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Comment by rrdharan | Hacker News Reader

> I assume that when the FBI sends a request to a tech company about a user, they probably also contact lots of other tech companies too about the same user...

You assume a lot. I know it’s fun to pontificate about dragnet surveillance, but in general when issuing / granting a warrant there has to be some kind of specific target and scope. In this case it’s likely the FBI knew the Sci-Hub founder was using iCloud email and so they could get a warrant for that specific account for a specific time range.

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Would they take a chance and miss a juicy account at Google/Facebook etc? I don’t think so.

Therefore it’s likely they issued requests but Google/Facebook etc were less “inclined” to talk about these things.

This is the correct take. When have they ever?

No, it's absolutely false.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-03-24...

> In Google’s case, the company typically lets users know which agency is seeking their information.

I'm not sure that's true for non-US citizens.

Two things:

1.) The US Constitution only applies to American citizens.

2.) It’s hilarious when someone starts a reply with egotistical language (like “you assume a lot”) and then miss the most important fact in a scenario.

Regarding: The US Constitution only applies to American citizens.

False.

In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, an 1898 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the term “person” under the Fifth Amendment applied to aliens living in the U.S. In Fong Yue Ting v. U.S.,the court held that Chinese laborers, “like all other aliens residing in the United States,” are entitled to protection of the laws.

"There's no dispute at the absolute core," said Andrew Kent, a constitutional scholar at Fordham Law. "If somebody is picked up by police they the have same Miranda and due process rights in all contexts except immigration law."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2017/01/30/does-th...

Ok, then: the US constitution only applies on US soil.

Also false.

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-do-in...

(Please try ... at least a little harder, people.)

You're being misleadingly pedantic.

This article is about people who are US citizens abroad, or foreigners who came to USA or who are under the jurisdiction (imprisonment) of territory controlled by the USA government.

Non-resident non-citizen non-present people violating US national security (rightly or wrongly, that's per the government's judgment) don't have Constitutional rights.

Statutory or case law citation requested.

But first, please, citation on how this "statutory or case law" could apply in the first place. It has no more jurisdiction over the kind of people described than the constitution. (Neither, of course, does the original claim that they violated US law.)

This American habit of claiming global hegemony for American law is, on the whole, about equally fucking annoying whichever side it comes from: Yank law enforcement blithely assuming a right to arrest someone who's never set foot in America isn't really all that much worse than Yank liberals who leap to the conclusion that the only defense such victims have is the Holy Constitution.

Does this case establish precedent that the fifth amendment applies to people in Kazakhstan?

Onus of precedent would have to be that it does not.

If you're able to find any such, I might have further interest in this line of questioning. Though I doubt even that.

You think the US Constitution of the United States* of America restricts what the US can do to non-citizens who aren't in the US at all?

What possible reason could you have for that thought?

Precedent is that protections like that are created by treaties like the Geneva Convention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27155570

The question isn’t about whether the constitution restricts non-citizens, but about whether it protects them by preserving their rights.

In fact I’m not sure the constitution restricts any entity other than the government. It’s laws that restrict people. And laws apply to everyone, assuming jurisdiction can be established, or extradition will be enforced. I can’t murder someone in Japan just because I’m a non-citizen there. But I could break US law by doing something not-illegal in Russia, and they probably wouldn’t extradite me.

United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 (1990), was a United States Supreme Court decision that determined that Fourth Amendment protections do not apply to searches and seizures by United States agents of property owned by a nonresident alien in a foreign country.

Points for a case in which a protection was held not to apply ... on a 5/4 decision. (Hand grenades, horse shoes, H-bombs, ... and SCOTUS decisions.)

Which still doesn't establish that no Constitutional rights (that is, limitations on government action) apply to extraterritorial noncitizens.

But props all the same for a relevant citation rather than more smoke-blowing as others have been.

If a country's constitution has the possibility of being interpreted in such a way that non-citizens outside its borders are entitled to zero protections, then that option should be rejected under a generalised version of what has been called "the Auschwitz rule of interpretation":

"in case there are two plausible interpretations of the text of a human rights treaty, one should favour that interpretation under which Auschwitz would be considered a human rights violation."

https://www.ejiltalk.org/foreign-surveillance-and-human-righ...

I disagree with using "the Auschwitz rule of interpretation". The first reason is that it's the rhetorical equivalent of comparing someone to a Nazi. It immediately escalates the discussion to a comparison with one of the worst things humanity has done.

The second is that it is either pointless, or creates a mess of international affairs. It disregards national sovereignty, so either we're going to do something about it every time another nation encroaches on what we consider natural rights (probably meaning war), or we're not going to do anything about it in which case it was a pointless exercise.

Your text actually says "treaty" though, which implies an international context. It makes more sense in that context because national sovereignty still exists.

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