Hacker News Reader

Comment by AddisonRyan | Hacker News Reader

Are people actually upset with Google and the other tech companies over all of this? It seems they were legally compelled to do it. Be furious at Washington, not Silicon Valley.

View on HN

Funny how tech companies don't mind breaking the law on principle when it aligns with growing their company, but when it comes to principle alone, they break like twigs.

I think this sums up the issue really well. But I think that's how the world works I guess !

They can certainly manage to avoid compliance with at least the spirit of the law when it really matters to them. I guess avoiding paying tax is important enough to engage armies of lawyers and reorganise your corporate structure, while this isn't.

In this case, I would be happy if some CEO refused, breaking the law in support of a higher principle.

Good luck finding someone who is willing to risk his own reputation and livelihood, including hireability (after he and the company have the shit sued out of them by their shareholders, including institutional investors), as well as the livelihood of his employees.

I understand. But the world would be totally different and much better if people didn't cave in like this.

Very few people don't cave when you put a gun to their head (NSA information demands like this require the direct supporting threat of violence as an or-else).

These guys have millions of dollars already, and just think about the goodwill generated from standing up on principle. We're not at the point where the government can seize their assets "because f___ you, that's why"

They're just as cowardly as many others facing this situation, except the CEO has a lot less to lose (if you can understand this paradox, cheers)

Isn't that the reason they seized Dotcom's assets? They had no legal basis for that.

in dotcom's case, the calculation was that he would be an unsympathetic character:

fat, obnoxious, foreigner, fortune gained from a somewhat illicit business (let's be honest about the service he provided to both licit and illicit customers)

You mean like this? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/business/global/top-google...

Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio did that when it was blatantly illegal - he's serving a six year prison sentence now.

This implies he was chucked into prison for refusing to hand over data to the US government, which is misleading at best.

He was imprisoned for insider trading, appealed on the basis that a witness's testimony (relating to the data-grab) was excluded from his defence, and won a re-trial where he had his conviction and sentence re-instated.

My understanding of this sequence of events is that while the witness was improperly excluded from his trial (thereby allowing him a re-trial), it did not materially alter anything about the 19 counts of insider trading of which he was convicted. So basically he did a good thing, then did a bad thing, and went to prison for the bad thing. Seems all right.

That is exactly what happens when you fight the powerful. You don't go to jail for fighting. You go in for something else that is entirely disconnected. It could even be a rape case (Yes, I'm talking about Assange)

And that is exactly the problem with PRISM. It gives people in power the ammunition to find you guilty of some unrelated crime if you challenge them.

    “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”
    - Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police

It doesn't matter. If you use their services, you are under the watch of Big Brother. Now I have to go untangle the mess that is my integration with Google. VPS in Argentina here I come!

Were their only options really "comply or go to jail"? I feel like they should have done more.

You're right.

But google also has part of the blame: it reassured people with "do no evil" and it's fights with government, instead of telling from the start that this would happen , as they would probably have known , and offering better technical protections against such things.

But in reality , it's a complex subject. Maybe they really thought that in world with global terrorism and crime , internet surveillance is the lesser of two evils.

Schmidt already tried telling people this would happen:

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

Instead of praising him for honesty, people started taking his quote out of context. "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."

They should have moved all their operations to a free country instead of caving in.

Five years later, the population of Iceland has exceeded that of the United States.

I just want the option to choose my data locality when I sign up. e.g. "Google, please save all my data in your Switzerland data centers".

I can't do anything to Washington. But if enough of us can make e.g. Google bleed cash they can do something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com