Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the lies,-damned-lies-and-government-denials dept

It’s a sad fact that a lot of big, important questions today are coming down to the government’s word versus the word of whistleblowers and anonymous sources. And as silverscarcat points out in our most insightful comment of the week, it’s obvious who deserves the benefit of the doubt:

At this point…

Snowden has more credibility than the entire U.S. government put together.

Save for a few individuals, but they’re few and far between.

Meanwhile, when it comes to interpreting copyright law, the MPAA seems to think that its word trumps all others, even those found in statute and caselaw. An anonymous commenter won second place this week by reinforcing the point that, whatever you think of Megaupload, you can’t just declare war on the whole internet:

If you think Megaupload is bad and evil and infringing and criminals and should fry, try replacing all instances of Megaupload with your favorite cloud service of choice and see if the complaint is still valid.

Of course, in the world of DMCA takedowns, the sad situation is that the rightsholder’s word is law, at least as far as taking something offline until it’s contested. That’s how Sony was able to take a creative commons movie down, and as an anonymous commenter reminds us in our first editor’s choice for insightful, the takedowns we hear about are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg:

When I see stories like this I always wonder how many videos with tiny audiences are taken down by mistake and never put back up because the author does not know how to contest the decision, or are simply scared that they may have infringed someones copyright by accident. Also how many people do not know their fair use rights, and so do not contest take-downs when they have a fair use claim, or cannot risk the cost of it going to court?

For our second editor’s choice, we have a thorough comment from Rich Kulawiec about the fact that even beyond the obvious moral issue, not torturing people is in everyone’s best interest no matter how you slice it:

Not only is it horrific to contemplate that Americans in positions of authority authorized and/or committed crimes against humanity and tortured helpless human beings to death, but this has serious negative repercussions for American troops in the field.

First, American troops are sporadically engaged in combat with soldiers from other countries — whether in a declared or undeclared war, or a so-called “police action”, or something else. One of the things that has often brought those combat situations to a peaceful end is the surrender of those fighting against the Americans. And one of the reasons those surrenders occured is that Americans could and would promise those surrendering that they would not be killed or otherwise harmed: that they would be treated humanely. That was a promise that American commanders very often worked hard to keep, even over the objections of their own soldiers and their emotions, running high in the heat of battle.

But no American soldier can promise that any more. And no opposing soldier can believe it. There is every possibility that a peacefully-surrendering individual will be “disappeared” into one of the CIA’s gulags and repeatedly tortured, perhaps to death.

So why should they surrender? Even if they’re surrounded, outnumbered, and in a militarily hopless situation, why should they give up? Why not fight it out and try to take a few more Americans with them?

The CIA’s torture program has removed one of the primary reasons for considering surrender as a viable option and thus ensures that more American soldiers will die, fighting protracted battles that need not have been fought by anyone.

Second, American soldiers are occasionally captured by adversaries. And while some of them have been treated brutally, many have been accorded the rights guaranteed to them under international law by countries who observed the Geneva Conventions because the United States did the same. In other words, those countries treated American prisoners of-war humanely because they wished the same for their own, and they had good reason to believe the United States would obey the law.

But the CIA has broken that tenuous trust. They’ve tortured people to death. And as a result, there is now far less reason for adversaries to treat American prisoners properly: why should they? Which means that captured American soldiers in the field now face substantially higher personal risk than they did previously.

This may not be fixable. I don’t know. But if there is any possibility of fixing it, surely it lies along a path that includes the full disclosure of the entire report and every accompanying document. It will be ugly. It will be painful. It will be horrifying. But I think it’s the only possible way and I think we, as a nation, owe it to the soldiers we put in harm’s way.

Over on the funny side, first place goes to a comment from ChurchHatesTucker, responding to the news that the EU Court of Justice ruled blanket data retention to be a violation of privacy:

So that’s where the Fourth Amendment wandered off to.

In second place, we’ve got a callback comment. After Michael Hayden claimed that various cables and documents were just as good a source of information as the torture tapes that had been destroyed, an anonymous commenter took things a step further with help from a recent, but unrelated, ridiculous ruling:

According to Indiana, Hayden’s testimony is better than the tapes.

As noted back at the beginning of this post, there are a lot of battles of “who’s lying?” going on right now, and one of the biggest is between Snowden and Rep. Mike Rogers. Our first editor’s choice goes to an anonymous commenter for anticipating the latter’s response to the former’s recent interview:

In before Mike Rogers says that his talking to Vanity Fair is a cover for working with the Russians.

Finally, we’ve got another anonymous comment that I think deserves to be elevated to Ironic Adage, because it perfectly sums up the mentality of every indiscriminate, overzealous incident of copyright enforcement:

Hey, You can’t make an omelet without breaking everybody’s eggs

That’s all for this week, folks!