Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

There are millions of ways to deny things.

This is the most clear and direct way

I accused you of doing X

You could say "you know, my brother and I, we once, 30 years ago blah blah blah blah blah blah but X, X never happened".

Most people, however, will just say "No, i don't do X".

They were accused, point blank, of providing direct access to their servers. They said "we do not provide direct access to their servers".

But please, see a conspiracy here because people are trying to be as direct and clear.

View on HN

I accused you of doing X on mondays. You could say "You know, in fact, I do X, but on tuesdays". Most hypocrites however will take your question as literally as possible and will just say: "No, I don't do X on mondays".

You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened.

It simply doesn't matter if google uploads data to government servers or government gets data from google servers by "directly accessing" them. I would even guess that the latter is simpler to implement and maintain.

I don't mean that google is happy to hand user data to government - they probably aren't - I want to know how many data governments gets.

"You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened. "

The companies are saying they have no idea. They literally said "we've never heard of this program". What more do you want?

The claim the newspapers made, in line 1, was, "the government has direct access". The denial made was "the government does not have direct access".

If they want to publish a different claim, i'm sure a different denial will be written.

If you want to know what happened, why are you asking GOogle? Go ask the NSA

No it isn't. You can run it through plagiarism software which is specifically designed to take into account scenarios like your suggest and it'll be flagged.

For example why do they all use the word "provide" there are hundreds of synonyms that work just as well ("given", "enabled", "allowed", "have", etc.). They weren't accused of "providing" the access, it's a word they've chosen to use.

The specific accusation was about the NSA, why are the denials using "government agencies" or synonyms rather than NSA. There might be perfectly valid reasons, but the chance that they'd all make the same decision to use it independently ?

Why are they all in current tense rather than "we have never x" ?

If there were on or two similarities it might be coincidence, but we're talking about dozens of grammatically and phrasing choices.

Because it is plagiarism. Do you honestly believe the PR people who wrote this didn't also read what others wrote? I don't think they released their statements all the same second.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com