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Comment by mig39 | Hacker News Reader

Man, you know you're the baddies when you have to have "secret courts."

... this is very silly. Sometimes the government needs to have secret stuff, and that needs an oversight body... and they need to see the secret stuff

There is absolutely no reason why the public at large can't know that some three letter agency is legally forcing a company to provide information with a national security letter. The public knowing that this is happening doesn't divulge any useful information to anyone. The fact that free speech is in fact being trounced in the US is really freaking gross to me.

That's a pretty naive take imo ; divulging such information leads to change in behaviour of nefarious actors.

I totally get the viewpoint, but there are other perspectives to consider

I don't disagree that it can change behavior, but surely many or most of these nefarious actors must already assume that uploading illegal materials to Apple or Google, whether they claim E2EE or not, is a risk? See for example Apple's ditched efforts to scan and flag CSAM material on-device.

My assumption has been that the real bad guys use their own infrastructure attached to anonymous access methods like Tor, or using anonymous file sharing accounts that can't be tied to an iPhone's serial number. Maybe that's not true?

Offering transparency in these areas may help to understand whether the government is really doing this to arrest criminals, or just to have unfettered access to everyone's data.

Literally any bad actor with half a brain cell assumes every large american tech company has been served a NSL. Disallowing them from disclosing they received one seems pretty pointless and only done to prevent bad optics and public opinion

It's not naive. I can definitely see value in a two-tier warrant system. The first (and normal one), just like a physical warrant: you know you're being searched. The second, and it is much harder to get: a covert warrant, more like a wiretap.

Specific details, sure.

Locations of military assets, passcodes, officials' personal details, etc.

But you cannot have a democracy without the people knowing what their government is doing.

The oversight body is the legislature. The judiciary has no ability to provide oversight. The judiciary cannot act on it's own. It cannot conduct investigations. It can only act on cases and motions within those cases. The two ideas you've presented do not have anything to do with eachother.

Regular courts already do that.

Didn't realize he was also talking about the US secret courts. Sorry.

Uh...[1] yeah. Secret courts are the worst! Those British and their secrets!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

Like I said, you know you're the baddies when you have to use "secret courts."

A charge of hypocrisy necessarily implies you agree with the principle.

Not so. Hypocritical positions tell you an error exists, but not which of the two contradictory positions is the wrong one.

I don't. I was merely pointing out the hypocrisy, not understanding that he meant it as a blanket statement for both/all countries with secret courts.

I'm not American. But if my country had (or has) secret courts, I'd think they were evil too.

What hypocrisy were you pointing out?

FISA abuse has been broadly reported in recent years.

Both are bad obviously, what a weird place to try to whataboutism

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