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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

The coverage has been ludicrous. The timeline was pretty much:

Day 1: We see some out of context powerpoint implying Google, Facebook, et al. have given the NSA full access to private info.

Day 2: We find out that wasn't true at all.

Days 3+: We keep filling HN with articles about how awful it is that Google, Facebook, et al. gave the NSA full access to private info.

The tech media really dropped the ball on this one. It's absolutely insane to think all of the CEOs who said they'd never heard of PRISM or given the NSA any special access were lying. The CEO of a large publicly traded firm would be taking a huge risk and be certain to be caught for such bold-faced lies.

It reminds me of a great joke Stephen Colbert told about George W. Bush at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Paraphrasing: "he'll think the same thing on Wednesday that he thought on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday."

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Very naive. Perhaps the CEOs are lying in order to avoid going to prison on trumped up charges?

"In 2006, USA Today published an article that revealed that Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth (since acquired by AT&T) were voluntarily providing the NSA with millions of call logs. It also said another landline provider, Qwest (since acquired by CenturyLink), refused to hand over logs without a warrant, and that the NSA had rejected Qwest's insistence that the matter go before the FISC.

In 2007, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider stock trading. During an appeal, Nacchio's lawyers claimed the charges were retaliation for Nacchio's refusal to go along with the warrantless surveillance program while he ran Qwest."

http://www.technewsdaily.com/18302-national-security-agency....

The notion that Joseph Nacchio, who enriched himself to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars by defrauding his shareholders when he sold his stock to them at prices he knew to be inflated due to secret information he possessed as an insider, is somehow a victim of NSA is another one of those "things people thing on Monday and Wednesday" --- except in this case it's a Monday 6 years in the past.

It's a pure coincidence, of course, that of all the white collar criminals, the guy who refuses to help the NSA gets found out.

Just like it's a pure coincidence, of course, that of all the people out there hiring escorts, Elliot Spitzer gets rumbled.

You mean besides everyone else at Qwest, and for that matter Worldcom and Enron, that went down at roughly the same time?

Wow. You've been served but you still are going to great lengths to defend your position.

Yes, nobody else has ever been jailed for white collar crime.

Maybe the recent DOJ prosecution of big-ticket Dem fundraiser Raj Gupta was also politically motivated? Oh wait, someone on HN claimed that too.

Or Martha Stewart. She was jailed for insider trading right? (Or technically for lying during an investigation into it.) Wonder what she wouldn't tell the NSA.

Very naive. Perhaps Joseph Nacchio, you know, committed insider trading. Perhaps his lawyer's excuse, that it was retribution from the NSA was, you know, a lawyer's excuse. And perhaps the sympathetic tech press regurgitates it like a fact.

Edit: and by the way, it was a jury trial. So not only was the SEC acting on behalf of the NSA, and the judge who sentenced him, but so was a 12 person jury. That's more believable.

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