Comment by phendrenad2

If I were a lawyer trying to defend Zuckerberg, in a court where we take turns pontificating in front of a jury, and I wanted to do some lying by omission and hope that is the one thing that sticks in their minds, I'd probably say exactly what you just wrote.

But this is the court of public opinion, and people are going to read your post about 5 seconds before they read mine, so that won't work. I think online debate is a lot better at getting to the truth than courts of law, actually. So while Zuckerberg may be ruled innocent, we can put him in the same category as OJ Simpson and Donald Trump and carefully caveat our assertions that he's guilty with "in my opinion" to avoid a slander case.

Of course, what you said is false. He didn't just shoot off an email with "get reliable analytics!", as you put it, like some kind of whimsical silly CEO on a kid's cartoon. He said: "their (instagram's) data is encrypted and we have no analytics about them" (seemingly implying that if their data wasn't encrypted, they would have data about it, because they would just spy on it). He then immediately proceeds to say they need to "get reliable analytics about them". He THEN immediately proceeds to clarify by saying that they might need to "write custom software" and that "you should figure out how to do this" (seems like a subtle hint that they should "figure out" his subtext here).

And then, what do you think happened? His underlings went rogue and developed iOS hacks that would allow them to decrypt traffic, and he didn't approve it or know about it? If this were court, that would probably be a good argument to achieve a not guilty verdict.

So while you're probably right that this doesn't qualify as a "smoking gun" in court, it should convince everyone who's capable of reading it.