How the fuck is it even remotely legal for a politician to sign an NDA with a corporation to hide information from their constituents?
How the fuck is it even remotely legal for a politician to sign an NDA with a corporation to hide information from their constituents?
PSA most NDAs are unenforceable BS. Same with non-competes. You can’t prevent a person from making a living. The only thing NDAs can really cover are true trade secrets that could cause actual damages to the company. Otherwise in the US a company can’t make you sign your right to free speech away.
And as an elected official, you should not be able to sign away your constituents’ ability to have a transparent government.
Isn’t it very easy for companies to argue any confidential information/agreement would damage them?
It has to be a specific trade secret AND cause actual damages.
If you leaked the secret recipe to coca cola and now competitors don’t just make cokealikes, but literal coke for half the price, you get nuked from orbit.
If I help a company develop machine learning I can talk about my implementation, the problems I solved, how I did it, what design decisions I made .etc because all of that is reasonable to an experienced software engineer. If I had some novel idea nobody else had that company would have patented it, or specifically named it as a trade secret and not just “it’s all a trade secret plz don’t talk or we SLAPP you with a dumb lawsuit”
They’re up against the constitution’s 1st amendment in the US. In my home country of Canada we have the same or stronger protections for workers. My second example literally happened to me. I was on a ML project and signed an NDA and the only thing that NDA and a non-compete and all that really covers is me giving info to competitors while I worked there basically… Once I no longer work for them it’s an uphill battle to even prove the basis of a lawsuit to go after me for the NDA or NC.
If you can’t afford the time or money to defend yourself from a SLAPP lawsuit, the legality doesn’t matter much anymore. It is unfortunately in most peoples best financial interests to not personally test the legality of unenforceable BS.
Exactly, corporations care not for the legality. It’s just that the very existence of a signed NDA opens up the power to suit, countersuit or in general drown a person in so many administrative fees that they are condemned to eternal poverty anyway. Whether the actual text is legal or not is irrelevant. An NDA is a weapon in many other ways.