The ACLU Wants To Know Why Facebook Beat a 2018 Wiretap Case (bloomberg.com) 65
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook in 2018 beat back federal prosecutors seeking to wiretap its encrypted Messenger app. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to find out how. The entire proceeding was confidential, with only the result leaking to the press. Lawyers for the ACLU and the Washington Post on Tuesday asked a San Francisco-based federal court of appeals to unseal the judge's decision, arguing the public has a right to know how the law is being applied, particularly in the area of privacy. "It's already publicly known that the Justice Department can't wiretap Facebook's messaging services," Jennifer Granick, an attorney representing the ACLU, told the judges. "What isn't known is the reason why." The three judges didn't tip their hand at the hearing conducted by video conference and said they would rule at a later date. "The Facebook case stems from a federal investigation of members of the violent MS-13 criminal gang. Prosecutors tried to hold Facebook in contempt after the company refused to help investigators wiretap its Messenger app, but the judge ruled against them," adds Bloomberg. "If the decision is unsealed, other tech companies will likely try to use its reasoning to ward off similar government requests in the future."
Go ask NSA (Score:4, Informative)
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NSA? More likely Zuckerboy gave the authoritay free access to the messages in real time.
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Probably, and not necessarily with money, but I meant "free" as in "unrestricted".
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What about this involving the Justice Dept. do you not understand?
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Secret laws and secret courts (Score:5, Insightful)
All the better to keep you free.
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I think by now we can add "Facebook is privacy" to the fold.
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We had to destroy the village (freedom) to save it.
Precedence (Score:5, Insightful)
If the decision is unsealed, other tech companies will likely try to use its reasoning to ward off similar government requests in the future.
Isn't that kinda one of the points of courts?
Re:Precedence (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the point of the court is to keep the plebes down while convincing them they really have a say.
Oh, and for replenishing the strategic slavepile.
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Oh, and for replenishing the strategic slavepile.
The 'slavepile' huh. Tell me more about this slave pile as I don't recall that one in my civics class. If only it were so that prisoners were forced to work like the rest of us.
Re:Precedence (Score:5, Informative)
You must not have been paying attention then - it's explicitly permitted by the 13th Amendment, section 1, which banned other forms of slavery:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Various forms of prison labor have been employed for a very long time - usually for "public service" work like cleanup or making license plates that the government would otherwise have to pay considerably more for, or leave undone. Which I heartily approve of. But there's also plenty of examples of corrupt wardens, etc. selling that labor to businesses for a tidy personal profit while distorting the labor market.
I have my doubts that it's a major cause of incarceration though - it seems like by far the largest cause of unjust incarceration is heavy lobbying, and even outright corruption of judges, by the for-profit prison industry itself. Why risk bad PR with obvious slavery when you turn a handsome profit selling room and board (and phone service) at radically inflated prices?
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If they work, I expect them to be paid reasonable wages. And to NOT be coerced into paying grossly inflated prices.
If you want them to behave well, you need to treat them fairly when they do.
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Re:Precedence (Score:5, Informative)
it seems like by far the largest cause of unjust incarceration is heavy lobbying, and even outright corruption of judges, by the for-profit prison industry itself.
For-profit prisons incarcerate about 8% of inmates. That number peaked in 2012 and has been declining since then.
About half the states don't use private prisons at all, and the incarceration rate in those states has increased just as much as in states that do use private prisons. Many harsh sentencing laws were enacted in referendums financed by public prison guard unions.
America's sky-high incarceration rate has little to do with private prisons.
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and everything to do with war. war on drugs.
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They might now be paid advertisers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: They might now be paid advertisers (Score:2)
Facebook has always been evil.
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Precedent (Score:3)
"If the decision is unsealed, other tech companies will likely try to use its reasoning to ward off similar government requests in the future."
That's a justifiable reason to withhold a decision? Isn't that one of the primary features of our legal framework, to enable future justice to proceed more fluently by being able to rely on precedent instead of trying everything from first principles every case (in which case, nobody gets justice)?
If the judge sided with Facebook, other companies are owed the same even handed treatment under the same circumstances.
Re: Precedent (Score:5, Interesting)
Not saying this is what happened, but it would be one plausible explanation of why the judge's ruling would need to be kept secret.
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Copyright (Score:2)
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Too late, you owe me patent royalties on it.
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Just wait.... I'm betting the fucks at FarceBark will copyright their winning argument. If they decide to do so, I hereby claim all rights to the idea and demand compensation.
As good luck would have it sanity prevailed and this is not legal thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling. The dissenting justices that were cool with the Law citations being behind a paywall were Ginsburg, Breyer, Thomas, and Alito. Citation: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
"We the people" indeed (Score:2)
Re: Law Enforcement should/must have FULL ACCESS!! (Score:2)
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In case you'd not noticed, FB36 is a recurring poster boy for, "Support your state police, for a better police state".
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I want to invoke Poe's law here. I thought the post was probably sarcastic.
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Which is absolutely against common good of general public!!!
The Constitution leans heavily toward protecting individuals' rights. Not so much the general welfare. The people's right to privacy is explicitly protected whereas the government's right to search is restricted by the requirement for a warrant.
Re:Law Enforcement should/must have FULL ACCESS!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
A far better way to reduce gang violence is to legalize drugs.
Even a blind dog still finds a bone occasionally (Score:1)
The ACLU may have gone astray, but I'll give them credit where credit is due. They've managed to get something right for once. There's an undeniable public interest in knowing how the courts interpret the constitutional protection to our rights to speech and privacy, and keeping that ruling sealed would be unconscionable.
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ACLU lost focus in the 1970s, after 50 years (Score:2, Flamebait)
It's easy for organizations to get side tracked by "related" issues and start reducing their effectiveness in the area they were created to work on.
For 50+ years, from the 1920s to the 1970s, the ACLU was focused on protecting rights, specifically the rights enumerated in the bill of rights. In the 1970s they started promoting liberalism generally and shifting their positions to match up with whatever the Democrat party was saying at any given time. That's sad, because the country could really use a non-pa
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Do you have examples? My impression has been that they are largely saying the government should not support any religion. This seems fair. Certainly most religions should not get the tax breaks they do. They got them in return for promising to provide comprehensive social welfare programs, and then largely reneged.
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Do you have examples?
Certainly, and from the ACLU itself:
Here is their stance on the 2nd Amendment [aclu.org], in which they clearly state that they see it as a "collective" government power rather than an independent right. The ACLU believes that the constitutional phrase "the people" means the police and military, not the citizens.
Here is their policy on free speech [aclu.org], in which they state they will no longer defend people whose values are not aligned with progressive views.
This abandonment of principles resulted in several board members
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I think you read the second document with different results extracted from it than I did. Basically it said that since they had limited resources, they should deploy them in ways that were both tactically and strategically effective.
On the second amendment I disagree with every interpretation I've heard. I'm quite certain that the citizens in rebellion were not talking about official government authorized programs, but they were also talking about well organized groups. A rifle team might be an example.
Perhaps because Facebook can't (Score:3)
I would expect the same reason why Apple doesn't unlock phones for the FBI.
Mostly because they actually did their job and secured the system so I can't be easily monitored.
Facebook doesn't have a good privacy track record. However, I haven't heard of any major hacks via messager.
You can't build a government backdoor that will not be exploited by a random hacker.
Both Facebook and the Government have too many people on the inside. So if some guy feels he was unjustly fired or quit. They might go rouge and take advantage of the back door they knew about. Also, hacker tends to poke around systems to see where there is an opening. Oh, why is there an SSH protocol on port 8361 on the server? or at least why isn't the firewall blocking it? Will just open the door for more investigation.
Or the government request was just stupid. Asking for a wiretap on a network. Which didn't give them any useful information as the data is just encrypted.
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They might go rouge
Only if it matches the handbag and shoes.
How can a court ruling be confidential? (Score:4, Informative)
How on earth, and especially in a common-law country like the US, can a ruling by a judge be confidential?
Given that the ruling can create a precedent, doesn't making in secret configure an obstruction of justice?
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Aww, the blessings of liberty should only be extended to people who think in ways that you approve of? Or perhaps you're simply unwilling to provide mental health care and assistance for basic housing without forcing people into it and assuming total control over their existence.
Re:How can a court ruling be confidential? (Score:4, Informative)
There is such a thing as an unpublished ruling. And it's not just in national security cases. It's any case where the court in question does not wish to create a precedent.
An unpublished ruling may not be cited as precedent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-publication_of_legal_opinions_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
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How on earth, and especially in a common-law country like the US, can a ruling by a judge be confidential?
Given that the ruling can create a precedent, doesn't making in secret configure an obstruction of justice?
Confidential rulings in civil cases are quite common, where there is no such thing as precedent.
In criminal cases sealed rulings are supposed to be reserved for actual individual cases that would endanger national security if known, however this has long ago been twisted around to seemingly mean any case the government is involved in.
But at least it is still true that no sealed case can ever be used as precedent.
Related, there was a recent article on copyright protection to legal annotations.
The case info i
Publicly known DOJ can't wiretap FB's messaging? (Score:2)
Publicly known, says who, Facebook or DOJ? Is the code open source or has it had an independent code review?
If we knew... (Score:1)
If we knew we would abandon Facebook because they have a way for the feds to abuse the platform.
More than likely now self submit to local police (Score:2)
Not that I would know anything at all about how streaming companies record all of their content and self review any questionable or requested behaviors back to a local authority. There would never be any kind of extrajudicial agreements among say a city police force and the DOJ that often requests or receives any recorded streams from a local based company literally without making it a federal case.
Start thinking now (Score:1)