Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for explaining the downvote.

But the position that because an institution works on behalf of the public, every communication it receives should be public seems naive. The entire publicly funded criminal justice service depends on secrecy to function, for example. Similarly, the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory or how to build a Falcon 9 any more than it needs to know the identities of whistleblowers, and if you don't redact that information, you don't get people blowing whistles or sharing their expansion plans with governors or IP with NASA. Without the ability to deliver suitcases full of cash in response to a private conversation being inconvenienced in the slightest.

As you've already pointed out, we have such things as subpoenas already to deal with the actual criminal conduct. This is a better approach than "don't write anything you wouldn't share with everyone", not least because the latter actually normalizes every interaction with government officials being a request for an off-the-record in-person conversation.

> the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory

Putting aside your other sensible comments, this one is true from Tesla's side, but false from the government side. I don't "need" to know what Tesla is doing, but I "need" to know what the government is doing. Let's say Tesla is weighing its options where to open the next factory, I want to know what governments are doing to attract (or not) their business.

I mean, the impact of that usually fairly public anyway, especially if it involves subsidies or legislative changes. Companies are free to whinge about legislators they consider obstructive too; Elon loves it!

I'll put it another way. Florida is quite happy to send state officials very publicly to small events explicitly focused in reeling in businesses, do a very public presentation about how they don't do socialist things like handouts but do offer them material support in building out their US base in Florida, and then hang around for networking. It's very much part of their jobs, and it's advertised and reported on, and in at least some cases open to the general public. So if I'd wanted to sidle up to Jared Purdue and explain why Florida's state investment fund should underwrite part of the cost of a space propulsion facility near Cape Canaveral, I was at a small event nowhere near Florida where I totally could have done that recently. But if I have no expectations that commercially sensitive data will be protected I'm almost certainly not going to consider following up by sharing financial projections and plans and evidence for his staff to review (and yet would be free to proceed if he can make things happen based purely on 5 minutes conversations or suitcases stuffed with cash) . I suspect Florida voters would prefer their DOT to be able to have that proper follow-up though (or would if the plant was likely to happen in the next 2 years and likely to end up in Florida...)

If the public wants more insight into what governments are doing to attract business you get that from budget transparency, formal review processes, publicised state support thresholds, independent anti corruption monitoring etc and of course PR about success stories, not by placing all written correspondence with businesses into the public domain, a measure which will severely limit their ability to [selectively] attract business. First thing I'd want the government to do to attract business is to respect the same confidences everyone else does, and that means where the new plant might be is non public information.

Likewise Elon can threaten or offer campaign contributions to a governor over the phone and probably does so, but if he wants to actually do the responsible thing and email lots and lots of arguments and evidence to try to persuade a governor that vetoing a bill is a bad thing, it's probably reasonable to assume that some of that is commercially sensitive (ironically if it's financial or technical details redacted from long emails is actually material to changing the governor's mind, it's probably because the case is better than the generic "yay Gigafactory, yay looser autonomous test regimes" arguments that get trotted out). Better to have a paper trail only suitably cleared people can see than nobody prepared to leave any paper trail at all.

And yeah, it's Elon, so there's probably other stuff that has nothing to do with his companies redacted too, but that's another issue entirely

You are putting "attracting businesses" as a bigger priority than public accountability of the government elected by the public? Why even have the farce of a democracy if the purpose of government in your view is to attract businesses?

There are mechanisms for businesses to share confidential information with government officials, and keep it under wraps if the release of them could undermine their businesses, use these mechanisms instead of trying to make government communication opaque to the public in the name of "attracting businesses".

More government transparency is never, ever, a bad thing, the few exceptions where it might require transparency to be reduced need to be very clear cut to avoid being abused (as is common in the USA to call "national security" and redact a shit ton of stuff), the less transparent your government is, the bigger chances it's just being corrupted, no one wants that.

> You are putting "attracting businesses" as a bigger priority than public accountability of the government elected by the public? Why even have the farce of a democracy if the purpose of government in your view is to attract businesses?

If you're going to respond to day old threads, at least try to engage with arguments in good faith. If someone (reasonably) suggests that what the government does to attract businesses is a matter of public interest, then naturally my reply is going to point out that not sharing all their commercially sensitive plans and positions is a good start. At no point have I even hinted that attracting business is government's highest priority. It isn't, but nor is "indiscriminately publishing every email ever sent to a public official" automatically a higher one.

There are indeed mechanisms to share confidential information with government officials. One of those mechanisms is that commercially sensitive information shared with public officials gets redacted from emails shared in the public interest. Like all mechanisms it can be abused, but the public is still better off from knowing the general gist that Elon had a lot of email exchanges with the governor, some of which have been published and some of which redacts stuff that was either sensitive business detail or very embarrassing than they are if a similar exchange took place through unofficial channels instead.

> If you're going to respond to day old threads, at least try to engage with arguments in good faith.

I replied to a comment posted 9 hours before my comment, don't come chastise me, thank you very much.

I replied to what I read: you defending that communications between the government and businesses don't need as much transparency as possible.

The rest of the comment is just trying to support this absurdity in too many words.

I don't have much to add here, I think we've reached the point where nuance is necessary, and "it depends" comes into play. This Abbot / Elon _seems like_ an abuse of confidentiality for competitive reasons, which itself can bring a bunch of other problems (like insider trading). But overall of course there are reasons for secrecy, and probably mechanisms to minimize that, like does the government REALLY needs to know details that would compromise competitiveness to make decisions? But we would go back to "it depends".

Anyway that's a lot for simplistic HN threads, and I enjoyed your replies.

Sorry it seems naive to you. But if someone is going into business with me (a part of the public), I expect to be able to see EVERYTHING that business has communicated with "the public" (which includes me). Like the other commenter said: I do need to know where the government plans to allow the next gigafactory or falcon 9 launchpad.

As far as whistleblowers and other such information, it's a nice deflection, but it's obviously irrelevant to this topic. I didn't claim anything about how the government should publicize everything, I made claims about what the government should share regarding business deals. Steelman, don't strawman.

And as far as your fear-mongering about everyone suddenly insisting on off-the-record conversations, A) it's a laughable premise; most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account of knowing what "public" means and B) anyone who tried to use off-the-record interaction as a means to circumvent public scrutiny would leave a trail of their behavior that could be relied upon in trial or legislative debate to evidence a law broken or a loophole to be made illegal. Simple as.

You can expect to see it all you like; you won't unless and until you can persuade enough other members of the public to vote for a platform of amending freedom of information legislation to stop redacting sensitive information (unless its a whistleblower identity apparently)

I'm sorry you find it "laughable" and "fear-mongering" that people will switch to off the record conversations. Perhaps you are not aware that government officials already spend most of their day talking to people in unrecorded conversations, with many of those conversations being with representatives of business.

As it is, companies will also happily follow those questions up with slide decks, projections, technical details and requests for information etc which helps substantiate their pitch or their case for funding or their objection to a bill (unless they're actually doing something dodgy, in which case creating a paper trail is counterproductive). They will not send this information if that is expected to be publicly disclosed because they don't want everybody knowing that they are emailing Texas officials about a Texan location before they've even decided if they actually want one or how much they're spending on widgets from which suppliers. Never mind other intriguing possibilities like NASA circulating all the technical documentation SpaceX has shared with them.

If you are truly convinced that 'most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account knowing what "public" means', I advise you to test this hypothesis by emailing some businesses asking them to share unredacted content of emails they have recently exchanged with government officials (a no-effort filter on .gov domains in their own mailbox is sufficient for this experiment). Let us know how many unredacted emails they share with you...

lol

It's hilarious that you seem to think that what you suggested is tantamount to what I suggested. You also don't seem to have actually worked with the government or requested any information via foia requests, based on your descriptions.

In any case, good luck on whatever you're trying to convince whoever your trying to convince of.

Or alternatively maybe I'm the participant in this discussion that's actually raised significant government funding based on sharing sensitive projections and technical detail, met elected officials doing their "we support business and dual use technology for national security" visits and had to reassure VCs that space agency disclosure requirements don't actually jeopardise IP.

Reason I'm able to that is precisely because I know full well that transparency legislation acknowledges that commercial sensitivity is a thing, and that parts of some emails made to evaluate us aren't going to be shared under FOIA legislation. And frankly if it wasn't, it would stop the appropriate email exchanges about business impact of policy changes, not inappropriate conversations people might want to have about campaign contributions. If you want FOIA tweaked to work on the sovcit principle that since the public is paying their bills everything shared with public officials is also public, you're the one that needs to do the convincing.

Let me know how you get on with those emails "most" businesses are happy to share the unredacted contents of.

Ah, yeah, bona fides! That oughtta do it! I bet you'll get a few suckers with that one!

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