[Thorrez]

>how they intend to secure this "vault" against the current government

Is there any risk of the government ordering them to take it down? That seems unlikely to me. The US has strong free speech protection, stronger than European free speech protection.

>keeping this data online against the express will of the government is gonna cost (political) capital.

Costing them political capital (aka the government is unhappy) is different from the government ordering them to take it down. Also, when you say "express will", are you saying the government has explicitly publicly stated that they don't like that Harvard is hosting this data?

[dmd]

> The US has strong free speech protection

The US literally just told (e.g., [0]) all scientists working for it they are not permitted to publish papers or speak at conferences or travel. What the US "has" is irrelevant when laws are being ignored.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/revised-and-extend...

[marcinzm]

That's an employer telling employees what to do? Google can tell the same thing to it's employees and does. I don't see the relevance to the government telling other entities what to do.

[MattGrommes]

The federal government isn't just "an employer", it's an extension of the public will funded with public money and should work toward the public good.

[marcinzm]

The topic is if the federal government is ignoring free speech laws in this specific instance. I'm arguing it's not.

As for public good, you'd probably find it depressing what the majority of Americans view as good.

[dmd]

The employer is the US federal government, in this case.

[marcinzm]

And employees signed contracts which allow the government to tell them how to do their jobs or fire them. Just like any other employer. Harvard did not.

[Teever]

Sure. But is it a good thing that their employer did this in this situation?

Is it a normal thing for the US government to do? Why or why not?

Do other government do this? Which ones and for what reasons?

[saghm]

> Is there any risk of the government ordering them to take it down? That seems unlikely to me. The US has strong free speech protection, stronger than European free speech protection.

In other words, you don't think we have to worry about Congress bringing in university presidents to grill them over political activities against the government's current policies occurring on their campuses? Certainly we wouldn't see any of those whose didn't give testimony that the government liked would end up being forced to resign in the aftermath; we're not in the dark ages anymore like we were in 2023...

[Thorrez]

I hadn't heard of that case before. However, some government officials saying that someone should resign is a bit different from the government actually forcing someone to resign or be fired.

The comment I replied to said "What I'm missing from this announcement though is any mention of how they intend to secure this "vault" against the current government.", which I believe is talking about a case where the government orders Harvard to take the info down. If Harvard will delete the data because a few government officials say they should (but don't order them to do so), then I don't see what can be done to secure the vault against the government. E.g. hosting it in Europe won't be any help, because Harvard could just delete it from the European hosting.

[CalRobert]

Whether the US still has this protection of free speech remains to be seen

[sofixa]

> The US has strong free speech protection, stronger than European free speech protection

Citation needed. "European free speech protection" doesn't exist, each country has its own rules and freedoms. Hungary is drastically less free than e.g. France... but overall, as a rule of thumb, unless for you freedom of speech includes freedom to be a Nazi, European countries are pretty free. And don't take stances such as "spending money is free speech which is sacred so no campaign financing rules". You might get arrested for a Nazi salute though... which, if you think is a bad thing, you haven't been paying attention in history classes nor modern news.

[Thorrez]

The US values free speech higher than privacy. The EU values privacy higher than free speech.

>Opinions on the right to be forgotten differ greatly between the United States and EU countries. In the United States, accessibility, the right of free speech according to the First Amendment, and the "right to know" are typically favored over removing or increasing difficulty to access truthfully published information regarding individuals and corporations. Although the term "right to be forgotten" is a relatively new idea, the European Court of Justice legally solidified that the "right to be forgotten" is a human right when they ruled against Google in the Costeja case on May 13, 2014.[20]

>The European Union has been advocating for the delinkings requested by EU citizens to be implemented by Google not just in European versions of Google (as in google.co.uk, google.fr, etc.), but on google.com and other international subdomains. Regulators want delinkings to be implemented so that the law cannot be circumvented in any way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#European...

[sofixa]

Right to be forgotten isn't related to free speech, it is indeed about privacy.

Free speech and "right to know" are different things. The second one is about transparency, and is very important... but as you say, the EU draws the border with "your rights stop where others' begin". We have a similar thing in many EU countries where people arrested/on trial still have a right to privacy until conviction, to avoid their names being forever plastered everywhere, with mugshots, based on nothing proven.

[Thorrez]

Right to be forgotten is related to free speech. It's a situation where one person's speech is at odds with another person's privacy. That's why this is mentioned many times in the article I linked.

The first paragraph I quoted earlier.

>Those who oppose the right worry about its effect on the right to freedom of expression and whether creating a right to be forgotten would result in a decreased quality of the Internet, censorship, and the rewriting of history.[5]

>Wikimedia is based in the United States, where the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In Germany, the law seeks to protect the name and likenesses of private persons from unwanted publicity.[63] On January 18, 2008, a court in Hamburg supported the personality rights of Werlé, which by German law includes removing his name from archive coverage of the case.[64]

>There is opposition to further recognition of the right to be forgotten in the United States as commentators argue[who?] that it will contravene the right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, or will constitute censorship, thus potentially breaching peoples' constitutionally protected right to freedom of expression in the United States Constitution.[96] These criticisms are consistent with the proposal that the only information that can be removed by user's request is content that they themselves uploaded.[clarification needed][96][97]

>Major criticisms stem from the idea that the right to be forgotten would restrict the right to freedom of speech.[111][112][113] Many nations, and the United States in particular (with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution), have very strong domestic freedom of speech laws, which would be challenging to reconcile with the right to be forgotten.[114] Some academics see that only a limited form of the right to be forgotten would be reconcilable with US constitutional law; the right of an individual to delete data that he or she has personally submitted.[96][97][115] In this limited form of the right individuals could not have material removed that has been uploaded by others, as demanding the removal of information could constitute censorship and a reduction in the freedom of expression in many countries.[116] Sandra Coliver of the Open Society Justice Initiative argues that not all rights must be compatible and this conflict between the two rights is not detrimental to the survival of either.[117]

>There were concerns that the proposed General Data Protection Regulation would result in Google and other Internet search engines not producing neutral search results, but rather producing biased and patchy results, and compromising the integrity of Internet-based information.[119] To balance this criticism, the proposed General Data Protection Regulation included an exception "for the processing of personal data carried out solely for journalistic purposes or the purpose of artistic or literary expression in order to reconcile the right to the protection of personal data with the rules governing freedom of expression."[70] Article 80 upheld freedom of speech, and while not lessening obligations on data providers and social media sites, nevertheless due to the wide meaning of "journalistic purposes" allows more autonomy and reduces the amount of information that is necessary to be removed.[2]: 9 When Google agreed to implement the ruling, European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding said, "The Court also made clear that journalistic work must not be touched; it is to be protected."[125] However, Google was criticized for taking down (by the Costeja precedent) a BBC News weblog post about Stan O'Neal by economics editor Robert Peston (eventually, Peston reported that his weblog post has remained findable in Google after all).[126][127] Despite these criticisms and Google's action, the company's CEO, Larry Page worries that the ruling will be "used by other governments that aren't as forward and progressive as Europe to do bad things", though has since distanced himself from that statement.[128] For example, pianist Dejan Lazic cited the "Right To Be Forgotten" in trying to remove a negative review about his performance from The Washington Post. He claimed that the critique was "defamatory, mean-spirited, opinionated, offensive and simply irrelevant for the arts".[129][130] and the St. Lawrence parish of the Roman Catholic church in Kutno, Poland asked Google to remove the Polish Wikipedia page about it,[131] (in Polish) without any allegations mentioned therein as of that date.

>Index on Censorship claimed that the Costeja ruling "allows individuals to complain to search engines about information they do not like with no legal oversight. This is akin to marching into a library and forcing it to pulp books. Although the ruling is intended for private individuals it opens the door to anyone who wants to whitewash their personal history… The Court's decision is a retrograde move that misunderstands the role and responsibility of search engines and the wider Internet. It should send chills down the spine of everyone in the European Union who believes in the crucial importance of free expression and freedom of information."[132]

>In 2014, the Gerry Hutch page on the English Wikipedia was among the first Wikipedia pages to be removed by several search engines' query results in the European Union.[133][134] The Daily Telegraph said, on 6 August 2014, that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales "described the EU's Right to be Forgotten as deeply immoral, as the organisation that operates the online encyclopedia warned the ruling will result in an Internet riddled with memory holes".[135]

> Volokh, Eugene (2000). "Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking about You".

>Portals: Freedom of speech

>Categories: Freedom of expression

[MollyRealized]

> The US has strong free speech protection, stronger than European free speech protection.

For this to be said in the current circumstances shows either a political viewpoint or a lack of knowledge.

[Thorrez]

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983898

Additionally:

* In some European countries newspapers cannot publish the names of people on trial. In the US they can.

* In some European countries you cannot take pictures of people in public and publish them. In the US you can.

[fragmede]

What's the name of the law in Germany that puts you in jail for Holocaust denial?