Many people point to the bad spelling and grammar of these powerful, abusive people and they say wow, that's a flex.
My own reaction is more like these people are stupid. It's not power that makes them write poorly. They're not capable of getting it right.
Look at what Noam Chomsky wrote to Epstein as a contrast. Multiple paragraphs and usually coherent. He makes Epstein look dumb. (Which he was.) I don't support what and to whom Chomsky was writing, but he is better at writing.
Exactly. Remember this is a guy who was "best friends" with Donald Trump. It's just a group of idiots who became rich and powerful through a combination of luck and criminality.
People see them on the screen so often they think they know them. I guess the term "parasocial relationship" has been common in the last few years to describe this.
I guess for actors and other types of artist specifically, people relate strongly to the work. It can form the basis for life memories. You remember where you were when you heard a song or saw a movie.
I don't object to most of what you're saying, but I take issue with this part.
This happens to be an area where lapse or neglect can be taken as a moral failure. And here you are mocking people who are concerned about it.
If someone uses AI to architect a bridge and the bridge collapses, you couldn't say that the structural integrity of the bridge wasn't the important part.
Nitpick, "Windows Native Development" also refers to the NT native subsystem, which would be basically coding against private APIs instead of Win32. From the title I thought that's what this was. Then I realized it was about avoiding full use of Visual Studio when building C projects (something that a lot of people already do by the way)
This depends a lot on what manpage you're looking at.
When I learned C more than 20 years ago, I found libc manpages a pretty good way to learn. For many functions in section 3, you can read the manpage and make an intelligent guess on how it's implemented, and write your own implementation. I did this as an exercise back in the day.
The email he wrote in October 2019 is especially odd. He reached out to FBI wanting information on interviews of victims. FBI blew him off. (EFTA00037405) Between the lines, this really reads to me like he wants to know if anybody accused him. Someone on an internal email said not to tell Oz anything about the meeting. (EFTA00037407)
He met with Epstein on 1/1/16. (EFTA02476629) I believe the meeting was initiated by Oz.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. These administrative warrants are very limited in scope. They are closer to the subpoenas that even ordinary civilian lawyers can send third parties in the course of litigation. They don’t give the government the power to bust into Google’s data center. The target has to respond or else challenge the warrant in court, but ordinary civilian subpoenas function the same way.
That's not at all what I've been hearing from reports of people getting these. They find that they're not at all targeted. They frequently don't even know who the target is. The officers get asked for a warrant and they might produce a bullshit piece of paper which is really just a memo.
Anyway, it's not "me" comparing these alleged apples and oranges, I am replying deep in a thread of other people making these comparisons.
That’s the same as the subpoena I could send you if you had information relevant to a litigation. And you have to give it to me or else go to court to quash the subpoena. But the key difference with judicial warrants is that judicial warrants can be enforced immediately while subpoenas and administrative warrants require the cooperation of the target or else going to court to enforce the subpoena.
Sorry, it's pretty clear that you like what ICE does and you're working backwards with what you think is a legal argument that justifies it. What ICE is reportedly doing has absolutely nothing in common with a lawful subpoena.
I do like ICE, but this point about administrative warrants is a rant I’ve been doing since the Obama administration. The only thing new is that these tactics are now being used for immigration enforcement.
The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.
That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.
The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant.
The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.
On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.
I also personally think there are some private collections we should ban, or put in place limitations on how it can be used, in the interest of general privacy.
That is trickier to decide on and surely there's room to debate.
Prohibiting (or at least restraining) the de jure government but allowing a parallel corporate de facto government to keep growing (in scope, coercion, and influence) is exactly what has happened here. It's naive to think that the de jure government can always continue to "just say no" to the parallel power structure, keeping it under control of the de jure government. Rather, eventually the corporate government gets powerful enough to overrun the traditional mechanics that keep it subservient, no matter how strong those mechanisms may be. Then the corporate government goes to work subverting, devouring, and replacing the traditional government.
If we had wanted to avoid where we are now at - staring down a full-on fascist dystopia - the surveillance industry ("tech") needed to be nipped in the bud 15+ years ago - with a GDPR-equivalent, and strong anti-trust enforcement that prohibited anti-competitive bundling [proprietary] software with [Metcalfe's law] network services. The surveillance industry's power needed to be constrained to remain in line with our assumptions of natural rights and Constitutionally-limited government.
But a lot of people were being paid a lot of money to not think too hard about the implications of what they were building. And so every time the topic came up in our communities, those on the take would shout it down with a litany of rationalizations about why such constraints were not necessary.
Yeah but these companies are operating hand in glove with govt such that there's no discernible difference between the current system and government just doing it themselves. Ban it outright.
I don't disagree with the sentiment. I feel like what we're seeing lately is that private companies are doing the thing that would violate the 4th amendment if government did it, then they sell to the government. The idea that it's not the government itself violating the constitution because they did it through a contractor is pretty absurd.
What specific legal measures you do to enforce this, I don't know, there's some room for debate there.
I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media. Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment.
The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data". To have an expectation of privacy, the data needs to not be shared in the first place.
I don't think tying the hands of the government is a viable solution. The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions, as well as legislation to impose costs on data collection.
- Teaching that "the cloud is just someone else's computer"
- E2EE cloud
- Some way of sharing things that don't involve pushing them to the whole internet, like Signal's stories.
- GDPR type legislation which allows deleting, opting out, etc
> The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data"
This isn't actually true (it varies by type of "cloud data", like content vs metadata, and the circuit you're in), and there are multiple recent carveouts (eg geofence warrants) that when the Supreme Court bothers to look at it again, suggests they don't feel it's as clear as it was decades ago. Congress can also just go ahead and any time make it clear they don't like it (see the Stored Communications Act).
It's also, just to be clear, an invented doctrine, and absolutely not in the constitution like the fourth amendment is. Don't cede the principle just because it has a name. Technical and social solutions are good, but we should not tolerate our government acting as it does.
> I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media
Neither is there an expectation that automation would slurp it up and build a database on you and everyone else. Maybe the HN crowd is one thing, but most normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed.
> Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment.
Every time I see someone make a statement like this I think of the Iraq war era when a Berkeley law professor said torture is legal. Simply saying something that clearly violates the spirit of our rights is ok based on a technicality, I would not call that a moral high ground.
> The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions,
At this point and points forward I think your comment is much more on the mark.
I think we clearly both agree that mass surveillance is problematic regardless of whether it is done by the government or corporations. With that said
> normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed
Despite knowing about this, most continue supporting the various companies doing exactly that, like Facebook and Google.
> Neither is there an expectation [...]
Expectation is not law, and it cuts both ways. The authors of the 4th and 5th amendments likely did not anticipate the existence of encryption - in their view, the flip side of the 4th amendment is that with a warrant, the government could search anything except your mind, which can't store that much information. We now get to enjoy an almost absolute right to privacy due to the letter of the law. You might feel that we should have that right anyway, but many other governments with a more recent/flexible constitution do not guarantee that, and in fact require key disclosure.
Expectation of privacy is a legal test based literally on on what "normies would probably say". If, as a society, we're moving more and more of our private effects to the cloud, there is a point where there's an expectation of privacy from the government there, regardless of the shadiness of the company we trusted for it, and regardless of what's convenient for the government.
Carpenter v. United States is a great example of this, where a thing once thought as obviously falling under the third party doctrine (cell tower location information) was put definitively within protection by the fourth amendment because of ongoing changes in how society used and considered cell phones.
And I forgot about this but just saw it referenced in the wikipedia article: it's notable that Gorsuch's dissent on the case argued for dropping the third party doctrine completely:
> There is another way. From the founding until the 1960s, the right to assert a Fourth Amendment claim didn’t depend on your ability to appeal to a judge’s personal sensibilities about the “reasonableness” of your expectations or privacy. It was tied to the law. The Fourth Amendment protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” True to those words and their original understanding, the traditional approach asked if a house, paper or effect was yours under law. No more was needed to trigger the Fourth Amendment....
> Under this more traditional approach, Fourth Amendment protections for your papers and effects do not automatically disappear just because you share them with third parties.
Thanks for the legal clarification. I don't disagree that the third part doctrine is rather overbroad.
I would still prefer legislation and tech that actually reduce data collection though. Fifth amendment protections are much stronger, and cannot be overcome by a warrant, whereas third parties can be subject to subpoena.
The problem comes from what you post under something that's not your name.
Personally, I'm thinking perhaps the answer is the other way around:
Any company that collects data apart from what you directly provide them must make a best-effort to end you an e-mail every year with the data in a standardized format or links to the data. (Doesn't need to be burdensome--documents go behind a UUID with a non-readable directory. You either know the URL or you don't.)
You have data you didn't disclose, pay $1 per item + costs. (If you have useful amounts of data that per item will add up really fast.)
Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore.
What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance.
Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos.
The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos.
Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is?
We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation.
That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.
But that is his point with "or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect"
The company doesn't have that power, but the government can compel companies to provide them with the same data as long as it exists, and then abuse it in the same way as if they had collected it themselves.
The separation between private and the government is purely theatrics - a mere administrative shell.
I really don't understand why people treat it with such sacrosanct reverence.
It reminds me of a cup and ball street scam. Opportunistic people move things around and there's a choir of true believers who think there's some sacred principles of separation to uphold as they defend the ornamental labels as if they're some divine decree.
In some cases yes, especially when it comes to surveillance, the distinction doesn't feel like very much. When the government hires a contractor specifically because they break the spirit of the 4th amendment, it's hard to argue that it's not the government breaking the law.
A private company can rat you out the government in the same way that a private citizen can report you to the police. I don't see a reasonable way to change this.
The government should be held to higher standards in terms of being able to appeal its actions, fairness, evidentiary standards. But the government shouldn't necessarily be prevented from acquiring and using information (which is otherwise legally obtained).
I don't disagree that we should perhaps more restrictions on private processing of data though -- GDPR style legislation that imposes a cost on data collection is probably sufficient.
> The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.
We put higher standards on the government because companies have the biggest propaganda coffers.
It’s not some rational principle. Money goes in, beliefs come out.
> I don't really see any other solution, can you explain it?
One reason a wealth tax is controversial and less precedented is that it taxes unrealized gains.
Another alternative would be to raise taxes on high income rather than wealth. In the 1950s people were taxed at something like 90% for every dollar over $400,000. We could go back to something like that but adjust that $400,000 to something like a couple of million, to match inflation.
This essentially puts a cap on wages. The money you make below the cap would be taxed at the same rates we pay today. Once you get above that amount, you keep most of what falls below, but the government would take almost all of what's above the cap.
I think if you do it that way you would also have to tax interest and capital gains similarly to wages. That's another loophole that's very commonly exploited in the last few decades, investment income gets taxed lower.
Additionally, if Gmail is a problem, Sergey Brin went to his events.
In one document drop Joi Ito is asking him about security hygiene and saying he is "worried about his emails".
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