Personal injury guys are the most entrepreneurial people I know...
Just Sayin’…
For examples: Accessibility laws, consumer protection laws, and privacy laws.
It's a trivial matter to determine which websites don't comply with the easy targets of accessibility. Yet the concept of running such a scanner, automatically, and charging for corrections, is seen as predatory behavior.
There was an article about grocery pricing with obvious collusion, dark practices, and misinformation yet nothing is done. Business as usual, people need to understand it and work around it. Problem is, it's clearly outside the realm of the average intellectual ability.
Predatory behavior is everywhere. I don't feel compelled to list even a single example.
If the lawyer chasing the ambulance results in a law being followed instead of ignored, that is a positive thing.
The Ashley Madison leaks should have been one name a week and making it a big spectacle till this very day!
Same for the Snowden leaks
you can also get bigger bidders for the data by drumming up interest and suspense
hackers really suck at marketing, so far.
A wikileak revival scares the most powerful
So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest?
> hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important?
There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.
Tangent, but we use Azure instead of OpenAI due to data-retention concerns. To ensure nobody's inputting anything classified or proprietary, Legal demanded implementation of an "AI safety" tool...so we demoed one that ships all prompts to a third party's regex-retraction API.
So you never know who ends up the recipient of your LLM prompt, where it's getting logged to, who's reviewing those logs, etc. Even some local models require execution of arbitrary code, and Gradio ships telemetry data. Uploading Snowden's docs into a black box is a good way to catch a ride in a black van.
You might want to browse /r/LocalLLaMA/ if "security" is an issue for you.
However at the time it was the more sexy things like tapping google's fibre and backdoors in cisco's kits that were more interesting. This is because the public could understand those things and therefore it sold papers.
The difference between "cisco, dell and many other leading manufacturers shipped backdoors in their kit" and "cavium the small provider you've not really heard of" is large.
Most people reading the snowden stuff will have assumed that the NSA had put in backdoors to most things.
That doesn't seem to be true. There are many court cases involving criminal conspiracies where you cannot find unrelated information about the involved people.
Due to the severe corruption of our institutions, the investigators in this case are the public. A time period of a decade is more than enough time to recall all the HUMINT assets that might be harmed by such disclosure.
Like how NSA collects a shit ton of data on citizens... the vast majority of which has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of wrongdoing.
I'm only pointing this out because your comment has a negative tone towards what Snowden did.
I don't know what the reason for the betrayal was. I'm pretty sure Alan Rusbridger knows though. He resigned as Editor-in-chief shortly after these events.
I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public; it's not as if the press are known for either their honesty or their scruples.
They have an interest in drama and a platform to publish on.
>After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when—soon after leaving the Washington Post—famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive exposé in Rolling Stone.
Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years “more than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” He added: “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.”
Bernstein’s story tarnished the reputations of many journalists and media institutions, including the Washington Post and New York Times. While the CIA’s mission was widely assumed to involve “obfuscation and deception,” the mission of the nation’s finest newspapers was ostensibly the opposite.
https://www.guernicamag.com/normon-solomon-why-the-washingto...
Support or criticism for the intelligence community became very partisan during Trump's campaign and presidency. Once something like this becomes partisan, the average political creature loses some degree of rationality for it. The IC becomes patriotic good guys, stalwart defenders of American democracy standing up to fascism; their past and present malfeasance goes unnoticed, forgotten, or simply ignored. This is how the WaPo's relentless pro-IC stance could be missed; they've been telling a lot of people what they want to hear and all people are less critical and suspicious of things that support their biases and prejudices.
https://www.amazon.in/Journalists-Hire-How-Buys-News/dp/1944...
So, the behavior you point out is enabled by politicians who show such bad judgment in such a critical area, and yet few if any lost their positions over their votes. I personalty have been wondering for the past few years how many of our leaders are actually there of their own accord, rather than put there by various backroom cabals of business leaders and intelligence (foreign and domestic) agencies that want to put their thumbs on the scale with a representative or dozen. How would you ever know, except by their behavior.
There's a lot of pontificating about the virtuous, important, selfless job journalists do, but when they're manipulated to such an extent not just by the Government and intelligence agencies but also by their corporate sponsors... It's hard to not be a bit cynical...
Fixed that for you
I'm often remind of PG's essay on corporate PR and the media: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
They very much did not. Twitter's own lawyers when pressed in court (the place where there are consequences for lying) admitted that nothing in the "Twitter Files" cited by Donald Trump actually show that the social media platform was a tool of government censorship.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-30445-CV0.pd...
You are moving the goalposts. First it was "gov policing speech" which there was no proof of. Now it's "gov coercion/encouragement" which is entirely up to how you subjectively interrupt what interactions occured.
Which fine, lets go over the facts. Any exchanges of information were voluntary, at times set up under the initiative of social media companies themselves, and the vast majority of instances of mis/disinfo flagged by the gov were not acted upon by platforms. Social media companies could have stopped talking to the gov at any time (a few did), and they didn't have to act on anything.
Not exactly the picture of an authoritarian government policing speech. The Twitter Files were set up as an exercise in confirmation bias for people that believe gov was censoring speech (and targeting them), which is why they disappeared so quickly when a lack of proof was highlighted in court. It served its purpose.
> We start with coercion. On multiple occasions, the officials coerced the platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to moderate content. Privately, the officials were not shy in their requests— they asked the platforms to remove posts “ASAP”
The ASAP was in reference to a case of revenge porn, something not only against the Twitter TOS, but illegal.
> When the platforms did not comply, officials followed up by asking why posts were “still up,” stating (1) “how does something like [this] happen,” (2) “what good is” flagging if it did not result in content moderation, (3) “I don’t know why you guys can’t figure this out,” and (4) “you are hiding the ball,”
Again, this was in reference to illegal content (iirc an OFAC sanctioned entity not only posting content but making money off it). Using such language when a private company isn't following the law isn't "coercion for censorship".
This reads like a political document by partisan lawyers. This document makes no attempt to distinguish between actually illegal content and suggested violations of TOS (such as when spreading COVID disinfo was against Twitter's rules, which it no longer is). It provides no context for how this "coercion" was mostly civil servants either pointing out violations of Twitter's own rules, or federal crimes. Either way, inaction was baffling, as communicated.
But, again, the mere fact that Twitter ignored so much of this, so often, proves they clearly didn't feel the need to respond to gov requests as if they had to.
NSA didn't have to lift a finger. Wait a few weeks and people move on to the next story, this should not be a shocking revelation to anyone.
While the USA and the UK are different, I suspect there was a bit more difficult for the NSA than "didn't have to lift a finger".
>Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished
Whether that's true I can't say. But as a reminder, despite constant claims that Assange is being extradited over hacking charges, something like 17 of his 18 charges are over publishing documents.
Washington Post -> Bezos -> AWS -> Cavium
Pretty simple to understand, really.
Sure - it was a surprise to the public. But rival security services I'm sure would expect US controlled backdoors in US made technology.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-rele...
The FBI and CIA had agents inside Twitter and Facebook. Of course they have them inside news agencies as well. Part of it over time is access-media, the ones that play ball get the stories and info, the others get weeded out.
It's illegal for FBI or CIA to actively target a US company. Anyone doing so would be fired for cause.
Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me.
I never do that, except when I do. What kind of soapbox are you trying to stand on. It looks more like a cardboard box collapsing under the weight of your own hubris.
I get the suspicion of news outlets of any kind. It doesn't matter what stream the journalists are fished out of, but they cannot all be subject matter experts in all subjects. This is also an expectation full of hubris on your part.
"Why go out or talk to anyone when I can just stay home and be on twitter all day!?!"
It's the absolute worst outcome for journalism, and none of publications seem to care. If I had a publication the first thing I would do is ban twitter use (and probably go bankrupt because of it.)
(2010) https://weirdshit.blog/2010/07/23/cointelpro-operation-mocki...
Which is fine I guess, as long as it doesn't go into the more abusive examples listed.
One thing that jumped at me when (re-?)reading the letter to MLK from the FBI : first you have some very informal speech :
"look into your heart", "you are done", "you are [] an evil, abnormal beast", "there is only one thing for you left to do"
Then SUDDENLY : "You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance)."
Lol, talk about a change in tone, I wonder if MLK noticed it ? (The specific reason being Christmas, but still...)
No...the organization is behaving exactly as intended.
NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services
That's not the only publication that had access to the documents. From wikipedia
>the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian. [...] The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times (United States), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
Wouldn't be more likely that a plant would actually not say that, but rather come up with something else? Seems much more likely that a plant would promote some other aspect of a leak that would be less damaging as the story. Or even possibly making part of the document dump disappear.
Journalists knowingly report lies, acting as the mouthpiece of the government.
We know at least one news organization had the whole Epstein story locked down and they buried it because they were afraid they’d lose access to the royal family for future news/puff pieces.
You think you hate journalists enough, but you don’t.
sure, why not. and while we're on this deluded train: Julian Assange's legal problems are not political persecution
[0]https://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html
The rest of your post is quite the bullshit (easily probable with publicly accessible archives bullshit at that), but this is also wrong. The mythological god-like creatures that crafted America as their divine powers ordained it didn't "intend" for the press to be "the fourth power". That term was first used after the US revolution, and in the UK. You're just retconing stuff into your mythology, and everyone knows that doesn't work and leaves a poor taste.
* it's an amendment, so not part of the original text
* "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" . I don't know, it doesn't sound to me like the freedom of the press was the most pressing matter when that amendment was written considering the ordering, and again, the fact that it's an amendment and not part of the original text where the rest of the "checks and balances" are written.