Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.

Personally, I think they found a way to tell the truth without breaking the law.

They apparently said what they were required to say, to the letter. People found it transparently suspicious. Now the secret appears to be out.

Could be an accident, I suppose.

View on HN

I don't think it looked quite so good. The "no direct access to our servers" line spoken by all four CEOs sounded like something out of North Korea, but they all also had the option to send this message through a relatively faceless spokesperson instead of throwing their own credibility on the pyre.

None of them addressed the incongruity of having all the major news outlets contradicting them, after apparently finding the major points of the story supportable.

It makes sense to me that Zuckerberg and Page came out personally. The idea that all their data is open to snooping is an existential threat to their companies. If true, their user bases (and thus revenues) would plummet. They absolutely had to deny it in the strongest terms possible.

Their data /is/ open to snooping. We'll see if their user bases plummet. For some reason I doubt it.

Isn't it too late to prevent the coming impact? Unless the news outlets backed down on the PRISM powerpoint, trust for American technologies and services for anything more serious than cat pictures is dead. Which prompts the question of why Facebook should be bothered by this at all.

They should have at least remained silent. By issuing grossly misleading denials they look silly and dishonest. And yes, cowardly.

Had they said, "We do not comment on matters of national security," such would have been honest, careful, and truthful and it would have been darned hard to prosecute them or put them at risk for effectively revealing that the press was right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com