What kinds of things could Musk and Abbott be discussing that could lead to an exchange of intimate messages? The only (non-jokey) thing I can think of would be discussions about the kinds of accommodations Abbott might need at SpaceX or Tesla events due to being paralyzed.
So yeah, there's probably some genuinely not-for-public consumption stuff about Tesla/SpaceX future business initiatives and a whole lot of racism and snarky comments about people that are supposed to be political allies...
Edit: wondering if the downvote brigade are supposed to be signalling that Elon doesn't have any legitimate reason to start conversations about his companies with Texas politicians or that private conversations with Elon would never end up segueing into something that might be embarrassing. Not sure which of those opinions is more ridiculous really...
Why are politicians involved with legal issues? Is this correct?
[1] A lot of less permits would be needed for 10,000 member software company compared to a rocket launch provider or a manufacturing unit.
I think this is what's confusing me - I'd expect politicians to pass laws, but enforcement might be the job of police, tax authorities, workplace safety inspectors, etc.
And giving politicians say over who laws apply to sounds like a fast track to corruption.
politicians have a dual role they are the legislative authority and also are the executive (when in power) . They don’t do those roles concurrently but the same people switch between those two.
The actual execution happens by police lawyers or tax authorities as you say, but the direction and leadership is set by the politicians. When to prosecute, whom to and what punishment to ask for and so on.
In the US system there is additional complexity as what are nominally administrative positions like judge, sheriff etc also elected. So by definition those people also have to be politicians.
This is how corruption is defined.
In government work, in my field specifically, it's the inappropriate transfer of money (gifts, deals, dinners) that's reportable.
The limit for reporting in my field (for gifts) is 10 dollars.
My industry has historically been extremely corrupt. This is why rules were defined for reportable expenses. Could you boil down your viewpoint into rules that can be applied in an organization, rather than a vibe test? I think I could better understand you, then.
Corruption is usually when there is personal benefit to the politician themselves.
Pointing out that Tesla might be prepared to do x, y and z in the state in only the regulatory framework concerning p and q is compatible with their plans is plain old lobbying. Whether this is more good because it means lots of jobs for Texas or bad because the existing regulatory framework does an excellent job of protecting roads/labour/investors is exactly the sort of decision we give to elected representatives, for better and for worse. If the regulatory framework gets changed and then Tesla sets up a new plant, we probably see the governor issue press releases about it. Same goes for if local government chooses to subside the plant construction to "bring jobs to the state". That doesn't mean all the questions any politician or government agency actually trying to do the right thing should ask to establish the credibility of the proposal should be asking aren't legitimately trade secrets.
My downvote was to indicate that I reject your implication that there are legitimate reasons to keep his communications with government officials private. "Government" is, in most instances, replaceable with "Public". If you don't want your private business to be public knowledge, do not do business with the public. And if you do business with the public, expect that business to be public. There are mechanisms to protect "private" information that do not require government secrecy or redactions. Private businesses use them all the time. They are fallible, sure, but so is everything. More importantly, they are subject to subpoena and other legal remedies so they can be made public if necessary, but they are otherwise private (unlike email). And no, it doesn't matter to me what levels of harm can be done by the lack of secrecy; that's not a reason to be secret, that's a reason to not provide so much harm exposure. Government should be minimizing risk, not providing mechanisms that engender it. Besides, if my refusal to show ID to a cop with no RAS can still get me arrested, obviously the state understands the law as a "do the bad thing, sort it out later" kind of setup. So show us the emails and let's start working to fix the fallout.
But the position that because an institution works on behalf of the public, every communication it receives should be public seems naive. The entire publicly funded criminal justice service depends on secrecy to function, for example. Similarly, the public doesn't need to be know the budget and shortlist of possible locations for the next Gigafactory or how to build a Falcon 9 any more than it needs to know the identities of whistleblowers, and if you don't redact that information, you don't get people blowing whistles or sharing their expansion plans with governors or IP with NASA. Without the ability to deliver suitcases full of cash in response to a private conversation being inconvenienced in the slightest.
As you've already pointed out, we have such things as subpoenas already to deal with the actual criminal conduct. This is a better approach than "don't write anything you wouldn't share with everyone", not least because the latter actually normalizes every interaction with government officials being a request for an off-the-record in-person conversation.
Putting aside your other sensible comments, this one is true from Tesla's side, but false from the government side. I don't "need" to know what Tesla is doing, but I "need" to know what the government is doing. Let's say Tesla is weighing its options where to open the next factory, I want to know what governments are doing to attract (or not) their business.
I'll put it another way. Florida is quite happy to send state officials very publicly to small events explicitly focused in reeling in businesses, do a very public presentation about how they don't do socialist things like handouts but do offer them material support in building out their US base in Florida, and then hang around for networking. It's very much part of their jobs, and it's advertised and reported on, and in at least some cases open to the general public. So if I'd wanted to sidle up to Jared Purdue and explain why Florida's state investment fund should underwrite part of the cost of a space propulsion facility near Cape Canaveral, I was at a small event nowhere near Florida where I totally could have done that recently. But if I have no expectations that commercially sensitive data will be protected I'm almost certainly not going to consider following up by sharing financial projections and plans and evidence for his staff to review (and yet would be free to proceed if he can make things happen based purely on 5 minutes conversations or suitcases stuffed with cash) . I suspect Florida voters would prefer their DOT to be able to have that proper follow-up though (or would if the plant was likely to happen in the next 2 years and likely to end up in Florida...)
If the public wants more insight into what governments are doing to attract business you get that from budget transparency, formal review processes, publicised state support thresholds, independent anti corruption monitoring etc and of course PR about success stories, not by placing all written correspondence with businesses into the public domain, a measure which will severely limit their ability to [selectively] attract business. First thing I'd want the government to do to attract business is to respect the same confidences everyone else does, and that means where the new plant might be is non public information.
Likewise Elon can threaten or offer campaign contributions to a governor over the phone and probably does so, but if he wants to actually do the responsible thing and email lots and lots of arguments and evidence to try to persuade a governor that vetoing a bill is a bad thing, it's probably reasonable to assume that some of that is commercially sensitive (ironically if it's financial or technical details redacted from long emails is actually material to changing the governor's mind, it's probably because the case is better than the generic "yay Gigafactory, yay looser autonomous test regimes" arguments that get trotted out). Better to have a paper trail only suitably cleared people can see than nobody prepared to leave any paper trail at all.
And yeah, it's Elon, so there's probably other stuff that has nothing to do with his companies redacted too, but that's another issue entirely
There are mechanisms for businesses to share confidential information with government officials, and keep it under wraps if the release of them could undermine their businesses, use these mechanisms instead of trying to make government communication opaque to the public in the name of "attracting businesses".
More government transparency is never, ever, a bad thing, the few exceptions where it might require transparency to be reduced need to be very clear cut to avoid being abused (as is common in the USA to call "national security" and redact a shit ton of stuff), the less transparent your government is, the bigger chances it's just being corrupted, no one wants that.
If you're going to respond to day old threads, at least try to engage with arguments in good faith. If someone (reasonably) suggests that what the government does to attract businesses is a matter of public interest, then naturally my reply is going to point out that not sharing all their commercially sensitive plans and positions is a good start. At no point have I even hinted that attracting business is government's highest priority. It isn't, but nor is "indiscriminately publishing every email ever sent to a public official" automatically a higher one.
There are indeed mechanisms to share confidential information with government officials. One of those mechanisms is that commercially sensitive information shared with public officials gets redacted from emails shared in the public interest. Like all mechanisms it can be abused, but the public is still better off from knowing the general gist that Elon had a lot of email exchanges with the governor, some of which have been published and some of which redacts stuff that was either sensitive business detail or very embarrassing than they are if a similar exchange took place through unofficial channels instead.
I replied to a comment posted 9 hours before my comment, don't come chastise me, thank you very much.
I replied to what I read: you defending that communications between the government and businesses don't need as much transparency as possible.
The rest of the comment is just trying to support this absurdity in too many words.
Anyway that's a lot for simplistic HN threads, and I enjoyed your replies.
As far as whistleblowers and other such information, it's a nice deflection, but it's obviously irrelevant to this topic. I didn't claim anything about how the government should publicize everything, I made claims about what the government should share regarding business deals. Steelman, don't strawman.
And as far as your fear-mongering about everyone suddenly insisting on off-the-record conversations, A) it's a laughable premise; most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account of knowing what "public" means and B) anyone who tried to use off-the-record interaction as a means to circumvent public scrutiny would leave a trail of their behavior that could be relied upon in trial or legislative debate to evidence a law broken or a loophole to be made illegal. Simple as.
I'm sorry you find it "laughable" and "fear-mongering" that people will switch to off the record conversations. Perhaps you are not aware that government officials already spend most of their day talking to people in unrecorded conversations, with many of those conversations being with representatives of business.
As it is, companies will also happily follow those questions up with slide decks, projections, technical details and requests for information etc which helps substantiate their pitch or their case for funding or their objection to a bill (unless they're actually doing something dodgy, in which case creating a paper trail is counterproductive). They will not send this information if that is expected to be publicly disclosed because they don't want everybody knowing that they are emailing Texas officials about a Texan location before they've even decided if they actually want one or how much they're spending on widgets from which suppliers. Never mind other intriguing possibilities like NASA circulating all the technical documentation SpaceX has shared with them.
If you are truly convinced that 'most people don't mind their business with the government being public on account knowing what "public" means', I advise you to test this hypothesis by emailing some businesses asking them to share unredacted content of emails they have recently exchanged with government officials (a no-effort filter on .gov domains in their own mailbox is sufficient for this experiment). Let us know how many unredacted emails they share with you...
It's hilarious that you seem to think that what you suggested is tantamount to what I suggested. You also don't seem to have actually worked with the government or requested any information via foia requests, based on your descriptions.
In any case, good luck on whatever you're trying to convince whoever your trying to convince of.
Reason I'm able to that is precisely because I know full well that transparency legislation acknowledges that commercial sensitivity is a thing, and that parts of some emails made to evaluate us aren't going to be shared under FOIA legislation. And frankly if it wasn't, it would stop the appropriate email exchanges about business impact of policy changes, not inappropriate conversations people might want to have about campaign contributions. If you want FOIA tweaked to work on the sovcit principle that since the public is paying their bills everything shared with public officials is also public, you're the one that needs to do the convincing.
Let me know how you get on with those emails "most" businesses are happy to share the unredacted contents of.
Mostly I was just amused by rapid fall before I got any replies and the possibility I might have managed to offend both ardently pro and anti Elon people with a relatively anodyne post :)
Like his support of racist organizations in Europe? Or hiding information about failures of self-driving automobiles? Or unexpected layoffs? There's probably a lot more, involving SpaceX, etc.
Honestly, that first one alone merits a lot of hairy eyeballing, but I despise racists and hate that my home state is associated with them.
Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't have used your government email account to have intimate and embarrassing exchanges? That thought come to mind, Mr. Abbott?
No. But there are investigative reporters.
The government uses "special masters" or "taint teams" if there's a scenario like this, at times. One was involved in the Trump Mar-a-Lago case.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/resources/news...
It's called an "In camera review". Assuming someone sues Abbott over this, then a judge can take the documents in question, look over them, and make a determination on whether or not Abbott's claims are true.
That ruling can be appealed to higher courts.
Of course, then the public body appeals it and the appellate justices then have to read the 800 pages all over again.
But eventually you should get a half-decent result.
The FBI and friends can also use their means of unlawful surveillance and leak the contents to politically aligned publishers.
My guess is that they discussed a lot of horse trading too candidly.
kelseyfrog•2mo ago
teeray•2mo ago
notahacker•2mo ago
I'm not seeing much to be gained by making it impossible for governments to do due diligence with many suppliers because they'd rather turn down the contract than broadcast such information to their competitors (not sure it'd jive particularly well with public company control over what is and isn't public information either)...
cogman10•2mo ago
The fact is, spacex does not have any "trade secrets" that they should be dropping into communication with a government official when speaking about policy or a future contract.
It's not like Musk would be dropping in things like vendors or material composition when talking to Abbott.
The upside of working with the government for a contract is that usually means a lot of money. The price should be full transparency as that's our tax dollars. Secret government communications should pretty much always be seen as highly suspicious.
notahacker•2mo ago
But it does mean that the answer to "can you disclose more about the functioning of technology X" or "can you tell us more about your expansion plans in Texas" will be "no". I don't think businesses being less transparent (or setting the price of the contract at greater than the value of open sourcing every part of their IP that isn't patentable or copyrightable) is a win.
cogman10•2mo ago
Forcing communication about illegal things to be done verbally is highly inconvenient for both Musk and Abbott. They have to take the time to connect which limits the other work they can be doing. They need a private time and to find a location to avoid someone overhearing their communications.
Not an impossibility, but definitely makes everything just a bit harder.
notahacker•2mo ago
Doing illegal things over email is already risky from the point of view of not being able to redact when supplying it to an investigator.
The people actually inconvenienced by "public by default" are government departments trying to run a fair selection process involving detailed technical audits, or to provide support to companies that don't wish for their business plan to be public information. That's just a new hurdle that people proposing stuff which is completely legal have to cross when deciding whether to share any information with any public official ever.
inerte•2mo ago
perihelions•2mo ago
> "The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE"
> "Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved"
flowerthoughts•2mo ago