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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • If she stays on and the federal court holds her in contempt and punishes her, maybe Donald will pardon her, so she still gets her money. So no, it’s not moral.

    What could she do? She could say what exactly the feds are doing wrong, for example, with federal officers’ names and dates and details. Create the record. She could refuse to file motions supporting the feds. Then the people would win those uncontested cases. Those would be relatively moral. But she made it about herself, and that’s hogwash.



  • What you’re positing here is a view of life that Margaret Thatcher loved. The idea is, “There is no society. There are no laws. There is no oversight. Everything, all responsibility, all of it is 1000% individual.”

    Of course in reality that’s nonsense. We live in a world with laws that are sometimes enforced, where governments sometimes protect us, because we want them to, because that’s good for us all.

    But even if you believe in Thatcher’s view, then you have the problem of corporations. You can’t seriously argue that we should be responsible for everything ourselves, as individuals, and also that corporations should exist, because they are anti-individual.



  • If companies are lying in their advertising to the general public, then that is something the companies are responsible for. You can blame the victims, but that’s kind of stupid because there are so many people in the world who are not technically savvy. They don’t have the resources, background, knowledge, and skills to evaluate whether what the company is telling them is true. That’s why there are laws designed to protect consumers from lying companies.

    Would it be great if everyone was an expert in everything? Yes. Are they? No. They never will be. That’s why we have laws.




  • It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere. It looks like the claims are based on specific aspects of California law (put simply: wiretapping, privacy, and deceptive business practices). Do they have a strong case? I don’t know, not worth my personal time to research state law on these issues.

    Is there enough to go to court? Certainly the lawyers think so, and I agree. If Meta is claiming E2EE (which it is) and then immediately undercutting that by re-transmitting large numbers of messages to itself (which is alleged), that sure feels deceptive to me, and it’s easy to think that a jury might agree.




  • So the interesting thing will be that, look, the feds are going to ignore this. They have and will delete data and burn evidence. There’s a name for that crime: accessory after the fact.

    On the one hand, of course contempt charges don’t matter to feds who don’t care. On the other hand, the penalty for accessory to murder can be as long as the penalty for murder itself. So it’s possible that a half dozen feds could get locked up for life, depending on who did what and when.

    And there is no statute of limitations for any of this. They can never feel like they got away with it.