
Twitter sues U.S. government over ability to disclose surveillance orders - tshtf
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/twitter-sues-us-government-over-limits-on-ability-to-disclose-surveillance-orders/2014/10/07/5cc39ba0-4dd4-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html
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jobu
_The government’s position, the complaint said, “forces Twitter either to
engage in speech that has been preapproved by government officials or else to
refrain from speaking altogether.”_

Isn't that the definition of censorship? I'm surprised they don't actually use
that word in the lawsuit:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/201...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/10/07/National-
Security/Graphics/Complaintnew.pdf)

~~~
rayiner
"Censorship" isn't unconstitutional (e.g. obscenities laws). Certain kinds of
censorship may be, and they have specific names.

~~~
adventured
That's an interesting statement. I regard obscenities laws to be
unconstitutional. Specifically, to be extremely anti-free speech and anti-free
press (depending). All forms of censorship are unconstitutional and blatant
violations of the first amendment.

Given the countless flawed or flat-out wrong positions the Supreme Court has
taken over the centuries when it comes to individual rights, I think we can
likely agree they are not always right in their conclusions.

~~~
rayiner
The exceptions to the first amendment are largely rooted in historical
practice, which informs what the founders would have understood the scope of
free speech to be. I don't think its a supportable statement that they would
have understood all forms of censorship to violate the first amendment.

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sophacles
Back when I was in 8th grade, there was a guy who claimed he had a girlfriend.
She lived in [two towns over]. But no one believed him because they never saw
her. Never got her last name. There were just claims that "she's from [town],
and she's awesome".

I have the same reaction to the national security theatre that we're always
presented with from classified space. "Trust us there's a real threat, but you
don't know about it because it's classified". They can't tell us anything
about their 'constant' and 'heroic' efforts to save us from the evil monster
redacted. There's no evidence presented to me.

On the other hand, the real bad guys are constantly doing stuff to get in the
news. So the only conclusion I have is 'national security' is the bureaucratic
way of saying "my girlfriend lives two towns over".

~~~
opendais
This is pretty much it.

I boarded a commuter plane (prop plane, less than 50 seats) last month at a
small town airport. It had pre-9/11 security in place _and_ a broken metal
detector. I got a quick pat down that didn't even cover all my pockets. From
there, I got on a cross country jet identical to the ones that hit NYC or the
Pentagon on 9/11.

It is pretty clear either:

A) The government is so incompetent they can't be trusted with providing
anything resembling security.

B) They don't take their security theater seriously.

~~~
sophacles
As a person who lives in a small town with a small town airport, my self-
interest implores you to not talk about that sort of thing. I really like
getting out of bed at 7:15 for an 8:00 flight - getting to the airport 15 mins
before departure time and being at the gate right when boarding starts is
fantastic.

~~~
opendais
I don't blame you at all. I've been trying to move to a smaller town for
awhile. Massive metropolises are nice and all but I'm kinda bored of it.

Would you say I am wrong tho?

~~~
amurph
At the same time, though there is very little evidence that that sort of
security stuff does much to help. Adding the extra security doors to the
cockpit helped a lot, but most of the other post 9/11 changes do not have a
clear benefit security wise.

------
uptown
I've never really understood why companies aren't able to disclose these
numbers. It tells the public nothing about specific investigations.

To me - it seems like the government has chosen to draw the line in the sand
so far beyond where it should be, to avoid having the actual debate over
corporate disclosure of more-specific information.

~~~
Kalium
Think of it in crypto terms. If you can know _when_ an investigation is
ongoing, you can learn something useful as an adversary.

~~~
seanflyon
That is some amount of information, so there is some value in concealing it.
It has the downside of removing accountability which I think is more valuable
than a trivial amount of information.

~~~
jfoster
One way to achieve some degree of both might be a time limited embargo on
disclosure of particular cases.

~~~
Kalium
That's the equivalent of adding jitter to try to foul up a timing attack. It
doesn't really work.

~~~
SapphireSun
Not exactly. A timing attack relies on targeting an ongoing process. If you
disclose after the investigation is complete, then there's nothing to attack.

In your analogy, it would be closer to someone logging and then disclosing the
fact they had logged in at some point (years) in the future.

(FWIW, I am not a security researcher, but I've heard about how these things
work. Would love to be corrected if wrong. :) )

~~~
uxp
Considering there are people sitting in Guantanamo and elsewhere who haven't
been charged with a crime, "after the investigation is complete" could be
decades.

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suprgeek
This eminently reasonable - Basically all Twitter wants to say is we have
received X requests of Y type. Right now they are restricted to broad
categories 0-999, between 6 & 8 thousand etc.

I thought they were going farther - that they wanted a per account
notification ability; not the case.

~~~
higherpurpose
Hopefully even small such victories against NSLs will encourage more companies
to sue the government for using NSLs.

Or we can just push for Congress to _stop_ renewing the Patriot Act next year.

~~~
happyscrappy
Congress will only stop renewing it if the voters demand it.

~~~
someone234
Hong Kong, as the most recent example, has once again shown us that whenever
"the voters" demand something, the government's response is tear-gas and
batons.

But hey, governments are "by the people" and "for the people" of course, and
to think otherwise would be tantamount to.. actually seeing what's happening!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Be fair - the crowds didn't go into the streets to vote.

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2xlbuds
I'm curious as to what would actually happen if Twitter just decided to
release the exact numbers. Would they be slapped with a fine? What if they
didn't pay the fine? Would they be forced to be shut down? People would not
tolerate that one bit.

~~~
chimeracoder
Almost certainly criminal charges, and possibly (probably?) ones that "pierce
the veil" (ie, go after the executives/employees personally, not [just] the
corporation).

Not exactly something anybody would really want to risk.

(I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice).

~~~
2xlbuds
Would any jury convict those people? I'd like to hope the answer is no. Again
these are just rhetorical questions, I don't work for twitter.

~~~
grecy
Who says they'd be tried in a courtroom that even _has_ a jury. Remember, we
now know there are courtrooms with no juries.

~~~
themartorana
They're the rooms no banker who helped cause a global economic crisis will
ever see the inside of, but if you reveal that you have been required to turn
over information to a secret government with a secret court against every
principal of the Constitution, well... I imagine you'd know the color of the
wallpaper pretty well.

~~~
adventured
It's not just the bankers that were spared of course, all the politicians that
were partially responsible for the economic melt-down were shielded as well.
From Greenspan to Clinton, nobody in D.C. was touched either.

The Fed has caused more destruction of wealth in the last 20 years than all
the private sector bankers in US history have combined. Not a single person
from the Fed will ever, nor has ever, gotten into trouble for it. They can
destroy the US economy with insane rates, QE, stimulus measures, you name it.
They can debase the dollar and steal trillions in savings from average
Americans. They can encourage incredibly dangerous asset inflation and
speculative behavior with 'free' money policies, and nobody will ever do
anything about it.

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erenemre
If I understand correctly, companies cannot say "we have received X (let's say
9) requests".

So, is it possible for them to say "We have NOT received 8 or 10 requests"?
This clearly doesn't say how many they have received but gives a clue that
they might have received 9.

Please ignore me if this is silly.

~~~
golemotron
It's not silly but it won't work. People in the tech community typically don't
see that you can't "hack the law" like it's machine or program. Judges just
don't put up with it. They're adept at augmenting the law with case law that
covers the loopholes.

~~~
uncoder0
Totally, when I first started learning and caring more about the law I came up
with all these clever hacks around various legal agreements and laws...
Luckily for me I had friends who went to Law School to explain to me that the
law is primarily about intent and most of my hacks weren't loopholes but
instead plainly in the wrong and would be dealt with in court if they hadn't
already through case law. I think its pretty common for hackers to look at
legal agreements like a series of boolean statements that can be solved...
sadly it doesn't work that way. Law is complicated :/

~~~
click170
Law works the way we want computer programming to work. That is to say, "Do
what I meant, not what I coded".

I think we get the impression that it's not that way based on our perception
of corporations driving money-filled trucks through legal loopholes, but it's
just not the same thing to a judge. Regardless of whether it is to you and I.

~~~
deciplex
>I think we get the impression that it's not that way based on our perception
of corporations driving money-filled trucks through legal loopholes

I get the impression that not everyone is playing by the same set of rules,
not that they have particularly clever lawyers (although, most of them
probably have that as well).

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wildwood
I think this is the first time I've seen the phrase "post Edward Snowden
world", used like "post 9-11 world" has been for the last decade-plus.

I hope that catches on.

Edit: can't believe I got the name wrong. Fixed.

~~~
J_Darnley
Now I want to know what you said the first time around.

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drderidder
For companies like Twitter, being based in the US seems to have become
something of a liability. There's Google, Apple, et al attempting to quell
international concerns with promises of better encryption... I wouldn't be
surprised if one of them just up and moves their operation overseas. After
all, some of the up-and-coming open-source competition is a decentralized,
globally distributed organization and not under the thumb of any nation state
per se. They have the luxury, I think, of cherry picking the best privacy and
security policies, and can open the kimono on their source code to prove it.

~~~
mikefonseca
But where would these multinationals go? Haven't we seen that the arms of the
US Government stretch across the globe? Wouldn't continued lobbying of the
government and eventual reform be a simpler and cheaper solution?

~~~
drderidder
It's extremely unlikely imho that surveillance capabilities will be ceded by
any of the nations that now possess them. More importantly, the trust that's
been lost can't be regained even if the wheels of politics eventually grind
out some kind of compromise. So waiting for a political resolution doesn't
look like a great option. What I expect to happen is for the engineering
community to push more secure protocols forward (for example, a rejuvenation
or successor of IPsec) to guarantee more secure communication. Individual
nations will then need to decide if their citizens have a right to real
privacy, or just the right to be lied to about privacy. Multinational
corporations have some flexibility in terms of where and how they do business,
but they have to acquiesce to whatever local laws apply in the countries where
they operate - with their own statement of ethics being some kind of baseline,
hopefully. One protection afforded companies based in say, the EU, is that
they're under less obligation to backdoor their products under threat of the
US et al. That gives them a better position of trust with the EU market base.
Of course, their products destined for the US market may well be customised to
accommodate CALEA etc. Open source projects and foundations on the other hand
operate practically outside the purview of traditional government, it seems.
They're decentralized, and the source is open, so... although it has happened
but it's quite hard to get a backdoor into the codebase. It will take a long
time to sort out but basically I expect things like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Mobile,
and self-hosted "cloud" solutions (cozy.io) to take at least some market share
from proprietary predecessors.

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rrggrr
Twitter is a medium at the forefront of democracy movements worldwide. If
there were any site worth standing down surveillance in pursuit of a larger
foreign policy goal then I would have thought Twitter would be that site.
Instead, I'm now imagining young staffers at various US agencies squirming
with dumb chills as senior policy makers articulate Twitter's threat to US
national security or law enforcement objectives. On the other hand, I'm
hopeful these stupid decisions lead to a new generation of US policy makers
who will learn something from their bosses mistakes.

~~~
jarradhope
Well the problem is that policy making is completely institutionalized and
only serves the 1%, which is why software like Ethereum is going to be so
important in the future. It will democratize policy making and put it in the
hands of everyone. As well as means to articulate any other form of meetings
of the minds.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Democratizing policy making is not a guaranteed panacea. Things like the civil
rights movement don't happen as a result of democratic policy; they happen
when the majority are forced to live a better way.

The founders recognized pure democracy was not an ideal government, regardless
of technological issues with regard to implementing it. A republic allows
decisions to be made that the majority will never agree to.

------
kruczek
One thing I don't quite understand - why these companies won't move to other
countries with better privacy? Is it only because of huge bureaucratic and
logistical effort that would be required, or are there some laws which prevent
"emigration" of companies, or is it that they would have to provide such data
anyway, if they want to operate in US too (but then at least people in other
countries would be beyond US gov's harassment)?

~~~
pjc50
How could you run a startup outside San Francisco? /sarcasm

More seriously, if you decided you could do this in (say) Switzerland, you'd
have to move the company there _and all of the admin staff_ to prevent them
being suborned by the NSA. Most countries you'd want to move to have lengthy
immigration procedures. The cost is huge, not just financial but cutting
yourself off. Remember, if you _truly_ annoy the intelligence agencies, you'll
go on the no-fly or visa denial lists, and you'll never be able to visit your
family again. Just look at Snowden.

It's a political problem. No surveillance without acountability.

------
wahsd
Don't be surprised that the government prevails and the first amendment is
furthermore whittled away at in an every increasing desire for our government
to prove it's illegitimacy.

------
joeblau
While this is a valiant cause, I don't know what this buys Twitter in the long
run. If they have the ability to disclose exact numbers, the only number that
would really have any impact is 0. It would be interesting to know what, if
any, this number would have on their business.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Twitter has said they don't get many of these requests compared to e.g. Google
(not surprising, since most Twitter content is public). The difference between
"0" and "0-999" in a six month period is significant. Even "2" or "3" seems
very low compared to what the mind assumes "0-999" means (at least 500 and
perhaps closer to 1000).

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monotribble
Is there precedent that backs up the legality of National Security Letters?

~~~
ep103
I believe to date every time an individual has sued about receiving a national
security letter, the government has arrange to remove the NSL gag and get the
suit dropped, so as to prevent setting a precedence as to their limits or
illegality. But doing that requires a constitutional lawyer, and that is
expensive, so they continue to be effective gag tool.

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kelukelugames
Can someone help me understand if this is a big deal?

~~~
stringray
I think people wanting others to tell them what is and isn't a big deal seeds
some of the biggest problems in the western world.

~~~
tetrep
I think the implication here is that kelukelugames doesn't think it's a big
deal, and is asking others for input without explicitly taking a side.

~~~
kelukelugames
I like Twitter and I think it's interesting whenever a big company sues the US
government. I wanted to see everyone else's reactions.

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bmmayer1
This is a good wake-up call for all those "companies shouldn't have the same
first amendment rights as people" folks out there.

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vijayboyapati
Would it be too gushing of me to say that Twitter is by far the most heroic of
the large tech companies in the US? Good for them!

~~~
rnovak
because they're doing something other companies have already tried to do[1],
and failed? How are they any more heroic?

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-google-v-nsa-lawsuit-to-
proce...](http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-google-v-nsa-lawsuit-to-
proceed-7000020311/)

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obamasupporter
GO TWITTER!

