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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

It's not possible for you to know how hard to contain it is.

The commonality of strange beliefs like this makes me seriously wonder if there is an initiative on social media to teach this form of thinking as being correct, because it is certainly the default. Try defecting from the game for a month and watch the other players from the sidelines, and see if you don't see what I'm talking about.

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Generally the more people you tell, the harder it is to keep a secret. I don't what makes that a "strange belief" but okay.

Well: it's the generalization that a large corporation is communicating with an agency as a whole entity - thousands of employees aware, top to bottom - as opposed to just 1 or 2 people at the top receiving secret orders.

It is strange because that's exactly the opposite of how a corporation operates. If every employee (or even too many) employees are aware of the decision making process, that process stalls out.

The default view should be: the person at the top is being the one contacted, and the employees are not in the know.

My point was that there isn't a secret scheme here where federal agents are pulling the strings at the top. They literally just ask private companies for data either through court orders or side channels and they'll get it eventually.

All out in the public view (essentially)

I think the disagreement is over whether the decision to ship the product was influenced. It is not hard to have a perfectly acceptable business reason, but also have secondary motive(s), and not many people need to be involved.

Plus it is not necessarily knowable.

Look how less ambitious this new characterization of your initial claim is.

> and know they'll have access to the data anyway

Here we agree.

Companies dealing only with new features, products and other things that are meaningless in the greater picture manage to keep secrets for years all the time. Why wouldn't more nefarious things also be able to kept secret. Before Snowden, plausible deniability existed. But not anymore.

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