
Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind - Lightning
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/technology/secret-court-ruling-put-tech-companies-in-data-bind.html?pagewanted=all
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tptacek
Read the court order. It is, as NYT says, heavily redacted, but it's also full
of interesting stuff about the FISA process.

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Fuxy
Decentralization is the only way.

It seems the only way to solve this is to force all big companies to have
servers in every country they offer their services to and limit all local
traffic to these servers only and be made to comply with local law.

Completely impractical from the internet architectural point of view but that
would make information on foreign citizens quite hard to get

That way any information retrieved from these servers and sent to Americans
can be considered and act of treason in that country.

Everybody seems to be forgetting that the internet is global and if they are
going to comply with one countries laws then they should be forced to comply
with every countries laws.

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tlb
I hate the way nytimes misuses "trove" to mean "a valuable collection". The
word is from French "trouvé" through the expression "treasure trove", meaning
found treasure. It has a technical legal meaning: treasure apparently hidden
so long ago that its original owner can be presumed dead and therefore can be
kept by the finder.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_trove](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_trove)

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discostrings
> FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to
> turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain
> country.

I wonder what the source for this is. It contrasts interestingly with Google's
statement regarding Prism:

> Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order
> that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand
> over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that
> such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing
> information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely
> false.

If Google received one of these broader requests, wouldn't they have had to
comply with it? If the requests can be that broad, it's hard to imagine they
never did. It's harder to imagine why they would deny it so strongly if they
did receive one.

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jdp23
Yes, if they challenged it and lost, they would have to comply with it.

Assuming David Drummond and Larry Page's denial is accurate, there are various
possible explanations. Two that leap to mind:

\- the government has so far held off on a broad order for Google because they
assumed that Google would challenge such a broad order (whereas given past
history Verizon and most other telcos would be likely to go along meekly).

\- perhaps internet-based orders can be targeted more precisely, so Google's
gotten requests for tens of thousands of user but not millions

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leoc
> (whereas given past history Verizon and most other telcos would be likely to
> go along meekly)

Weren't varous telcos co-operating with this program before it was strictly
speaking legal? I seem to recall something about them being given retroactive
immunity. Indeed, I'd guess that Verizon's broad metadata order is less a
means to really compel Verizon than a convenient sicknote for them, giving
immunity and some PR cover in the event of discovery.

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jdp23
Yes indeed, almost all the telcos (except for Qwest) cooperated with the Bush
administration's illegal wiretapping in the early 2000s. The Protect America
Act in 2007 and FISA Amendments Act in 2008 made it legal -- as a bonus the
FAA included retroactive immunity for telcos.

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JumpCrisscross
" _Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers
said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and
fewer disincentives to rock the boat._ "

This makes the increasing concentration in IT and communications more
worrying.

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rayiner
> It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly
> vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads,
> many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures
> that resists sharing that data with the government.

Bizarre definition of "libertarian."

