notveryrational

> If there wasn't a legal risk, why would the Guardian have complied?

They were at gunpoint.

If there was merely a legal risk, it would have been sorted out by the courts and with lawyers. Example: Pentagon Papers, NYT.

This was a no-disagreement, forced compliance situation. It's not like they debated with the armed guards and they came to mutual philosophical position.

And note that The Guardian _did_ disagree. They had no other option.

So the entire argument "They complied (when forced at gunpoint and under threat) -> therefore it must have been a legally gray thing for them to report on global surveillance documents" begs the question. And to that point, the argument would be thrown out of any courtroom on those grounds.

When strongarm governments exercise their authoritarian muscles, we don't need to apologize and make excuses for it.

American documents were leaked to journalists and that was a legally gray problem in the UK? Don't be silly.

Imagine if some Saudi documents were leaked to journalists and the American government walked into the Times and forced them to destroy the documents at gunpoint.

This was clear and simple government censorship.

Not particularly unusual or remarkable for the UK.

This conversation on HN can essentially be boiled down to "law versus ethics".

Those supporting censorship make basic references to it being okay because it is legal.

Those opposed to censorship make basic references to it being wrong because it is unethical.

Clearly, there is a tension between what is legal and what is ethical.

This has actually already been determined. For instance, businesses are required to serve all colors regardless of sexual orientation, color, religion, etc.

It's a regressive part of this epoch of human history that the opposite is true of free speech: companies are required by law to surveil and censor.

The HN readership has its own fascistic tendencies, including a large portion of its membership that defends censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

Increasingly, that's representative of the US population writ large.

Because the UK government has a censorship program that prevented journalists from reporting on source material relevant to the interests of their citizens.

When well-defined rules include "content that the government wants to suppress because it criticized them" the rules provide censorship via moderation.

In this case, Facebook - presuming what they did was "follow the rules" - is following censorship rules.

So perhaps the thread should be about the US government forcing companies to censor free speech for them.

No person is claiming that "moderation is censorship".

Merely, this specific act of moderation was an implementation of censorship.

Moderation and censorship are two different things that are not mutually exclusive.

Something can be both moderation and censorship at the same time.

You are presenting a false dichotomy.

In no way was there an attempt to transfer risk.

Facebook was a community platform where I could reach out to the people I knew and loved - my friends and family. That's the only reason I made Facebook posts.

Regarding moderation - do you agree that something can be both moderation and censorship at the same time?

To make this more clear, consider Facebook's relationship with the Turkish government. Facebook will moderate the content in Turkey to what is allowed speech in that country, including moderation to remove criticism of the government.

Is that moderation or censorship? Or is it both?

Having been censored multiple times by tech firms, I fall squarely into one camp.

During the Snowden Disclosures, I took to Facebook with the documents getting published and started to do my own summaries.

Facebook implemented a policy in which it would not let any post that contained a link to a Snowden Document. In some cases they would let the content get posted, but I confirmed with a friend's account that it was not visible when scrolling my feed from another account. Posts about other content were all visible and otherwise had no problems.

I complained and Facebook got back to me with a customer relations paragraph about keeping their platform free of unwanted or questionable content.

Not long after I discovered through media, and then some friends from Turkey, that what I experienced was identical to state sponsored censorship that Facebook extends to the Turkish government.

This lasted for close to the entire duration of public attention on the global and domestic surveillance scandal.

(Other links and content in other scenarios, for example May Day protest organization, was similarly blocked by Facebook - at least in Seattle for the organizers that I was in contact with).

Was talking here about the regulatory requirements for mortgages to be accepted in the first place as well as the rather lax regulatory regime (in practice) that was in effect at the time.

Yes, Glass-Steagall's removal of the separation between depository and investment banks had its own effects.

Let me clarify here that I did not intend to communicate that "everything everywhere was completely 100% good except for the bad US mortgage packaging". This was my miscommunication and I own it.

There were (and are) lots of problems in the financial sector.

This is what I got by trying to distill down a very complex process into an easily readable list.

Are we interpreting the bailout of a global US-created financial crisis "saving the world" now?

Here's what happened: - The international market, particularly the Asian market, burst.

- Investment went into the tech industry, which also burst.

- To keep investment rates high, the Fed coordinated changes to regulations so that private mortages could be sold as investments.

- The Fed pushed for other countries to adopt the same practices.

- This new regulation regime was inherently designed to push investment earnings as much as possible, and new financial instruments were created to centralize risk from individual risk toward systemic risk.

- It started to become clear that there were inherent structural issues with the investment scheme.

- The Fed continuously lowered regulations to feed the market in an attempt to prevent it from crashing.

- When no more regulations could be cut, the entire global market crashed.

- This was all based on a philosophy that investment is a key indicator of economic health, and that driving up investment would drive up the health of the overall economy.

- Regulators decided to distribute the costs of the mistake, and loan tax payer money to banks that had collapsed.

- With rate exception, people in the financial sector made hand over fist.

- Congress even evaluated making it legal to falsify accounting information in an effort to save the banks.

- The U.S. and European economy is still recovering.