docs released by the New York Post. The serial number can be used to lookup the model. It was a mid-2017 macbook pro, the T2 chip started shipping in 2018 models.