It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer:
> According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
Sounds like she was a pretty terrible CEO all-around. But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.
Microsoft and Apple have both been in court during the last 12 months to block US government over-reach. Yahoo joins Amazon in ethusiastically facilitating it. Your assertion isn't realistic, it's nonsense.
I'm curious, when has Amazon facilitated US government over-reach? I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head, and googling only provided a bunch of documentation for AWS's cloud offerings to government agencies.
I'll be honest, that doesn't really bother me, assuming AWS wasn't forced or coerced into dropping WikiLeaks. I happen to disagree with a lot of WL's actions, and understand why AWS may not want to host stolen classified documents. I understand that you don't share that opinion, and that my opinion may not be the most popular one on HN.
Sure, as far as we know, MS and Apple have been in the public eye as being against government overreach. I suspect it's less about protecting customers from the government and more about protecting themselves, though.
But one needs their hands and toes to count the other areas in which Microsoft and Apple have conducted themselves... poorly?
Apple in the poaching employees lawsuit. Spurious lawsuits over "design" (ie rounded corners on rectangles) trademarks. Colluding with music execs to push customers to their streaming music service (instead of ad supported "free" streaming on labels sites). Since this is about a CEO hate, Steve Jobs was a complete asshole by a number of accounts. Horribly abusive.
Microsoft... well their track record should be well established. The absolute worst of which was releasing a mass market OS that was egregiously insecure by default (yet, around here, the conversation often is "I wish MS tested like they did back in the day." when webcams break, but I digress). Again, the CEO thing, Ballmer was borderline incompetent, Gates was involved in a number of shady market capture schemes.
But you know, because in this one context of government over-reach, they did a bit better than Yahoo!, the parents position that they're all untrustable is complete nonsense.
The only thing "wrong" Marissa did was not make a shit ton of money for Yahoo! No one would give this story another thought if Yahoo!'s stock was worth $100 more than it was when she started.
That's about all MS and Apple have done "right". That end justified the means.
Court isn't likely to solve this. Only a wholesale rejection of terrorism as a realistic threat to, well, anything but our political process is going to do it.
I assume the FBI is reading my email. You should, too, or you will be unhappy when you find out they are.
Yea--I'm just saying this is a product of being a business, not Meyer. One can fight it and still give information over. You can't take the sign of struggle as a sign your data is safe.
It's not a sign that your data is safe, but I think the point here is the opposite: You can take easy capitulation as a sure sign that your data is compromised.
Similarly, the lock on my door doesn't make me safe against everyone who might want to commit any crime against me, but all else being equal, a locked door is still preferable from a security standpoint, and it's very preferable to keeping your valuables in an unlocked room with a known thief.
You can trust Google/MS/Yahoo!/etc. with your pizza orders and mortgage payments, while switching to self-hosted, GPG email from a RYF-certified machine for organising your secret mattress-tag-removing guerrilla.
I'm not a fan of Mayer's, but sounds like she didn't want to fight the order since that hadn't worked in the past:
"Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsuccessful."
Her real mistake was going directly to the e-mail team to implement the backdoor without telling the security chief about it:
"They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.
The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails."
I'm not remotely rich, but I feel like after a certain amount of wealth, personal and professional reputation (and the success of things you control) matters much more to your overall happiness and well-being than your net worth.
I suspect she's not had a good year, from her perspective and for the people around her.
If you actually wanted to do something, call them out on it. Blackmail is highly illegal, and if it actually goes anywhere, your VP can always pardon you.
"Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.
Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment."
It's not a hard question to answer. You either are or are not searching all emails in realtime at the behest of the NSA.
How much trouble would someone like Google be in if they gave a "warrant canary" style answer? "I'm sorry, we are unable to answer your question" would speak volumes without actually saying anything.
But I suppose that the order forbids "disclosure", and that statement is arguably disclosure...
They later responded. Quoting from Arstechnica's 5:11 ET update:
A spokeswoman for Microsoft, Kim Kurseman, e-mailed Ars this statement, and also declined further questions: “We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo.”
For its part, Google was the most unequivocal. Spokesman Aaron Stein e-mailed: "We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'no way.'"
It's not just pressure, it's an order by government. Court orders aren't really optional.
And as much as you might think this is a huge problem, it's a bigger problem with companies aren't restrained by government orders. Imagine if Exceleon politely declined to allow nuclear inspections.
Apple actually had a good case that what the FBI was asking for was beyond the scope of the law. And if the court ended up siding against them, they would have done it.
At this point, it's save to assume that NSA/FBI/CIA/Pentagon has front door access to Google.
That cheap-oil-for-your-private-planes deal with Pentagon is one small evidence [1]. The other is Matt Cutts working for (on a temporary basis) the Defense Department's branch of USDS [2]
> That cheap-oil-for-your-private-planes deal with Pentagon is one small evidence
a perk they apparently shouldn't have been getting and was cut off by the pentagon is evidence the pentagon has front door access to Google?
> The other is Matt Cutts working for (on a temporary basis) the Defense Department's branch of USDS
What, do you think he really needed a job so the web search spam guy gave access to user accounts in exchange for getting to work in government contracting?
Really need to work on your circumstantial evidence.
I think the attitude here that most tech companies are rolling over and just complying without a single ethical consideration is misplaced.
The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders.
You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companies in the same position. Most your legal team probably doesn't get to know what's going on. You can't take your case to the public without being held in contempt.
I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair.
The most damning part of this story is that Mayer decided to comply without telling her chief security officer. That really does make it look like Yahoo rolled over without a fight.
Since it had a gag order, she likely wouldn't have been allowed to tell him. The government doesn't care about the security implications of these backdoors, they just want the data.
Also, Yahoo spent many years fighting similar requests (I think before anyone else did) and won nothing.
She also was obviously being advised by Ron Bell, the GC. If she didn't tell Stamos, it was probably based on the guidance of Mr. Bell. I'm not sure we can fault Mayer much on this one.
How do you slip something like this past a corporate security team? Stamos and @bcrypt never struck me as individuals that were "asleep at the wheel".
Surely there was evidence somewhere? If Stamos wasn't briefed as to the situation and a security engineer found the rootkit on their own how could they be bound by the terms of an NSL / gag order?
I don't know any more about this than you do; I'm learning about it from the same Reuters story. But according to the story, the decision to implant the backdoor wasn't discovered by Yahoo security; rather, the backdoor itself was discovered, weeks after it was deployed.
So is the speculation that Stamos' departure was related to this? The timing would seem suspicious otherwise.
If so, one wonders if he would take a similar principled stance a second time at Facebook. Much harder to jump ship for greener pastures while already riding the biggest rocketship in town.
I do not believe Stamos would remain at Facebook after something like this.
But we're not much more than acquaintances (we both worked at NCC, and were prior to that former business rivals or whatever you call two people with similar roles at competing firms). I like him.
I just want to be clear that I'm not speculating about Stamos's motives.
In a large pipelined, distributed architecture, there's probably dozens of consumers of the databases that all look rather similar: they do some queries and pack up some reports for internal consumption. Marketing, ab testing, user experience, etc. Yet another consumer sharing 99% of the same code might not stand out.
At the risk of being downvoted for possibly being pedantic...
Knowing Yahoo's mail architecture very intimately, your analogy here isn't very accurate unless you get very abstract with your usage of the words "database" and "queries".
Whether Mayer went around him willingly or by legal requirement is basically unanswerable, except to note that the email team chose to do the same. There's not much to say when we can't tell collusion from compulsion.
The question of accidental discovery, by contrast, is a fascinating one. A gag order couldn't possibly compel someone who made the discovery on their own (for the simple reason that they wouldn't know about it to be compelled). So circumventing the security team, instead of simply including them in the NSL, raises an interesting discussion about the nature of the NSL and why the matter was kept from Stamos' team.
> A gag order couldn't possibly compel someone who made the discovery on their own (for the simple reason that they wouldn't know about it to be compelled).
If the company was gagged, I don't see how it would matter whether company employees knew about it in advance or found it by accident. Either way, the company is still gagged.
Also, while your comment makes common sense, national security restrictions don't have to make sense to be legal. For example there is information that is "born classified," meaning that even if it is independently developed, totally separate from the defense apparatus, it's still considered classified!
That particular employee may not be. Obvious solution is to have a page ran by some reasonably trustworthy organisation where people can report these breaches before passing them on to their superiors.
Add it to the spam filter? The security team probably reviews the spam filter code, but perhaps not the particular weights and measures it uses on a daily basis. So you set up a parallel filter for "arabic spam" that generally looks like regular filter, just tuned a little differently.
> Yahoo execs deliberately bypassed review from the security team when installing the backdoor. In fact, when members of the security team found it within weeks of its installation, they immediately assumed it had been installed by malicious hackers, rather than Yahoo’s own mail team. (This says something about what the backdoor code may have looked like.)
I wonder what the actual personal consequences are for someone going public that there is an NSL requested. I seriously doubt they'd destroy a major public company with lots of employees/voters/users; fines, maybe, and going after execs, but the Government loses most of its power to threaten things once the act is done and everything is public.
I think you win in the court of public opinion if it's a broad program like this (and IMO clearly unconstitutional). If it's an NSL about, say, an order to specifically target UBL, you probably hang in public opinion. If it's an NSL about, say, finding Snowden, you might be ok. This is an interesting check and balance vs. government overreach.
I'd be a lot more comfortable with someone going public in a live press conference in DC (maybe releasing a key to a file which is pre-distributed), than someone running off to Russia or doing it anonymously, though.
It's an experiment that I would personally be willing to try were I a high-visibility C-level exec. Been to jail, not that bad, mostly just boring; and certainly the jail that CEO me goes to would likely be better than the jail the real me has been a guest of. But the kind of person willing to tweak the nose of the government doesn't usually get to be C-anything.
As you point out, best to wisely pick your battle as you'll want public opinion behind you. And remember that as popular as she is, Martha Stewart still went to jail.
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned over something very different: she was a US soldier, not a private citizen, and she made public internal government documents, not a letter explicitly addressed to her.
Different standards do (and, IMO, should) apply to leakers who are government employees or members of the armed forces with a security clearance and to private citizens who are not 'leaking' something but rather sharing something they did not explicitly and voluntarily (through a contract or NDA) agree not to disclose.
And yet the non-military CJ system can be brutal and harsh. I'd imagine it's certainly possible the first person to disobey a NSL might be made an example of, especially depending on who is in charge of the executive branch at the time. You could be locked in solitary for years until you lose your mind. You could be assigned to prisons in such a way the authorities ensure you would be repeatedly beaten and raped. You could be indefinitely detained without trial or attorney -- the crime is national security related, after all. There is a horde of horribly nasty things that could be done to you even if you aren't military or security clearance. It's worse for the military, but it's bad enough for the rest of us.
For one, it depends where you come from. If you earn in the neighborhood of $25M a year it's likely you will find jail less comfortable than your home.
Secondly, breaking the law or even challenging NFLs carries a personal risk of going to jail, while silently complying carries almost zero personal risk, and a small risk of damaging the company's reputation if/when someone finds out. If you're not very strongly principled, the choice is really easy to make.
Apple got a mixed response when they pushed back on the FBI, but certainly not a clearly negative one. Lavabit's rather alarming case earned them substantial respect in the tech circles that learned about the matter.
Certainly whistleblowers have faced immense consequences, but they've been government or military employees engaged in major disclosures. To jail a 'captain of industry' for reporting that the government handed her a sheet of paper would be spectacularly bad optics, attacking a respected private citizen over an intuitively absurd legal mandate.
I suppose the details of the account in question would become important. If the public can be persuaded that you blew up an important investigation, you probably lose all support; we've certainly seen the government disclose a surprising amount of formerly-secret material to turn public opinion against whistleblowers. Even there, though, you could test the gag order by disclosing the fact of an NSL without the content.
If they can't show overwhelming importance, though? If it's just a cartel bust or a leaker or something similarly non-terrorist-y? I'm trying to picture the government bringing the hammer down on Cook or Mayer for going up on stage at a conference and unashamedly violating an NSL. It doesn't seem like a good fight to pick.
The fact no-one has done this means the consequences must be absolutely devastating. Probably jail time for executives and potential financial collapse.
Probably the only time an executive would go to jail for breaking the law in the US...
I remain unclear on the consequences. I don't think they're tested. 18 USC 2709(c) is what the government cites when they invoke nondisclosure. You win a prize if you find the consequences for violating that statute. Also, NSLs can be upgraded to court orders if the recipient is noncompliant. 18 USC 3511 discusses that:
> the Attorney General may invoke the aid of any district court of the United States within the jurisdiction in which the investigation is carried on or the person or entity resides, carries on business, or may be found, to compel compliance with the request. The court may issue an order requiring the person or entity to comply with the request. Any failure to obey the order of the court may be punished by the court as contempt thereof.
So they can upgrade to a court order and then hold you in contempt if you do not fulfill the terms of the court order. I am not clear if that includes the nondisclosure term. This is the closest I've ever come to identifying "what would legally happen if someone published an NSL?" Honestly, and I'm not extremely comfortable saying this and please do not get ideas, after a lot of research I don't think there is a federal punishment defined in legislation for doing it.
Usually laws have a punishment immediately after them. As in, section A is what's illegal, section B is how to punish violations of section A. 18 USC 2709 and 18 USC 3511 don't have that, so I honestly have no idea what would happen, and I half wonder if the federal government doesn't either.
It's entirely possible a highly-paid legal counsel like Apple or Google has finds out the emperor is wearing no clothes and NSL's are unenforceable.
The question is: who is willing to find out? There's all kinds of nasty stuff the gov can do to you personally for trying to fight an NSL - loss of gov contracts, detention at custom and border control, no-fly list, etc.
NSLs are likely not the case here with Yahoo (and in fact are not the most significant privacy threat, IMHO). An NSL is a demand from the FBI, not a court order. NSLs also have unique First Amendment vulnerabilities that would help a company choosing to publicize receiving one.
A FISA court order, which can force you to do much more than NSLs, is the more significant operational threat to Internet companies. These court orders typically have "do not disclose" provisions. Willfully violating that court order will almost certainly result in contempt charges.
What if you had all your mail scanned or OCRed to remove certain phrases such as "do not disclose" and then the resulting message was delivered to you.
The key here being that you will never have any knowledge of such requirements and therefore cannot act with intent to violate such requirements. Basically, can you eliminate mens rea as an element of the crime of contempt?
The burden is on the deliverer to make sure you receive, open, read and acknowledge the entire message instead of a partial message.
> What if you had all your mail scanned or OCRed to remove certain phrases such as "do not disclose" and then the resulting message was delivered to you.
Willful blindness is (as one might expect) evidence of willfulness of an act, rather than a way of displaying an absence of willfulness.
Is it possible that the board would simply remove the CEO in time for the government to have its way with the company, in hope of averting financial Armageddon?
Yes. It's worth noting that the former CEO of now-defunct telco Qwest claims that he spent 4 years in prison because he refused to comply with illegal NSA demands. [0]
If only he had taken the high road and not dumped millions of dollars in stock shortly before it tanked, we wouldn't have to wonder about why he's in prison.
Yeah, that's what I said. It seems so many of these leakers or government examples would almost perfectly illustrate the point of activists if they just didn't do something incredibly illegal, naive, or debatable on top of the solid contributions. Then, we have to wonder why whatever happened to them really happened. Would the connection still be there if they just did the one or two good things? Can't prove it to skeptics.
I always encourage those in the future resisting police states to make sure whatever they do is beyond doubt A Good Thing. Even Constitutionalists on pro-surveillance side should pause to reconsider their views. They won't if they think person got canned for being a traitor or running financial schemes. (sighs)
Right, they didn't make up this case. Everyone who has worked in a publicaly traded company knows you can't trade until a few days after the earnings release. It's double so for the CEO! How could he have not known that? I am sympathetic to the possibility that the govt my go after someone that didn't work with them, but he committed a separate illegal act, selling that stock. They didn't go after Martha Stewart for talking about the cia.
Advocate for reality: they don't mean shit in bigger scheme of things since virtually nobody uses them. So secret groups put less effort into them. Yahoo, Gmail, Lavabit, various IM's... all were in the Snowden leaks as SIGINT-enabled through taps, black bags, or "FBI coercion." If Whisper got that important, I think we'd see bad stuff happen to the company or Moxie.
So, enjoy the added protection from nation states of low uptake if you're using it. :)
> I will defy you and in the process cost 10k+ people their jobs without them having any say or knowledge of this
There's no way the govt. would do anything more than skewer (or attempt to) a few sacrificial lambs for violating a gag order. There's no political win otherwise.
"The US government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day if it refused to hand over user data to the National Security Agency, according to court documents unsealed on Thursday."
"The size of the daily fine was set to double every week that Yahoo refused to comply, the documents show."
Yahoo challenged it in FISA court, not open court.
"Yahoo took its case to the foreign intelligence surveillance court, also known as the Fisa court, which oversees requests for surveillance orders in national security investigations. The secretive Fisa court provides the legal authorities that underpin the US government’s controversial surveillance programmes. Yahoo lost its case, and an appeal."
isn't the whole premise that the Big Companies actually control the government? "They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders."
full weight? You mean like a small fine ? That's what happened to Wells Fargo. The govt . seems really angry about it, but what can they really do to a corp that is considered an entity?
Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds.
It's so important that these leaks go public for two critical reasons:
1) with that type of financial regulatory environment for public companies, the only way to create incentives for that type of consumer protection play is when it has monetary consequences if they do nothing (customers shutting down their accounts)
2) court docs from an earlier Yahoo trial in a secret court were already released when the NSA requested a huge trove of emails and Yahoo challenged it. I read the judges ruling and the TLDR is that the judge said the customers will never know their email is being read so how can you claim that a privacy violation has occurred?
The twisted logic here is that there's no damage to the customer/company as long as the intrusion is conducted in total secrecy.
So that's why Yahoo is so willing to fold here. This is what they are dealing with.
Side note: Imagine the same logic was applied to police a search warrant that allowed police to enter hundreds of houses, a type of warrant that could never be challenged by these homeowners defence attorneys. "They'll never know police broke into their house and went through all of their drawers and personal belongings. They'll come home the next day and everything will seem exactly. the same. So what claim to privacy violation could do they have?"
The need for secrecy in FISA courts goes well beyond protecting state secrets like NSA tech. This type of judicial rationalization would never withstand scrutiny in open courts which is why total secrecy is the key.
>I read the judges ruling and the TLDR is that the judge said the customers will never know their email is being read so how can you claim that a privacy violation has occurred?
What?! That's like saying my home wasn't actually burgled until I arrive home to see that it was, absolutely ridiculous
> Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds.
Will this meme never die on HN? There is an obvious counter-example: Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request.
The idea that "maximizing shareholder value" is some sort of inescapable Faustian bargain is just not supported by the facts. People who run corporations might choose to act unethically, in order to maximize a certain outcome, but they are not forced to do so by the mere fact of running a for-profit corporation.
To the extent there is a structural problem in public corporations, it is one of executive incentive, not shareholder obligation.
> Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request.
The FBI went public with the case, not Apple... and the warrant was signed by a public criminal courts judge not a FISA court. That's a critical difference. There are no examples of successful challenges to NSLs, don't downplay the seriousness of doing so.
"Going public" is not really an option for the stuff we're talking about (as the Yahoo case I mentioned made clear, the whole warrant is predicated on secrecy ). If they do they could face serious financial penalties or face their CEOs going to jail where yes shareholder value will take a hit. The markets are very sensitive to large lawsuit liability and CEO changes.
So I don't see how you could challenge these laws as a public corporation without knowing full well you will damage the share value.
Their obligation to maintaining the stock value is only part of the issue here. You're expecting these businesses to be heroic martyrs when the state has stacked the chips extremely high against them. There's no question who is responsible for this mess.
Yet the US is on track to vote in another president whose primary national security strategy on her website is to expand NSA power and increase domestic and foreign intelligence gathering.
> Yet the US is on track to vote in another president whose primary national security strategy on her website is to expand NSA power and increase domestic and foreign intelligence gathering.
> > Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds.
> Will this meme never die on HN? There is an obvious counter-example: Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request.
This is a poor example to use to disprove the claim; Apple used the FBI encounter to prove to customers that they were tough on security, a component of their value proposition to a segment of the customer base.
> the TLDR is that the judge said the customers will never know their email is being read so how can you claim that a privacy violation has occurred?
Really? A judge really said that? So if I place a camera in my neighbors' bathroom, and they never find out about it, everything's okay? Does it work with other crimes? If I steal millions from a company, but they never figure it out because their accounting department is sub-par, then I'm fine??
Centralised powers have capabilities, but also weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and Yahoo in particular is an exceptionally vulnerable technology company.
Companies can influence specific laws, and sometimes work in concert to achieve specific aims (see the totalitarian plutonomic pact, a/k/a TPP, backed by virtually every major infotech and comms company: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Verizon, among others). But they're also vulnerable to specific legal threats, investigations, and withdrawals of contracts.
Where corporations influence governments most effectively is where the collective interests of political and industrial leaders is furthered. Where corporations successfully oppose governments is where the corporations have some level of political leverage, often through influence on key elements of local economy. Where government has influence over corporations is where there's little financial upside, and often only a vague and long-term benefit to the company, and where national security or mass popular interest plays strongly against the companies.
Yahoo had no leverage and considerable downside in trying to stand up against this order. The long-term downside to compliance is what's emerged here: disclosure of the project and a possible scuttling of Yahoo's announced purchase by Verizon. The best case for Yahoo without the Verizon takeover is that it's dead. With the takeover, some of the investors and executives recoup a small amount of the long-term loss of value in the company.
Yahoo had little to gain by fighting (it would have been executively decapitated and entered immediately into a likely fatal legal fight with the US Government), and something to gain by playing along.
Mayer took the easy, and unprincipled, decision to play along.
Well, they've already "made an example" of the only company to truly stand in their way. Look at Qwest - you talk to the average citizen and their takeaway was that justice was served | A corrupt CEO ran the company into the ground and went to prison. Hurrah!
Don't pay attention to the fact he denied installing what he considered unconstitutional wire taps for the NSA resulting in the government pulling almost a billion dollars worth of contracts from the company. That example alone proved that the government can tell any narrative they want; they own the media, they'll own private companies too.
The Joseph Nacchio story is very complicated and not the best example of the point you are making, sadly. Qwest was undeniably naughty with the books on his watch and they had a case. I agree it sucks, just saying he's not the best example.
Which isn't to say that government organizations only ask companies with unquestionably above board accounting to engage in legally dubious initiatives.
Plainly, there's no reason to take a company's compliance as a sign that they 'have nothing to hide'. Likelier, it was in part because they did that they complied.
No, it just means, if you're going to dig in and take on the government make sure your house is clean. That's all it means. That applies to dealing with anyone with power, really, not just the government.
I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. They had a case, and while the conclusion I was responding to is extreme, Qwest's accounting fraud ran into the billions and they had a pretty strong case that Nacchio profited from that. I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree nor am I saying I don't think Nacchio is notable for taking on the feds, just that Qwest is not a good example of what happens when you do because the government had a legitimate gripe with the books.
Lots of other companies, especially lots of other investor-driven telcos in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were guilty of the same and worse, and were never charged.
The proliferation of fake crimes like insider trading gives the state discretion to imprison anyone for basically political reasons. Any executive who owns financial instruments that refer to the firm that employs her can be found guilty of insider trading, if federal prosecutors wish.
Being clean is not an adequate defense. First off, no one is perfectly clean. If you were by some freak of nature actually clean, they would just throw a bucket of mud in your face before accusing you of being dirty.
The way the experts play is by mutually assured destruction. You get enough blackmail material on someone to assure their cooperation, and you leak just enough to them for them to think they have some leverage over you.
That's why fraternity initiation rituals are usually at least embarrassing, sometimes humiliating, and maybe even illegal. Rather than ensuring cooperation using intimidation by strength and the constant threat of swift and certain retribution, as with organized crime's code of silence, that mutual blackmail ensures that whomever it is that acts against the group first loses most. The renegade can be dogpiled, discredited, and disavowed, and the damage to the group is minimized, because no one person can know all the dirty secrets.
If you want to take on the government, you have to be as clean as possible, while also knowing where a few of the bodies are buried. But in that case, it may be easier for the government to recruit you to switching to their side. So you also need the moral fortitude to put principles over huge, heaping piles of money. And in that case, how did you get to be CxO of a big company, again?
Thats the entire point he is making. Blackmail and other forms of influence and control are their modus operandi, they used knowledge of his illegality (which they had most likely got unconstitutionally) to try to bend him their way, and the prosecution was vengeance for defiance.
If anyone wants to have a serious discussion of the control structure, lets start with Milners Kindergarten and the round table groups. Even the NSA has a shadowboss.
The media is mostly controlled and distributed by private companies that collude with the government for their own benefit, Google and Yahoo are exactly such companies.
if by collude you mean do so under threat of legal action and possible end of your business, then perhaps you are right.
for a site like this I am always amazed at how many people think it is easy to stand up to the full brunt of the government. the US government not only has the capability to do any business and person on US soil what it wants, it has people within it who relish in that power and who won't bat an eye to use it. if there is a legal issue the laws can simply updated "for the people".
this is not to say its any different elsewhere, the government controls the laws, the weapons, and through those can end your ability to do business if not simply through confiscation.
Well, since most media is advertising dependent, they're dependent on access to information to give you something of value, to in turn sell ads. If investigating or reporting on something shady means, a press operative can no longer be allowed access to an election campaign, or means their correspondents get snubbed at press conferences. They'll cooperate or not report on something, or follow the delivered narrative in lieu of their long term business interests.
It's much simpler when you stop trying to pretend the people who run these companies are benevolent angels out to do good in a scary scary world. These companies are run by the same class of people that run the government, they have the same interests and they collude in order to further their interests. Very simple.
The Palantir witchhunt against Peter Thiel is another example -- threatening to invalidate government contracts because of some imagined discrimination due to Thiel's political views.
If that were the case, then Apple would've caved in, too.
Mayer was probably too new and too scared to deal with this, especially when she had to think about her new baby.
My point is it has less to do with "Yahoo being scared about being destroyed by the US government" and more with Mayer's own personal fear of the US government, and easily caving to such threats, whether it was because of her baby, because of weak character, or because she was inexperienced as CEO didn't know how to handle this.
EDIT: Also Yahoo's response to the story is such bullshit:
> “Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States.”
What's the law you're abiding with that says you need to implement such a backdoor? Name it. Even the FBI named the law or laws it thought would help it force Apple to put a backdoor in its phones.
So if Yahoo can't even name the law, then that law or the gag order saying they can't name it are unconstitutional. Period. It also proves once again how easily Yahoo caved.
> Mayer was probably too new and too scared to deal with this, especially when she had to think about her new baby.
OK, I normally think misogyny claims are over-blown and people are way too sensitive.
But your comment positively reeks of misogyny.
Rather than go for a down-vote, because you're able to edit your comment, I think you should reconsider the phrasing and delete the misogyny. If your comment doesn't stand without it, I believe deleting it would add to rather than subtract from, the discussion.
> > Mayer was probably too new and too scared to deal with this, especially when she had to think about her new baby.
> OK, I normally think misogyny claims are over-blown and people are way too sensitive. But your comment positively reeks of misogyny. Rather than go for a down-vote, because you're able to edit your comment, I think you should reconsider the phrasing and delete the misogyny.
Having newborn twins at home could certainly be a factor in any CEO's willingness to make an ideological stand in the face of jail time, regardless of the CEO's gender. Plus there's a wealth of feminist writing about the potential for gender disagreement when it comes to this very question, going back to Kohlberg, Gilligan, and an imaginary guy named Heinz.[1]
FWIW, I do agree that any privileged group should be conscientious when discussing others who might sometimes feel like or be seen as outsiders, and that this applies to guys in tech. But your comment seems a bit over the top and risks shutting down discussion about an important topic... whether the government took advantage of the fact that Mayer had newborns at home when they pressured her to comply.
Men can also have new babies. I'm chuckling rather heavily at the fact that you are the person who brought the sexism to the discussion in an attempt to white knight a bit.
"What's the law you're abiding with that says you need to implement such a backdoor? Name it. Even the FBI named the law or laws it thought would help it force Apple to put a backdoor in its phones."
A court order to enable warrantless wiretapping per FISA provisions. That's what they were doing with others per the leaks. The Sentry Eagle leaks, highest classification they had, indicated the FBI "compelled" domestic firms to "SIGINT-enable" their stuff with FISA mentioned repeatedly. It didn't define the methods they used to compel companies.
So, they have some way of leaning on them with the Patriot and FISA Acts as legal support. It shouldn't surprise you given it's happening in an active, police state with apathetic citizens who haven't forced Congress to roll back the legislation. Media has been fairly complicit, too, as they're not pushing the angles that would stir people into action. They watered down the previous debates.
Until these legislations are killed, there's secret courts, secret consequences, and gag orders that all these companies are faced with. Unlikely anybody will help them if they violate the rules that serve the state. So, it's on the citizenry to modify those rules so there's accountability. They mostly don't care. So, compliance with the court orders is rational choice by a company with no rational alternatives unless it intends to shutdown and make everyone jobless. Which will likely just shift business to competitors that secretly cooperate with the State. Like with Lavabit.
Note: Apple got to be lucky exception since FBI publicized the case and tried to fight in court of public opinion on top of an actual court. Terrible thing is we still don't know if they backdoored stuff for them with that being a show. Especially that HSM. It's illegal to know in the U.S..
> I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair.
Actually you are giving them a pass because your comment contains nothing but apologetics for these companies. Whether their decision to spy on their customers and invade their privacy was easy is irrelevant and all of your apologetics are worthless speculations based on nothing whatsoever.
I'm not saying they made the right decision. I'm saying that people treating this as if it were an easy place to be are likely over simplifying the situation.
I agree. I'll go further to hold the U.S. citizens responsible for the apathy in dealing with rampant deceit and abuses of power by intelligence companies. One set of those were what led up to secret courts, mass surveillances, etc. Any number of leaks showing they were full of crap wasn't enough for citizens to take action. They took action on many inconsequential matters, though.
So, if citizens continuously allow or even create (surveillance supporters) a police state, then the companies operating in it are under no ethical obligation to take risk to protect them from that police state's activities. Those companies would actually be putting in more effort and taking more risk than most of the citizens themselves. That's an unreasonable expectation.
U.S. citizens need to get their shit straight in this country. Interestingly, the vast majority are pushing for the two most corrupt candidates imaginable for this election who have each mocked the Constitution and support the police state apparatus. Trying to protect them is a lost cause. Better to invest that effort into a different democracy whose people actually give a shit vs this one.
Public companies have no real ethical consideration other than the warped perception of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. Some companies may be managed by good people, but people are ephemeral, tomorrow anything can happen.
You have to criticize and a spew abuse at these companies, whether or not they are secretly resisting these orders, because their resistance is secret. Only by damaging entities responsible for implementing government policy can you affect change.
I used to work for a govt contractor. The only chance freedom has is for people to say shit like this to signal some of the bs I witnessed under those circumstances. Nuff said.
Very few people would put the blame mainly on companies like Yahoo or Google as they are forced by their government to do this.
But it still makes using their services dangerous to you and your company or the company you are working for.
I would even go so far and require any politician running for any office to not have used any foreign email, messenger or social network in the last X years except for reaching out to voters.
There's a high risk that they could be blackmailed with their private communication being in the hands of foreign governments and I don't want compromised people like that anywhere near public office.
But let us just do a thought experiment. Suppose your bank suddenly locks up your money tomorrow, and when you ask for it back, they say: "Well, there was an unexpected event in some sector of the economy which happened behind the scenes which we cannot tell you about. However, what we can tell you is that we were sufficiently pressurized by the government that it was for the good of the entire economy to not give money back to the depositors. Also, you should know that we didn't take this decision lightly but spent many many hours agonizing over it. Please come back in a year. And you might have to take a little haircut on your money as well."
Would you say, "Oh, I didn't realize you gave it so much thought. Besides, its all for the good of the economy. Tell you what, why don't you just keep the money?"
Does the fact that the decision was actually genuinely hard, or even possibly justifiable in some sense, make you any less likely to get mad? Your justification of the hardness of the decision is a poor excuse, because many of these companies are trustees of a lot of money from the public who have some expectations about how their data should be managed and secured (not explicitly, sure. But they wouldn't agree to random strangers searching through their email if told beforehand, either). To borrow a cliche, great power comes with great responsibility. In the field of software unfortunately the only thing which comes with great power is a tendency to turn a blind eye and simply try and acquire even more power.
I have no objection to anger or even conclusions that the CEO made the wrong decision.
My objection was entirely to how the first commenters in this topic treated the situation as obvious and the CEO as the clear moral antagonist of this story.
One of my life mottos is seek first to understand. Another is that very few things in life are as simple as they appear.
I will forever object to vilification and simplification.
You're knowingly sending your data to a 3rd party. You're not encrypting. It's not through the USPS (special protections).
It seems bloody evident that, of course, your email provider can read your emails! Unless you're encrypting with GPG, then they can (and they can still read the signing keys).
Yahoo, Google, and friends all scan, dedup, and all sorts of tricks to determine marketing and quality content (spamming). If you're worried, run your own mailserver. It's what I do, along with using gmail. But I know that, at any time, people/scripts/ai are reading everything sent and received.
edit: I'd much prefer to hear commentary/how wrong/how right/how crazy I am, rather than -1's.I'd like to hear a discussion about the "Secrecy of text written on postcards"....
Yes, but there's a huge difference between a computer "seeing" your email and a human being searching for keywords within your email to decide whether or not to follow you around and/or arrest you.
This report isn't complaining about unencrypted emails. It's about them giving an intelligence agency the equivalent of a `grep "terrorism" | tail -f` for all their users' email. Without a warrant. (Not that a warrant could even be granted for something so broad, anyway.)
You're right, that US govt bulk-scanning is terrifying, especially without warrants. But what happens when Facebook scans your private chats and reports your illegal doings to the police? ( http://www.infowars.com/facebook-monitors-your-private-messa... )
What data restrictions do we have that would prevent $dataCompany from sharing data with other actors? I'm sure a "privacy policy" can do something, but in the end, not really. The FTC doesn't require a privacy policy; they can only enforce one and apply lowball fines for bad behavior.
For example, what laws would prevent me from running a "* As a Service", scanning everything, ranging from copyright violations, spammers, criminal enterprises, and today's bugagboo of terrorism; and forwarding each of those things to the relevant authorities? Can a law protect criminal behavior in cases it is illegal? What responsibilities do you have if you know of criminality?
And specifically talking of emails, unless they are encrypted, they are akin to postcards with the content all in the clear.
(And for your example, I get your sentiment, but I'm guessing they'd have a neural net that triggers on examples of terrorism discussion. And they'd run all messages through it. Not saying I agree with it without a warrant...)
It's hard to tell if this is sarcasm. You are aware that Allo has been widely criticized for its deep message inspection when outside of "incognito" mode right?
For secure messaging, I trust QTox and properly vetted Onion-aware applications.
Pretty much, if a for-profit company offers it, I can only assume it will be used to the fullest extent for their profitability. And they will, depending on popularity within... certain sectors... heavily leaned on by the US government to provide secret access to their database.
Technologically speaking, that's why I have more innate trust for things like Tox and Tor. It also makes me a very interesting target for "lists". But, whatever. I've done nothing wrong (and not like you can prove otherwise :) .
Yes, it's a frightening precedent. What Facebook's doing is essentially just as bad. Common carriers of communications (Facebook chat, Yahoo mail, etc.) should not be scanning mail. I think I'd grant an exception for the child pornography searching that most providers already do, since it's just comparing image hashes against a specific blacklist of hash and can never reveal private information about non-applicable images or communications.
Why do you believe that child porn should be given a legal carve-out? Once the system to scan is in place, it matters not what's actually being scanned.
And there's the fact that CP is strict statutory. Meaning, I can get your email, and send you via a remixing network, a few dozen CP images. And you're now guilty.
If anything, adding in mens rea requirement would be the best choice. Or remove it as law, because it's evidence of a crime.
That's a very different situation. With Facebook you learn about it and chose to continue using it or not. With government bulk scanning you no longer have any choice or even knowledge about it.
This. Email messages are digital postcards. When it leaves your computer (house) and goes to your ISP (local post office), anyone at that place can pick it up and read it before sending it on its way to the recipient's mail handler. While it's in transit, it's not sealed, it's not obscured or encrypted, it is plain text.
Now, that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo rolled over like a puppy when the government came calling, which is reprehensible for any tech company to do. They should have fought it and asked for a warrant for the specific persons of interest, rather than happily fucking over every single Yahoo email subscriber.
Don't a lot of the big providers pass emails between each other encrypted with TLS? And emails internal to Yahoo's email system wouldn't be visible to your ISP or anyone outside of Yahoo.
They might pass the email around via TLS but they store their copy unencrypted on their servers[1]. Even if they do one day decide to encrypt their local copy, they hold the keys, you don't. According to the Ars article on this subject[2], Google has officially said "We haven't been subpoenaed and if we were we'd say 'no'", but that stance could change in the next few years.
The fact that email is a digital postcard doesn't mean it must be.
SMTP was designed with no privacy, security, reputation, or authentication capabilities. Even the add-ons which provide some of these (e.g., PGP -- and I'm looking for the comment on this thread mentioning that) doesn't address what's almost always more useful than full-text search: metadata.
It's the systematic failure of tech industry leadership to come up with an open and viable alternative to email that's landed us in this position, and that's a lack of action that's increasingly utterly indefensible.
My underlying thoughts are as follows. Yahoo is the target in this story, so I'll use Yahoo as the placeholder for any company that deals with user data in that capacity.
When you send an email, it shows up at a destination. You send it from your mail provider, "magic happens", and it shows up at the destination. By definition, the text that you send it what is received.
By sending your text with who you want it to go to, you are relinquishing control over your data. Now, Yahoo can read it. And any mailserver in between. And the destination mailserver can as well. You also give up a form of copyright- because the basis of this transmission means that the same message may appear multiple places.
With the USPS, we pay postage to send data and packages. And there are stringent safeguards in place for the USPS. We have no such data safeguard laws in the US. European Union is different (I don't know the laws there). But whatever data I send to some private org, can be used and reused in whatever ways that are bound by their privacy policy (which they write), and whatever contracts they abide by (PCI DSS, HIPAA, FERPA, etc).
Even though this part isn't logical, whenever I don't pay for a service, I automatically assume that I'm paying with my data. I guess when you're cash-poor, it's a good trade-off.
The "paying-with-my-data-I-am-the-product" cliche doesn't really work here because Yahoo didn't do this for money. You are also not giving up "some form of copyright" beyond the narrow definition of the license yahoo may require to show it to someone else. Otherwise there'd probably be a few bestsellers owned by google et al. – I'm sure quite a few Harry Potter manuscripts went through their network.
There's a certain expectation of the relationship between a service like yahoo's and the customer. Those expectations go beyond what may be the bare minimum that is legally required. Considering that there is healthy competition even in the free tier of email services, consumers are not powerless in the "negotiation" that defines this relationship.
The bare minimum of any such relationship must be a truthful and specific description of any access the provider has to my data. Indeed that is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions.
But how can I trust them? It depends on the organization. I'm 100% certain that Apple doesn't sell the content of my e-mails because it'd be stupid... They'd be risking a triple-digit-revenue business on what could amount to a few million/year tops. Their and my interest are aligned.
Regarding the analogy you weren't following: placing yourself in a position of vulnerability is simply never an excuse for anybody, either legally or morally, to exploit that vulnerability. If I accidentally leave my bike unlocked doesn't change the thieve's legal or moral standing at all.
I don't see how there's anything to agree or disagree with. Nowhere is the question of "deserving" or justice raised explicitly, for example. It's just a fact: your shit is being read and analyzed at all times and at all levels. If in doubt, the safer course of action is likely to be based on assuming this rather than assuming otherwise. Encryption is a way to make sure. Though even that won't stop somebody who has already pwned your system.
I'd like to hear a discussion about the "Secrecy of text written on postcards"....
In a nutshell, there's a near-consensus (if I'm not mistaken) among judicial experts that in fact, email has the same expectations of privacy as regular, sealed postal mail (i.e. not postcards). So that's where the postcard analogy breaks down.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, pragmatically. But you also have to take into account why there are special protections on the USPS.
Privacy is a quality people generally expect to have. The USPS protections were created after the long social feedback cycle it took for people to realize what they were missing. We're going through another one of those cycles now, where people are finally realizing how surveilled-by-design modern technology is.
I'm unsure what will be quicker - groupwise societal understanding leading to legal privacy protection, or individual adoption of specific better technology. Given that social protections only work for those in "average" society, I personally hope it's the latter. But the two viewpoints are not conflicting, and are actually complementary - privacy preserving tools educate society as to what is possible, and a person has to value privacy before they can seek out tools to preserve it,
Please, I am absolutely for protections of data privacy even more stringent than what the USPS does with parcels.
I would be for something akin to "Swiss Banking requirements for Data" - where companies are NOT allowed to share data unless given exception in writing/cryptographically. I'm sure we can expound on these ideas collectively.
I'd also be OK with services that DO treat data as a semipermeable membrane. Think of what Google has done with all their free services. They make neural models that they (and others they choose to release) can exploit to great effect. In cases like this, there needs to be a simple chart; think of something like this https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0... . I also think of these services as bringing technology to me when I could not afford it... And yes, it has been a wonderful boon for me, and I'm sure as for Google as well.
I also want to be able to request all the data on my account, sent to me in a reasonable format (multiple of: Zip, ftp, file share, mailed DVDs for reasonable price). European Union already has that law, to great effect. I should also be able to legally command a company to remove my content. If copyright is so great, I should be able to revoke their rights to it as well due to copyright.
______________________________
I get privacy. I get how networks work, and how the Internet works. I know how mailservers work, as well as file deduplication. And I see a glaring hole in the technology that allows an action, a-ethical companies that will do anything to get ahead, and a government hell-bent on dismantling privacy and data security all to stop today's big bad monster, terrorism.
I'm also guaranteed on watch lists. I'm a minor Tor developer, and greatly utilizes Tor in many ways. In fact, my network resides in Tor-Space. I've figured out how to get Linux to resolve .onion addresses seamlessly, and have .onion endpoints on all my Linux machines. I also work with IPFS and Zeronet, both technologies that have some very... interesting content as well.
It's my little corner of the Net... And if I help others with my tech, awesome. If enough of us do this, then we can start stemming the tide of data insecurity. But I also remember, parts of these issues are with the Political system, and not of technology. Until these older, technologically ignorant politicians die or retire, and Millenials come in, we're stuck. At least we've grown up with it.
Well, your original comment lacks the ethical understanding that you clearly do have.
My own island of autonomy is tinc/unison. Less scalable namespaces, but more straightforward for now.
The only point I disagree on is your last bit. I don't think waiting out the politicians will suffice. Millenial politicians will still be politicians, still desire power in order to "do good", and still pander to the easily-spooked herd. Modern democracy is a centralized beast, just with everybody encouraged to think as a mini-dictator. True freedom isn't merely protecting the average person from surveillance, but also the social outcasts whom the herd would otherwise persecute. That core of that problem really is technological - our communication patterns need to support individual autonomy.
I do agree that a technological solution(s) are needed. I see things like Zero-knowledge Proofs, Homomorphic encryption, plausibility networks, and other types of software are essential for freedom.... But I think this is also a governmental and societal issue as well. Of course, there's no reason to attack both fronts :)
And I'm also very much interested in Government as a Service, ala what Estonia is doing. The US in antiquated... I don't see it thriving much longer, as it's not staying ahead with technology in government. The spying on citizens however.....
Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to
search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific
information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according
to people familiar with the matter.
Wonder how much of the 4.8 billion can be attributed this custom software program?
From the article: "Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time."
The first case to surface. Anybody else could have been doing it for just as long, but we don't know yet.
I was honestly a bit unhappy when Stamos left Yahoo in the middle of a bunch of (what seemed like) cool projects for users -- seemed like he was just jumping ship from an objectively pretty crappy company to a continuing-to-accelerate rocketship, presumably for career reasons.
However, if it went down like this -- he did probably the least destructive thing possible. I probably would have gone public or done something stupider, but at the very least not being a party to ongoing abuse of users' trust is necessary.
I'd like to see what other senior execs at Yahoo! were aware of the program and supported or at least tolerated it, so I can avoid ever working with any of them.
This should forever taint Marissa Meyer's reputation. Failure to save Yahoo is understandable. Disregard for user privacy and safety at this scale is unforgivable.
Nacchio is no hero. He ran a $50MM pump-and-dump scam that personally netted him millions of dollars in profits at the expense of common shareholders, and he was indicted in a wave of similar prosecutions in the wake of the Enron fiasco. His offenses are there in black and white: with full knowledge that his company faced materially adverse changes unknown to his investors, he not only promoted the company but privately (and illegally) sold his own shares.
You do people like Stamos a huge disservice by drawing this comparison. People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment.
The entangling of the FISA order and the insider trading scandal actually makes things worse. His most significant trades came just months after he refused the FISA order --- after which he claims NSA arranged to have DoD contracts with Qwest terminated. He did something with an obvious material impact on his shareholders, and secretly profited from it.
The reality, though, is that his tenure at Qwest appears broadly similar to the kinds of bullshit that was rife in corporate America at the time: accounting scandals, entirely unrelated to Qwest's government contracts, that boosted apparent growth and drove share prices higher than the fundamentals of the business could possibly justify.
* That he was simply very optimistic about the business he was running that that he believed there would be an uptick in the stock long term after the company weathered the downturn he knew to be coming.
* That he was "set up" by NSA: yes, he sold at a high price anticipating a sector-wide downturn, but he did so because he'd been assured that Qwest would be part of a multi-billion NSA modernization program called "Groundbreaker", led by CSC, which contract would surely rescue Qwest's stock and even out his sale.
* That his board had demanded that he sell his stock, and that such sales were routine at Qwest.
* That he was distraught over the suicide of his son and sold the stock as part of an effort to immediately disentangle himself from the CEO position which he hoped to leave.
Against that, you have the black-and-white record of his trades and the testimony of numerous high-level Qwest executives all saying they'd been urgently warning him to revise Qwest's targets downwards. He not only maintained the unrealistic targets, and participated in channel-stuffing-style schemes to fake up earnings numbers, but profited personally by trading against those bogus numbers.
Psychologists have measured this! The capacity to stop yourself from doing bad things is different from the tendency to do good things (someone, go make an improved D&D alignment system out of that...).
This misses the point of the Nacchio story. There is nothing to suggest that Qwest's refusal to cave in to NSA demands was motivated by Nacchio's desire for personal enrichment instead of a principled stance. At worst, Qwest was motivated by the risk of fines of up to $130,000 per violation per day for breaching Section 222 of the Communications Act, according to Qwest legal [1]. We would do well to stop focusing on Nacchio and more on the response of Qwest as a whole. The NSA retaliated at Qwest for their non-cooperation by cancelling secret government contracts [2].
I don't understand your point. I was responding to this:
Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio who resisted NSA spying is out of prison
Nacchio's imprisonment has nothing to do with NSA spying; it has to do with his efforts to bilk Qwest shareholders out of their money. Those efforts are well-documented.
Further.. where is the motive?? So they guy scams everyone and their dog out of 50MM and doesn't care about shareholders and is evil to the core.. but yet disagrees to play along with some government agency that would put a spy trap in his servers?
If anything this could probably somehow helped him along the lines of some secret plea bargain.
I'm not sure what motive you're asking about. His motive for running a pump-and-dump scam with Qwest's stock was almost certainly straightforward: to enrich himself and his family.
The implication, as I'm sure you've heard, is that the stock drop was due in part to the canceled government contracts, and/or that Nacchio was investigated and prosecuted for somewhat common behavior because of Qwest's refusal to spy.
He did better than Meyer but I fail to see how his move bettered the world. It helped him not longer being part of something nefarious. But he left all users he had responsibility for in the unclear.
At least he managed to say, if only privately, "I'm not going to be a party to this" (most likely leaving a significant pile of cash and/or equity on the table in doing so). Which is way more than many CIOs/CSOs do in similar situations.
Of course you or I might like to believe we would have taken a more overtly defiant stand (by going public for example). But then again, we weren't there, in his shoes - now were we?
"It is the duty of an attorney to do all of the following: ... To employ, for the purpose of maintaining the causes confided to him or her those means only as are consistent with truth ..."
"Every attorney is guilty of a misdemeanor who either:
(a) Is guilty of any deceit or collusion, or consents to any
deceit or collusion, with intent to deceive the court or any party."
Google is definitely in cahoots with the government and probably way deeper than Yahoo. Why would you even assume otherwise, given how much ties to the government they expose to the public these days?
Because the odds of Yahoo being exceptionally bad and anyone else being exceptionally good about this are extremely low. The intelligence agency doing this wants 100% coverage - it would be absurd not to. Everyone has been told to do this.
I’ve said the same a few times before, sadly, I usually get downvoted for it.
It’s impossible to trust Google (Search, Chrome, DNS, Fi, Voice, Android, etc) or other big US companies at all regarding this, so we need open source solutions.
The US government is openly hostile to citizen of other countries, on the internet and in the real world, so relying on them not sending an NSL to Google to fuck you over is quite dumb.
Personally, I built my own cloud for everything I need, and I run Firefox on Arch Linux.
For its part, Google was the most unequivocal. Spokesman Aaron Stein e-mailed: "We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'no way.'"[0]
I wonder if Google could even run a program like this while keeping it secret. Yahoo had their program discovered within weeks, and public within a year. Stamos could easily have immediately gone public in a way which would have prevented him from being prosecuted - say posting a blog post about how hypothetically Yahoo would implement such a system at the governments request, forwarding this on to Bruce Scheiner, and then refusing to comment if such a "hypothetical" program actually existed.
But it also would be insane to make a provably false statement, leaving you open to lawsuits and probably enraging any would be whistle blowers. It would be even more insane to make your false statement more false than it needs to be.
They could always reply something like what Microsoft did.
“We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo,”
Everybody else declined having received the request, Microsoft just declined doing exactly what the report said yahoo were doing. Seems a lot more "safe".
The problems are of establishing protocols and standards, and seeing that others adopt them, and of creating self-contained systems that are bulletproof to set up and operate.
There are projects working on this, but the hurdle for having Joe Random User operate their own server is fairly high.
I'd much rather see a highly, but not entirely distributed system, with pervasive security, and very strong legal protections. I don't know if that can happen.
Yes, it's totally the fault of tech companies that the US Federal government forces them to give up access to any information they want, and a non-profit email org would immune US intelligence agencies. /s
Non-profit is not the opposite of corporation. In fact, most non-profits are corporations.
The message is obviously to control your own security to the maximum extent practicable. Esau didn't assign fault in their comment. You might disagree with their assertion, but your comment is attacking a straw man, rather than the claim posted.
Yourself? The idea that you have to either trust governments or corporations is very much a false dichotomy.
GPG, running your own mail server, etc. may not be for you (they aren't for me), but let's not pretend cloud-hosted mail is the only option, or that encryption is impossible.
The lesson from this is to not trust corporations with out privacy.
I'm as upset about this as anybody, but realistically speaking... they had a gun to their heads. The real problem here isn't Yahoo! (or the other corporations), it's the government.
It's referring to cause of the symptom. Paraphrased differently: If the government can hold a gun to any organization or individuals' head for information, then the privacy distrust doesn't stop with just corporations.
True, the government can compel me to turn over all my data, but if I'm managing it myself, I'll know this has happened[0].
Additionally, if I'm managing the data myself, they'll only get access because they thought I was a worthwhile target. If I'm using Yahoo!, I get caught in a dragnet. In general, the larger the service, the better a position they are to fight these orders, but also the more likely the government is to bother dragneting it.
I'm not worth my own NSL, but this one's a freebie: the marginal effort the government has to put into spying on my Yahoo! account is zero, because they've already got access.
[0] Well, I might know. They can also do it surreptitiously unless I'm very competent and very diligent, but if I receive an NSL, I'll know.
I find this hilarious since the only thing I use my yahoo address for is retailer sign-ups and things I know will land me a boat load of junk mail. It is my email landfill.
$250k per day doubling every week that can come with a gag order sounds like the sort of thing that could damage a business to the point of extinction, no?
Some people here laud some companies for being good about user privacy and security. This shows they have not yet reached table stakes for privacy and security.
This is why no provider can be trusted. Every routine communication should be e2e encrypted. Otherwise this WILL happen.
This is where I remind everyone about S/MIME. A bit awkward to setup for the first time, but with good email clients it is a pretty transparent experience once you have it setup.
That's good, but the correct response from the big internet services/portals should be to make it impossible to comply with such a request without an obvious and public withdrawal of service. And, beyond that, to use their resources to make key exchange and management simple and secure (they do that in some real time communications products) for storage and email. They have your social graph, they can implement web-of-trust features. They can made it both simple to use and exceedingly difficult to subvert. They can provide secure, open endpoint software. They can effectively end dragnet surveillance by providing a refuge from it, AND make burdensome and credibility-destroying requests/orders impossible to implement. And all these years after Snowden, they have not.
This is substantially worse than PRISM which operates on individual targeted persons and the upstream Verizon, AT&T program which collects plaintext over the public Internet.
This involved bulk search of data past the decryption layer.
The scariest part of the whole piece answers this question:
Why are back doors with secret keys a BAD idea?
"... he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails...."
The CEO of Yahoo must have known that this kind of scanning and storage puts their users at risk. She choose to do it anyway as being the path of least resistance against a more powerful adversary (US govt.).
Bad judgement compounded by zero spine... Verizon looks like the perfect fit.
I imagine Yahoo! Mail engineers being royally pissed about this. Well, I suppose that includes all Yahoo! folks who are still putting real effort into improving Y!'s services. Every odd day something surfaces about Y!'s execs questionable practices and decisions, every even day problems, leaks, bad press. Moral must have hit rock bottom.
Maybe the Yahoo! Board should have surveyed the startups scene, looking for founders who bootstrapped successfully and proven their worth, and recruit the best they could get. I am not very familiar with management of people and aspects of running a business, but I believe there is a lot more to it than being a smart person with computers.
You may have missed the part where Yahoo engineers implemented this scheme, they are to blame as much as management here, possibly more because they could've walked away and gotten a different job without much trouble, but management had a responsibility to the whole organization.
Contrast with the rumors that Apple engineers were prepared to refuse & resign if ordered to share the iPhone's encryption keys.
Yahoo users can't go to court if they can't prove their rights were violated. Even with this news story there is no court-admissible evidence of collusion with the government.
Also, from the perspective of a civil suit against Yahoo, this program is likely somewhat legal unless it was specifically against their privacy policy and terms of use.
That doesn't mean the engineers knew they were performing unethical behavior. A better question is: why should anyone hire someone who aided unethical behavior?
Their behaviour might be not very ethical in relation to a customers but they were loyal to the company. This is a good point for an employer. I doubt a company would like to hire a Snowden type person that puts public interest over company's.
Of course it's better elsewhere. Many companies are not under US authority. Many provide better security features. Many are not known for having terrible security, or the biggest breach of user data ever.
IIRC, Yahoo has always provided more data not even because they shared it, but because they were so lax with security.
Consider setting up your own mail server.
Decentralization is the most effective way of fighting this.
Rent a cheap, dedicated server (a VPS provides poor privacy protection), encrypt the root partition and install sovereign (https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign).
I have been running my own mail server for more than a decade now and haven't had that problem.
If you rent a new server check its IP against the RBLs to see if its burned. If it's bad, request a new IP from your ISP.
Other than that, adhere to industry best practices and you're good.
While it is damning that Mayer didn't go to Stamos about this and went straight to the email team, it's hard to say whether she felt it was necessary to tell him, or was even allowed to, since we don't see the court orders and what they entail. It's really easy to be against this and play armchair preacher but this is something she probably had no choice in, in many ways.
Also, I'm wondering if this story is bigger because people love to hate on Mayer. I am certain this kind of thing happened/happens at Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., so it's confusing why this is so newsworthy. It's not really newsworthy that data from an email provider is sent to NSA under secret court orders and NSA can search the full text of it. Is the newsworthy part that she asked the team to do it without consulting the security team? My question would be, why wouldn't a manager from the email team consult the security team if they had the power to?
The newsworthy thing was that this was a trigger word or similar ongoing filter that the surveillors wanted copies on sight of, and not a specific email account.
> It's not really newsworthy that data from an email provider is sent to NSA under secret court orders and NSA can search the full text of it.
It absolutely is newsworthy. We may have suspected it beforehand, we may suspect it happens at other providers, but we have specific proof about Yahoo now. This is new and important and we should be making a fuss. If we play the jaded cynic we are joining the enemies of democracy.
No, we had proof back when Snowden released documents about the search engine that NSA has from data siphoned from providers. I'm not being cynical, I'm being realistic in that this isn't newsworthy now because it was extremely newsworthy when it first came to light a few years ago.
I would rather this be newsworthy because it gets people interested in fighting FISC orders again, not against Yahoo and Mayer.
Except that the song and dance the US Congress put on pretending that the FREEDOM act made domestic surveillance illegal put an end to the Snowden Documents in many people's minds.
Continued news about domestic surveillance, police surveillance, Federal controlled 'perception management' news media messaging, etc should continue to happen so that citizens understand that the US has clarified that the bulk of these activities are legal, justified and necessary.
What Snowden revelation are you talking about? I remember when everyone was up in arms about PRISM, but that's just a pretty interface on more focused requests of data for specific users.
This is the first instance, to my knowledge, of the government requesting carte blanche realtime search of all incoming and outgoing email for all users.
That's them searching for what they want plus seeing everything without notification. There was also a $250,000 a day fine for non-compliance with court orders. That adds up. I can't find the link but they made it grow exponentially over time in another report.
#8 is a weird thing to bring up. Yahoo was going to be fined for not letting the NSA secretly tap their cables? They didn't even know the tapping was being done! How could they be non compliant?
Yeah, that might not totally fit in the point I was making on compliance side. It does fit into overall picture of answering losvedir in how they'd be collecting and searching everything in real-time. The next order might force a tap on the cables on the inside. Much like the "pen register" Lavabit was going to have to add.
Privacy expectations and acceptance of government surveillance changed a lot in less than 20 years.
When info about FBI Carnivore system was leaked (or announced, cannot recall), there was a public outcry that made FBI shut it down (according to Wikipedia they soon replaced it with a similar system under a different name). Learning about massive government data collections of today? Resigned acceptance :(
Edward Snowden's revelations were made in 2013. The Yahoo story concerns events of 2015, and programs specifically begun in 2015.
Ed Snowden's good. But he's not Timelord good.
The Yahoo revelations are new, and material. And exceptionally bad for Yahoo, Verizon (who've their own dark history of mass surveillance participation), and Mayer, who took on a tough job with a sinking ship and based on latest information made it worse and the holes bigger.
I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't implicate the entire SAAS / centralised services Web world by association, particularly with the lack of comment from other vendors.
Mayer had many choices on how to act. This is extremely newsworthy, no matter what you are "certain" about, because it has never been reported before that the government had been given realtime scanning access to a major provider. Stop trying to turn this into a stupid tabloid story about who likes or doesn't like the CEO.
I don't think you understand the nature of natural security letters. We don't know how Mayer was allowed to ask because we cannot see the letter, such is their nature
> Also, I'm wondering if this story is bigger because people love to hate on Mayer. I am certain this kind of thing happened/happens at Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., so it's confusing why this is so newsworthy.
Are you serious? It's newsworthy because we have proof they did it.
If we had proof Google or Facebook did it, then it would be news, too. And probably much bigger news, because nobody really cares about Yahoo anymore, especially after its sale to Verizon.
In fact, check social media and Reddit. A story about Wikileaks hinting at Google manipulating search results to favor a certain US candidate is already being talked about. And that's despite the latest trend to hate on Wikileaks because they focus too much (?!) on exposing Clinton's corruption.
> Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails. US president is confident intelligence services have 'struck appropriate balance', he tells journalists in Berlin
Yup. So that's a complete lie now (not that I actually believed him when he said it then). When you searching through everyone's emails, then you're invading everyone's privacy.
He's a career politician, it seemed so obvious from the first day I heard him campaign that he was just telling people what they wanted to hear without any intention of implementing the details except for what is needed to keep up his reputation as he campaigns for his next term and then his legacy. It's the same thing from all the presidential candidates in recent history. The system is broken in some ways, and in some ways it's working ok.
I guess they are using the same justification as GCHQ; they use tools to scan everything and a human doesn't actually read ("rifle through") the majority of material.
Is it still an invasion of privacy if a machine reads my emails? Google read my emails to check for spam.
To me, the main difference is that you know about Google's automatic parsing of your emails upfront and it can therefore be a factor in your subscribing/unsubscribing decision.
It's pretty obvious you're wrong in that assessment:
"The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events."
Your theory is that Yahoo scanned hundreds of millions of accounts for the NSA, but the NSA isn't doing / hasn't done anything with those billions of emails. Your premise requires that the NSA come into possession of a truly massive load of data and then never touches it at all. That's absurd.
It was just a flippant remark, but think about it: the story claims that Yahoo greps through emails at NSA's direction. So the NSA isn't grepping through the emails; Yahoo is. Sure, Yahoo then maybe turns around and gives all the results to NSA, which then proceeds to do whatever it wants with it.
The way I read this story the NSA is really not rifling through ordinary people's email. They are specifically looking for a certain string. It is highly unlikely that ordinary people's emails contain this string.
> Using a Yahoo e-mail address and a different name, Kuok also allegedly contacted an Arizona company this year that had posted on eBay a KG-175 TACLANE — an NSA designed encryption device used to communicate with classified military computer networks, such as the Defense Department’s SIPRNet.
> Kuok repeatedly expressed fears that he might be dealing with an NSA, CIA or FBI agent, but continued to negotiate with the undercover officer, even cautioning him to avoid referencing the items by model number in e-mail, because “your country has this system to analyze” e-mail for keywords.
What if the string was something like "KG-175 TACLANE"? How many ordinary people would have this string in an e-mail? What is wrong with getting a warrant to read through e-mails containing such a string?
This news is definitely news to me. It is just not shocking or unexpected or contrary to what Barack Obama has been saying.
Distribute, encrypt, and anonymize. The only way forward doesn't include them.
Congress is up for grabs. You can really change who is in congress this round. If you don't like the guy you have vote in another. Vote for people that want to cut surveillance programs and agencies that request them. We could save or reallocate mountains of money.
This is unfortunate and something that is very common with all of the companies in the USA. They must comply with the government in one way or another. If the people within the company refuse, they will be replaced one way or another.
It's a sad fact that all of the major companies in the USA are spying or are complicit in the spying of all customers (both US citizen and not)
Ever wonder why Microsoft constantly has holes/glitches/back-doors in all of its operating systems for so long now. They could build a very secure operating system. They hire the best minds, yet year after year we see multiple exploits and issues.
Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers "have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies."
Like most people, I have no problem with the government using probable cause to get warrants that are in search of something specific (none of these grab-all bullshit orders). If you have a legitimate reason to be looking at someone, then there should be no problem getting a warrant.
These secret FISA court orders are a serious violation to the rights of Americans in many cases. At minimum, if we really do need these secret courts to prevent people from finding out they are the subject of surveillance, then there needs to be an expiration on those gag orders. This crap about never being able to mention it FOREVER has to go. There should be a limit, say 5 years, which is well beyond the length of time most investigations take. At that time, those orders should expire so that these government actions can be brought to light if there is any question of wrong-doing on the part of our overzealous law enforcement.
"Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers 'have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies.'" Sorry, but no. That's not how it works. There is no obligation to do the work of government unless it is actually written into law (i.e. record-keeping laws). And it currently is not. This is precisely why everyone should be encrypting all communications on the CLIENT side themselves. It should never leave your device (PC, phone, whatever) unencrypted. That way, if the government wants to go on a fishing expedition or has an actual legitimate reason to look at you, they will have to get a warrant for the device itself, which will at least give you a head's up that they are trying to put you in the clink with a bunkmate named Bubba.
The NSA, and the government in general, has completely blown any goodwill they once had with the public. Under no circumstance will I ever advocate for anything that makes their job easier. And it is for no other reason than simply because they have proven time and again they cannot be trusted.
Honestly, I'm still not even clear why every employee of project PRISM isn't rotting a jail cell right now after Snowden shed some light on the program for the rest of us peasants. Every single employee of that program had to know the clear violations of the constitution they were helping to partake in. Keep in mind the constitution protects against unreasonable SEIZURE as well as search. Gobbling up communications in the manner they did clearly counts as seizure because they would not have had them otherwise - whether or not they actually search the records is immaterial.
I'm not an Apple fan, but when they told the government to go pound sand regarding that terrorist phone encryption case, that was the first time that I can recall I actually approved of Apple's political position on something.
If she had wanted to this to get out, I wonder if she could have ordered the email team to go ahead and build out the sniffer so she is not in contempt of the court, but let her security team openly blog about it, without informing her, when they found it - which could lead to an inadvertent release of the info? If the sec team was not under the gag order maybe they would not have gotten in trouble.
Or take her to a super boss level, she could have used whisper to talk to guccifer and let him know about some vuln that would allow access to the legal directory.... which would have to gag order. #wikileakitup
The security or email team could also blog about how to "hypothetically" implement real-time scan of email for keywords, and then stay mum about if they ever actually implemented something like their proposed program.
Ignoring fiduciary responsibility for a minute, what would happen if a publicly-traded company refused to comply with such a court order until they were required to release a financial statement? Wouldn't they be legally required to disclose that multi-million dollar fine?
How would a company under such a gag order announce bankruptcy? "Sorry, we lost all the money and we can't tell you why"?
Which reminds me of this great passage in Atlas Shrugged:
“Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
The quote is somewhat apt, because it describes, to a certain degree, the current state of federal laws. That's the best thing I can say about the quote. It certainly isn't good.
Those same views of the nature of power were much better expressed by Orwell in his "1984". That's what I would call good.
You don't have to be a lit crit to come to a solid conclusion that Rand should not be followed as a life plan. I feel the same way about "The Prince" and "The Art of War," both of which I haven't read because I don't want them poisoning my brain.
Edit: Apparently I'm not as cultured as I thought. I didn't know Machiavelli had his own version of "The Art of War". Obviously, my previous comment was unqualified.
However, I did read "The Prince" and I think there's a lot most can learn from it. While I find the majority of the book reprehensible, there are many powerful people in our society that seem to think of it as a bible / instruction manual. Given the fact that such ideas still play a significant role in our society; I feel it is worthwhile to learn about them.
That's like saying "I've never eaten lettuce, but I know I don't like it just from looking at it." What a weird, sheltered approach to life; you should broaden your horizons a bit and read, say, Mein Kampf. Developing critical skills is essential for anyone and it's totally reasonable to read something even when you know you will disagree.
The Art of a War is a lot of common sense. If your not predisposed to be a sociopath, I don't think it's a bad read.
You don't want to be the guy who has memorized every passage, and rarely leaves his room though.
I wasn't introduced to Ayn Rand's books/philosophy until years after philosophy classes in college. The guys who followed it, or were rabid fans of hers were literally homeless. I can't blame her philosophy on their situation.
One of her most voracious, fervent fans was one of the most naturally gifted artists I have ever been in the presence of. His personality was like sandpaper. He would argue for the sake of arguing.
I will never forget one thing he did. He received over a million dollars in an inheritance. He bought a nice Van. I figured I will never have to picture him homeless.
He decided to invest the money on the stock market himself. He literally lost everything in about a year in a half. He didn't want any advice--nothing, even about diversification. He relied on a computer program to pick stock. I heard he's still around.
If you happen to read this; your art is magical. (He didn't know quite how talented he was as an artist. I don't know why. At some point, I believe, someone he respected, told him his art was not original, and his drawings were just the result of good technique? His drawings/paintings were original, and showed so much original talent.)
They're excellent. You should read both, critically. You should likely throw in the Fountainhead as well....and for good measure should likely also read Exodus, 1914, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, and likely more fun stuff like the Federalist and Anti-federalist papers. The history, passion, and often hypocrisy found are enlightening. Ayn R. had wonderful insights into the human condition...as a previous author had said, the solutions were often a bit twisted. If you want really interesting, dig into Beyond Good and Evil. I read all of Nietzsche while I was in officer basic a long time ago. Very interesting stuff. I guess my point is, don't discount literature because you disagree with it.
It is phrases and words, accumulated to symbols, that form our thoughts. A whole network is being built upon it which will then be your subconcious mind. It is interesting how much of such phrases one might used to get a simple point across. Like an oyster hiding their pearl. To get to the pearl you need to be well aware so you are not trapped in a shell that is not yours.
EDIT: I as well assumed you were referring to Sun Tzu. I can't speak to whether my comments hold for Machiavelli's at all.
If you've lumped "The Art of War" into the same category in your mind as Ayn Rand's writings, I suggest you to read it. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised. Aside from being both commonly cited as influential (in greater or lesser unfortunate ways), there's really about zero similarity between the two.
cited as influential (in greater or lesser unfortunate ways)
I definitely mean in the greater of unfortunate ways. That there's zero similarity is irrelevant, they keep showing up in the same places. They're not brothers, they're friends.
Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory).
Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow them blindly (no need to bother forming policy) and is how we end up with Trump vs Clinton in 2016 (see [1] for the impact on the legislative process). Reducing the quality of debate is therefore a harmful thing with real consequences.
One line of argument might be to criticise the paranoid nature of the quote: it is entirely possible that a mess of laws arises naturally from a mix of special interests doing some lobbying to preserve small advantages for themselves, and bad laws arising as a form of horse trading necessary to get policy enacted. Only then does this mess presents an opportunity to manipulators.
[1] http://imgur.com/a/Wmoex - "Voting Relationships between Senators in the 101st through 113th Congresses"
I was tempted to reply with a "found the objectivist" just to illustrate what "ad hominem" really means, but I'm waiting for a build, so I have time to kill.
Ad hominem would have been to attack Ayn Rand. I didn't do that. The quote I used doesn't attack the author, it attacks the work. I happen to agree with it. If you want to criticize it, you would do better to point out that the quote I used is not constructive criticism. I would agree with that, but I would probably also point out that humorous quips rarely are.
Well, in addition to the "insult" (which surely adult conversationists can suffer easily) the quote also included a summarized view of the contents of mrs. Rand's work.
The problem is that language is much higher bandwidth than the information content of the words. Context and implicit shared knowledge play a huge part and should be taken into account when assessing someone's words. Both the quote, your original use of it, and your reply to my comment are ad hominem attacks where the attack is mostly in what is left unsaid but understood by the relatively smart, well read, culturally aware audience of HN.
I'll now explain what I mean by taking both your quote and your reply and dissecting how I interpret them:
> "childish fantasy" "lifelong obsession" "unbelievable heroes" "emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood" "unable to deal with the real world"
The argument here goes: people who like Ayn Rand are immature and live in a dream world, which means you should not listen to what they have to say because it bears little relation with the real world. It's pretty obvious what the ad hominem is if you use this quote straight after someone quotes Ayn Rand: it is targeted at the poster and implies he is, himself, immature, living in a dream world, meaning one should dismiss his arguments without consideration.
> I was tempted to reply with a "found the objectivist"
This one is on par with telling a new black acquaintance about your black friends, or sending them news about black people doing great things. I should not need to explain it, but I will.
First, your original comment, as explained above, painted all "Objectivists" (Ayn Rand "fans", for those unaware of her writings; she groups her ideas under the term Objectivism) as immature dreamers whose arguments should be dismissed.
Then, you hint at what is on your mind, much as the man sending "black news" to his black acquaintance is hinting pretty strongly at the only thing he can think about looking at him. "I was tempted" might work in a bar discussion as a sufficient disclaimer, but HN is sophisticated and sensitive to such "fake disclaimers" (although those who point them out can be tarred with the "SJW" brush).
Your line of argument here is "I am stating that you are an Objectivist, therefore your arguments are not worth listening to because Objectivists are immature/unable to deal with the real world/see above". This is the literal definition of ad hominem, even if you hinted instead of outright stating. The context - HN, and its sophisticated audience and level of discussion - make it intentional and the equivalent of stating it outright.
You reinforce this line with the end of the sentence:
> but I'm waiting for a build, so I have time to kill
This really means "you are not ordinarily worth engaging with, because [see above], but since I have nothing to do, I will". This is reinforcing the ad hominem by introducing superiority and dismissiveness. "Here, child, let me explain."
> The quote I used doesn't attack the author, it attacks the work
It is extremely rare to attack a work using appeal to emotion without attacking the author. Usually, the best way to clear the doubt is to spell it out. You didn't. In fact, the brevity and context of the use of the quote, coupled with the fact it explicitly attacks Ayn Rand, imply the opposite.
> If you want to criticize it, you would do better to point out that the quote I used is not constructive criticism.
I did criticise it. Pointing out that appeal to emotion is not a valid line of argument is a constructive criticism. I have expanded on the idea earlier in this reply, but the core of it is that appeal to emotion attempts to use emotion to make you skip logical steps and accept a conclusion you might not have ordinarily.
> humorous quips rarely are
Ridicule is one of the most effective appeals to emotion. I could probably point 10 examples from the first 15 minutes of the Presidential debate last week. Even the words used by both candidates are carefully chosen (see [1]). Your particular quip is only humorous if you belong to the tribe that likes to auto-ridicule Ayn Rand readers (without having ever read the books or even the arguments), and otherwise serves to silence those unwilling to take the social penalty of speaking out against it.
Lest you think it is personal, it is not. Hell, I know where you're coming from - in a previous era, I was banned for several weeks from an internet forum for calling someone an "internet redneck" for presenting Republican-favouring arguments.
I am simply fed up with the rising market share of appeal to emotion in all kinds of domains from advertising (thank you uBlock, Privacy Badger etc. for making the internet useable for me again) all the way up to politics and the legislative process. This is my little contribution to fighting against this trend. And yes, the use of the word "fighting" is itself an appeal to emotion.
Ah, yes, you'd like more reasoned, rational debate. Which is why you turn to Scott Adams, who is of course a paragon of that, as he is a paragon of every field of study and endeavor of all of humanity, or can quickly become so, according to himself.
Why, again, attack the man instead of the argument? It's especially grating when the entire thread is about ad hominems.
Saying that Scott Adams has been known to be irrational is at best tangential to the example he gives to qualify whether the Trump and Clinton campaigns are using emotional manipulation, especially ad hominem attacks, to achieve their respective goals.
It's an appeal to emotion built upon an ad hominem: you use your attack on Scott Adams' ability to reason coupled with an association fallacy [1] to attack me in order to invalidate my line of argument.
Specifically: Scott Adams is irrational; you presented an example by Scott Adams; you therefore agree with an irrational man; this makes you irrational; your arguments are therefore irrational; let's not bother debating your irrational arguments.
I might be wrong, so attack the flaws in my reasoning, not me or the author or my examples.
I suspect sooner or later you're going to try to find a way to claim that anything which merely mentions someone's argument is an ad hominem, and your entire style is close to the fallacy fallacy ("I can name an informal fallacy, therefore your argument is invalid"), but...
It is perfectly fair to say "Scott Adams makes claims about himself which cannot charitably be interpreted as rational or reasonable, therefore appealing to Scott Adams (hint: appeal to authority!) when talking about a desire for more rational and reasoned and impersonal debate does not lend credibility to your argument".
But I did not appeal to authority. I gave an example of both the Trump and Clinton campaigns using manipulation to illustrate my point. Why do you disagree?
> The problem is that language is much higher bandwidth than the information content of the words.
On the contrary, the problem with a natural language is that is imprecise, vague and ambiguous. This is why it's so easy to allow assumptions to creep into one's interpretation of it. A substantial part of your interpretation of my comments is based on your own assumptions, a lot of which do not hold up. I'm not inclined to address all of them -- for the same reasons I will elaborate when I address your interpretation of my having "time to kill" -- but I will try to address a few I found interesting.
> It's pretty obvious what the ad hominem is if you use this quote straight after someone quotes Ayn Rand: it is targeted at the poster and implies he is, himself, immature, living in a dream world, meaning one should dismiss his arguments without consideration.
I don't know if the poster is an objectivist. The poster remembered a quote from "Atlas Shrugged" that resonated with them and posted it in a comment, which does not necessarily imply that the poster is a fan of "Atlas Shrugged" or Ayn Rand in general; I could probably find myself in a situation where I could consider a comment from Meyer's "Twilight" relevant, without changing my opinion that "Twilight" is an utter piece of crap. I used the quote I posted to express my opinion of "Atlas Shrugged". Which brings me to the next assumption I would like to address:
> It is extremely rare to attack a work using appeal to emotion without attacking the author.
To paraphrase, instead of quoting: You keep mentioning that fallacy; I do not think it means what you think it means. "Appeal to emotion" is a logical fallacy that consists of trying to support your argument with pathos instead of logos. Not every form of discourse is an argument. Mine certainly wasn't and I suspect John's wasn't either. As I mentioned before, I was stating an opinion -- to wit, that I find "Atlas Shrugged" sorely lacking in certain aspects and that I think that staunch objectivists have certain flaws -- not refuting a point made by the poster. As a matter of fact, I did state in another comment that I agree, to a degree, with the poster's point, but dislike the quote he used to make that point.
> This really means "you are not ordinarily worth engaging with, because [see above], but since I have nothing to do, I will". This is reinforcing the ad hominem by introducing superiority and dismissiveness. "Here, child, let me explain."
You're right about one thing here: my reply to you did, indeed, contain an intentional ad hominem. That doesn't mean that the assumption underlying your interpretation of "time to kill" is correct. Rather than implying that objectivists, as a whole group, are not worth engaging with, I was implying that I ordinarily would not find a comment like yours worth replying to. Is that dismissive? It certainly is. Does it imply a feeling of superiority? Not at all. Just because I don't think that, under normal circumstances, I can produce more worth by spending my time on other things rather than replying to that particular kind of argument, it doesn't mean I'm superior (or feel like it) to you. Rather, it means that I don't think I'm good enough at arguing to produce any net worth by engaging in the discussion of a comment like yours.
> This one is on par with telling a new black acquaintance about your black friends, or sending them news about black people doing great things. I should not need to explain it, but I will.
As a quick aside, I don't have any assumption to address here; I just wanted to point out that I have no idea what that whole "black news" analogy is supposed to mean; you might have tried to explain it, but I failed to understand it.
But you do delve a lot into the ad hominem in that part of my sentence, so I should probably address that. Yes, I assumed from your comment that you're an objectivist and that, as an objectivist, you share the flaws I ascribe to the whole group. No, that assumption is not based on any hard facts, but my experience with similar comments and, as such, might very well be incorrect. Yes, I do imply that being an objectivist would explain why you misintepreted my original comment as an ad hominem. Yes, I did intentionally include an ad hominem in a comment that points out that my previous comment was not an ad hominem.
In closing, many of the assumptions on which you based your interpretations are wrong. It's not that I believe that they're wrong -- most of them are factually wrong, because most are assumptions about what I meant to say or was trying to say. The reason I point this out at all is because you're trying to engage in a highly rational argument out of a highly emotional motivation and I suspect those emotions are creeping into your assumptions and invalidating your efforts. The reason I suspect that is because I used to do the same thing: get riled up about something I read and then try to deconstruct the offending text with what I believe were purely rational arguments. In hindsight, it never worked out, even when I believed I "won" the discussion.
Regardless of the context of HN "and its sophisticated audience and level of discussion", sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes a person might state the equivalent of "I think 'Atlas Shrugged' is crap and adults who wholeheartedly buy into it should know better" and it might not be a slippery slope to a dystopian future where all rational argument has been replaced by Trump/Clinton debates; sometimes a person's sense of humor is impolite to a certain audience and the best reply is more along the lines of "Dude, don't be a jerk" rather than "The test results say you are a horrible person; we weren't even testing for that." ;)
First, thank you for the long reply. I know the effort and time involved in typing those out and I really appreciate your taking it.
> On the contrary, the problem with a natural language is that is imprecise, vague and ambiguous.
These are attributes of natural language, but I do not see how their existence invalidates my argument. Natural language is ambiguous because words are like variables that can take different values depending on the situation. Any advanced society necessarily requires the shared context and for the other side to make assumptions about what is not said in order to communicate at the very high bandwidth required to deal with the complexity of life.
For example, imagine two buddies meeting at the bar after a hard day of work. One of them sips his beer then says "man... that was a long, long day." He does not literally mean that the day contained more work hours than usual. He is bonding by expressing a hint of shared feelings (that they are satisfied with a hard day's work and can begin relaxing) to his colleague with whom he just shared an experience. I just provided you with context with the early part of the story: bar, long day, beer... which allows you to understand what he says.
And this is why I need to make assumptions in order to further understanding and discussion:
> it's so easy to allow assumptions to creep into one's interpretation of it
> I don't know if the poster is an objectivist
It does not matter if you know or not. Every word posted on a public forum is an attempt at convincing somebody of something, a means of spreading a message or communicating a feeling (as in the case above - although these comments are relatively rare on HN). A brief one liner has to be very well chosen in order to be effective, as it assumes a good read on people's mindsets, the context, and their background in order to have the intended effect. My comment was that the way your comment read was an attack on more than the book.
> "Appeal to emotion" is a logical fallacy
The way I understand it, appeal to emotion is a family of fallacies used to advance arguments without taking a reasoned path, with a subconscious or conscious goal to do so.
> Not every form of discourse is an argument. Mine certainly wasn't and I suspect John's wasn't either.
This is where we disagree. Anything you post here will be read by others and might influence their thinking. Whether or not you want to, you send a message with your comments. Whether or not you meant to have an impact, your words will have that impact. "I didn't mean to hurt X" is not an excuse for inconsiderateness.
> Rather, it means that I don't think I'm good enough at arguing to produce any net worth by engaging in the discussion of a comment like yours.
A different opinion is ALWAYS welcome. The only way to learn is to put oneself in the other's point of view and see if there is something to it...
> out of a highly emotional motivation
What would you guess is my motivation? Most highly emotional "motivation" of irrational arguments is linked to belonging to a tribe and having to accept its arguments in order to further the power of its voice (as members acting in concert predictably are exponentially more powerful as a result). My understanding is that you believe/d that I belong to the "Objectivist" tribe. As I mentioned elsewhere, I have no interest in debating ownership or not to a tribe; I think such arguments are automatic ways to engage discussion onto emotional ground and away from what you might call "fact".
For example, you might debate the idea of taxing pollution. You can argue about it from the point of view of Tragedy of the Commons in economics and trying to establish some kind of net welfare equation, or you can argue against it by saying "you pinko commie" and for it by saying "you fascist tax evader from the 1%". The latter form of argumentation is extremely noxious to civilisation, which is why I oppose it.
> Regardless of the context of HN "and its sophisticated audience and level of discussion", sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes a person might state the equivalent of "I think 'Atlas Shrugged' is crap and adults who wholeheartedly buy into it should know better" and it might not be a slippery slope to a dystopian future where all rational argument has been replaced by Trump/Clinton debates; sometimes a person's sense of humor is impolite to a certain audience and the best reply is more along the lines of "Dude, don't be a jerk" rather than "The test results say you are a horrible person; we weren't even testing for that." ;)
>The problem is that language is much higher bandwidth than the information content of the words. Context and implicit shared knowledge play a huge part and should be taken into account when assessing someone's words.
But not when assuming they are Rand's followers?
Because you criticized the parent poster exactly for making such an assumption (whether he made it or not)...
Well considering that the quote was the entirety of the post, I don't see how you can then claim that responding with a second quote discrediting the first is in some way responding to the person and not the argument. There was no argument being made and if they tried to do the work of the commenter for them and make an argument, you'd then say they were putting words into the person's mouth.
IMO, if you are relying on a work of mid-20th century fiction to make your case that corporate corruption in the U.S. in the 21st century is somehow going out of control, then your argument has already defeated itself.
> considering that the quote was the entirety of the post, I don't see how you can then claim that responding with a second quote discrediting the first is in some way responding to the person and not the argument
The first quote laid out a case using a narrative as a metaphor. It explicitly states its position, and as such is an appropriate use of a quote.
The second quote is entirely composed of appeals to emotion and its sole purpose is to ridicule the author of the first quote as well as any readers who might agree with it. As such it is not an appropriate response.
An appropriate response would have first established the premise of the first quote, then argued for or against it.
> "mid-20th century" "21st century"
The age of an idea has no bearing on its quality. To an extent, humanity refines and builds on ideas over time but the basis of Western civilisation dates from Antiquity. To take your specific date range, this post is typed on a browser, operating system, machine, and global network that all date from ideas from the mid 20th century which themselves build on a few centuries of reasoning.
No. My premise is that of "rational" argument (and I know the word is loaded in the context of Ayn Rand), that of seeking a better understanding of the world.
My position is that emotional manipulation leads to a worse understanding of the world and decrease net welfare by encouraging people to be less rational. As such arguments that abuse emotion are not desirable (perhaps "appropriate" is the wrong word: any argument is appropriate on HN so long as it is civil, according to moderation and history).
To go deeper into the subject would require a discussion of whether the end justifies the means, which I'm not willing to spend considerable time and mental effort on right now (otherwise I'd have commented on the article at the top of this page already).
>* My position is that emotional manipulation leads to a worse understanding of the world and decrease net welfare by encouraging people to be less rational.*
That's circular reasoning. "Emotional is bad because it's less rational" (given that rational is the opposite of emotional).
Why would emotional be worse? Or generally worse? It is itself a useful way of deciding, that originated from evolution. In fact there would be a thing as being too rational. Besides, if the ultimate goal is one's happiness (and rationally, there's no way to objectively establish any other goal over it), that's something inherently tied to emotions anyway.
Here's some food for thought:
The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.
The work is still fiction and the characters described in the work become less and less helpful over time as it becomes difficult to try to fit them into the context of today's society. This becomes more true the further you get from the time the novel was written and it is this lens of time passed which allows us, as a society, to filter out many of the mediocre ideas that are no longer helpful and hold onto the works that are more fundamental.
So yes, time matters as does the context in which the works were written. The world itself has become more integrated and capital much more mobile and the role of government is also less clearcut than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Many of the dangers of overreach in government that the writer was worried about have been reduced but at the same time new dangers, including those of global corporations overreaching into our daily lives, have increased.
TL;DR: Snowcrash is probably more helpful to understanding this story than Atlas Shrugged.
I suggest you read Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" which, though it was written with no knowledge of Ayn Rand (it predates all of her published works), anticipates her work (through a philosophy Heinlein introduces, called "Functionalism") and proceeds to demolish it on basic economic and common-sense grounds.
Whilst I appreciate the recommendation, I do not understand its relevance in the context of this thread.
What I am reading in your comment is an implication:
- that by attacking the use of a quote to ridicule those who have read Ayn Rand and attempt to present her ideas, I am myself promoting Ayn Rand's ideas,
- and that the other ideas of Ayn Rand's (beyond those illustrated by the metaphors used in Atlas Shrugged that lead to this quote, which is very specifically about government use of bad laws for manipulation) are relevant to this discussion.
This would lead for a need for a response to Ayn Rand's body of ideas as relates to "economic and common-sense grounds" (which I assume is not related to the quote by the grandparent), as opposed to specifically the original post or the direction I have put the thread in.
Is this the correct interpretation?
If so, I disagree that Ayn Rand's entire body of ideas is relevant to the discussion of the specific case put forward by her metaphor and narrative in the context of this quote and discussion.
An example of this kind of association fallacy: Heinlein promoted incest in his later novels (e.g. Lazarus Long's relationship with his mother post time travel). Incest has negative connotations in modern society. It would be possible to use an appeal to emotion: "Heinlein promotes incest! You like Heinlein, so I can't listen to your argument, since you promote incest." It would, however, be manipulation to do so. A similar line of argument is used to attack certain religions today (I've even seen some French politicians try to paint Muslims as barbarians by pointing out a few incidents of goats slaughtered ritually in the bath tubs of social housing projects).
Every writer, every body of work has flaws. The beauty of discussing ideas is to hash out a better set of values and ideas to better model and understand the world we live in. There are even valid uses of appeal to emotion, when emotion is used to transmit higher information content than can be done via contextual awareness and shared culture, or to transmit complex ideas quickly. You could even argue that's a large reason for the existence of art (much of which is paid propaganda, other propaganda of the artist's ideas spread using appeal to emotion).
To use a writer's flaws to censor their work out of discussion is a subtler, more powerful version of Orwell's 1984 book censorship. I hold that all books should be discussed, even the "unpalatable" ones.
Your whole post starts from an assumption on what the parent meant (that he assumed you support Ayn Rand and that he suggested Heinlein specifically to address that) and then proceeds with irrelevant references to various fallacies.
First, obviously one can suggest a book that they think "demolishes" Ayn Rand's (or any other author's) views, regardless of whether they think that the person they suggest it to supports Rand or not.
But let's get into the implication and see, if it was true, whether it could be justified.
So, you protest on the implication you think the parent makes that "by attacking the use of a quote to ridicule those who have read Ayn Rand and attempt to present her ideas, I am myself promoting Ayn Rand's ideas".
And you name various fallacies to show why this is not necessarily true.
Well, it might not be a logical conclusion in the formal logic sense, but it's a very probable conclusion given all we know about human behavior, how conversations go, etc -- not to mention your writing style.
In life, as opposed to pure math, we often need, and do, judgement calls based on incomplete data, calls that don't actually follow with 100% logical certainty, but are nevertheless quite clear from the general context. Sure, we might be wrong in some cases. That's still a net positive, if we are correct in most cases. 100% correctness is for the inhabitants of Vulcan.
I don't know what the parent consider you -- he might consider you a fellow anti-Rand person for all I know, and suggested the book because you'd appreciate it being such.
But to my eyes you totally look like a pro-Rand person -- not just because you jumped to criticize the quote (yes, it appealed to emotion -- but people tend to ignore that when it concerns emotions and quotes they are in favor of), but also because of the overall tone of the responses and the fallacitis ("oh, I discovered this blunt tool on the internet, let's hammer every conversation into a inquiry for objective truth").
Yes, one can. My complaint here was that it was not relevant to what was being discussed. It's similar to a discussion on the latest Postgres being hijacked by yet another languages war.
> In life, as opposed to pure math, we often need, and do, judgement calls based on incomplete data, calls that don't actually follow with 100% logical certainty, but are nevertheless quite clear from the general context
Agreed.
> 100% correctness is for the inhabitants of Vulcan.
Disagree. You make the best decision based on the incomplete data available, and your own value system. That decision is by definition "correct". There are always costs to any path.
> to my eyes you totally look like a pro-Rand person
This is irrelevant to the discussion, except as an ad hominem. Ad hominems are justified in a very small number of cases where directly relevant to the situation. Learning that an investor has a history of playing hardball with his portfolio companies is relevant when examining his term sheet. Dismissing entire arguments due to them not being branded right is not.
I am not trying to defend myself from belonging to a certain tribe or not, as it would not add to the discussion and would probably detract from it by taking it further down the road to the Trump/Clinton debates' tone. I am attempting to clarify arguments, values, premises and ideas for myself and others. You may assume it is propaganda: my own ideas, that I am trying to convince others of.
> because of the overall tone of the responses
What is the appropriate tone for responding? I believe I was sufficiently polite and civil, and fair in presenting my position. Please help me improve my communication style by pointing out how this was not the case.
> "oh, I discovered this blunt tool on the internet, let's hammer every conversation into a inquiry for objective truth"
It predates the internet. Technically I was first exposed to these ideas in Critical Thinking classes in high school, although self-study of logic and various books and life experience helped pad out most of it.
I would just add that the complexity of objective truth, and its lack of total discoverability (due to personal subjectivity, etc.) does not imply its inexistence, or the inadvisability of seeking to get closer to it. My philosophy chops are not developed enough to discuss this one much further though.
>This is irrelevant to the discussion, except as an ad hominem.
It is irrelevant to the original theme of the post, but it is quite relevant to the subthread that started with two quotes from and about Rand, and you coming to criticize the poster of the second quote. We're way too into that subthread for it to be irrelevant.
>What is the appropriate tone for responding? I believe I was sufficiently polite and civil, and fair in presenting my position. Please help me improve my communication style by pointing out how this was not the case.
That would be relevant if I had accused you that your tone was bad. What I say is completely different: that your tone made me think that you are a pro-Rand person (concerned with objectivity, overuse of logical fallacies, defensive of Rand, etc).
>It predates the internet.
Yes, but most people one meets online discovered it on the internet, often as part of a whole related culture (skeptics, etc.) and use it as a blunt instrument. The laundry list of fallacies wasn't that popular before the internet anyway, not even in philosophical and logician's discourses.
> It is irrelevant to the original theme of the post, but it is quite relevant to the subthread that started with two quotes from and about Rand, and you coming to criticise the poster of the second quote.
My belonging to the Ayn Rand tribe is irrelevant to the quality of my arguments, in the same way as your distaste for her work does not stop you from seeing the value in the original quote.
> "your tone was bad" "your tone made me think that you are a pro-Rand person (concerned with objectivity, overuse of logical fallacies, defensive of Rand, etc)"
Everything in the brackets strikes me as "bad" except "concerned with objectivity" (shouldn't we all be?) although in that case I think you meant to say Objectivism. If the tone, as opposed to the arguments, implies bad things, then the tone is bad.
This is a bit more complicated if the tone is merely a signal which might indicate belonging to a bad tribe, as opposed to the tone being objectively bad, because then we get on to deciding which tribe is good or bad. Personally, I have no inclination for going down that path for previously mentioned reasons.
I try hard not to judge people based on the signals they emit, except when I do not have the time to form a proper judgement, and I always hear what they have to say, as it is a way to learn something new (sometimes).
I still disagree with your implying that I am merely "laundry listing" big words as opposed to making points using them to rapidly communicate relevant concepts, but at this point I do not think we will reach agreement so I will agree to disagree and move on to the next thread.
>Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory).
Thankfully, that was not an ad hominem. It was a quote against a particular BOOK.
>Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow them blindly
So, kind of like Ayn Rand, which had a known history of blind following entourage?
> Thankfully, that was not an ad hominem. It was a quote against a particular BOOK.
I've explained in detail why I disagree with you on this.
I see you have engaged into the discussion further, for which I thank you as this is a lot of fun (and I mean this genuinely, in a "thank you for taking the time and effort to engage into a discussion with me" way). Although this is the top comment reply right now, I'll continue the conversation on the other thread.
> So, kind of like Ayn Rand, which had a known history of blind following entourage?
Do I need to expand on why this, in this context, is ad hominem coupled with an inappropriate use of the association fallacy?
FWIW I happen to agree with your statement to an extent (that there exists a bit of a cult, and that it resembles blind following), but disagree with its relevance to this line of discussion, or the assumption I half get the impression of that all people who reference Ayn Rand are blind followers.
I personally know hundreds of people who have taken value from Ayn Rand's writings without agreeing with her on everything. Note that I am not sure whether that is what you are implying, but I'm addressing the possibility that it is.
> So, kind of like Ayn Rand, which had a known history of blind following entourage?
Without any sort of quantification, that is a very hollow argument. All systems of ideas, and originators of such systems, have a history of "blind following".
Saying that Objectivists are less critical of their own and competing ideas strikes me as pretty laughable, especially when compared to the more popular ideas - like Marxism. Maybe Ayn just doesn't look as good on a T-shirt as Che...
There are many ways to categorize and define argumentational fallacies, and so it is often difficult and disingenuous to argue over exactly which fallacy is violated by a particular utterance.
But since this is blown up since I last looked at it, why not take a moment to try to diagnose this.
It is not in fact an 'ad hominem', as you said, since an ad hominem attacks an argument by attacking a person (or group). Though it is, to me, perfectly fine to call it that, since that is the result, the second quote does not in fact attack any argument directly.
It is a response to the act of quoting Rand, rather than to anything specific that Rand was quoted as saying.
Secondly it is also not an 'appeal to emotion', since an appeal to emotion is again directed at making a particular argument, in this case by making people feel instead of think. This again does not fit the second quote, because it does not make any specific argument at all.
From what I can tell, the most descriptive term we can find for what makes this quote by 'John Rogers' so upsetting, as evidenced by the amount of discussion below and above, is that it is a 'smear'.
Its nature is that it does not attack the argument made by the quote it is posted in reply to, but instead attacks anyone who might believe, and quote, anything from that book, presumably including the OP.
To quote Wikipedia [1]:
> A [smear] is an intentional, premeditated effort to undermine an individual's or group's reputation, credibility, and character.
...
> Smear tactics differ from normal discourse or debate in that they do not bear upon the issues or arguments in question. A smear is a simple attempt to malign a group or an individual with the aim of undermining their credibility.
> Smears often consist of ad hominem attacks in the form of unverifiable rumors and distortions, half-truths, or even outright lies; smear campaigns are often propagated by gossip magazines. Even when the facts behind a smear campaign are demonstrated to lack proper foundation, the tactic is often effective because the target's reputation is tarnished before the truth is known.
> Smears are also effective in diverting attention away from the matter in question and onto the a specific individual or group. The target of the smear typically must focus on correcting the false information rather than on the original issue.
> Smear tactics are considered by many to be a low, disingenuous form of discourse; they are nevertheless very common.
So, while this is not strictly one of the traditional logical fallacies, I think it is nevertheless clearly a bad form of discourse, and frankly inappropriate.
Milton Friedman made a similar point about the advantages of a complex tax code for those in power.
A complex tax code favors those that will contribute to politicians in order to gain a special benefit or avoid a specific harm. Paraphrased obviously. Here's the original lecture: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8
The Dr. Ferris talk to Mr. Reardon is one of those quotes that rings so true when you read Rand's work for the first time as a teenager.
Anecdotally I too had this "They Live" sunglasses moment.
You are reading Atlas Shrugged and you think this book is the Truth this is IT. Those other silly teenagers getting into religion or socialism or drugs or music they are so deluded.
I personally have no problem with the John Rogers quote as a response to my comment since I don't think the poster meant to attack me as a person (at least I hope so :) ). After all it's not like I made some broad statement endorsing Ayn Rand.
Funnily enough the xkcd-comic you linked really made an impression on me when it was first posted, since at the time I was having that exact thought almost every day. XKCD showed me how foolish that was and I was and am really thankful for that. (Even though my false sense of superiority was pretty comforting)
Does anyone know if there's a name for this form of humour? (That is: forcing a split between two things, then describing the second one first in a manner that is ambiguous until the punchline confirms the order.)
I don't know if the type of humor itself has a name, but the technique it employs is misdirection, of which there are many variations such as posing a question to 1 of 2 very different people, when the more suitable target (to audience) starts to answer, asker then says "I wasn't talking to you"
Incidentally I've noticed that jokes structured like this have become so common in UK comedy shows that the punchline is often unnecessary or even omitted.
Is that the John Rodgers that gave us masterpieces like American Outlaws and Catwoman?
Maybe I'm wrong/misremembering but I feel like all criticism of Atlas Shrugged I've read seems to assume that whoever reads it will be brainwashed into becoming a fanboy who cannot reflect on the work. I thought it was one of the more interesting books I've read but a bit long winded. I don't think it's well written but the content was interesting (I do think "The Driver" by Garrett is a better book).
I do appreciate interesting ideas even if I don't agree with them (I partly agree with quite a few thoughts by Rand at least on some level)
Every time a Russian or Chinese oligarch goes to prison the headlines in Western media are about the evil dictatorial governments oppressing the poor oligarchs.
Since all these companies (Yahoo, Google, FB, MSFT, etc) all operate and with users in other countries, what happen when other countries/governments demand the same "search/access" of info?
I don't believe they are capable of writing the "siphon" they are accused of. To be honest, I don't think they actually have engineers. I think they just use summer interns.
Another reason for users and enterprises alike to avoid US companies and services. And another reason for entrepreneurs to start companies outside the US - escape the stigma, escape the potential clash with secret courts.
This reminds me of what happened to my grandfather in the early 30's. He was employed by a small glassworks in PA, a factory town that owned his home, the town store, post office everything. They opened his mail and fired him for trying to start a union. Three kids under five and a wife thrown out on the street. Seems like the Oligarchs are still reading the spues mail all of these years later.
Setting up and using PGP personally isn't all that hard, though it's got a few twists. Above and beyond any learning-curve issues:
1. It doesn't protect metadata. Who you communicate with, and when, and what subject you specify, are all available to any system which can read the packets. Unless you only accept and transmit TLS (secured-session) transport (HTTPS), this means that your communications patterns are in the clear. If your receiving party are fetching messages via a cleartext protocol (IMAP or POP, say, and in some cases HTTP, rather than the secured variants IMAPS, POPS, and HTTPS), then the headers and possibly mail body will be clear.
Cryptography has to be end-to-end to be effective, though attack surfaces exist at many levels. Ultimately the viewing device itself may be compromised, but that's a rather unscalable attack.
2. If you're using PGP but nobody else you're communicating with is then you're not gaining much. Keep in mind, I've been yelled at and/or chided by highly technical people with strong security backgrounds over sending PGP-encrypted emails. Including senior Google technical staff and Gene Spafford, of recent memory.
Much of that is due to a wide range of email clients not playing well with PGP, which gets again to vendor issues.
I recently posted a long critique of email on HN, and ultimately it's the lack of privacy, security, encryption, authentication, and reputation which make me think it's time to scrap it and start over, although learning from it and taking the best bits along.
Friendly reminder: the FBI and NSA are part of the executive branch of government and report to the President of the United States. Make no mistake -- there absolutely is someone who could stop this. The fact that this clearly unconstitutional activity not only continued after being exposed, but actually appears to has expanded in its scope, leaves us with but one conclusion: the President supports this activity and wants it to continue.
> (...) are part of the executive branch of government and report to the President of the United States.
It's very likely, from what we have observed over the past sixty to seventy years, that the Executive Branch does not operate this way in practice. The actual bureaucratic system has probably morphed to allow for deniability and other measures that offer structural protection against political or legal attacks.
But we know that he knows about it. Because he has talked about it. He once gave a speech specifically about government spying. Not only was the illegal activity not stopped, it expanded. There simply is no deniability left.
Most illustrative part:
"Yahoo President Marissa Mayer and the company's legal team kept the order secret from the company's security team."
If you have to hide things from your own security team, it's pretty clear you're doing something very bad and you know it.
And my imaginary hat off to Stamos for resigning when he found his boss betrayed user privacy and undermined security. If everybody had such level of integrity, doing shady stuff would be much harder.
"""
The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.
"""
To be frank, the more I hear about those stories, the less I'm shocked.
There is nothing to be shocked about. Unless nobody else than intelligence officials are getting access to this, and if the investigations are legit, then what?
News like this are trying to ride the whole Snowden train, but that's not what Snowden what whistle blowing about. Snowden was trying to warn about the abuse of those tools.
Now people moan and yell each time agencies try to do their job.
This is not just another case of surveillance. This is a company betraying its own security chief and programming a backdoor to spy on its own customers on behalf of a bunch of agencies.
It is unprecedented, overreaching and must not be tolerated.
So you really think that a free email service will "protect your privacy?" Any of them?
Why would you think that?
FWIW, SIGINT is a major part of the present festivities in the Woah on Terruh. It's simply unrealistic to expect anything transmitted through ordinary means to be remotely private.
> According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
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