Tell HN: Twitter suspends arrested Iranian tech blogger’s account
twitter.com
twitter.com
Jadi (Amirhossein Mirmirani) had 133K Twitter followers. He is a lovely computer geek and open source veteran from Tehran, Iran. He has been active educating youth for many years. He was arrested yesterday.
His account is suspended after his arrest, which is most probably due to fake reports from the cyber army. If you work at Twitter or Facebook, please help unsuspending his account which is vital for him to reach his audience and give him visibility, even when he is arrested. They want to remove his internet presence.
Profile screenshot: https://twitter.com/KavehMadani/status/1577695715131899904/p...
His Website in Persian: https://jadi.net
Instagram (suspended): https://www.instagram.com/jadijadinet/
It would also prevent their account being used to access any private accounts they may follow.
It's about terror and control, not about justice. If you think that's bad wait till you see what the Khmer Rogue did in Cambodia. The precious framework of individual rights, a relatively functioning justice system, and constitutional guarantees may not be perfect here in the US of A, there are issues, and those rights are still being eroded, and we have work to do, but people who draw comparisons between places like the US and China or Iran clearly have no idea what they are talking about, and it's a decent chance they may in fact be part of state sponsored psychological warfare apparatuses.
Yet another example of how good intentions aren’t enough. You need to fully understand the situation before you act, especially when dealing with a situation that is different from what you are familiar with.
The thing is we don‘t know either way.
A guy is quietly abducted by an authoritarian regime.
Naturally, the smart response would be for "activists" to "help" him by erasing all public record of his existence.
I was unable to edit my top-level comment, otherwise I would have added an explanation. Thanks.
Hopefully the authorities in Iran are similarly ignorant
When they arrest someone in a demonstration, they will confiscate their phone and open the apps on the device. If the account is inactive, they can not see anything.
May I ask you to delete your comment if that is not a problem? You basically gave the regime an evidence we said the activists are trying to hide away.
If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country. This is pretty much how it has worked forever.
This is obviously not great if you have a set of less-restrictive and more-restrictive laws that contradict each other. And it's not great if values, politics and rights in general aren't compatible. As much as we can disagree with what mass-murdering authoritarian regimes are up to, unless we go to war (after we have already applied all the sanctions we can think of) there isn't much you can do about it.
As for who might care: twitter might. They may have to spend more money on defence, on screening people when hiring them, and on legal to make sure they aren't getting sued in the US for discrimination, data leaks or whatever else people might come up with if they keep (accidentally) hiring foreign intelligence officers without checking who they are.
You are right.
Now, Twitter is free to not follow this law and expect consequences: a law suit from Iran, or retaliation towards Twitter operations on Iranian ground.
Unless you can point to a treaty between the US and Iran that lets Iran sue US companies, or some other way that Iran can actually enforce a judgement on Twitter, then no, Twitter has no need to respect Iran's laws. About the only way I see is for Iran to firewall Twitter wholesale, but isn't the wholesale end-user Internet shutdown basically doing that?
This isn't really a "but it's the law!"-case, it's a country A wants something, and they might use whatever they have to get it. The US has sanctions, but Iran doesn't except maybe oil production, but there are other places where you can get oil. So if Iran has nothing they can deny anyone else, they resort to attacks.
So when Iran says "do this because it is our law", you might not do it because you are interested in their laws nor do you have to follow them (legally), but you might not want the expense of being targeted by them.
As to the law of the jungle, if embedded Iranian agents have enough power to do anything to Twitter, then the right framing is that Twitter has a massive security problem. Also it would be foolish of Iran to burn such resources on damaging Twitter rather than continuing to silently exfiltrate data that interests them.
If Iran performs arbitrary attacks on hospitals in "retaliation" for Twitter's actions, then that still doesn't affect Twitter. And similarly, that's best framed as said hospitals having abysmal security, rather than focusing blame on Iran. The Internet is hostile noise.
No, it implies that if you respect the laws of the countries the people you serve reside in, you can choose to follow the law by not serving them, and therefore not having to "do what they say", or serve them, but then by their laws "do what they say".
Regarding effects on Twitter: it costs them money. Their share prices drop and jo-jo a ton when stuff like this gets out. Legally, not much effects twitter, it's not a person after all, and legal departments weasel their way around plenty to make sure a company keeps existing and keeps making money. If it's cheaper to censor some random person on your private platform then compared against shoring up your cyber defences, that's an easy choice for the people in charge with somewhat cartoonish dollar signs in their eyes.
The reality is that nothing is truly isolated from side-effects and circumstances in the world. Even if there are no diplomatic ties, and no physical violence, it's all happening on the same globe with the same internet. So ignoring laws is not always the cheapest way to deal with countries, and not dealing with countries is generally not an option when you're connected online.
This is only a real dichotomy if there is a legal enforcement regime forcing one to choose.
You're substituting a few handwavey indirections to profit-based incentives. While partially true, this mainly functions to absolve Twitter from not taking a more principled stand - the same argument could be made if they started doing more deplorable things with user data.
So sure, the stock market is fickle and irrational, like every herd. But the fundamental analysis for Iran being able to attack Twitter is that Twitter has poor security, period. I'd rather focus on the real problem than merely shoot today's messenger.
Twitter, on the other hand, is known to be a massive censor, just like Youtube/Google.
If this is actually the case, then the reporting system is incredibly broken.
Example news source supporting this is likely what happened:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-diaspora-tech-worker...
"This account has been suspended to protect the user" (or something like that)
Au least it is good to know that this may (and probably is) the reason.
Concept of plausible deniability is vital in situations like this for all parties involved. Unless you are able to prove via evidence it is not, please refrain from (repeatedly) commenting on a topic, that at least to me, you appear to be unfamiliar with and has the very real potential to result in physical harm to others.
If I have errored in my reasoning, please feel free to explicitly state why. Thanks.
If you are talking about plausible deniability for the person (I was talking about Twitter) - there is strictly zero value of it for him. He is in prison and everything should be done to free him up.
Other people that worked with him? It is not like the public Twitter messages cannot be filed as they come (other do it for you too). You mean that he may have received DMs? Ah, and the zealots in Iran will just say "ah yes, right, this must be the devil US".
So before getting all warmed up - state what you have to state. This is not like there is a big secret about people using Twitter/Telegram/Signal to protect their lives and only you, me and 3 other people are aware.
You are probably much more experienced in plausible deniability than me. I have just set this up for companies, on actual systems with actual encryption.
It is not that you have an error in your reasoning - it is that I do not see that reasoning at all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...
Again, if you have evidence deleting the accounts of detained activists has made them less safe, please provide it.
What kind of plausible deniability do you expect from Twitter? The app may leave numerous traces in the phone and this has nothing to do with Twitter but it is just the way things work. Once you know that Twitter was installed, where do you see room for plausible deniability?
Point two: you do not know whether the accounts were deleted. They may have been suspended/masked/whatever.
Point three: well, if you are taking into account internal espionnage, do you expect that the data from within Twitter will only be retrieved after the imprisonment?
You are on our mind bro. Hope to see you soon in your next podcast. #woman_life_freedom
Even the general public can use archives of twitter stream grabs to process past tweets: https://archive.org/details/twitterstream
How do they justify this?
Twitter really has one rule for some individuals and another rule for many. There is no justification for any of this from the big tech appeasers.
[0] https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1263749566744100864
Huh? Twitter has explicitly justified differential treatment for different kinds of users -- particularly in the name of public interest. Their rules and policies site has a page titled, "About public-interest exceptions on Twitter":
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere...
> At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content—Tweets from elected and government officials—given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements.
> As a result, in rare instances, we may choose to leave up a Tweet from an elected or government official that would otherwise be taken down.
The Nazi regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed. Then, the shame will fall on those who put their facilities at the service of normalization of relations with this regime.
For more information see:
Twitter stating the obvious has no control over information that’s no longer on its servers. Possible Wayback may not not even be aware of the risks it’s creating.
That said, DMs are very much in Twitter’s control and it is not uncommon for highly motivated parties with substantial resources to either insert employees into companies like Twitter or target employees via bribes, blackmail, etc. Google’s first publicly disclosed attack, which among other things targeted activist accounts, very likely was a result of insider helping. Beyond that, if Twitter did not do anything, it is a very real possibility that the activist might be tortured for their passwords; if the accounts don’t exist, are not recoverable, at least for that specific reason, it would be irrelevant.
There are so many situations to account for, but deleting the account/data is this safest minimal viable path.
If the US turned into a repressive single-party state that only held sham elections, Twitter would follow it's laws, too, whatever they would be.
There was a particularly farcical argument used by them, which was on the lines of "our policies are better than your law."
They only complied when their employees faced arrest and other legal actions.
I don't get the impression that their senior management are grounded in reality. My popcorn is getting cold waiting for Twitter's muskification.
They tolerate them just like how they tolerate the murderous f*cks who lied about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs and proceeded to murder 1 million Iraqis. They are still on twitter. They have blue checkmarks. They make 6 figures or more. The whole lot of them, an entire administration...
Some next level doublethink going on in this thread.