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Twitter is being sued for letting Saudi spies inside the company
- onionisafruit 5y agoWhether twitter was negligent or not the bigger lesson here is that you should assume every big tech company is compromised by every state that cares to do so. Don’t trust any company with compromising information. The bigger the company, the higher the chance that they employ a spy for your adversary.
- bpodgursky 5y agoIt's also pretty much impossible for a big tech company to filter against this during hiring without risking catastrophic discrimination suits.
- CheezeIt 5y agoThat’s the big problem. It’s absolutely insane that tech companies can’t keep foreign nationals and people with foreign ties from sensitive positions.
- vagrantJin 5y agoPlease elaborate on what the insanity is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tester34 5y agoYou're kinda right, but on the other hand how I'll get visa and steal some faamg jobs if they'll not accept foreigners? /s ok, just kidding, now serious take: US population: 330kk Rest of the World: 8kkk Delta (8kkk-330kk) Even if we assume that distribution of highly skilled people is not uniform (lack of decent higher edu places, harder access to computers/internet) then you still lose shitton of outliers edit. ops I misread.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoAre you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. I can't say I would recommend the practice.
- tester34 5y ago>Are you using kkk as a unit prefix for billion? I've never seen that before. afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities e.g 1k - 1 000 (of gold) 1kk - 1 000 000 (of gold) 1kkk - 1 000 000 000 (of gold) >I can't say I would recommend the practice. Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk... damn, but with number in front of it it's just like yet another unit - I guess?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago> afaik it's pretty common within gaming communities Ah okay. > Oh, I just realized that somebody may think about other kkk... Well more just because (I thought) it is unusual it'd be hard to understand in a context where you hadn't made it obvious. Maybe I'm just out of touch!
- yardstick 5y agoNot in any of the games I’ve played. Why not use use m for million and b for billion? That’s the standard that everyone understands.
- tester34 5y agohmm, it's the same as e.g "Y2K problem" >The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, Millennium bug, Y2K bug, Y2K glitch or Y2K error, - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/39370/what-does-k-mean-in-20k-when-talking-about-prices https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/39370/what-does-k-me...
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- yardstick 5y agoI know what you are trying to say, but for many people outside the US, Facebook is a foreign tech company. What makes US nationals any better in safeguarding sensitive data/access about the companies customers than people from UK or Canada or Germany or Norway or Australia or New Zealand etc? Should a tech company silo its data and operations so each country has its own independent unit? No, too infeasible and defeats the purpose for a lot of their services.
- CheezeIt 5y agoWell, the U.S. Government isn’t likely to steal IP from American companies. For things like customer data or encryption secrets, it’s also perfectly reasonable to avoid hiring former spooks.
- sneak 5y agoThe problem isn't just foreign nationals. There's plenty of CIA inside FAAMG. It is always a mistake to use nationality as a proxy for trustworthiness. Being a US person, personally I'm much more concerned with the negative impacts of US spies spying in the US than foreign spies spying in the US. Foreign governments don't regularly go around mass murdering and torturing Americans the way the US government does. Americans have a lot more to lose from CIA spying than they do from Saudi intelligence agency spying.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- _8j50 5y agoDiscrimination is for protected classes.
- eternalban 5y agoPlease elaborate on this impossibility and eluded catastrophes. Unless a candidate has a deep pocket and backers it is “impossible” to field a discrimination lawsuit based on a boilerplate rejection letter. If corporations were actually this scared of lawsuits, there would be no age ceiling in software hiring. Twitter’s CEO is on the record being cozy with deep pocketed Saudi investors in Twitter. It was certainly not the fear of discrimination lawsuits that permitted Saudi agents gaining access to Twitter’s systems.
- imajoredinecon 5y agoI'm sure this is true to a certain extent, but it'd be interesting to see how it varies in degree. For instance * do some companies have good enough insider risk controls to make it expensive or risky to access particular kinds of sensitive data? * not all nation state actors are equally well-resourced (and not all of them have equally large populations of computer science grads from which to recruit potential spies): is there a difference between what (say) KSA or Iran could get, vs US/UK/China/Russia?
- _8j50 5y agoInsider risk can be reduced, not eliminated. Let's say a company has more stringent checks than TS//SCI and pays employees that handle sensitive info well. People can always be turned, if not direct then indirect extortion through loved ones and family. You don't need that much money to develop an asset (it can be a lot but even the poorest nation would find it trivial). If you can't get to data handlers then you can go after developers and the software supply chain. You have to understand, people can cooperate with threat actors without implicating themselves by getting paid or coerced to allow an intrustion (fall for a phish link or email, install seemingly legit software, insert a USB drivr they found in the parking lot,etc..). Worst case they get fired.
- sneak 5y agoMore importantly: stop giving your phone number and GPS position to services. Your phone number is the same as your home address, because it is linked to same in a million databases.
- 1cvmask 5y agoOr assume that these censorship platforms are complicit and in-bed with national security apparatuses of their home countries and the close allies of their home countries. “The suit also alleges that Al-Ahmed's Arabic-language Twitter account was suspended in 2018 and has not been reinstated despite multiple attempts at appeal, and accuses the company of keeping Al-Ahmed's account offline because of its interest in maintaining users in Saudi Arabia. "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint.“
- SMVS 5y agoThe tech industry is chock full of spies working for one side or the other. FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning. The only bullshit here is targeting KSA, when everyone's involved.
- l33t2328 5y agoWhy do you say FAANG has been an intelligence front since the beginning?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoPRISM would seem to support that idea.
- evgen 5y agoNo it would not. It would only suggest that once the data existed there was an interest on the part of certain government agencies to gain access to the data. The idea that these companies are 'fronts' for these agencies is moronic to the point of being self-parody.
- sneak 5y agoFront suggests secret ownership/control. More likely is that they are simply compelled by the state to spy, willingly or not.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoHow is "the state secretly compels them to do things" different from "they are secretly controlled by the state"?
- d23 5y agoAs another commenter suggested: it's absurd beyond parody and a flagrant abuse of language to conflate being a "front" with being compelled by a third party (especially one with legal authority) to do some action(s). Being a "front" suggests an entire business model created by and built around propping up that third party such that the two are indistinguishable actors on everything but the surface level.
- arisAlexis 5y agoAlternative title could be: Twitter sued for discrimination and low personel diversity
- graperapist1480 5y agoyou can just sue for discrimination though? That is common. It is considered legally dangerous to have an all white (or, less fantastically, 30% Jew 30% Asian 20% white 0% hispanicblack), but the mode of enforcement would be employment or hiring discrimination, not this...
- denton-scratch 5y ago"Discrimination" is what sensible people do all the time. It means "distinguishing things that are different", and if you don't discriminate, bad stuff is likely to happen. For example, it can be bad for your digestion if you fail to discriminate between a hamburger and a house-brick.
- graperapist1480 5y agoyeah I’d rather hire 7 skilled and well oiled Jews than an “equal opportunity” ratio mixture of 4 whites : 1 black. but there is a “civil rights act” and a lot of creative, anti-hegemonic jurisprudence enduring that my militant ascetic coding-Shtel will never be a reality. :(
- gremIin 5y agoYour comments read like someone who just did a large amount of drugs. All over the place.
- rendall 5y ago> ...to appease a neigh beneficial owner... Has anyone seen this use of neigh before? Is it a legal term? What does it mean?
- Ancapistani 5y agoHuh, that’s a new one to me. I found a couple of usages in academic publications, but they don’t give me any more context as to meaning. That leads me to believe that it’s not a legal term. I can’t find any meaning other than the “sound a horse makes” in any dictionary, either. ETA: Apparently, the old English “nēah” meant “near”. That seems to be the the root of the work “neighbor”. Interestingly, it looks like “neigh” (like a horse) and “neighbor” both came into use in English in the 12th Century. Perhaps coincidental.
- wpearse 5y agonée, perhaps? Possibly something for r/BoneAppleTea
- denton-scratch 5y agoPerhaps the OP meant "nigh", which is archaic, and means the same as "near". Even then, "nigh beneficial owner" and "near beneficial owner" are awkward constructions that would have broken the continuity of my reading comprehension. But surely one is or is not a "beneficial owner". Being nearly a beneficial owner is the same as not being a beneficial owner at all.
- curryst 5y agoI think "nigh" is meant to modify "owner", not "beneficial". I think the lawyer saying is saying that the KSA figuratively owns Twitter, and that Twitter benefits from that relationship. Golden handcuffs, basically. That is the most awkward phrasing I've seen in a long time. I'm not even sure it's grammatically correct. I would've expected "beneficial nigh-owner" or something like that.
- mickjagger 5y agoThe biggest lesson here is the threat is within, but most security strategies focus on the concept of external threat.
- southerntofu 5y agoThat's one of the teachings of feminist privacy classes, that the biggest threats are usually very close to you, such as a jealous lover setting up spyware on your phone to track your movements.
- vadfa 5y agoThe dangers of diverse hiring.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoThe argument that being a victim of espionage constitutes per se negligence seems like a stretch. For spies to exist at all, they need to fool whatever supervision is in place. For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening. When a warbler feeds a cuckoo chick and lets his own chicks starve, is that because he's a bad parent who could be fixed with a lawsuit, or is it just a fact about the ecosystem?
- quartesixte 5y agoMy thoughts exactly. Sometimes you will lose the cat and mouse game and often the spies just have a huge upper hand on you.
- onionisafruit 5y agoI get what you’re saying, but one way or another personal data twitter was entrusted with was leaked and people were murdered as a result. I don’t know if twitter was actually negligent here, but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> but it seems worthwhile to find out through this law suit. If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe. Otherwise, no. We already know that Twitter specifically tried to deal with one of these spies when he came to their attention, shortly before he escaped. There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't. Lawsuits aren't cost-free; the off-chance that, against all expectations, you might find something that almost definitely isn't there is not a good reason to entertain one.
- hluska 5y agoIf Twitter could assess penalties this wouldn’t be a legal system. Courts and judges assess penalties. Companies can sue for damages but they don’t assess penalties. With all due respect, this is the second ignorant thing you’ve said on this article. You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please stop…