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Comment by tehwebguy | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the correct response to unconstitutional, secret warrants is to refuse to comply, maybe even refuse to respond?

It's not clear to me what would happen next but I can't imagine Pichai would be arrested. Maybe a datacenter would be raided (could FBI even guess where this data might be physically located?) but at least then some public action would have to happen and break the secrecy.

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I would love for this to be viable. But I can't help but think there are all sorts of ways for our intelligence agencies to ruin a person's life for not complying. I'm not even suggesting some kind of spy-novel intrigue, you can just tell them to comply or they'll drag you and your company through the mud until they get what they want. Imagine taking a principled stand and then suddenly having your life examined under a microscope by the FBI or the IRS. It would be a totally unrelated audit, just how some people tend to be subject to random additional screening at airports.

Just remember Qwest and Joseph Nacchio.

It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers.

> It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers

Read the charge sheet [1]. Is it possible that the NSA walked over to the SEC and asked them to prioritise this? Sure, why not. Is it also pretty clear cut that he insider traded? Yes.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2005-36.htm

It's difficult to win in an SEC governed market that is corrupt by design. You'd need a competitive advantage large enough to bridge the SECs designed corruption in the market.

What does this even mean? That it’s difficult to make your stock go up because the SEC has rigged the market?

Read through Tesla’s history with the SEC, specifically Musk being immature and committing securities fraud on Twitter. They’ve fined him and the company, and there is no love lost between the two, but TSLA is still going up.

One could argue that's the problem: They got a slap on the wrist instead of crippling punishment for illegal behavior, and there are companies that may be farther in the electric vehicle game than they are today, because they didn't employ a grandiose, law-flouting CEO to prop up their stock.

Spend even just a couple hours researching dark pools and naked shorts and it becomes blindingly obvious the SEC exists to do anything but protect consumers.

The twitter outrage over elon's comments are nothing more than a woefully uninformed public hoping to remove the tip without addressing the iceburg underneath.

If every one of your competition doesn't have to play by the rules, you'll find it hard to beat them playing honestly and you'll find that over time the only winners left are the cheaters.

I know all about dark pools and naked shorts and I have no idea what you're talking about. Be specific. Give details.

The market design is unfavorable to retail investors and traders partly due the regulations and laws in the US.

- flow internalization which reduces liquidity on venues and widens spreads

- dark pools which is liquidity only available to institutions, therefore removing liquidity from venues that retail trades on

- market fragmentation which harms retail investors who don't have the execution sophistication of HFT or execution algos

- short sale restriction which harms retail traders who incur excess slippage

- allowing market makers to naked short sell but not retail investors which harms retail investors because they have to pay rents to access it

- trading halts which benefit institutions (over retail) who have the execution sophistication to handle unhalts and who can price warrants etc better while the product is halted

You forget the other company he manages.

I still see significant issues with using the threat of finicial repercussions and criminal charges to force dirty executives to comply with illegal efforts to spy on their customers.

This is problematic not just because of the violations of those customers' rights, but also because it creates perverse incentives for the government to encourage the success of dirty tech companies as means to circumvent constitutional protections.

Thus while I don't doubt Nacchio's guilt, I absolutely think that he should have atleast been allowed to use that argument as a defense in his court case so that the Government is somewhat discouraged from using such tactics by the knowledge that it can come to light in court.

> still see significant issues with using the threat of finicial repercussions and criminal charges to force dirty executives to comply with illegal efforts to spy on their customers

I do too. We just have no evidence this happened.

> We just have no evidence this happened.

Any evidence regarding that was suppressed by the judge due to the possible revealing of classified information. This sort of suppression is precisely my objection as it effectively allows the government to operate with impunity.

I don't claim to know if the claims were true, I just think they should have been assessed in court.

“Show me the man and I'll show you the crime” was Beria's infamous boast. He served as deputy premier from 1941 until Stalin's death in 1953 ...

Ironic considering, soon after he was arrested, tried for treason and other offenses, sentenced to death, and executed on 23 December 1953.

I don’t think ironic is the right word. Just fitting - he knew the system and the system lived up to his promise.

I'm using it in the greek tragedy sense, not the sarcasm sense.

This is what I fear is going to happen once surveillance-type robots start appearing in the streets. The narrative is that we'd somehow destroy them on sight but the truth is that that would be criminally persecuted.

Both things will happen. In some locations they will be destroyed despite the potential consequences, in other locations the population will rationalize their presence as being a good thing. It'll vary by affluence, culture. Poor people will tolerate them a lot less than rich people (rich people will believe that they make the area safer and will accept the trade-off).

The recent documents made public have shown that google doesn't give a shit about moral integrity. What makes you think that they would put themselves at risk for some kind of non-monetary public good?

According to Forbes (who published the unsealed the docs), nothing is known about whether or not Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are even complying with the requests, or to what extent if they are.

I know a guy that was working for a defense contractor in the 2000s that searched his military ranked boss's name on Google and told me he was told the next day not to do that anymore.

I mean yea, everything you do at work in a defense contractor is keylogged. They don't need to ask Google, they know what you're doing on their network.

He said he did it from home though. I always wondered if he was making it up or not, but this was the Bush era (not that that much has changed).

VPN or company managed device? Seems like something a vaguely savvy user would keep in mind though.

I think it was a home device, I don't think this guy was super savvy though.

I'm assuming he landed somewhere after the search that his bosses had logs for, like maybe a bio page on some .mil domain. Back in the 2000's, you still got a referrer header that included not just "google.com", but also the search query parameters.

So if you followed https://www.google.com/search?q=my+asshole+boss+joe+schmoe to get to the .mil hosted bio page, they got to see that.

That seems plausible, but as this story was related to me over a decade ago, I can't remember if he said he clicked on anything in particular.

It's not made up. They monitor key sites including social media and those peddling in sensitive information. EO12333 makes warrantless searches legal for anyone with a clearance. It's also a convenient cover for why they need this extra-judicial domestic surveillance apparatus.

I'm not disputing the idea that he was told this but that's a weird thing to be told just for googling someones name. Maybe he was just curious about his background and wanted to read his wikipedia page.

I'll be the part of the story he didn't tell you is more interesting.

>> Maybe the correct response to unconstitutional, secret warrants is to refuse to comply, maybe even refuse to respond?

Ummmm, no. Correct response is courts and then comply. Pichai would lose his job in a minute.

You are ignoring the fact that Tim Cook fought the government on the San Bernardino shooter, and still has his job.

The Board is not going to fire Pichai over this, provided he appears to be fighting through the courts rather than practicing outright defiance.

you can fight until the case is still in the courts. Then, it is over. That's what I meant.

In a short search I didn't find any indication that this was one of the infamous "National Security Letters" that comes with a gag order.

The government and Google are symbiotic entities. Why would this ever happen?

Not even close. This sort of rhetoric just numbs people to actual abuses when they happen.

If you want to see actual symbiotic entities, go look at social media in China or American defense contractors.

What's the difference? Sam must have invested in Google before 2005. At least that was the time it became somewhat apparent

Without backing up your assertion, we're just talking past one another. Google the entity relies upon USG's system of laws for what it can and cannot do. Without Google (et al), USG would have a much harder time gathering information on citizens. That's symbiosis.

There is real downside to Google if it decided to go against USG's de facto interests, even if it technically has the de jure ability to do so. What is the upside? The only large company that has made an attempt to rebuke the general desires of USG is Apple, which has since backpedaled with its on device spyware.

Could this relationship be reformed through the little bit of leverage that US citizens have over USG? Perhaps. If you've got another concrete proposal aimed at doing do, then bring it up. But unless we're discussing a specific proposal, it's prudent for individual citizens to model the two as cooperating attackers rather than getting distracted with hopeful dichotomies such as "government" vs "private company".

> Google the entity relies upon USG's system of laws for what it can and cannot do

You've defined symbiosis in a way that incorporates every person, company--and hell protected species--that touches American law. That makes the term useless for purposes of discussion.

Eh, kind of. I agree I could have done a better job. I was trying to quickly summarize this distinction -

A corporation literally cannot exist without a government charter.

Google is able to collect all this surveillance data with impunity due to the state. Google is able to wash its hands of responsibility for the results of its actions due to the state. Google is able to force its workers to be loyal (eg not embezzle for themselves or competitors) due to the state. Google wouldn't have such outsized financial resources without the state printing reams of fiat money.

Heading off the common retort that a private person can do whatever a corporation can do - the relevant issue is scale. It's simply impractical for an individual or a simple group of individuals to scale up to the level of a large corporation.

And yes, this definition does end up catching any corporation as an intrinsic organ of the state. While jarring (because in the US power flows both ways), this is still a fundamental truth. For example if you attempt to set up an LLC or corporation that operates at odds with government policy (eg selling drugs), you'll find out how quickly a corporate veil will be discarded. Actions that are at odds with government policy are defined criminally, and thus all corporate activity is inherently government chartered.

Of course all of this is only useful as a lemma to reach another conclusion. But that's what I was doing - why would Google ever choose to rock the boat? It's not impossible (cf Apple), it's just that there would need to be some explicit incentive for Google beyond mere citizens' hope.

Honestly this forced choice (either google is in bed with government or Raytheon et Al are) is just needless politicization.

Why don't we just condemn both? I mean... Google is going down the same path as the defense contractors and instead of stopping it from evolving into something like them, you're essentially arguing to look the other way

"We're way better than China" is not really a great thing in this context. It is also a problem that the bar has been set too low by other countries.

Pichai certainly could be arrested for refusing to comply with warrants and court orders.

In principle, by the letter and spirit of the law (bad as it is in this case), sure. In practice, I very much doubt anyone would dare arrest someone with Sundar Pichai's money and social standing for anything less than murder or insider trading basically.

I don't think so.

If Sundar decided to fight this (I'm not saying he would), then Google would probably file for an injunction to quash the request. No arrests, no raids.

The judge that issued the warrant would order Google into court and administer hefty fines for a few days. if they still refused the court could order arrest warrants for executives of the company until they comply.

it never ever goes this far

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