Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

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While I'd like to know how many secret requests are being made to whom, why should I ever believe any numbers?

We're living in crazy-town, maybe we always were. What is to stop the A.G. from publicly saying "Yes, disclose away!" and then to privately send one of those magic-do-anything-we-say requests saying, "Don't disclose X, Y, and Z."? Or if we are given an accurate count today, what is to prevent the government from in the future secretly retracting that privilege?

I think in the end we can be satisfied by nothing less than some sort of "Too Many Secrets" Constitutional Amendment, stating clearly that no private citizen can be required or compelled to partake in a "National Security" cover-up, so that everyone currently bound up in the web of lies could speak up without fear of persecution.

That is what galls me as much as anything. If the government wants to gather data and keep secrets, let them gather and keep them themselves. Drafting people against their will into compulsory service in signals-intelligence, forcing them to lie to their loved ones and the world, and persecuting them for honesty, is absolutely amoral.

Good point. If they can force companies to lie about the existence of FISA requests, why wouldn't they force them to lie about the number of such?

[citation needed].

Again, i have seen this in argument after argument. Nobody has yet provided any legal authority that states it is constitutional or legal for the government to compel forced lies. They can compel silence, for sure.

There is plenty of authority in other contexts (IE not national security), that the government cannot compel you to speak misleading or non-truthful information.

I wish this idea that everyone must be lying because the government can legally, force them to, would stop.

I imagine someone started with the NSL gag orders, which compel silence, and then just started saying they compel you to lie instead (which they don't).

In fact, even the compel silence part of the NSL was found unconstitutional.

You're interneting wrong. Of course we can't give official links pointing to where this is policy, that's the point of the policy! But from the information we've gathered so far it very much appears to be the case that companies are forced to deny getting requests from the government, not just be silent.

And don't bother trying to work out how the law allows this, we're not even allowed to know what some of the laws even are.

"And don't bother trying to work out how the law allows this, we're not even allowed to know what some of the laws even are. " This is false. You may not be allowed to know some internal agency regulations, but that's always been the case.

What laws do you think you can't know of, exactly?

What lies have companies told?

From the news I've read, my understanding about FISA is that if someone asks you whether you've been subject to one, you're legally obligated to lie and say no. Right, or am I missing something?

If that is the case, it seems like a very risky move. If I were so ordered, for example, I would immediately seek to challenge it on the basis of the first amendment. Not the free speech part - the free exercise of religion part. My religion explicitly states "thou shalt not lie".

EDIT: well, technically it says not to 'bear false witness against thy neighbor', but it certainly would not be hard to justify a religious objection to that requirement.

That is the impression that I've been given from reading the stories about the stress of living under a FISA order and lying to everyone about it.

Which is not to say Google or anyone else is lying about the nature or the scope or anything else about the requests they have received. But the problem is that we can't ever know one way or the other, because we have apparently created a system of secrecy and dishonesty. Once you know someone (in this case, the intelligence community, and those they compel) has a history of lying to you, how do you move past that back into a state of trust?

I think you may be able to get away with saying "we aren't allowed to divulge information regarding FISA requests". If you say that to everyone who asks.

They're compelled to lie, or they're compelled not to answer?

Difficult to tell. The fact the Google's name is singled out with 8 others on an NSA slide fuels speculation, and is at odds (again, speculation) with this letter. Someone on either side will have to provide something spectacularly believable to kill that speculation.

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