This behavior is depressingly common among lawyers working for big organizations - lawyers are cc'ed on communications just to create attorney-client privilege and make the messages non-discoverable. In general, it seems that lawyers for large companies are not asking the question of "is this legal?" but instead asking "how can I ensure that my company doesn't get sued for this behavior?".
"A human law has the nature of law insofar as it accords with right reason; if it departs from reason, it is an act of violence rather than law." - Thomas Aquinas
The American legal tradition was not built on rules alone, but on inherited Christian moral reasoning about right and wrong, justice and restraint. In that tradition, law derives its legitimacy not from power or procedure, but from truth ordered toward the common good. When law is divorced from that moral ground, it ceases to govern and begins to coerce, preserving authority while emptying the word justice of any real meaning.
A friend whose husband was a vp level management at Qualcomm whos job was to make deals selling its TV internet services to other countries. He would not let his own children watch TV, the very product he sold. He said you wouldn't open the door to let strangers in your home, why do that online? The billionnaire founder of computer firm Sun Microsystems also did not let his children use computers in the bedroom. They know.
Although I'm sure it could benefit the public interest for Meta to get knocked down a few pegs, the way that we do it matters. For this reason, I found the D.C. judge's invocation of the crime-fraud exception a little concerning. What standard of evidence is necessary to invoke the exception, and what's the alleged crime or fraud that occurred?
An executive of Brown & Wiliiamson, a large tobacco company wrote in a 1969 memo“doubt is our product.” The wireless industry knows this as well, and this is why the studies finding harm (positive) vs no harm (negative) are always presented as mixed and inconclusive.
There are two immediate problems with these “inconclusive” studies.
Industry-funded studies used simulated EMF exposures instead of real cell phones.
Eighty percent of the papers showing “no effect” (17 out of 21) originally published in Radiation Research were paid for by either industry or the U.S. Air Force
How is a manufacturer supposed to determine the safety flaws of its products if it does not run tests, hence 'pay for' the tests? The source of the funds for the tests should not be a deciding factor, only the quality and reproducibility of the tests themselves should be questioned and examined.
I am a scientist who has refereed many papers and sat on boards to evaluate the worth of research proposals. The work should be examined and judged on its own merits, not on the qualifications or other features of the author or who is paying for it. That is an objective evaluation; all else is prejudice.
"A stint in Meta’s legal department on a lawyer’s resume should be considered disqualifying by law firms and other future employers, making that lawyer unhireable if they cannot show that they spoke up about, or were otherwise unaware of, the suppression of evidence or harm."
Isn't this canceling? Isn't this the 'assumption of guilt' rather than the presumption of innocence and the requirement to prove guilt?
While I agree that Meta's lawyers should be scrutinized, the author is promoting unethical and illegal means that he criticizes.
No, it’s not cancelling. Licensed attorneys have an affirmative obligation under ethics rules to report the misconduct of other attorneys. Mets attorneys who were aware of this misconduct and didn’t report it are guilty of misconduct themselves.
There is nothing in an attorney’s oath of office that allows them to consider the broader implications of their work. They are gladiators hired to fight and defend their client with no further ethical obligations.
If we want real correction of this problem, let's first & finally put the responsibility squarely where it belongs: Parents. As my dad used to ask when he saw kids wandering unsupervised, "Where are the parents?" From what I have seen extremely often during my 68 years, it would be a safe bet to assume that many parents do not love or care about their children & that rings true here. The job of children is academic & moral learning, not sports, friends, clubs or anything else & parents are the first & should be but seldom are the best teachers. Tech can be used responsibly & parents had better start singing that tune also & they had better act it out. Kids could not get into any trouble if they were at home studying. Tiger parents should be the order of the day.
While it is true that parents hold the lion share of responsibility over how their kids spend their free time, corporations like Meta and their lawyers who deliberately allow pedophiles to stalk and abuse their children deserve a special place in hell.
I doubt any decent parent or person would ever even dream such things are going on, but here we are.
It should be a major wake up call to parents and a clarion call for swift justice for these perpetrators of these most heinous crimes.
Lets look at the underlying forces at work: It’s the necessity for women to work in order to finance a home that destabilizes families. House price inflation has exceeded the growth in wages. In 1908, in Melbourne Australia, in an arbitration court set up to manage relations between employers and workers, Justice Higgins in the Harvester Judgement set a 'basic wage', a minimum wage for a male that would enable that single worker to support a stay at home wife to look after their family, and it was a large family at that time. Put it down to the rapacity of the economic system that has enabled some to thrive at the expense of others. And this in the context of rapidly increasing productivity due to the use of machines and the availability of many new sources of energy to drive them. And to make that power widely available via the generation of electricity and its distribution via the 'grid'. Still measured in 'horsepower'.
If we want children to have a real childhood and more births, we have to enable a man to put a roof over his head for no more than three times his annual income and somehow reorganise society so that women can be stay at home mothers and people can walk or cycle to work, and kids to school without the use of an automobile and its associated costs. This is going to take a lot of undoing.
But women today, most anyway, have abandoned the idea of being a “stay at home Mom”, or even a Mom at all. That’s the first hurdle.
Govt Setting wages is a non-starter as that inevitably results in less work opportunities overall as companies don’t want to spend the money so curtail their workforces.
The way our societies have devolved over the last several decades, where everyone wants more from someone else yet they are not willing to make any of the sacrifices themselves, as was the ethos once upon a time, has led us here.
Getting government as far out of people’s lives as humanly possible is a start. From there people have to realize there’s no sugar daddy or handouts coming to supplant their own willingness to do what needs to be done to forge a decent life for them and their families.
Will that ever happen?
It could, but it will take a long time to get things reordered in that direction.
In the meantime, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, as a hell of lot of hell will have to be purged out in the process.
Interesting. I’m wondering if those grants were attached to a university or college.
If so, those administrators who’ve turned those schools into indoctrination warehouse centers are to blame. And they’ve refused stubbornly to alter course, hence the withholding of grant money.
But many of them have huge endowments which they COULD use to offset the losses for important work, but will they? Of course not.
Women in the workforce means you have many more 2 income families. With 2 incomes they can afford more expensive homes, better cars, better and more frequent vacations. With the increased demand for homes the prices rise. The 1 income households are left behind. This is a smallish issue for the laptop class who aren't just scraping by, but is a near existential crisis for the lower working class who cannot afford to buy a home at all. This feeds the general sense of failure leading to dependence on drugs and alcohol, and despair.
I don't have a metric. Just observation. An ex-school teacher as my first ten year career. I think its different in Western societies that don't have a tradition of living in multigenerational communities where grandparents can look after children. Schools are too large and impersonal, kids can't walk to school. Urban sprawl doesn't generate communities, just loneliness. We waste a lot of time in cars. But, primarily, for a lot of middle and low income families there is a lot of economic pressure on parents that makes it difficult to maintain cohesion. In my substack I look at what people call 'the housing affordability problem'. I see a connection between the way people live in single use, single generation homes, town planning and developer preferences, the use of motor cars, the absence of the corner store and its replacement by 'supermarkets' and the ennui of our lives.
The legal system that evolved in the West over centuries was intended to do two things: (1) deliver justice and (2) prevent vigilantism. When the system demonstrates that it not only can not but will not deliver justice, then it’s a pretty safe bet that vigilantism makes a return. Remember Gary Ploucet, the father who executed his son’s abuser on live TV and was hailed as a national hero? I won’t be surprised if more and more fathers assume the role of judge, jury and executioner in cases like this since the legal system has proven it will not deliver justice.
"Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs. Can you imagine Bostonians’ outrage if Adams had, say, withheld evidence that the British soldiers did have murderous intent? What would Adams’s legal legacy be if he’d tried not to discover the truth of what happened outside the Custom House, but to sow doubt and uncertainty among the people of Boston? How different would our legal system be if the British soldiers were acquitted not because they were innocent, but because they had a lawyer who was willing to hide the truth?"
This is completely wrong. A defense lawyer has no obligation to present information that helps convict his client. He is simply prohibited from lying or otherwise presenting false evidence.
This behavior is depressingly common among lawyers working for big organizations - lawyers are cc'ed on communications just to create attorney-client privilege and make the messages non-discoverable. In general, it seems that lawyers for large companies are not asking the question of "is this legal?" but instead asking "how can I ensure that my company doesn't get sued for this behavior?".
Some government agencies also appear to practice this method of keeping info from the public.
"A human law has the nature of law insofar as it accords with right reason; if it departs from reason, it is an act of violence rather than law." - Thomas Aquinas
The American legal tradition was not built on rules alone, but on inherited Christian moral reasoning about right and wrong, justice and restraint. In that tradition, law derives its legitimacy not from power or procedure, but from truth ordered toward the common good. When law is divorced from that moral ground, it ceases to govern and begins to coerce, preserving authority while emptying the word justice of any real meaning.
Should, should, should - but they won’t.
We live in age of Zero Accountability for even the most egregious of crimes.
When will anybody, EVER go to jail, aside from those who are persecuted innocent people?
This has got to end.
It's a pleasure to see a moral compass, and a determination to see a grievous wrong set right, in full flight.
People with children doing this to other people's children. That's the bottom line.
A friend whose husband was a vp level management at Qualcomm whos job was to make deals selling its TV internet services to other countries. He would not let his own children watch TV, the very product he sold. He said you wouldn't open the door to let strangers in your home, why do that online? The billionnaire founder of computer firm Sun Microsystems also did not let his children use computers in the bedroom. They know.
They absolutely know. This is what makes it criminal.
The Unabomber was right about tech bros
Although I'm sure it could benefit the public interest for Meta to get knocked down a few pegs, the way that we do it matters. For this reason, I found the D.C. judge's invocation of the crime-fraud exception a little concerning. What standard of evidence is necessary to invoke the exception, and what's the alleged crime or fraud that occurred?
An executive of Brown & Wiliiamson, a large tobacco company wrote in a 1969 memo“doubt is our product.” The wireless industry knows this as well, and this is why the studies finding harm (positive) vs no harm (negative) are always presented as mixed and inconclusive.
There are two immediate problems with these “inconclusive” studies.
Industry-funded studies used simulated EMF exposures instead of real cell phones.
Eighty percent of the papers showing “no effect” (17 out of 21) originally published in Radiation Research were paid for by either industry or the U.S. Air Force
How is a manufacturer supposed to determine the safety flaws of its products if it does not run tests, hence 'pay for' the tests? The source of the funds for the tests should not be a deciding factor, only the quality and reproducibility of the tests themselves should be questioned and examined.
I am a scientist who has refereed many papers and sat on boards to evaluate the worth of research proposals. The work should be examined and judged on its own merits, not on the qualifications or other features of the author or who is paying for it. That is an objective evaluation; all else is prejudice.
"A stint in Meta’s legal department on a lawyer’s resume should be considered disqualifying by law firms and other future employers, making that lawyer unhireable if they cannot show that they spoke up about, or were otherwise unaware of, the suppression of evidence or harm."
Isn't this canceling? Isn't this the 'assumption of guilt' rather than the presumption of innocence and the requirement to prove guilt?
While I agree that Meta's lawyers should be scrutinized, the author is promoting unethical and illegal means that he criticizes.
No, it’s not cancelling. Licensed attorneys have an affirmative obligation under ethics rules to report the misconduct of other attorneys. Mets attorneys who were aware of this misconduct and didn’t report it are guilty of misconduct themselves.
There is nothing in an attorney’s oath of office that allows them to consider the broader implications of their work. They are gladiators hired to fight and defend their client with no further ethical obligations.
Thank you, and well-said. I can't help but wonder if Meta's pullback from VR is a response to mounting data.
And one might ask about where the board has been in all of this? The accountability must extend to the board.
If we want real correction of this problem, let's first & finally put the responsibility squarely where it belongs: Parents. As my dad used to ask when he saw kids wandering unsupervised, "Where are the parents?" From what I have seen extremely often during my 68 years, it would be a safe bet to assume that many parents do not love or care about their children & that rings true here. The job of children is academic & moral learning, not sports, friends, clubs or anything else & parents are the first & should be but seldom are the best teachers. Tech can be used responsibly & parents had better start singing that tune also & they had better act it out. Kids could not get into any trouble if they were at home studying. Tiger parents should be the order of the day.
While it is true that parents hold the lion share of responsibility over how their kids spend their free time, corporations like Meta and their lawyers who deliberately allow pedophiles to stalk and abuse their children deserve a special place in hell.
I doubt any decent parent or person would ever even dream such things are going on, but here we are.
It should be a major wake up call to parents and a clarion call for swift justice for these perpetrators of these most heinous crimes.
Lets look at the underlying forces at work: It’s the necessity for women to work in order to finance a home that destabilizes families. House price inflation has exceeded the growth in wages. In 1908, in Melbourne Australia, in an arbitration court set up to manage relations between employers and workers, Justice Higgins in the Harvester Judgement set a 'basic wage', a minimum wage for a male that would enable that single worker to support a stay at home wife to look after their family, and it was a large family at that time. Put it down to the rapacity of the economic system that has enabled some to thrive at the expense of others. And this in the context of rapidly increasing productivity due to the use of machines and the availability of many new sources of energy to drive them. And to make that power widely available via the generation of electricity and its distribution via the 'grid'. Still measured in 'horsepower'.
If we want children to have a real childhood and more births, we have to enable a man to put a roof over his head for no more than three times his annual income and somehow reorganise society so that women can be stay at home mothers and people can walk or cycle to work, and kids to school without the use of an automobile and its associated costs. This is going to take a lot of undoing.
Sounds good - in theory.
But women today, most anyway, have abandoned the idea of being a “stay at home Mom”, or even a Mom at all. That’s the first hurdle.
Govt Setting wages is a non-starter as that inevitably results in less work opportunities overall as companies don’t want to spend the money so curtail their workforces.
The way our societies have devolved over the last several decades, where everyone wants more from someone else yet they are not willing to make any of the sacrifices themselves, as was the ethos once upon a time, has led us here.
Getting government as far out of people’s lives as humanly possible is a start. From there people have to realize there’s no sugar daddy or handouts coming to supplant their own willingness to do what needs to be done to forge a decent life for them and their families.
Will that ever happen?
It could, but it will take a long time to get things reordered in that direction.
In the meantime, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, as a hell of lot of hell will have to be purged out in the process.
I agree. For contrast and the nitty gritty of the way forward check this out: https://howardyu.substack.com/p/the-invisible-majority-who-really
Interesting. I’m wondering if those grants were attached to a university or college.
If so, those administrators who’ve turned those schools into indoctrination warehouse centers are to blame. And they’ve refused stubbornly to alter course, hence the withholding of grant money.
But many of them have huge endowments which they COULD use to offset the losses for important work, but will they? Of course not.
What metric would you use to argue that women in the workplace destabilizes families? Genuinely curious.
Women in the workforce means you have many more 2 income families. With 2 incomes they can afford more expensive homes, better cars, better and more frequent vacations. With the increased demand for homes the prices rise. The 1 income households are left behind. This is a smallish issue for the laptop class who aren't just scraping by, but is a near existential crisis for the lower working class who cannot afford to buy a home at all. This feeds the general sense of failure leading to dependence on drugs and alcohol, and despair.
I don't have a metric. Just observation. An ex-school teacher as my first ten year career. I think its different in Western societies that don't have a tradition of living in multigenerational communities where grandparents can look after children. Schools are too large and impersonal, kids can't walk to school. Urban sprawl doesn't generate communities, just loneliness. We waste a lot of time in cars. But, primarily, for a lot of middle and low income families there is a lot of economic pressure on parents that makes it difficult to maintain cohesion. In my substack I look at what people call 'the housing affordability problem'. I see a connection between the way people live in single use, single generation homes, town planning and developer preferences, the use of motor cars, the absence of the corner store and its replacement by 'supermarkets' and the ennui of our lives.
The legal system that evolved in the West over centuries was intended to do two things: (1) deliver justice and (2) prevent vigilantism. When the system demonstrates that it not only can not but will not deliver justice, then it’s a pretty safe bet that vigilantism makes a return. Remember Gary Ploucet, the father who executed his son’s abuser on live TV and was hailed as a national hero? I won’t be surprised if more and more fathers assume the role of judge, jury and executioner in cases like this since the legal system has proven it will not deliver justice.
Meta-and other social media platforms, systematically sexualize and target children and teenagers. Where are all the burning buildings and dead CEOs?
You people are a bunch of fucking cowards
"Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs. Can you imagine Bostonians’ outrage if Adams had, say, withheld evidence that the British soldiers did have murderous intent? What would Adams’s legal legacy be if he’d tried not to discover the truth of what happened outside the Custom House, but to sow doubt and uncertainty among the people of Boston? How different would our legal system be if the British soldiers were acquitted not because they were innocent, but because they had a lawyer who was willing to hide the truth?"
This is completely wrong. A defense lawyer has no obligation to present information that helps convict his client. He is simply prohibited from lying or otherwise presenting false evidence.
How on earth did this get published?
At no point does the essay make the claim that a defense lawyer has an obligation to present information that helps convict his client.