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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

What amazes me is that among those corporations with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars, not one of them challenged the constitutionality of the decision in court. Not one, not once.

Not that it would be necessary in an obvious case like this, but each one of Microsoft/Skype, Google/Youtube, Apple and Facebook could easily have hired the nation's best and brightest one thousand lawyers at $1,000 an hour, full time for 10 years to defend privacy. It would have been well within their means. Yet, each of them chose to back down. Each of them chose to fail their users' trust.

I don't think its due to cowardice. If these organisations cared the slightest bit they would have acted to protect their users. Not in the wildest scenario would the US government have jailed the leaders of Apple, Google or Microsoft. My best guess is they got something in return.

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Correction: Yahoo did fight, and lost. The details aren't all released, but here's a precis of what's public:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/yahoo-failed-fisa-f...

It's possible that there's as-yet undisclosed legal action with some of the others; the secrecy around just about any proceeding in the FISC makes it very hard to tell.

I wondered the same thing. With secret courts and secret hearings, who knows who is fighting or not for our rights?

Fighting unconstitutional laws in the phony secret "court" set up by the same laws is not really fighting, is it? It's sort of accepting the terms.

Take the battle to the real courts and ask them to decide on the matter.

Unfortunately, those are real courts, their functions and jurisdictions have been established by the Congress.

If congress can redefine courts into what is basically an administrative panel, then the entire separation of powers can be short-circuited.

It's not a court just because congress says so.

That's the crux of the matter. The root cause is that half of Americans are okay with such courts.

> The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Congress certainly does have the 'say so' -- at least with 'inferior Courts'. That still leaves the Supreme Court though as final arbiter.

I'd like to agree with you. I believe there is a category of societal actions that constitutes a court of justice within the framework of a civil society; secrecy doesn't fall into that category.

Exactly how do you get standing to sue the government for something they are not doing with something that does not exist?

Not in the wildest scenario would the US government have jailed the leaders of Apple, Google or Microsoft.

That may be naive. Most people have skeletons in their closets. The government would use these to pressure those leaders to acquiesce. I suspect the most dangerous skeletons are ones which seem harmless to you, but cast in the proper light they can be used as a justification for punishment. E.g. Something which seems harmless now can retroactively be used to claim you were doing insider trading. Few people would step up to defend you, even if the charges are baseless, because recently it's been fashionable to hate capitalists, and trading stocks is the epitome of capitalism. So it'd be very much "obey us or we will litigate you into bending your knee anyway."

Jobs was immune because he was the CEO equivalent of a rockstar. To try to pull baseless charges against him would outrage the public. Yet I'd imagine the public would get grim satisfaction out of seeing Ballmer punished, even if the charges were baseless, because most people don't like him. It's shallow, but it seems true.

I can see two sides to this.

On one hand, the CEO of Qwest was convicted of insider trading, and he claims it was retaliation by the NSA because Qwest would not participate in warrantless wiretapping.

On the other hand, the federal government had a perfect excuse to prosecute Steve Jobs in 2006 with the options backdating scandal, but chose not to. Those would not have been baseless charges--Apple really did backdate those options. The government just concluded that Jobs was not personally culpable.

Maybe they were using it as leverage.

Well, PRISM seems to have been created in '07. Plus Apple didn't matter very much in '06 -- not in the same way Google mattered. Apple didn't have much user data for the government to be interested in, because iPhone didn't launch till June '07.

That's actually a perfect example of leverage that the government would have used against a technology company to pressure them into doing the government's bidding.

I remain astonished that Martha Stewart was targeted, convicted, and jailed. I don't care either way if she did some thing wrong. I care about the unequal application of justice.

In contrast, I can't imagine anyone targeting Oprah. She'd destroy (PR-wise) anyone challenging her. Recall that beef lobby's attacks.

Jobs is like Silicon Valley's Oprah.

I agree - it's what I mean when I say that I think they got something in return for not fighting the FISA requests. Could be antitrust cases that were dropped, tax hikes that were cancelled or more personal matters.

It's been my observation that revenue in the tens of billions of dollars doesn't enable a company to make bold, risky moves -- it hinders it. People become very risk-averse when there's a lot to lose. Many of these well established, high revenue companies can't even take the risks that are necessary to continue having revenue in the tens of billions of dollars, much less stand up to nation-states.

For all we know, some of them may have challenged it but they cannot make those details public because they're not even allowed to admit the NSA requested such information to begin with.

Well, how does one fight dictatorship in a court that is owned by dictatorship?

FISA give them the right to install real-time monitoring on premise.

That means if you fight, they put a server in your shop.

It was just not worth it until now. That's going to be the real legacy of the Snowden leaks.

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