>Shouldn’t there be an outcry against the suppression of free speech?
Only if someone was one of the many people who don't understand what Free Speech is or incorrectly think of rights only in terms of themselves and people they like, not for those who they don't. In this case, Amazon is exercising their own Free Speech rights. Free speech necessarily (and as a matter of law) means the freedom to not speak and to not associate with other people. If I want to lend my support to a specific candidate with a sign in my field, I necessarily must have the right to refuse signs by everyone else. If the government puts a gun to my head and forces me to let every single candidate put a sign in my field, then the effect is no special endorsement for anyone and a flagrant violation of my free speech rights.
Someone denying another person the use of their own private property because of disapproval over their behavior doesn't generally mean any free speech issues, quite the contrary. As always there are certainly very rare edge cases, but none of them apply to a situation like this. Amazon refusing business to someone due to their race or gender or the like would be a problem, but "spies working with authoritarians" is not a Protected Class.
>What jurisdiction’s laws were broken by this company?
Why would that matter? Amazon isn't the government. They aren't threatening with force/arresting/jailing/killing the NSO Group, just refusing to continue their business relationship. So they aren't restricted to caring about only illegal behavior. In fact a core part of the whole point of free speech is to move consequences into the realms of social and economic, rather then force, not to eliminate all consequences entirely. There are a few limited legal instances they can't discriminate over. Otherwise they can deal with whomever the hell they want.
This is not even a free speech problem in the first place. We are talking about actions. To draw up an analogy: If I own a gun store and I sell you a rifle and ammunition because you want to hunt deer and I learn that you started shooting at journalists instead, I can decide to stop selling (an act) you further goods because of your actions.
As pointed out elsewhere, this is a business relationship.
In any case, the grave human rights violations that are the result of the use of Pegasus - including loss of life and liberty - weigh much more than an abstract notion of a corporation's freedom to act and impose their will on other corporations.
I don't understand the line where lots of people are seemingly outraged about people using online platforms to disseminate propaganda and extremist materials. (ie. most recently Google Drive)
NSO group seems to be a not-so-nice company. But why does what they do justify blackballing, while similar companies (say BlueCoat or any of a dozen companies that provide solutions to hack on behalf of the police) are ok?
You're going to have to be more specific than a handwave-y "lots of people" to have good online discussions. You also need to be specific in your terminology. You need to actually address the specific people and their arguments, or else do a much better job of phrasing an inquiry into theoretical tradeoffs. Ie., from your other reply:
>What I don't understand is why AWS is justified to shut them down; but Google or Facebook is not justified in preventing their platforms from being propaganda distribution channels?
So I do in fact think Google and Facebook at 100% "justified" to shut them down, and I think Amazon is too. I do have lines where I think morally, if not legally, a service can start to drift into quasi-governmental (or perhaps should be that way) territory. An example for me would be core physical infrastructure companies, not just at Tier 3 but also at Tiers 2 and 1. I think those should operate as common carriers. But I don't think social media fits. Not using it at all (as I don't) may have "costs" in terms of social opportunities but alternatives are trivial.
So for me there isn't any dissonance here, I generally support "Big Tech" (and everyone down the ladder) associating as they see fit when it comes to ongoing online service relationships within existing jurisprudence. The initial legal tweaks I'd like would be aimed at things like expanding user power in a purely additive way (like giving people the option to access root hardware/software key stores), or internalizing costs some companies are shifting onto the public, rather then beating down what some people don't like.
Hacker News (and every other forum) aren't hive mind and it's silly and tiresome to have them treated that way. What you did in your first post here was essentially throw up a big silly strawman.
>Corporations aren't humans; they don't have free speech rights.
As a matter of law in the United States you are objectively wrong. This has been settled in a series of SCOTUS decisions starting with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Corporations are legal persons, and further the individual humans that make them up do not somehow lose the free speech rights just because they decide to take collective action.
And in turn: as a matter of morality, common sense and the point of free speech you're also wrong. It's important that people be able to speak to power, and a core part of that for humanity is socializing, being able to form groups to support each other and pool ideas, skills and resources to have a greater effect than what any individual alone could accomplish. Seriously, you say "corporations don't have free speech rights"? Exactly what form of combined effort do you imagine most, say, NEWSPAPERS are organized under? So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations? You think that jives with free speech?
Oh maybe you only meant "the bad ones". That makes it very easy, but no reason to limit it to corps in this case, just stop "the bad humans" too and everything is great. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan, since everyone agrees who "the bad ones" are.....
> It's important that people be able to speak to power, and a core part of that for humanity is socializing, being able to form groups to support each other and pool ideas, skills and resources to have a greater effect than what any individual alone could accomplish. Seriously, you say "corporations don't have free speech rights"?
The people in many corporations in fact lose their free speech rights and have to follow the company line. Granted, they agreed to that in their employment contract but this is in many cases a coercive relationship.
> Exactly what form of combined effort do you imagine most, say, NEWSPAPERS are organized under? So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations?
Well, the individual reporters could still be free to exercise their free speech rights without conferring any right on the newspaper itself.
> "As a matter of law in the United States you are objectively wrong."
You are quite correct, of course. I meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "don't".
> "So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations?"
I'll point out that there's an entirely separate and intentional carve-out for freedom of the press that is distinct from freedom of speech, so that's not a good justification for corporations to get freedom of speech as a right directly.
>I'll point out that there's an entirely separate and intentional carve-out for freedom of the press that is distinct from freedom of speech
Not really as a matter of law we're talking about here. "The press" isn't some special legal entity, there's no licensing for it or anything. Absolutely critical press victories like NYT v. Sullivan were based on freedom of speech protections.
But whatever, so you don't want Mozilla Corporation to be able to advocate for Firefox if the government doesn't want it to because Google managed to lobby successfully? No company can come out in favor gay rights or Pride Day if the government doesn't want them to? You're fine with with the government being able to punish companies for arguing against encryption backdoors? And what about the individuals at those companies, if the CEO speaks about those things is that the company speaking and punishable or is it ok if he says "this is my opinion" first every time? What about employees?
Like, we can go through a million examples here if you want but I don't think it's that hard to see how maybe government might abuse that just a little bit.
>"The press" isn't some special legal entity, there's no licensing for it or anything
This is one of those things that's plausible and common enough to read on the internet that it makes me worry about alternate universes intersecting.
If you type "credentialed members of the media" into Google, do you see any results, or is it just me?
Another key phrase I find is "reporter's privilege" relating to state laws to shield the press, which, as you might imagine, requires defining what a reporter is.
"Some privilege schemes are narrow and apply only to full-time employees of professional news outlets, while others are broad and extend to bloggers, filmmakers, freelancers, book authors, and student journalists. In other words, some are inclusive and others are exclusive."
they absolutely do have free speech rights in the United States. Also, if NSO was hosting malware on AWS resources, it's almost certainly against their terms of service..
Not convinced that using the service to distribute malware, on behalf of odious third party governments for antidemocratic purposes, is protected by free speech demands. It's not speech, is it?
Sure, and it "seems like" the extremist propaganda that Big Tech shut down was violating all sorts of other laws like incitement.
Is "seems like" enough of a reason now for private companies to choose not to contract with other private companies? Or should we go to a judge and jury in both cases?
>Sure, and it "seems like" the extremist propaganda that Big Tech shut down was violating all sorts of other laws like incitement.
Most of it actually wasn't FWIW, hateful extremist content is generally perfectly legal free speech. "Incitement" gets used way, way too often on the internet, almost nothing that gets posted online is legal incitement. But neither "Big Tech" (such a dumb term) nor Hacker News nor a random forum on birds needs any violation of law or anything else to moderate what gets posted on their sites. It doesn't have to be "negative" or whatever at all even. There is nothing illegal or objectionable about someone who likes discussing trains for example. But if you post lots just about trains on a birder forum they may delete all your posts and ask you to stop because they want to focus on birds, and if you continue to do so they can delete everything and ban you. Why would there be anything wrong with that?
Private society looking at extremist content and saying "we're not going to shoot you over it but we do strongly object and we're going to socially ostracize you and deny you business and our support in any way we can" is free speech working as intended.
>Is "seems like" enough of a reason now for private companies to choose not to contract with other private companies?
Uh, yeah? People can refuse to do business with each other for nearly any reason at all, and definitely for anything other people merely say or do (at least, within the bounds defined by any existing contracts, but Amazon has covered its bases pretty well there to put it mildly).
> "Private society looking at extremist content and saying "we're not going to shoot you over it but we do strongly object and we're going to socially ostracize you and deny you business and our support in any way we can" is free speech working as intended."
Given that such logic was once used to attempt to deny service to and harass PoCs, religious, LGBTQ and other formerly "undesirable" classes, society clearly doesn't buy that logic and made them into protected classes and required businesses to serve them on an equal footing. It's not a valid argument unless you're arguing to roll back protected classes too, which I hope you're not.
(Note that I'm not defending NSO or Amazon here. I concur with others that NSO isn't engaging in speech, so while there may be a contract law issue between them and Amazon, there is no freedom of speech issue here.)
>Given that such logic was once used to attempt to deny service to and harass PoCs, religious, LGBTQ and other formerly "undesirable" classes, society clearly doesn't buy that logic and made them into protected classes and required businesses to serve them on an equal footing.
No, that was not the logic, businesses were not discriminating based purely on speech and choices of content. That's the point. I mentioned Protected Classes, but those are about entire classes of people and things that are innate to their personhood. Skin color and sex/gender being obvious ones, but disabilities either at birth or acquired later in life still are innate aspects. We've decided that public businesses as part of the privileges they have may not discriminate and rightly so.
But none of that has anything to do with actions and expression, and indeed a core part of the point is that all protected classes are in no way "inferior" or less capable of reason, argumentation, responsibility, social activities and so on! No one is born with some political alignment, as humans we all have to develop that ourselves.
>* It's not a valid argument unless you're arguing to roll back protected classes too*
No, because the worldview you've come to about given issues, morals and so on have nothing to do with protected classes.
Religion is not innate, nationality is not innate (cf. the discriminatory "Help Wanted. No Irish Need Apply" signs of the 19th century), and while sexual preference may be innate, expression of it can be consciously restrained as demonstrated by all those people who suffered from being "being in the closet". Does not being innate mean these protected classes should not exist? Clearly not, so appealing to innateness does not rescue your argument.
To be clear, I'm personally all in favor of Amazon choosing who they want or don't want to contract to. But the comment I was replying to was saying it's only okay (as in, good for society, I guess) for Amazon to kick off NSO because Amazon thought they were violating the law. I agree most extremist content is legal free speech, but not all of it is, which should be enough reason, by that rule, to kick off extremist content.
I'm simply agreeing with the comment at the top of the thread - all the outcry we usually hear about private companies being too powerful should apply here too. (My opinion is there should be no outcry about either.)
> Most of it actually wasn't FWIW, hateful extremist content is generally perfectly legal free speech. "Incitement" gets used way, way too often on the internet, almost nothing that gets posted online is legal incitement. But neither "Big Tech" (such a dumb term) nor Hacker News nor a random forum on birds needs any violation of law or anything else to moderate what gets posted on their sites. It doesn't have to be "negative" or whatever at all even. There is nothing illegal or objectionable about someone who likes discussing trains for example. But if you post lots just about trains on a birder forum they may delete all your posts and ask you to stop because they want to focus on birds, and if you continue to do so they can delete everything and ban you. Why would there be anything wrong with that?
I don't think anything is wrong with that.
What I don't understand is why AWS is justified to shut them down; but Google or Facebook is not justified in preventing their platforms from being propaganda distribution channels?
Specifically here on HN, people were outraged about Google's actions, but at the time I posted my original comment, nobody seemed to be upset about AWS's actions against NSO, at all.
Isn't the line due process of law, though? If NSO is allegedly committing a crime, then we can punish them in courts of law that are empowered and qualified to investigate the allegations fully and decide whether to deprive them of their rights. Why would we put these decisions in the hands of Big Tech?
At least, that's what I heard during the debates about deplatforming Parler. It was apparently very bad for private companies to decide that a customer was engaging in distasteful but legal actions. What is the principled argument that it was not okay for AWS to take down Parler but it's okay for AWS to take down NSO?
For state actions, yes. For private actors, if I suspect someone is using my services to break the law or engage in terrorism, "but your honor, I didn't have a court order confirming they were terrorists" won't cut my liability.
Parler was a free speech question because it was almost purely speech. NSO Group isn't just speaking. It's doing, and it's doing things that will bring liability for people around it.
> So then the question becomes Did Amazon let police gather evidence before touching anything?
Why does that become the question? If I fire a customer, must I ask the police for permission first?
America isn't a police state. And we don't have general data retention laws. The First Amendment contains both the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly; there is a balance between Parler's freedom to spew rubbish and Amazon's freedom to not assemble with them. With NSO Group, the free speech question is sharply constrained; Amazon's rights are thus stronger.
When you changed it. To use your own words, if you "suspect someone is using my services to break the law or engage in terrorism" and you then delete all evidence then you are absolutely tampering with evidence. If AWS was used to DDoS all hospitals in the US and people died, would you see a move by Amazon to delete all trace as just fine and dandy "because the US isn't a police state"? I doubt that. It doesn't matter if it is a small or big crime; knowingly deleting evidence is a crime too.
AWS ain't a law agency. They just decided to boot this organization out of their infra. Fair enough. AWS simply decided they don't want to benefit financially from this organization's operations.
I dunno. NSO group is extremely capable. I know a lot of folks go back and forth on the “if you don’t want X vendor to shut you down then go build it yourself” and for various reasons. But in the case of NSO group I feel like AWS cutting them off is probably more of an annoyance than anything else. They’re gonna be ok.
Possible. But they rely on the infrastructure AWS, Linode or DigitalOcean provide in order to fly under the radar among legitimate traffic. If all of these service providers were to blacklist NSO, Candiru or Cellebrite those would have to fall back to more exotic providers and would therefore be easier to uncover.
Only if someone was one of the many people who don't understand what Free Speech is or incorrectly think of rights only in terms of themselves and people they like, not for those who they don't. In this case, Amazon is exercising their own Free Speech rights. Free speech necessarily (and as a matter of law) means the freedom to not speak and to not associate with other people. If I want to lend my support to a specific candidate with a sign in my field, I necessarily must have the right to refuse signs by everyone else. If the government puts a gun to my head and forces me to let every single candidate put a sign in my field, then the effect is no special endorsement for anyone and a flagrant violation of my free speech rights.
Someone denying another person the use of their own private property because of disapproval over their behavior doesn't generally mean any free speech issues, quite the contrary. As always there are certainly very rare edge cases, but none of them apply to a situation like this. Amazon refusing business to someone due to their race or gender or the like would be a problem, but "spies working with authoritarians" is not a Protected Class.
>What jurisdiction’s laws were broken by this company?
Why would that matter? Amazon isn't the government. They aren't threatening with force/arresting/jailing/killing the NSO Group, just refusing to continue their business relationship. So they aren't restricted to caring about only illegal behavior. In fact a core part of the whole point of free speech is to move consequences into the realms of social and economic, rather then force, not to eliminate all consequences entirely. There are a few limited legal instances they can't discriminate over. Otherwise they can deal with whomever the hell they want.