> a) convince the chair of the relevent House Subcommittee it was important enough to bring up for a vote
That's a convoluted way to avoid saying, "bribe"
Campaign donations are one way to get a vote, but they're far from the only one. That's why all the pressure groups you've ever heard of have frequent "Days of Action" where their minions all call the local Congressman to demand something.
Even most campaign donations are not quid pro quos. Pressure groups find people who agree with them and would be good candidates. Then they get them to run. The donation is supporting the sincerely-held-view of the candidate, not bribing the candidate to change his mind. This is particularly true these days on issues that require spending money because DC is in austerity mode and the guy you whose on your side because you paid him off will almost certainly decide not to vote for your spending package because it includes cuts to some other program from somebody else who bribed him.
The military wants the JSF. If the Military did not want the JSF they'd have kept funding the F-22, or they'd have their pet Congressman propose a new fighter competition. The idea is that a) it goes Mach 1.6, and b) it's virtually impossible to detect via RADR. If both a) and b) are true it's impossible to take out with missiles (which require a target of some sort before you can fire them), and it can sit back fire a load of missiles, and run away at 1.6 times the speed of sound before the enemy can get into visual flight range. This will, in theory, make every other combat aircraft anyone has ever designed obsolete. So fuck yes, the USAF is perfectly willing to spend a $Trillion on that shit even if it only has a 50% chance of working. And all of our Allies with actual defense budgets (ie: the Western Democracies) seem to agree because almost all of them are ordering the damn things too.
The practical problems that critics raise are based on two points: 1) This shit is costing a whole ass-ton of money and there's no end in sight. 2) F-35 may be more easily detectable then alternatives, particularly due to the fact it has a ridiculously large (and nont Stealth-friendly) fan in the middle to appease the Marine desire for VTOL capability in their version.
The military is not blind to the risk, but as with the risk of the new Abrams tank in the 80s (which used an Aircraft engine that was so hot they could theoretically be detected from miles away, and whose gas mileage at the time was measured in gallons per mile rather then the other way around), has decided they'd rather rather risk wasting a whole shitload of cash then risk having their pilots out-gunned by the Chinese when those fuckers figure this shit out.
If you recall what actually happened, as opposed to what your dad claims to remember from that decade he was on SO MUCH POT, you'll recall that the primary justification for involving US Ground Troops in 'Nam were a pair of attacks on one of our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Legally speaking, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the only justification for their presence. Only it turned out that the second attack was the artifact of having a bunch of first-year Naval conscripts try to read 60s-era RADAR and SONAR displays in the middle of a fucking storm two fucking days after the North Vietnamese tried to kill them*. A major reason people thought the Vietnam War was pointless was that the justification turned out to be made up.
OTOH, our reason for being in Afghanistan was that one of their best buddies leveled a couple office buildings and they wouldn't turn him over to face the music.
It's very easy to poke holes in our Afghanistan policy. What I have yet to see, from anyone, is an alternative plan that would have a) been politically possible on S12, and b) would have worked a tenth as well as what we actually did.
*In North Vietnam's defense, two days before that incident their ship supported several South Vietnamese raids on Northern territory.
So let's say Microsoft had some idea to reduce Social Engineering. How will they figure out whether it's Security Theater without trying it out on people?
Have you ever lived in America? Because it is really fucking hard for an idea to become law here. Particularly an idea that actually spends money.
To get funded a government program had to a) convince the chair of the relevent House Subcommittee it was important enough to bring up for a vote, b) win the vote, c) convince the chair of the Full Committee it was important enough for a vote, c) win that vote, d) convince the Speaker it was important enough to bring to the Rules Committee, d) convince the members of the Rules Committee to craft a Rule for a general House Vote, e) win that vote, f-j) repeat the process in the Senate, k) convince the House to appoint a delegation to the Reconciliation Committee to hash out differences between the House and Senate version, l) win the same from the Senate, m) convince said Committee to report a bill to their respective House, n) and o) convince both Houses to vote on said bill, p) and q) win both votes, and finally r) convince the President to sign rather then Veto (a Veto would trigger s) and t), votes to over-riude in both Houses).
It's true bad ideas get through. What is absolutely, totally, completely 100% false is that any idea with enough support to get through that 20-odd-step process I just mentioned is on so many people's "This idea sucks and it should be done away with" list that a proposal to change the damn thing is easy. Especially since such proposals would need to go threough the 20-odd-step-process themselves.
BTW, this has nothing to do with ease of use. It has to do with researching Social Engineering.
We're talking about America, so it's a lot less ambiguous then you're implying. State-side the politicians who run the shebang are either "Congressional leadership, or "the Administration" depending on which branch they get their power from. "Government" as a term for those Administration/Leadership schmucks is a not-Americanism.
State-side "government" is the term used for the Federal employees who enforce their will. During the Convention this apparatus did not exist. The only Federal employees were the First American Regiment of about 1000 men, who were led by a Lieutenant Colonel (breveted to Brigadier General -- every County in the country had an elected Militia leader with the rank of full Colonel). The feds had significant theoretical powers, but since the check on those powers was a state had to actually enforce Federal rulings in practice Congress was useless.
I wasn't talking about kiting checks to do trades.
I was talking about it as a financial crime that's proven almost entirely by circumstantial evidence. The government doesn't prove a guy who kited 30 checks for groceries by proving that they know 100% that he actually intended for each individual check to bounce, it proves it by showing a very consistent pattern of bouncing checks, with the guy who bounced them not doing anything to prevent future bounces, etc.
The same applies to this case. If this guy's technique to manipulate the market price actually results in manipulating the price (which is illegal), rather then timing the market (which is what day-traders try to do, and HFT guys actually do), and he didx it repeatedly for five years, his defense can;t be "well that was just an accident," because five years of behavior without changing are enough to get a conviction.
He never actually said that. The "liberty" was "essential liberties," and the security was "a little, temporary safety." Which completely changes the meaning of the sentence from don't-think-authority-BAD to a desire for critical thinking and balance between the needs of everyone as a whole (ie: the government in a democracy) and the needs of the individual.
Which makes sense if you look at what he actually did. Prior to the US Constitution there was no actual Federal government, there was a late-18th-century version of the UN Security Council called Congress. In theory it was supreme in many matters, but without it's own bureaucracy/Army/etc. it had trouble doing things like convincing Connecticut to give up it's claim to Chicago. This anti-freedom monster everyone worries about (the Federal government) was actually created by him at the Constitutional Convention. The Articles of Confederation government was unable to provide any "safety" from being reconquered by the Brits, largely because it couldn't directly affect anyone's individual liberty. It could not even tax you directly, it had to convince your state to do that, and then turn over the money to Congress.
An HFT is not an insider with special knowledge of the operations of a company. He's not getting his information from such a person. To quote the C0urt:
"It is well established, as a general proposition, that a person who acquires special knowledge or information by virtue of a confidential or fiduciary relationship with another is not free to exploit that knowledge or information for his own personal benefit but must account to his principal for any profits derived therefrom."
It resulted in huge swings in the market (because scam artists could get away with all kinds of shit), that resulted in major harm for ordinary people because their boss gets his capital from the capitalists on either the stock market or the bond market, and if he can't do that he has to fire you, which means you buy less food, etc.
The panic of 1873, which bore the title "Great Depression" before the one of the 30s, was caused partly because Austria-Hungary's barely regulated stock market collapsed. In the US the problem was that investors got wind of a bank's impending bailout by the treasury before the bail-out could actually happen.
You know that thing penny-stock-bugs get arrested for? They talk down a penny-stock on their forums and get it for a penny, then they use other accounts to talk it up so they can sell it for a quarter? And it's illegal market manipulation because they were making shit up with the intent of acquiring large amounts of money from rubes?
That's precisely what this guy did, except instead of using his First Amendment right to find rubes he used a computer algorithm.
The markets aren't there for this sort of thing, they're primarily there to fund businesses.
How exactly does high frequency trading fund businesses?
HFT is justified by it's advocates as promoting "liquidity" in markets. Since prices are even more responsive to data the market price is more accurate, and something on the order of 74.2643% of capitalist economic theory is based on the premise that the market price must be 100% accurate at all times be definition.
I don't think that level of liquidity is a particularly strong argument, but that doesn't change the fact that a) they have a justification that cannot be scientifically disproven by economists, and b) they aren't doing anything illegal.
They actually do the opposite of what this guy is charged with. He used his bots to convince the market to change the price, they use their bots to predict the price the market will come up with in a nanosecond.
Seems a big mistake to hinge this on intent. It needs to be clear what actions are punishable, not what state of mind.
Almost all financial crime is intent. You have the right to write a check on an account that has no money in it if you intend to put money in it by the time the check gets to the bank in a few days. If you fail to do so because something stopped you (ie: you get hit by a bus on the way to the bank and go into a coma) you have committed no crime. OTOH if you failed to do so because the original check was a lie you've committed a bunch of crimes.
So HFT as a whole should also be illegal by your logic.
HFT is bad and should be banned, but legally it's actually the opposite of this.
A HFT trader uses his knowledge of market conditions (ie: Royal Bank of Canada just placed a major buy order for GM that will jack up the price) to profit. He doesn't try to change the price of anything, he just uses his superior knowledge of what the price is going to do to make a buck.
This guy did the opposite. Instead of waiting for the market price to change by itself, he manipulated the system so the market price changed.
You can buy a penny stock. You have a First Amendment right to talk it up on penny stock forums. You can then sell for a profit. No single step is illegal. But if the police prove you intended to pump and dump it you have committed a crime. The whole process, taken together, is a crime if they prove you were trying to convince a bunch of idiots to do something stupid (ie: buy your $.05 penny stock for $0.25) that a) cost them money while b) earning you money. You manipulated the market for your personal gain, and that's bad.
This guy made a series of perfectly legal moves that had the effect of a) costing a bunch of idiots to lose money in the Flash Crash while b) he gained money.
How do you know a guy who wrote 30 checks on an account with $0 in it didn't intend to deposit enough to cover the difference?
You don't really. But in the US Legal system enough circumstantial evidence will overcome reasonable doubt every time. And if this guy made loads of money off a crash caused by these tactics, and then continued to use the same damn tactics for years and years, it's really hard to believe it was an accident.
You really don't understand how primitive the situation is regarding International Law in a country that hasn't addressed the topic in it's Constitution since 1789.
Why do US Courts legally recognize the Republic of Ireland's right to govern anything?
Because the President told them that those 26 counties are not-America, recognized Ireland as an independent Republic, and Congress has yet to pass a law declaring Dublin a territory.
What happens when the US Government asks for a warrant to search Irish data, or seize a person in Ireland? The Government is the Executive Branch, which means that as far as the Courts are concerned the president has added a "but" to his recognition of Irish sovereignty, and they have every right to a) consider the case on it's merits, and b) penalize the shit out of anyone in the US who fails to help the Federal government in it's inquiries.
Incidentally, since Ireland is not in the US the merits of the case are much more likely to allow aggressive data-gathering because Irish data has no Fourth Amendment protections.
By that standard warrants don't have anything to do with searching a bag i9n your closet because it would probably be for the entire room and say nothing about a bag directly.
This is what happens:
1) Court issues warrant.
2) Twitter refuses to comply with warrant, claiming it can't due to the way it's designed it's database.
3) Court rules that bullshit and starts fining Twitter for contempt.
Now Twitter is fined every day it doesn't have a back door. Lawyers probably insist on claiming it has not been ordered to install a back door or be fined, but this is because lawyers are insane and do not live in the real world. Twitter's choices are a) install a back door so the data can be handed over or b) get fined. Ergo they are ordered to install a back door or be fined.
It's a warrant. The restrictions on what it can do are very very limited. As long as the cops convince a Judge that that the public interest is better served by adding the backdoor then not adding it it's perfectly legal.
In other words: Dude, there's a reason they're called "powers," not "easily-hackable APIs."
And you're going to convince the Courts you don't have access how, precisely?
Courts can order you to do inconvenient things to get information required for investigations. They can force you to let the police use your house for a stakeout. They can order you to divulge reams of information it's not trivial for you to get.
As long as the database supports remote access of any kind, then it's going to be literally impossible to convince the Courts twitter can't simply update the software to allow remote access in the States. Which in turn means that if Twitter refuses to grant itself such access Twitter is in violation of a court order and gets fined.
Dealing with that requires a change to their process, which means costs (ie: new meters, people smart enough to handle monitoring the system, etc.). They will whine to high heaven about it until a) the government steps in and writes them a check in exchange for shutting the fuck up, or b) the Courts order them to do it anyway.
A test written by Kalahari Bushmen would be useless for creating a General Intelligence distribution anywhere but the Kalahari because the tools they have are completely different then the tools anyone else has.
The problem isn't as bad when everyone on the test is from the same country, but it's still true that a test written by the Duck Dynasty guys demographic would be significantly different from one written by the Hip-Hop demographic, and it would be very hard to judge folks from one of those groups based on their score from the other test. What we've actually got are tests written by that famous WEIRD ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic") demographic, which of course a) does great on the test, b) has measurably better life-outcomes because we also create most of the social and economic systems that allow one to have good life-outcomes, thus creating c) a very strong belief that we are smarter then everyone else because the test we took in A has a high number and it strongly correlates with B.
You might have a point on private messages and British law, but the rest of it just isn't protected. I didn't know it had that feature because I've never used it. It also may not be. UK Cops use Facebook posts all the time without a warrant, and those only go out to a select group of your friends. But as for the rest, it's fucking twitter. The whole point is that it's not private. Your handle, your name, and your tweets are all public information that you have no right to keep out of Court. And if you have no right to keep them out of Court then (under bopth the British and American systems) you have absolutely no right to protect that information from the government at all.
As for the fines, you have yet to present any legal argument that would prevent your boss from being fined for violating a Court Order if he let you know that he had installed a back door. Microsoft is trying the one you'd doubtless make, but it's lost at the District Court level and is not likely to win at higher levels.
Meanwhile your boss's boss has secretly installed a back door in your database software, which he could not tell you about due to a US Court Order, and if you figure it out and sabotage the back door he gets to get fined.
BTW: what precisely do you think is stored in a Twitter database that is protected by UK law? This is Twitter, not Hotmail. Almost the entire database are tweets, which count as public statements, and have no expectation of privacy. Most of the rest of the database consists of your name and twitter handle, which are displayed with your tweet and thus public statements. Refusing to supply any one of these things to the NSA is not a position that's protected by British law in any way shape or form.
The only thing that could possibly have any level of protection whatsoever is the email address twitter uses to communicate with users, and in a country that spent decades fighting masked gunmen reading public statements I sincerely doubt a that there is some magical legal document protecting your right not to be linked to your public statements.
The subsidiary workaround worked because a) the New York state subsidiaries genuinely had no access to the Swiss bank vaults, and b) because Federal Courts are much less respectful of state laws then the warrants Federal courts issue. In this case it just doesn't pass the smell test to claim that the US-based version of twitter doesn't have the ability to get data from Irish twitter servers, particularly since the database software is probably designed here. Good luck convincing a Court you genuinely can't downgrade it to get rid of the security features you just added.
As for my writing, thanks.
Are we being civil to each-other on the internet? Since when has that been allowed? Particularly on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
> a) convince the chair of the relevent House Subcommittee it was important enough to bring up for a vote
That's a convoluted way to avoid saying, "bribe"
Campaign donations are one way to get a vote, but they're far from the only one. That's why all the pressure groups you've ever heard of have frequent "Days of Action" where their minions all call the local Congressman to demand something.
Even most campaign donations are not quid pro quos. Pressure groups find people who agree with them and would be good candidates. Then they get them to run. The donation is supporting the sincerely-held-view of the candidate, not bribing the candidate to change his mind. This is particularly true these days on issues that require spending money because DC is in austerity mode and the guy you whose on your side because you paid him off will almost certainly decide not to vote for your spending package because it includes cuts to some other program from somebody else who bribed him.
Dude,
The military wants the JSF. If the Military did not want the JSF they'd have kept funding the F-22, or they'd have their pet Congressman propose a new fighter competition. The idea is that a) it goes Mach 1.6, and b) it's virtually impossible to detect via RADR. If both a) and b) are true it's impossible to take out with missiles (which require a target of some sort before you can fire them), and it can sit back fire a load of missiles, and run away at 1.6 times the speed of sound before the enemy can get into visual flight range. This will, in theory, make every other combat aircraft anyone has ever designed obsolete. So fuck yes, the USAF is perfectly willing to spend a $Trillion on that shit even if it only has a 50% chance of working. And all of our Allies with actual defense budgets (ie: the Western Democracies) seem to agree because almost all of them are ordering the damn things too.
The practical problems that critics raise are based on two points:
1) This shit is costing a whole ass-ton of money and there's no end in sight.
2) F-35 may be more easily detectable then alternatives, particularly due to the fact it has a ridiculously large (and nont Stealth-friendly) fan in the middle to appease the Marine desire for VTOL capability in their version.
The military is not blind to the risk, but as with the risk of the new Abrams tank in the 80s (which used an Aircraft engine that was so hot they could theoretically be detected from miles away, and whose gas mileage at the time was measured in gallons per mile rather then the other way around), has decided they'd rather rather risk wasting a whole shitload of cash then risk having their pilots out-gunned by the Chinese when those fuckers figure this shit out.
If you recall what actually happened, as opposed to what your dad claims to remember from that decade he was on SO MUCH POT, you'll recall that the primary justification for involving US Ground Troops in 'Nam were a pair of attacks on one of our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Legally speaking, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the only justification for their presence. Only it turned out that the second attack was the artifact of having a bunch of first-year Naval conscripts try to read 60s-era RADAR and SONAR displays in the middle of a fucking storm two fucking days after the North Vietnamese tried to kill them*. A major reason people thought the Vietnam War was pointless was that the justification turned out to be made up.
OTOH, our reason for being in Afghanistan was that one of their best buddies leveled a couple office buildings and they wouldn't turn him over to face the music.
It's very easy to poke holes in our Afghanistan policy. What I have yet to see, from anyone, is an alternative plan that would have a) been politically possible on S12, and b) would have worked a tenth as well as what we actually did.
*In North Vietnam's defense, two days before that incident their ship supported several South Vietnamese raids on Northern territory.
So let's say Microsoft had some idea to reduce Social Engineering. How will they figure out whether it's Security Theater without trying it out on people?
How is that not behavioral science?
Have you ever lived in America? Because it is really fucking hard for an idea to become law here. Particularly an idea that actually spends money.
To get funded a government program had to a) convince the chair of the relevent House Subcommittee it was important enough to bring up for a vote, b) win the vote, c) convince the chair of the Full Committee it was important enough for a vote, c) win that vote, d) convince the Speaker it was important enough to bring to the Rules Committee, d) convince the members of the Rules Committee to craft a Rule for a general House Vote, e) win that vote, f-j) repeat the process in the Senate, k) convince the House to appoint a delegation to the Reconciliation Committee to hash out differences between the House and Senate version, l) win the same from the Senate, m) convince said Committee to report a bill to their respective House, n) and o) convince both Houses to vote on said bill, p) and q) win both votes, and finally r) convince the President to sign rather then Veto (a Veto would trigger s) and t), votes to over-riude in both Houses).
It's true bad ideas get through. What is absolutely, totally, completely 100% false is that any idea with enough support to get through that 20-odd-step process I just mentioned is on so many people's "This idea sucks and it should be done away with" list that a proposal to change the damn thing is easy. Especially since such proposals would need to go threough the 20-odd-step-process themselves.
BTW, this has nothing to do with ease of use. It has to do with researching Social Engineering.
We're talking about America, so it's a lot less ambiguous then you're implying. State-side the politicians who run the shebang are either "Congressional leadership, or "the Administration" depending on which branch they get their power from. "Government" as a term for those Administration/Leadership schmucks is a not-Americanism.
State-side "government" is the term used for the Federal employees who enforce their will. During the Convention this apparatus did not exist. The only Federal employees were the First American Regiment of about 1000 men, who were led by a Lieutenant Colonel (breveted to Brigadier General -- every County in the country had an elected Militia leader with the rank of full Colonel). The feds had significant theoretical powers, but since the check on those powers was a state had to actually enforce Federal rulings in practice Congress was useless.
I wasn't talking about kiting checks to do trades.
I was talking about it as a financial crime that's proven almost entirely by circumstantial evidence. The government doesn't prove a guy who kited 30 checks for groceries by proving that they know 100% that he actually intended for each individual check to bounce, it proves it by showing a very consistent pattern of bouncing checks, with the guy who bounced them not doing anything to prevent future bounces, etc.
The same applies to this case. If this guy's technique to manipulate the market price actually results in manipulating the price (which is illegal), rather then timing the market (which is what day-traders try to do, and HFT guys actually do), and he didx it repeatedly for five years, his defense can;t be "well that was just an accident," because five years of behavior without changing are enough to get a conviction.
He never actually said that. The "liberty" was "essential liberties," and the security was "a little, temporary safety." Which completely changes the meaning of the sentence from don't-think-authority-BAD to a desire for critical thinking and balance between the needs of everyone as a whole (ie: the government in a democracy) and the needs of the individual.
Which makes sense if you look at what he actually did. Prior to the US Constitution there was no actual Federal government, there was a late-18th-century version of the UN Security Council called Congress. In theory it was supreme in many matters, but without it's own bureaucracy/Army/etc. it had trouble doing things like convincing Connecticut to give up it's claim to Chicago. This anti-freedom monster everyone worries about (the Federal government) was actually created by him at the Constitutional Convention. The Articles of Confederation government was unable to provide any "safety" from being reconquered by the Brits, largely because it couldn't directly affect anyone's individual liberty. It could not even tax you directly, it had to convince your state to do that, and then turn over the money to Congress.
An HFT is not an insider with special knowledge of the operations of a company. He's not getting his information from such a person. To quote the C0urt:
"It is well established, as a general proposition, that a person who acquires special knowledge or information by virtue of a confidential or fiduciary relationship with another is not free to exploit that knowledge or information for his own personal benefit but must account to his principal for any profits derived therefrom."
We've tried this before.
It resulted in huge swings in the market (because scam artists could get away with all kinds of shit), that resulted in major harm for ordinary people because their boss gets his capital from the capitalists on either the stock market or the bond market, and if he can't do that he has to fire you, which means you buy less food, etc.
The panic of 1873, which bore the title "Great Depression" before the one of the 30s, was caused partly because Austria-Hungary's barely regulated stock market collapsed. In the US the problem was that investors got wind of a bank's impending bailout by the treasury before the bail-out could actually happen.
You know that thing penny-stock-bugs get arrested for? They talk down a penny-stock on their forums and get it for a penny, then they use other accounts to talk it up so they can sell it for a quarter? And it's illegal market manipulation because they were making shit up with the intent of acquiring large amounts of money from rubes?
That's precisely what this guy did, except instead of using his First Amendment right to find rubes he used a computer algorithm.
The markets aren't there for this sort of thing, they're primarily there to fund businesses.
How exactly does high frequency trading fund businesses?
HFT is justified by it's advocates as promoting "liquidity" in markets. Since prices are even more responsive to data the market price is more accurate, and something on the order of 74.2643% of capitalist economic theory is based on the premise that the market price must be 100% accurate at all times be definition.
I don't think that level of liquidity is a particularly strong argument, but that doesn't change the fact that a) they have a justification that cannot be scientifically disproven by economists, and b) they aren't doing anything illegal.
They actually do the opposite of what this guy is charged with. He used his bots to convince the market to change the price, they use their bots to predict the price the market will come up with in a nanosecond.
Seems a big mistake to hinge this on intent. It needs to be clear what actions are punishable, not what state of mind.
Almost all financial crime is intent. You have the right to write a check on an account that has no money in it if you intend to put money in it by the time the check gets to the bank in a few days. If you fail to do so because something stopped you (ie: you get hit by a bus on the way to the bank and go into a coma) you have committed no crime. OTOH if you failed to do so because the original check was a lie you've committed a bunch of crimes.
So HFT as a whole should also be illegal by your logic.
HFT is bad and should be banned, but legally it's actually the opposite of this.
A HFT trader uses his knowledge of market conditions (ie: Royal Bank of Canada just placed a major buy order for GM that will jack up the price) to profit. He doesn't try to change the price of anything, he just uses his superior knowledge of what the price is going to do to make a buck.
This guy did the opposite. Instead of waiting for the market price to change by itself, he manipulated the system so the market price changed.
You can buy a penny stock. You have a First Amendment right to talk it up on penny stock forums. You can then sell for a profit. No single step is illegal. But if the police prove you intended to pump and dump it you have committed a crime. The whole process, taken together, is a crime if they prove you were trying to convince a bunch of idiots to do something stupid (ie: buy your $.05 penny stock for $0.25) that a) cost them money while b) earning you money. You manipulated the market for your personal gain, and that's bad.
This guy made a series of perfectly legal moves that had the effect of a) costing a bunch of idiots to lose money in the Flash Crash while b) he gained money.
How do you know a guy who wrote 30 checks on an account with $0 in it didn't intend to deposit enough to cover the difference?
You don't really. But in the US Legal system enough circumstantial evidence will overcome reasonable doubt every time. And if this guy made loads of money off a crash caused by these tactics, and then continued to use the same damn tactics for years and years, it's really hard to believe it was an accident.
You really don't understand how primitive the situation is regarding International Law in a country that hasn't addressed the topic in it's Constitution since 1789.
Why do US Courts legally recognize the Republic of Ireland's right to govern anything?
Because the President told them that those 26 counties are not-America, recognized Ireland as an independent Republic, and Congress has yet to pass a law declaring Dublin a territory.
What happens when the US Government asks for a warrant to search Irish data, or seize a person in Ireland? The Government is the Executive Branch, which means that as far as the Courts are concerned the president has added a "but" to his recognition of Irish sovereignty, and they have every right to a) consider the case on it's merits, and b) penalize the shit out of anyone in the US who fails to help the Federal government in it's inquiries.
Incidentally, since Ireland is not in the US the merits of the case are much more likely to allow aggressive data-gathering because Irish data has no Fourth Amendment protections.
By that standard warrants don't have anything to do with searching a bag i9n your closet because it would probably be for the entire room and say nothing about a bag directly.
This is what happens:
1) Court issues warrant.
2) Twitter refuses to comply with warrant, claiming it can't due to the way it's designed it's database.
3) Court rules that bullshit and starts fining Twitter for contempt.
Now Twitter is fined every day it doesn't have a back door. Lawyers probably insist on claiming it has not been ordered to install a back door or be fined, but this is because lawyers are insane and do not live in the real world. Twitter's choices are a) install a back door so the data can be handed over or b) get fined. Ergo they are ordered to install a back door or be fined.
It's a warrant. The restrictions on what it can do are very very limited. As long as the cops convince a Judge that that the public interest is better served by adding the backdoor then not adding it it's perfectly legal.
In other words:
Dude, there's a reason they're called "powers," not "easily-hackable APIs."
And you're going to convince the Courts you don't have access how, precisely?
Courts can order you to do inconvenient things to get information required for investigations. They can force you to let the police use your house for a stakeout. They can order you to divulge reams of information it's not trivial for you to get.
As long as the database supports remote access of any kind, then it's going to be literally impossible to convince the Courts twitter can't simply update the software to allow remote access in the States. Which in turn means that if Twitter refuses to grant itself such access Twitter is in violation of a court order and gets fined.
They're businessmen.
Dealing with that requires a change to their process, which means costs (ie: new meters, people smart enough to handle monitoring the system, etc.). They will whine to high heaven about it until a) the government steps in and writes them a check in exchange for shutting the fuck up, or b) the Courts order them to do it anyway.
Even that would be tricky to do right.
A test written by Kalahari Bushmen would be useless for creating a General Intelligence distribution anywhere but the Kalahari because the tools they have are completely different then the tools anyone else has.
The problem isn't as bad when everyone on the test is from the same country, but it's still true that a test written by the Duck Dynasty guys demographic would be significantly different from one written by the Hip-Hop demographic, and it would be very hard to judge folks from one of those groups based on their score from the other test. What we've actually got are tests written by that famous WEIRD ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic") demographic, which of course a) does great on the test, b) has measurably better life-outcomes because we also create most of the social and economic systems that allow one to have good life-outcomes, thus creating c) a very strong belief that we are smarter then everyone else because the test we took in A has a high number and it strongly correlates with B.
You might have a point on private messages and British law, but the rest of it just isn't protected. I didn't know it had that feature because I've never used it. It also may not be. UK Cops use Facebook posts all the time without a warrant, and those only go out to a select group of your friends. But as for the rest, it's fucking twitter. The whole point is that it's not private. Your handle, your name, and your tweets are all public information that you have no right to keep out of Court. And if you have no right to keep them out of Court then (under bopth the British and American systems) you have absolutely no right to protect that information from the government at all.
As for the fines, you have yet to present any legal argument that would prevent your boss from being fined for violating a Court Order if he let you know that he had installed a back door. Microsoft is trying the one you'd doubtless make, but it's lost at the District Court level and is not likely to win at higher levels.
Congratulations. You get a gold star.
Meanwhile your boss's boss has secretly installed a back door in your database software, which he could not tell you about due to a US Court Order, and if you figure it out and sabotage the back door he gets to get fined.
BTW: what precisely do you think is stored in a Twitter database that is protected by UK law? This is Twitter, not Hotmail. Almost the entire database are tweets, which count as public statements, and have no expectation of privacy. Most of the rest of the database consists of your name and twitter handle, which are displayed with your tweet and thus public statements. Refusing to supply any one of these things to the NSA is not a position that's protected by British law in any way shape or form.
The only thing that could possibly have any level of protection whatsoever is the email address twitter uses to communicate with users, and in a country that spent decades fighting masked gunmen reading public statements I sincerely doubt a that there is some magical legal document protecting your right not to be linked to your public statements.
The subsidiary workaround worked because a) the New York state subsidiaries genuinely had no access to the Swiss bank vaults, and b) because Federal Courts are much less respectful of state laws then the warrants Federal courts issue. In this case it just doesn't pass the smell test to claim that the US-based version of twitter doesn't have the ability to get data from Irish twitter servers, particularly since the database software is probably designed here. Good luck convincing a Court you genuinely can't downgrade it to get rid of the security features you just added.
As for my writing, thanks.
Are we being civil to each-other on the internet? Since when has that been allowed? Particularly on Slashdot.