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With my current knowledge of the case, I'd say Apple was clearly in the moral wrong and it's a pretty dark mark in their past.

My understanding is the suspect was detained and law enforcement was not asking for a dragnet (at least thats what they stated publicly), and they were asking for a tool for a specific phone. Apple stated the FBI was asking them to backdoor in all iPhones, then the FBI countered and said thats not what they were asking for. Apple then marched triumphantly into the moral sunset over the innocent victims'; meanwhile the FBI then send funds to a dubious group with questionable ethics and ties to authoritarian regimes.

In my opinion, Apple should have expediently helped here, if for no other reason than to prevent the funding of groups that support dragnets, but also out of moral obligation to the victims.

The difference is that in this case OpenAI was able to produce the requested information without compromising security for their other customers.

Changing the headline post hoc without any indication of the change is kind of a pet peeve of mine. Why is it not indicated as errata in the article like other edits when the body of the text is changed or factual information is confirmed?

I had the same assumption but apparently it does not appear to have changed since publication. [1]

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20251008204636/https://www.rolli...

I suppose it's a good reminder to people that every cloud service they interact with is collecting data which can be used against them in court or in any number of other ways at any point in the future and that chatbots are no exception.

I'm sure that there are many people who thoughtlessly type very personal things into chatgpt including things that might not look so good for them if they came out at trial.

> But makes me wonder about what happens when you are dealing with summaries of summaries of long gone tokens. Is that evidence?

There is text input and text output it's really not that complicated

If used in court the jury would be given access to the full conversation just like if it was an email thread

> Also why the sudden interest? Amazon Alexa snips have been used before in court/investigation and this is not new.

As I understand it, some people treat chatgpt like a close personal friend and therapist. Confiding their deepest secrets and things like that.

You have your full history in chatgpt not just summaries and I doubt they permanently delete chats you specifically choose to delete.

Your honor, the defendant is semantically guilty!

There are two questions that come up.

1. How wide is the search net dragged?

2. Who can ask for access?

The first shows up in court cases about things like "which phones were near the crime" or "who in the area was talking about forest fires to ChatGPT?" If you sweep the net far enough, everyone can be put under suspicion for something.

A fun example of the second from a few years ago in the New York area was toll records being accessed to prove affairs. While most of us are OK with detectives investigating murders getting access to private information, having to turn it over to our exes is more questionable. (And the more personal the information, the less we are OK with it.)

I don’t think you hold an unreasonable position on that issue. If everything is operating as it should then many would agree.

We’ve long ago entered a reality where almost everyone has a device on them that can track their exact location all the time and keeps a log of all their connections, interests and experiences. If a crime occurs at a location police can now theoretically see everyone who was in the vicinity, or who researched methods of committing a crime, etc. It’s hard to balance personal freedoms with justice, especially when those who execute on that balance have a monopoly on violence and can at times operate without public review. I think it’s the power differential that makes the debate and advocacy for clearer privacy protection more practical.

Sure, warrants and subpoenas need to exist in order for the legal system to function. However, they have limits.

The modern abuse of the third-party doctrine is a different topic. Modern usage of the third-party doctrine claims (for instance) that emails sent and received via Gmail are actually Google's property and thus they can serve Google a warrant in order to access anyone's emails. The old-timey equivalent would be that the police could subpoena the post office to get the contents of my (past) letters -- this is something that would've been considered inconceivably illegal a few decades ago, but because of technical details of the design of the internet, we have ended up in this situation. Of course, the fact there are these choke points you can subpoena is very useful to the mass surveillance crowd (which is why these topics get linked -- people forget that many of these mass surveillance programs do have rubber-stamped court orders to claim that there is some legal basis for wiretapping hundreds of millions of people without probable cause).

In addition (in the US) the 5th amendment allows you the right to not be witness against yourself, and this has been found to apply to certain kinds of requests for documents. However, because of the third-party doctrine you cannot exercise those rights because you are not being asked to produce those documents.

> Am I wrong?

As a naturally curious person, who reads a lot and looks up a lot of things, I've learned to be cautious when talking to regular people.

While considering buying a house I did extensive research about fires. To do my job, I often read about computer security, data exfiltration, hackers and ransomware.

If I watch a WWI documentary, I'll end up reading about mustard gas and trench foot and how to aim artillery afterwards. If I read a sci-fi novel about a lab leak virus, I'll end up researching how real virus safety works and about bioterrorism. If I listen to a podcast about psychedelic-assisted therapy, I'll end up researching how drugs work and how they were discovered.

If I'm ever accused of a crime, of almost any variety or circumstance, I'm sure that prosecutors would be able to find suspicious searches related to it in my history. And then leaked out to the press or mentioned to the jury as just a vague "suspect had searches related to..."

The average juror, or the average person who's just scrolling past a headline, could pretty trivially be convinced that my search history is nefarious for almost any accusation.

I think you're right, but the two collide over the question of whether police have the right to be able to access your stuff, or merely the right to try to access it.

In the past, if you put evidence in a safe and refused to open it, the police could crack it, drill it, cut it open, etc. if all else failed.

Modern technology allows wide access to the equivalent of a perfectly impregnable safe. If the police get a warrant for your files, but your files fundamentally cannot be read without your cooperation, what then?

It comes down to three options: accept this possibility and do without the evidence; make it legally required to unlock the files, with a punishment at least as severe as you're facing for the actual crime; or outlaw impregnable safes.

There doesn't seem to be any consensus yet about which approach is correct. We see all three in action in various places.

[flagged]

Nothing new here. Somehow people are surprised evidence against them includes - "my google search" or "my chatgpt logs" or ...

In this age I'd assume the NSA already has such records.

they HAD to? didnt Apple refuse to do this exact thing?

Every company must comply with lawful warrants and subpoenas.

Arson is also an inherently dangerous felony, which is why when someone dies because of arson, the arsonist can be charged with murder.

Isn't lighting any fire in the woods during dry conditions inherently malicious?

>it would be extremely unusual for an arsonist to switch from targeted arson based on anger or revenge to thrill seeking arson setting unmotivated fires

This is all pet theories and silliness for purposes of discussion. I freely admit that I haven't built a case here that's strong enough to withstand even a gentle poking by an opponent.

I don't know as much about arson but I did go through the same serial killer phase as every morose teen and one of the things that stuck with me is the way that some offenders escalate from simple peeping and stalking all the way up to murder. Another thing that stuck with me is how in some cases when there is an intended victim, esp for revenge, an obsessed mind will often hone in on a single characteristic of the intended victim then transfer victimhood to strangers based on that characteristic. The woman who "wronged" you is a skinny blonde who smokes cigarettes so you go out looking for skinny blondes who smoke cigarettes to victimize in her stead because in your unconscious brain that matches the pattern of behavior that would soothe the wounded entitlement of the offender. Given these facts about the nature of obsessive, vengeance-oriented crime and the fact that the serial killer/arsonist crossover is so common that arson is one of the mcdonald triad of behaviors common to serial killers there's a non-zero possibility that we're seeing a revenge fantasy transferred to another victim. There's also the fact that obsessed criminals tend to want to roleplay or practice and a lot of times their first "serious" crime is one of these roleplay/practice sessions getting out of control. This feels like that to me though I can't prove it. It's like he wanted to see what starting a fire would be like, assumed that the local VFD would get it under control and in doing so would also give him an idea of what the response looked like so he could optimize for escape, then either it got out of control or he tried to inject himself into the emergency response (another common thing among obsessed criminals, many like to relive the crime by being part of the investigation, like to tease investigators by being right under their nose or believe that by injecting themselves into the investigation they can steer it away from them).

Again, does any of this hold up in a court of law? Of course not. Does it hold up in a court of a thread on a post on HN? Maybe, we're here to talk and I'm of a mind that we didn't do anything to fix w/e it was that made people serial killers but there aren't really any serial killers anymore so something must have happened to that behavior. Perhaps stranger arson is a way that the same drivers that led to serial murder before the ~~panopticon~~internet are driving new behaviors now. Intuitively I'm highly confident that the stranger spree killings we see now are driven by those same pressures in a lot of perpetrators and the change in MO is about taking advantage of lag time in law enforcement's ability to correlate facts. Before the internet you could drive a few hours' down the road and start using a new name and unless your old name was already in the system there was basically no way for anyone to know. Obsessed criminals could offend, disappear and wait it out. Nowadays we're really good at ID'ing an offender so obsessive murders have to be one and done, but another strategy could be crimes that are small enough that they don't trigger the kind of dragnet response that involves things like checking all the CCTV cameras in a ten mile circle around the crime and things like that.

edit: everyone seems focused on the "serial killer phase" line that was really intended to be a throwaway. I just mean that I read a lot about them and thought it was shocking and cool to have a "favorite". Gross shit, but I assure you no one was ever in any amount of physical or psychic danger beyond declaring me a pizza cutter (all edge and no real point).

> The reason I want maximum punishment is that it works, it does deter

People disagree with you not of opinion but because you are factually wrong.

"Evidence shows lengthy prison terms do not have a significant deterrent effect on crime" https://ccla.org/criminal-justice/no-longer-prison-sentences...

"Research Shows That Long Prison Sentences Don’t Actually Improve Safety" https://www.vera.org/news/research-shows-that-long-prison-se...

People aren't robots that think through every single decision. Arson happens frequently and nobody dies. Death is a rare consequence and the arsonist didn't intend to kill someone, it feels like an accident, not murder.

This is how humans work. We work on probability and approximation. We often act based the consequences of our intentions, not the consequences of our actions.

Someone that learns the consequences of their actions, regrets the harm they inflicted, and changes their behavior as a result, is not the same danger to society they were before. In fact society would be better off reintegrating them because they'll tell others not to do the same thing.

I'm not exactly sure where to fit this in, but people change. A society that makes vengeance the only rule, where death is punished with death, regardless of a person's intentions, is an authoritarian nightmare.

Intent here will matter.

If he's got a gun fetish and accidentally set it off, killing someone, that's different than shooting it at someone.

He might have had a fire fetish, set one, extinguished it, and despite his intent it got out of control.

Hard to say though. Either way, I can see a stiff penalty to prevent future use of the "oops I just like fire" defense.

The question to ask is manslaughter or first degree murder.

Judges can refuse to admit anything they want, or give jurors instructions of any kind about how to consider evidence in relation to a crime. About the only thing a judge can't do is fabricate evidence themselves.

Another thread says they tried to use his past "drawing a fire related photo" to try and paint him as some kind of pyromaniac. These clods just cant help themselves but to prove AT THE FIRST CHANCE that they will twist and abuse anything they can get their hands on to paint some kind of picture. Its hilarious that they cant even keep this in their back pockets to wait for a real real bad hard to persecute criminal to use it on either

Chats with chatgpt are end to end encrypted (it's https), but one of the ends is OpenAI.

End-to-end encrypted data is also fair game -- the only difference is that there are simply fewer parties that have the data to give.

Not using Google but instead use a Mullvad or Brave search engine isn't solving any problem. Because if you cannot trust company A, you also shouldn't trust company B.

If you want real and total anonymous search, use a public computer.

He started a continuous combustion reaction, and Malibu was destroyed by the continuance of that combustion reaction. Whether at some point the orange light it was giving off dimmed a bit is not very interesting. He committed the crime; then emergency services tried to mitigate the damage but failed. These are two fully separate things.

The fire would not have rekindled had it not been started in the first place.

Liability would still be on him.

Did he start the fire knowing it could kill people? Did his actions lead to the death of people?

That seems clear cut first degree murder to me, as I understand it (I'm not sure if it requires a specific person to be murdered but a pre-meditated act that kills people seems like it'd qualify to me).

(I am not a lawyer)

You may find the "Thin skull rule" interesting for criminal liability

Don’t get me wrong, I am highly skeptical. I also am genuinely curious because it seems to be in their best interest to delete these records for a few reasons:

1. Adherence to their own customer-facing policy. 2. Corporate or government customers would CERTAINLY want their data handling requirements to be respected. 3. In my experience at $MEGA_CORP, we absolutely delete customer data or never maintain logs at all for ML inference products. 4. They’re a corporation with explicit goal of making money. They’re not interested in assisting LE beyond minimum legal requirements.

But still I wonder what the reality is at OpenAI.

I'm not sure what details would add. What happened:

1. I engaged with Gemini.

2. I found the results wanting, and pasted them into comment threads elsewhere on the internet, observing that they tended to support the common criticism of LLMs as being "meaning-blind".

3. Later, I went back and viewed the "history" of my "saved" session.

4. My prompts were not changed, but the responses from Gemini were different. Because of the comment threads, it was easy for me to verify that I was remembering the original exchange correctly and Google was indulging in some revision of history.

That's why companies usually use an AI to automatically ban your account. That's why there are currently tricks floating around to get anyone you don't like banned from Discord, by editing your half of an innocuous conversation to make it about child porn and trafficking. The AI reads the edited conversation, decided it's about bad stuff and bans both accounts involved.

You don't even need to make bets. Encoded within the answer of "what is the best way to prevent fires" is the obvious data on the best way to start them.

> I'm dubious of your claim that climate change was cited as a cause in any serious publication. Can you provide any sources?

I didn't claim anything about publications. I complain about the media coverage. If you want the source, you can go to YouTube and watch German Tageschau, a central news outlet. Every report of fire was followed by brainwashing about climate change. It was similar in most of the major Western European news coverage.

I still haven't once talked to an LLM for personal reasons. It's always been to get information.

Talking to an LLM like a human is like talking to a mirror. You're just shaping their responses based on what you say. Quite sad to see stuff like the "myboyfriendisai" reddit