It may only be a ceremony but in case you never met a human before, ceremony is a non-trivial thing with them. It procuces real effects which matter.
Nobody thinks a document protects a president from a spy or assasin directly. Obviously a spy will sign an nda without blinking.
But the document and the ceremony around it absolutely does produce a real world effect on everyone else, and one that matters, both in explicitly defining things that you absolutely can not leave up to most people's simple judgement, and in getting them to classify what this document says differently than the 5 different terms of service they probably agreed to that week.
Enforcement is almost the dumbest aspect to even talk about. The threat of enforcement (in this case) is a token. But that does not make the formality a token.
And even the threat of enforcement is more than a token for most of the people involved, since they are all local. It's only a token for the exception case of a visitor.
I suspect many potential visitors would appreciate the need to maintain secrecy, but not appreciate just how much needs to be made secret. For example - the article refers to food. This may seem like an innocuous detail, but could allow an adversary to poison the food before its delivered to the bunker. The NDA servers to spell out exactly how little a visitor should tell the outside world.
Even just afterwards saying “they served Pepsi with lemon” leaks information - Pepsi and lemon are both available to the bunker, which may be enough to determine the area it is in, if you know that only one shipment of Pepsi got through.
That’s an important point that I didn’t bring up in my post.
The story mentions specific items of secrecy. But most NDA forms provided by lawyers speak only in broad generalizations about what information must be kept confidential. The best terms would be tailored to the specific situation. But the cost of legal help is high and people’s empowerment to write for themselves is low.
Given that a Dutch journalist had to have spelled out to him what exactly is meant by not giving targeting information in near real time to the Russians I can totally see the need for this. Some people are too dumb to appreciate the effects of their actions and will through stupidity (often hard to tell from malice) create serious problems in the pursuit of their personal goals.
He was asked politely first to remove the content, refused because 'it was his right', then was asked officially, still refused, then was arrested and expelled from the country after his Ukrainian press accreditation was revoked.
His employer claims that they did not know that this was forbidden, whereas war zone journalism 101 is pretty much 'don't share targeting info with the enemy'. The rocket attack that he covered has missed their intended target and within minutes he put a bunch of pictures online of where they had landed. Pretty bad episode, and ND (the newspaper he worked for) lost a ton of credibility with their positioning around this, they should have just admitted their mistake and move on, instead they focus on how the guy was treated. As far as I'm concerned he was pretty lucky, they could have easily believed he was spying for the Russians directly rather than just being monumentally stupid. I guess he couldn't wait to get his War Photo prize or something to that effect.
Much like everyone making a purchase online will 'agree to the terms and conditions' without reading them, many jobs get so many NDAs thrust at them that they'll sign without reading them.
If you repair office coffee machines for a living? You might visit 4 office buildings a day, and they'll all hand you a pile of paperwork telling you not to take photos, not to connect things to their computers, that you should evacuate if you hear the fire alarm, and so on. Hardly anybody reads such things before signing them.
If you're actually signing, with signature, a legal document without reading it, you reap what you sow. Ticking a checkbox on a site is not the same legally binding agreement that an NDA is.
For some foreign journalist or diplomat sure but against a local journalist, maintenance crew, cleaner, etc who all most likely sign the exact same NDA for sure Ukraine can enforce it if the person is unable to escape the country (which for males aged 18 to 65 is really hard at the moment for example)
edit: Also as a journalist if you actually do leak such information after signing a piece of paper saying you would not who would actually trust you with any kind of secret information in the future?
Sorry to rant about the presentation rather than the content, but this blog is another great example for horribly inaccessible typography.
Unlike other sites I've seen linked on HN this one uses a reasonable body font size of 16px, i.e. the browser default font size. However it uses a font that at 16px renders as the equivalent of the Windows default sans-serif font at 14px.
What's worse, block quotes are rendered at a calculated 13.6px, which makes it the equivalent of the default font at a minute 11px!
I know most HN users will likely not care about this as HN comments are set to a mere 12px (making HN the only site on the web I regularly visit that I have to zoom in to at least 150% to use comfortably) but this just borders on cruelty. It's not even good from an aesthetics point of view as at a fixed width of roughly 30rem (working out to roughly 70 characters per line) the article occupies less than 1/3rd of the screen.
There's clearly some intent behind the design as it uses a non-standard font and makes other seemingly deliberate choices but every choice seemingly just compounded on making the site harder to look at.
For many years, I did set font-size. And now I can't exactly remember why I stopped. Taking a look at some browser previews across OS'es and and browsers, I do see that it's too small. I'll bump it.
> I don’t know who would enforce the NDAs for Zelensky’s bunker
Leaking this information would be enforced by court under "Leaking the state secrets".
I'm not a lawyer, but if I remember correctly, in Ukraine you can't be prosecuted for leaking the secret information unless it's clearly labeled as secret and you signed a consent to access it. If you don't sign, you are not supposed to get access.
So this is the case, where to access the secret bunker they have to know what is the secret and sign they understand the implications.
Edit: in some cases before the war it was better to not consent. This would limit access to certain data, but would also give more freedom in case you want to travel or work abroad.
No, I brought it up specifically because they were specifically told not to do that and signed the NDA. He was heavily criticized by other members of congress for endangering Zelensky.
But in this case, Cruz and Rubio shared a picture of their screens on Twitter, while on a call, revealling at the very least that Zelenskyy was on a video call at that moment in time.
No, other senators said that they were explicitly asked by Ukrainian Ambassador to not share anything on social media. Cruz and Rubio then just went and shared.
What a strange position for a lawyer to take. Contracts primarily keep honest people honest: hey, we agree to do these things, and if either of us is unsure we can look back and see what we agreed to. If you don’t agree up front, don’t sign.*
And NDAs have plenty of value (oh, I can’t talk about what I’m working on? Good thing you let me know!). Yes, they can also be abusive and that is worth addressing, but they can also enable a lot of valuable things.
* in some cases, such as employment, this kind of negotiation isn’t meaningfully possible, which is where legislation is useful.
Readit News
Nobody thinks a document protects a president from a spy or assasin directly. Obviously a spy will sign an nda without blinking.
But the document and the ceremony around it absolutely does produce a real world effect on everyone else, and one that matters, both in explicitly defining things that you absolutely can not leave up to most people's simple judgement, and in getting them to classify what this document says differently than the 5 different terms of service they probably agreed to that week.
Enforcement is almost the dumbest aspect to even talk about. The threat of enforcement (in this case) is a token. But that does not make the formality a token.
And even the threat of enforcement is more than a token for most of the people involved, since they are all local. It's only a token for the exception case of a visitor.
The story mentions specific items of secrecy. But most NDA forms provided by lawyers speak only in broad generalizations about what information must be kept confidential. The best terms would be tailored to the specific situation. But the cost of legal help is high and people’s empowerment to write for themselves is low.
https://nltimes.nl/2022/04/04/dutch-journalist-expelled-ukra...
He was asked politely first to remove the content, refused because 'it was his right', then was asked officially, still refused, then was arrested and expelled from the country after his Ukrainian press accreditation was revoked.
His employer claims that they did not know that this was forbidden, whereas war zone journalism 101 is pretty much 'don't share targeting info with the enemy'. The rocket attack that he covered has missed their intended target and within minutes he put a bunch of pictures online of where they had landed. Pretty bad episode, and ND (the newspaper he worked for) lost a ton of credibility with their positioning around this, they should have just admitted their mistake and move on, instead they focus on how the guy was treated. As far as I'm concerned he was pretty lucky, they could have easily believed he was spying for the Russians directly rather than just being monumentally stupid. I guess he couldn't wait to get his War Photo prize or something to that effect.
Much like everyone making a purchase online will 'agree to the terms and conditions' without reading them, many jobs get so many NDAs thrust at them that they'll sign without reading them.
If you repair office coffee machines for a living? You might visit 4 office buildings a day, and they'll all hand you a pile of paperwork telling you not to take photos, not to connect things to their computers, that you should evacuate if you hear the fire alarm, and so on. Hardly anybody reads such things before signing them.
If you're actually signing, with signature, a legal document without reading it, you reap what you sow. Ticking a checkbox on a site is not the same legally binding agreement that an NDA is.
For some foreign journalist or diplomat sure but against a local journalist, maintenance crew, cleaner, etc who all most likely sign the exact same NDA for sure Ukraine can enforce it if the person is unable to escape the country (which for males aged 18 to 65 is really hard at the moment for example)
edit: Also as a journalist if you actually do leak such information after signing a piece of paper saying you would not who would actually trust you with any kind of secret information in the future?
Unlike other sites I've seen linked on HN this one uses a reasonable body font size of 16px, i.e. the browser default font size. However it uses a font that at 16px renders as the equivalent of the Windows default sans-serif font at 14px.
What's worse, block quotes are rendered at a calculated 13.6px, which makes it the equivalent of the default font at a minute 11px!
I know most HN users will likely not care about this as HN comments are set to a mere 12px (making HN the only site on the web I regularly visit that I have to zoom in to at least 150% to use comfortably) but this just borders on cruelty. It's not even good from an aesthetics point of view as at a fixed width of roughly 30rem (working out to roughly 70 characters per line) the article occupies less than 1/3rd of the screen.
There's clearly some intent behind the design as it uses a non-standard font and makes other seemingly deliberate choices but every choice seemingly just compounded on making the site harder to look at.
For many years, I did set font-size. And now I can't exactly remember why I stopped. Taking a look at some browser previews across OS'es and and browsers, I do see that it's too small. I'll bump it.
Leaking this information would be enforced by court under "Leaking the state secrets".
I'm not a lawyer, but if I remember correctly, in Ukraine you can't be prosecuted for leaking the secret information unless it's clearly labeled as secret and you signed a consent to access it. If you don't sign, you are not supposed to get access.
So this is the case, where to access the secret bunker they have to know what is the secret and sign they understand the implications.
Edit: in some cases before the war it was better to not consent. This would limit access to certain data, but would also give more freedom in case you want to travel or work abroad.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
But in this case, Cruz and Rubio shared a picture of their screens on Twitter, while on a call, revealling at the very least that Zelenskyy was on a video call at that moment in time.
Those are not the kinds of possibilities it makes any sense to consider.
And NDAs have plenty of value (oh, I can’t talk about what I’m working on? Good thing you let me know!). Yes, they can also be abusive and that is worth addressing, but they can also enable a lot of valuable things.
* in some cases, such as employment, this kind of negotiation isn’t meaningfully possible, which is where legislation is useful.