The injunction is quite harsh and I agree that it's likely to be seriously modified in its final form.
As fare as predictions go do you think the gov will come out clean or it'll end with "gov did a bad thing"? And if so will _you_ come back and say "i guess the government did do a bad thing"?
First, i always admit when i'm wrong, you can find plenty of examples on HN :)
I don't go through life pretending i will always be right, and I try to learn from the times i get it wrong :)
As for what will happen -
Honestly - it's hard to say.
I think it will be that some people in the government asked for things they shouldn't have (let's ignore if they are illegal things or not or whatever for a second). The government is big. My experience with any large company discovery is that somebody somewhere says or does something stupid. It's hard to believe that won't be the case for the government here[1] :)
I think some people take the view that's okay (despite imbalance of power), and others think they should only be allowed to ask for things that are affirmatively okay.
Historically, the court result has been the former, though usually it's closer to "state/feds pass law saying x, ask you to do x, law gets overturned as not okay".
I think it may be decided to be closer to the middle now if it makes it to SCOTUS - but i'm not sure what that looks like. It's hard to come up with bright line standards, but bad facts make bad law - if the there are senior officials ordering censorship, ....
I don't think folks will go all the way to saying the government may not ask for things that later may be decided to be illegal to ask for.
[1] I would personally be much more concerned if it was senior officials vs random worker bees. Unlike some corporations, the government is actually pretty darn good at retaining evidence,etc. So if senior officials ordered it, the likelihood of a record existing is much much higher than "CEO who verbally tells a junior software engineer to do something bad" or whatever.
Our founding fathers made the distinction between civil law and natural law.
Rights are granted by natural law. If rights were granted by civil law then they would not be rights, they would be privileges and privileges can be taken away.
That is a clear basis for which to make distinctions between cases a person might agree or disagree with even if the process is identical.
When law is used against the weak, it's probably wrong. When law is used against the powerful, it's probably right.
If you believe in rule of law, rule of law is the idea of preventing arbitrary exercises of power. You have to have power to exercise it, so rule of law is first and foremost a belief that the law should protect the weak and bind the powerful.
As fare as predictions go do you think the gov will come out clean or it'll end with "gov did a bad thing"? And if so will _you_ come back and say "i guess the government did do a bad thing"?