Posted by firefax 10 hours ago
They have a toy, they’re increasingly abusing it, then trying to dodge from it being taken away.
The thing is nobody has to comply with 1509 summons, DHS has to go to court to enforce it. A lot of the fault is on a company that complies without just ignoring it.
You're not wrong, but companies such as Google make business decisions, not moral decisions. It's far easier and cheaper for them to comply, while there is basically no incentive for them to fight the summons. Especially given the current administration's proven record of taking retaliation against anyone who stands in their way.
If you want companies to behave in the interest of the general public, you need to create an incentive structure that supports that.
Of course then it's up to judge to determine if the request was valid or not.
And lose time and money, which they also likely don't have?
And as this is something that has already happened there isn't much else the person in question can do. Third parties always have option to just disclose information to whoever asks it, at most you can hold them accountable for it later if it was unlawful. And what accountability exactly means depends on what laws exists. If you want some real accountability for the people/companies involved in these kinds of decisions then get Congress to pass such laws (however impossible it might be).
"In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHS by saying it had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation."
> companies such as Google make business decisions, not moral decisions
The world is more complicated than that; they make both kinds of decisions and many decisions aren't clearly in one basket or the other. Humans don't biologically change to amoral creatures when they pull into the office parking lot (despite theories to the contrary or attempts to encourage it), nor are they absolved of human responsibility when doing things for which they are paid.
Not sure what this means. I think you meant to write "fiduciary duty": the company's board have an affirmative legal obligation to act in the interest of stockholders, regardless of moral impact.
It's entirely possible to still satisfy those requirements by building a sustainable and moral company. The shareholders get to vote, if they don't like it they'll make that clear.
I think you don't understand what this phrase means. In a publicly-traded company, "the interest of the shareholders" does not mean "whatever the shareholders want"; it means "whatever is best for the company." That means money.
It may be possible to be both profitable and moral; but if it isn't, the fiduciary duty obligates corporate officers to choose the profitable path rather than the moral one.
The easy way of looking at this is that there beyond complying with the law, there is no general obligation for companies to behave morally, but there is a general obligation to behave profitably. So it's not hard to see why they make they choices they do.
> It's entirely possible to still satisfy those requirements by building a sustainable and moral company.
It is, but it's a lot easier to be not sustainable and not moral.
Citation needed.
From the space between the lines in the article, it seems pretty clear that Google denied the request, and its employees were the source for the claim being reported at all. Yes, they absolutely could be evil in principle. They appear to have been good in practice.
And in times of extremis like this, maybe it's important to call out those little victories and find allies where you can. Even if you happen to be a HN Apple stan.
Ehhh, seems to me a cloud provider that wants to back up my documents, communications, photos, passkeys etc has a very strong business case for ensuring the data is as safe with them as they would be in my own home.
This isn't uncommon - this is how NY deals with any compelling case involving their infringing gun control statutes. If a defendant has money and no other meaningful charges, they tend to just dismiss and moot the issue rather than risk a finding of unconstitutionality.
Become your own tiny infra
> The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.
...
> In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHS by saying it had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation.
> A Google spokesperson said the company reviews each request for data it gets to ensure it is legal and pushes back when it is too broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.
What part of GP's quote from the article gets you to "private companies are part of the judicial branch"? The judicial branch wasn't involved there, only the executive. All of us, private individuals or organizations, have the right to challenge any requests by the executive branch (and by the same token, unless forbidden by law we can also just voluntarily go along with its requests). The judicial branch can then rule on who is right. If the executive wants to force it then it can go to the judicial branch up front and get an actual for real warrant. If it wants to bypass judicial review, then it doesn't have the same legal force either.
Here, it asked T-Mobile and Google for a bunch of stuff on a journalist. T-Mobile said sure. Google said no, come back with a warrant.
>I don’t remember that part of the Constitution.
Might want to reread if it's been awhile for you.
No, unless you're arguing that the government should be barred from even making voluntary requests at all? I'm not sure I'd agree with that either though, there's plenty of times where a government request really is just an honest "request" for pure info, like a poll or survey or something on how a program is working and any feedback participants want to give. Though of course it's also easy to see how things like 3rd party doctrine have expanded in effect over time and gotten badly abused, particularly in combination with other levers government has. Perhaps that doctrine should be abolished and the government shouldn't be able to make "voluntary requests" for anything that'd touch on a criminal or civil investigation (so they'd still be able to ask for surveys and the like), but that'd require some careful consideration. Or maybe there are some reasonable limits in terms of data automatically and unavoidably collected (like cellular location) vs data voluntarily shared.
Regardless however, if the government wants to compel somebody to comply, well that's literally what a warrant (or court order) is for right? If the government chooses not to involve a judge in a request for data that'd require a warrant to force, then yeah of course the private party they're asking gets to decide whether to voluntarily go along with that or not. That's the trade.
IMHO the third-party doctrine is an area where legislators ought to be passing laws to broaden constitutional protections, in suitably nuanced way, to keep up with the times. In the modern age, people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
The idea that fourth amendment protections apply to physical mail, but not to e-mail [1] doesn't really make much sense.
Unfortunately this is the sort of thing change that really needs to come from legislators, and the legislative process isn't very effective at the moment.
[1] except for the 0.1% of people who self-host their own e-mail server in their own home
This is assuming the first pass is before a judge. They're circumventing this by going straight to the companies, as noted by the following blurbs:
> This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official.
and
> It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.
In most cases, a company's legal team will attempt to validate the legality of a request because, if they just acquiesce, it becomes a legal problem for them to turn over data without that validation of legality - which can have financial repercussions.
In those cases, the government most often will not (and cannot) step in to save them from the financial blowback (i.e.: the government got what it wanted; it's not their problem, now).
If they suspect the request isn't legal, they can refuse it, and then it can be escalated to a judge.
Are you suggesting that every request should go through a judge before it gets sent to a company? That would be great, but even then, different judges interpret laws differently, so a company will still do a legal review before deciding whether or not to comply.
I've seen this somewhere before and I can't quite put my finger on where I saw it.
At the end of the day this sort of wastefulness eventually attracts attention.
To cover 70.5 million seniors [1]. $17k per senior.
“Per person personal health care spending for the 65 and older population was $22,356 in 2020, over 5 times higher than spending per child ($4,217) and almost 2.5 times the spending per working-age person ($9,154)” [2].
80 million under 19 [3] at that rate comes to about $400bn. And most efficiency estimates would take at least a third off that when we eliminate redundant billing processes.
Given 6% of children lack health insurance, we could cover them for about $24bn. Less than Trump’s war in Iran has cost [4].
[1] https://data.cms.gov/summary-statistics-on-beneficiary-enrol...
[2] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
[3] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
If you have to spy on these particular groups then you know you’re doing something wrong.
There may be other uses for an anonymous US company though.
Do they not get that we live under an authoritarian regime? The regime doesn't care about the law. They have been installing their own people at every level of government for years, taking over parts of the government, and granting themselves new powers. When eventually every powerful person in government is part of the regime, it won't matter what the law says. This isn't hyperbole, this is how they have been operating for 1.5 years.
This is what the beginning looks like. The end looks like Germany 1942.