Voting By Cell Phone Is A Terrible Idea, And West Virginia Is Probably The Last State That Should Try It Anyway
from the industrialized-incompetence dept
So we've kind of been over this. For more than two decades now we've pointed out that electronic voting is neither private nor secure. We've also noted that despite this several-decade long conversation, many of the vendors pushing this solution are still astonishingly-bad at not only securing their products, but acknowledging that nearly every reputable security analyst and expert has warned that it's impossible to build a secure fully electronic voting system, and that if you're going to to do so anyway, at the very least you need to include a paper trail system that's not accessible via the internet.
Having apparently learned nothing, reports emerged this week that West Virginia is considering launching an initiative that would let some state residents vote via cellphone. To be clear, the effort initially appears focused on letting troops stationed overseas vote. Not surprisingly, more than a few folks were quick to highlight to CNN how this would be an arguably terrible idea:
"Mobile voting is a horrific idea," Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN in an email. "It's internet voting on people's horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote."
Marian K. Schneider, president of the election integrity watchdog group Verified Voting, was even more blunt. Asked if she thought mobile voting is a good idea, she said, "The short answer is no."
Given security analysts routinely aren't sure whether or not our existing voting systems may have been compromised by actors foreign and/or domestic, and the federal government just got done making it clear election security isn't a priority with an idiotically-partisan vote, it seems like a pretty terrible time to begin trying to implement new online voting efforts. And if you've watched West Virginia's blistering corruption when it comes to sectors like the telecom industry, the state is probably the last state in the union that should be attempting such a voting system overhaul.
Judging from online conversations, the company that's building the new West Virginia system (Voatz) may not be the best choice either, since it doesn't appear capable of securing its own website:
The Voatz website is running on a box with out of date SSH, Apache (multiple CVSS 9+), PHP etc. https://t.co/o1RvrLbQ0S
— kevin (@GossiTheDog) August 6, 2018
Comforting. Ideally, the system would involve a user first registering by taking a photo of their government-issued ID and a selfie-video of their face, which are then registered via the app. Voatz claims the company's facial recognition software will then ensure the photo and video submitted are of the same person, with users then able to cast their ballot using the Voatz app. Documents the company circulates at trade shows indicate the company utilizes the blockchain to ensure its systems are more secure and "fundamentally different than touchscreen or online voting." But the company has failed to clarify how.
There's roughly a million and one ways this entire process could go to hell, from SS7 vulnerabilities to man in the middle attacks everywhere along the chain between your device and the Voatz database. And if there's not a hard paper trail, it opens the door to any number of undetectable changes that could happen during transit. Of course this has all been repeatedly stated countless times over the last few decades, but it's a message that's still not apparently getting through.
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Filed Under: blockchain, e-voting, electronic voting, mobile voting, security, west virginia
Companies: voatz
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I find it disturbing that as a technews site there has been no comments about the censoring of infowars. I think alex jones is a lunatic, but it should terrify every independant website that such a thing can happen.
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For the most part, infowars had articles not out of the ordinary.
“I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it”
Seems to me like the retarded kid is being picked on and nobody seems to want to help.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
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Also, anyone telling you nobody reached out to anyone at Infowars or to Jones is just outright lying to you. For example, The NYT has interviewed him. You really need to seek sources outside of your conspiracy bubble.
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As I said
"Funny that when this came out I read it on Ars."
I didn't see the NYT article you expect me to have seen, and the ARS article didnt bother.
"Nah this is the asshole kid who bullies other kids"
Do you even do irony brah?
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Alex Jones has a right to say whatever the fuck he wants (with standard exceptions including incitement, fraud, defamation, etc.). He does not have the right to say it in my house.
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Ok now people are looking at me because I laughed in an out loud fashion on the bus.
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Why? Alex Jones is free to spew his odious lies and assorted bullshit on his own platform and any other platform that would have him. Apple, Google, etc. did nothing to stop him from doing that, and Jones is not legally entitled to force those companies into hosting his speech or giving him a platform with which he can spread his bullshit. By now, anyone who was truly interested in reading/listening to anything from Jones in particular and InfoWars in general knows where to find it—and they are more than free to link others to it on the same platforms from which Jones was booted.
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I do see a problem here, but it's not that private platforms have a right to deny service to people -- that part I'm perfectly fine with.
The problem is that online discourse has come to be dominated by a handful of very large platforms, and those platforms wield an inordinate amount of power.
(Cory Doctorow has a bit more on this today.)
The solution to the problem isn't to restrict the rights of the platforms. The solution is to quit using them. Easier said than done, obviously.
You and I've talked before about Mastodon and WordPress and the benefits of open platforms on open protocols. And I've said before that I'd really like to see a shift back to those, to smaller communities.
It's going to require people to think very differently about how they approach the Internet, and it's not going to be easy. But I think it could achieve some level of success in the same way that "buy local" campaigns do. Budweiser isn't going anywhere, but microbreweries are more popular than ever; there are markets that have proven that some people -- maybe not most, but some -- prefer something smaller, that they feel they get a better experience that way.
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The larger issue lies in how sites like Twitter and Facebook centralized the one thing that should never have been centralized on the Internet: communities.
Before centralized social interaction networks—Twitter, Facebook, and even MySpace and Livejournal before them—Internet communities were on entirely different platforms, specifically forums. A fan community for, say, one specific cartoon would rarely have shared space with a fan community of another cartoon. Forums for niche interests remained niche themselves, although the occasional bout of “atrocity tourism” started via email and instant messaging likely struck those at some point. The web was largely decentralized and interests splintered into separate communities, and lo, it was good.
Then came the centralized services—the silos, if you will. Rather than keep the communities separate, the silos decided that having everyone interacting with each other regardless of interest would be better for…well, the silos, really. Nobody with the power to stop the silos really thought through the ethics and morals and potential ramifications of centralizing social interaction until it was far too late.
A decade-plus after the first wave of Twitter’s popularity and the complete erosion of trust in the silos, people have begun to tire of this bullshit. Why should they have to put up with harassment and bullying just so they can talk to other people with similar interests? Why should they have to share a platform with avowed racists, liars, and Donald Trump? Mastodon represents the first major step in going back to what we had before—decentralized communities on separate platforms—while allowing people to choose whether they want to bridge those communities together via federation. The move away from the silos also allows for better control of data associated with those services; unless an instance admin is a particularly awful person, Mastodon instances tend to avoid advertising and using data for nefarious/capitalistic purposes. (anticapitalist.party is an actual Masto instance, by the way.)
Yes, some of these services might one day grow large enough to become a silo in and of themselves. But that is why these new protocols are open-source and freely available: If one instance grows “too big”, anyone can spin off a specialized instance of their own and invite their friends onto it. mastodon.social has no danger of becoming Twitter even if it remains the “flagship” instance of Mastodon. Too many instances already exist as alternatives—or, like in the Before Time, as secondary outlets for exploring different interests and communicating with others who share them.
Decentralization is the goal. Getting there is gonna be a hell of a fight. Then again, so was getting people to take Twitter seriously…and look how that turned out.
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Sites like them, but a decade or two before them. Well, these two became general-community centralizations, but long before marketers declared "web 2.0", each individual community had largely centralized into a handful of sites. While they changed over time, and none of them became so overwhelmingly huge, we could name a topic and people would usually agree on the top few sites for that topic.
Nobody's ever figured out how that should work in a satisfying way. We could all run some blog instance, but what if we want to be anonymous or have a bunch of pseudonyms? Maybe I could figure out how to anonymously buy Bitcoin from some local person (but someone watching them would know where "local" is for me), then use it to buy hosting anonymously, install some open-source package, repeat for each pseudonym.... it's really not practical. And then we're not a "community", just a network of sparsely linked blogs.
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In fairness, the decentralized “community structures” of the World Wide Web back in the 1990s and early 2000s were pretty much that: a network of sparsely linked websites that shared a common interest. Directories like the Anipike and stuff like webrings came about as a way of helping people find sites for their specific fandom/community. Now that we have functions like tag systems on sites like Tumblr, we no longer need to leave a specific site if we want to find a community (such as it is).
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I've been a member of a messageboard for the past sixteen years or so. It's changed hands and platforms a couple of times, and most of the community has moved on, but it's still the online community I think of as my online community.
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I fear it's more dire than that.
A lot of people came from silos -- the closed, proprietary online networks of the 1990s, chiefly AOL (I was a Prodigy kid myself) --, decided the open Internet was a much better value proposition...and then changed their minds a decade later and decided nah, let's go back to AOL's way of doing things, because it's easier and everybody else is doing it.
Yeah, we've talked about Mastodon before; here's what I said the other day:
I read a good piece at Computing the other day called Decentralising the web: Maintaining the momentum. There are certainly some promising ideas out there, and in some cases (like Mastodon) the technology is already there; in other cases we're talking about protocol-level changes that could take decades (how's that IPv6 rollout going, guys?). And aside from the technology is the perhaps-even-more-difficult problem of changing people's attitudes so that they learn to value open, distributed platforms again.
We're definitely seeing some backlash against Facebook and Twitter right now; I used Budweiser-versus-microbreweries as my example a couple posts up, but the truth is Facebook and Twitter are far more vulnerable than Budweiser is. (Anheuser-Busch InBev has never lost 20% of its value in a single day.) That's good. But there's a gap between people getting fed up with the big corporate social networks and people changing their attitudes so that they choose smaller, independently-run social networks. It doesn't help much if people quit Facebook and go to Instagram.
I think we're talking about changing people's priorities and values here. I think it's possible. I even think the answer is simple. But simple isn't the same thing as easy, and changing the way the general public thinks about the Internet is a difficult problem indeed.
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Difficult, but not impossible. I refuse to believe Facebook, Twitter, etc. cannot be replaced by something better—and possibly something less addictive than those sites are designed to be.
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They didn't replace something better. They replaced something worse.
Circa Netscape 1.1, you could create a typical web site in a day, starting from scratch even if you didn't know html. The default fonts sucked, but all sites were pretty much equal in that respect. It just wasn't that difficult in the beginning.
As HTML became more complex with the addition of java, css and flash; making a "typical" site became more than a week long process for a skill developer. Not to mention the security problems that along with the more complex site architectures.
The community came partly from the egalitarian nature of the medium. Simply stated: the W3C fucked HTML up so bad that people went to other platforms.
That isn't to say that reverting isn't possible. But your talking about forking the whole stack. Which by modern software standards is doable. And it probably should be done. But it isn't going to happen without a hefty bankroll.
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Wait, I know how to solve this issue.
QUICK, TO GOFUNDME!
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Okay, I've heard of Mastodon but never investigated it, and now I'm seeing the 500-character limit. That's bizarre. People have been overselling this software. A general-purpose federation technology wouldn't have arbitrary limits like that. It hints at something fundamentally wrong with the design.
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The protocol’s default limit is 500 characters; because it is open-source, anyone who spins their own instance with Mastodon can change that limit for their instance. All other federated instances will display longer posts as intended.
As for the design…well, Masto is designed to be a Twitter-esque microblogging platform and not, you know, a full-bore blogging platform like Tumblr or Wordpress. Blame any failures of design on the inspiration, I guess. (At least Masto has “content warning” functionality. You can hide spoilers!)
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That seems reasonable then. A good protocol is much more important than the software.
From a protocol point of view, I can't say I see a huge difference between microblogging and "regular" blogging. It would be unfortunate if we needed different federation protocols for blogging, micro-blogging, photo-blogging, etc.
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In fairness, we already compartmentalize in that way with our current crop of social interaction networks - Twitter for firing off quick thoughts/arguing with randos, Instagram for sharing pictures/arguing with randos, Tumblr for general-ish blogging/arguing with randos, and so on - so open-sourcing each of those functionalities separately makes sense. It also leaves room for people to experiment with what they want to do with each of those SINs, including the use of different identities on different SINs to compartmentalize and explore different facets of their personal identity.
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Yeah, it's not just the character limit; the design in general isn't really appealing to me.
I've got a blog for my monologues, and I use a handful of online forums for dialogue. It works for me, mostly.
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That sounds like a great approach, actually. Twitter and their ilk have replaced blogging in general, so returning back to blogging is wonderful; it is still, after all, a better way of collecting coherent thoughts that do not need “separating” because of a character limit. And I miss old-school forums, so I say bring those back, too.
Besides, not all services like Twitter have to be for everybody. I am not on Instagram, for example, because I have nothing to share in terms of self-created imagery.
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Jones was banned from Facebook but Farrakhan,s Nation of Islam page remains, despite it being every bit as objectionable and TOS-violating as InfoWars. So are the various Antifa pages, which routinely call for violence against those who disagree with them.
And on a personal note, I find it amusing that alleged conservatives are asserting that private property should be considered a public resource, and alleged liberals are applauding the power of corporations to control public discourse.
We're living in the Twilight Zone.
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I do not applaud how Twitter, Facebook, etc. have the power to control public discourse at large. That shit is fucking scary, and we should all acknowledge and discuss it. Alls I have been doing is pointing out that those companies have the right to boot people from those platforms—and that regulating said right to enforce a false sense of political neutrality is as scary an idea as letting megacorps control our speech.
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I can't help but wonder what his opinion of absentee ballots (voting by mail) is. Direct analogues of all those same criticisms apply, but so many people seem to think it's an amazing, awesome thing that's good for democracy...
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About the same way as it currently works, except that verifying the electronic side is much easier as there are no questions of poor handwriting to deal with.
But that doesn't even address the myriad problems with the integrity of mail-in ballots. Going back to the original quote:
Hall mentions three security vulnerabilities: 1) the ballot itself on an insecure device, 2) the network over which the vote is sent, 3) the server where it's counted.
With a mail-in ballot:
1) in many cases the ballot is mailed to you, and can be intercepted 2) the ballot is filled out insecurely. (Just imagine how trivial it would be if an abusive husband wanted to steal his wife's vote, just for starters.) 3) the ballot is submitted by mail, where it could be intercepted 4) the ballot may not end up getting counted for various reasons, as noted above
So why do we think that this is a good idea again?
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Because there's no evidence that any of the hypotheticals you suggest are actually happening, and the real benefit of increasing access to voting outweighs the imagined drawbacks of mass mail fraud.
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The big issue, is that international vote by app could be easier to target malware packages for, and provides less exposure for the interceptor, and because of the lack of paper ballot it is impossible to audit the results.
Vote by mail is certainly more secure than E-Voting right now. Vote by mail can be intercepted, and abusers can abuse the system, and votes have been shown to be not counted in the past, but you need to be physically proximate to the vote. E-voting as the same risks, plus foreign actors, state and private, trolls and more from all over the world. Vote by mail is a necessary system to enfranchise many voters (military, elderly) that likely shouldn't be pushed as hard as it is for general use. But with Republicans, State and Federal, of the belief that elections are too wasteful currently (see ridiculous state cutbacks in 2016 and recent security votes in congress), it is unlikely we will get the investment in critical voting infrastructure necessary to reduce dependency on vote by mail.
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We have so many other vital systems in society that are presumably secure enough to function normally without interference.
The financial system: I can pull up my bank account on my phone and transfer money around and the banks themselves are linked in a global network where billions are shifted around every second. Somehow that system is secure enough that we're all not being robbed of our life savings on a daily basis.
The stock market: Somehow the stock market functions without the loss of billions of dollars in hacked transactions.
The military: Heavily dependent on computers and the internet. Somehow they've managed to effectively secure their deadly weapons systems.
I could go on. It's amazing to me that we can do all that, but secure voting seems to be only a fantasy at this point.
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The bank keeps a record of every financial transaction you make.
Stock markets keep a record of every online trade, the seller, and the buyer.
The military keeps a record of what users do on its computers.
The part you seem to have missed is that voting is supposed to be anonymous.
Every single one of your examples is of an entity that keeps track of exactly what every individual user on its network does.
That is not desirable for voting.
A voting system requires that (1) a record be kept that someone has voted; (2) a record be kept of who that person voted for; (3) the person who cast the vote can verify that their vote was counted correctly; and (4) nobody else can connect that vote to that person.
If you have a solution to this problem, then I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be very interested to hear it.
Please note that just saying "blockchain" is not a solution.
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From the past..
REMOVE electronic and you have made the best assumption of the WHOLE thing since it started..
We have a history of back dooring the WHOLE system.
From the beginning to the end, all it takes is a few energetic persons or ALLOT of money..
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Re: From the past..
lol
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Submit us a Tip, but it takes time
Part of it is that partisans from all sides are expected to pull out their verbal swords, accomplishing nothing except further divisive dysfunction.
There *is* an article about Facebook's censorship of legit activists shows policing propaganda being a fucking mess by Karl Bode from last Friday.
Nobody has been able to come up with a *properly principled* solution to balancing Alex Jones' right to make up and speak realistic nonsense against the very real harms it causes, for example the armed guy investigating pizzagate, now in jail, and the harassment of the parents in the Sandy Hook Tragedy.
Good luck, make me happy and prove me wrong with a counterexample!
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He is not legally entitled to use the platforms of others for the purpose of spreading his speech. Banning him for telling lies and generally being an asshole is properly principled in that Jones is an asshole and no platform should be legally forced to host his speech if it does not want to host his speech. If he hates the fact that some platforms do not want him, he has plenty of other platforms—including his own—that he can use, and his fans/followers/insane sychophants can always link to his speech on the platforms from which he was booted.
Morally and ethically, I take no issue with any of the platforms that booted him. He slandered the families of Sandy Hook victims; for that alone, those platforms are justified—legally, morally, and ethically—in de-platforming him.
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Re: Principled solutions
So it's fairly high on my scale of "government-like" power, therefore should follow consistent principles.
I'm extremely wary of "someone is a dangerous lunatic" or whatever pejorative opinion you like as a principle...because that is wide open to suppressing the speech of activists, who will be equally unpopular with some.
It also leaves twitter or facebook in the uncomfortable position of arbiter of truth.
There's got to be a better way using some kind of counter-speech. Or so my gut tells me.... just like we take comments we don't like here and flag them or something!
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Re: Re: Principled solutions
...how can two companies both have a unique or monopolistic position in the same marketplace?
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Re: Re: Re: Principled solutions
Together, they form at best a duopoly of social media.
The point is either has tremendous power.
The state regulates monopolies (like utilities) with tremendous power, just like it regulates public accommodations, usually in the form of "non-discrimination" and published rules and tariffs. Personal animus for arbitrary reasons isn't supposed to be allowed. We ask for the same with net neutrality ourselves.
And *that* is where the sovcits get the idea that they are being censored when Alex Jones is tossed from twitter and Facebook.
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The difference between regulating ISPs and regulating companies like Twitter and Facebook is simple: In many places within the US, ISPs are a de facto monopoly, whereas social interaction networks cannot be a true monopoly by virtue of there always being more than one available to consumers.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Principled solutions
I think you're off-base in calling them monopolies. There are many other social networks. You're free to use Google+ or Tumblr or whatever you like.
It's fundamentally different from the lack of competition in ISPs. If I don't like Facebook, I can go somewhere else. If I don't like Cox, well, too bad; there's no other ISP available to me.
That said, regardless of verbiage we're clearly in agreement on the outsized influence that Twitter and Facebook have.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I do not believe the solution is for the government to compel them to host all legal speech. The solution is for their customers to take their business elsewhere.
You don't like what Facebook is doing? Neither do I. That's why I don't use Facebook.
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Of course there is. There's dialup, satellite, cellular data, libraries, and of course you can move. Those are several unpalatable options, of course, kind of like if your friends all use Facebook and you don't want to.
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Public accomodations have the right to kick people out for saying shit that disrupts business or otherwise annoys the other customers. Why should Twitter, Facebook, etc. have less of a right to enforce their terms of service?
The only things that makes those services “government-like” are the size and their social penetration. Those are arbitrary measurements that anyone with the right power can define however they choose to force legal sanctions upon a service they may not like. We have no universally agreed-upon metric at which a company like Twitter becomes “too big” to avoid tighter regulations than before it hit that point. Until we do, thinking they should be regulated like government entities does not strike me as a solid plan.
I am aware of that. I stand by what I said. Any service is free to boot anyone it thinks violates the Terms of Service; if that happens to be someone I would agree with, so be it. And being booted off a service does not deny someone the right to say elsehwere what they said on that service. It may limit the reach of their message, sure. But when have platforms ever been legally required to guarantee someone an audience?
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Re: Submit us a Tip, but it takes time
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Re: Submit us a Tip, but it takes time
HE CAN POST only on his section of the site..
Anyone that wishes to View his stuff,
Either connects to it EACH time(no subscribe)
Or can subscribe.
He can NOT propagate or advert his section or what he wishes to say..
This would be fine with anyone..IMO..
He would also be held liable for his OWN comments.
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Stone age
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Re: Stone age
Not that anyone (cough... Republicans and Democrats... cough) would EVER do such a thing... I mean who, besides the dirty rotten commie bastard Russians would try to manipulate an election?
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Re: Re: Stone age
Well, I’ve been accused of being pretty thick-headed at times, so…
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So what you're saying is...
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Boooooooooooo.
…take your funny vote.
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Re: So what you're saying is...
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as always...
https://xkcd.com/2030/
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Computerized Voting: My stance
Las Vegas in 2012 was using a e-voting system. Touchscreen, lots of info, and in the end it was printing a clear, human readable paper receipt (on what appeared to be standard receipt paper), that was stored with the machine and I could not access. A decent safeguard in the vein of security recommendations, but a recount or tampering verification using the paper receipt would be...difficult.
San Jose, despite, or perhaps because of, being in the middle of tech ground zero, uses paper ballots. Its a clean, clear system - there are arrows pointing to your choices, with a gap in each one. Fill in the appropriate gaps, and that is your ballot. It does have issues with accessability for those with carpel tunnel, and is time consuming in large elections.
I recognize the security issues with e-voting, but would prefer an e voting system for ease of use.
Here is my solution. An e-voting system, that prints your selections to a card stock ballot similar to the one used by San Jose, that you then verify is accurate and turn in. Those ballots are then machine counted (as I assume they are now). This produces a gap between the voting and the counting that reduces security issues, hopefully speeds up voting, and produces a solid paper trail that is easy to count and verify for accuracy of the machine count. The ease of e voting with the security of a paper ballot. Best of both worlds.
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Re: Computerized Voting: My stance
Not quite "best". You don't get the full security of paper ballots (the machine could leak vote details, by keeping logs or by EMI). Depending on how the scanning works, maybe the machine could be made to see a false vote that's not visible on the ballot. But it does bring real benefits over fully paper-based systems, and might be worth it.
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Re: Re: Computerized Voting: My stance
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Re: Re: Computerized Voting: My stance
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We don't yet have a sufficiently secure technology.
I imagine we can create a sufficient online voting technology with time and effort. It would probably involve state-released hash keys, two-to-three-step identity verification, and some sort of asymmetrical signing and blockchain databasing.
But we're totally not there yet. We haven't seen any tests on less-critical elections (such as a homeowners' association election). We don't have any technology we know works pretty well, and has been thoroughly penetration-tested.
This is a scam by which to facilitate meddling.
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Things keep going from bad to worse,
But! in other Countries when a democratic electoral system breaks down like this.. UN Election Monitors are sent in to 'ensure fairness' :)
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To big to judge.
If we were able to apply the same rules and reliefs applied by the UN (or the global community) to other smaller nations, a lot of US debt falls well into the realm of odious debt. Including many contemporary subsidies and government contracts.
But our nation and our debt are way to big to forgive.
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Infowars, journalism and Techdirt
Yes, all you corporatists will cling to your right to police your own web site as you see fit. You will abandon the defense of others to speak, as you always have. You will take for granted the rights hard won by American fighting men and women over centuries. The lawyers among you will cite anarchist arguments about the reasonableness of your position.
Defense of the freedom of others is self-defense. That is a timeless truth. Journalists in England are being tortured, and the public (including “I Support Journalism - Techdirt) is silent. The maniacal mob of Techdirt will write at length about how defense of others is unimportant and unwarranted, because they disagree with their words. They will cast doubt and disparagement and otherwise defame those with views that they do not hold themselves.
Sad. Obvious, ugly, nasty, but consistent. Techdirt has a position and is sticking to it. One side to every issue, silence all critics here, and applaud the silencing of critics elsewhere.
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Re: Infowars, journalism and Techdirt
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We can comprehend coming to the defense of others, even a shithead like Alex Jones. What we cannot comprehend is the idea that platforms should be forced into hosting his speech under some sense of “morality” that would have platforms enforce false neutrality to ease your personal moral anguish. Think of it this way: If you wanted to kick someone out of your house for saying awful things about your family, your friends, and your pet poodle Fluffikins with the pink bow on the collar, why would you listen to anyone telling you how kicking that person out of your house is an immoral act?
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At present, if one were to properly analogize them to a physical space, they are privately-owned spaces of business. The inside of a store. The hallways of a mall. A privately-owned and operated library.
As such, the operators of these spaces are afforded the legal right to determine who has access and who does not have access. They have Terms of Service, and if those Terms are violated, they have the recognized right to take the action they determine to be appropriate.
If you feel the Terms of Service are flawed or incorrect, that is also a discussion to have. Assert your point in this matter, present reasons, make arguments.
Recognize, however, that the bare fact of the matter is that legally these forums do not have an obligation to host Alex Jones' content. They are not the street corner. If you feel they've acted disingenuously in this matter, review their Terms of Service, find where the violation is incorrect, and talk to them about it.
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No, I am not. Twitter, Facebook, and their similarly-large brethren are privately-owned services operated by privately-owned companies. A person has the right to speak their mind; nobody has the right to force a platform into giving their speech an audience.
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Yes, I do—and if Twitter, Facebook, etc. were actual public squares instead of privately-owned platforms that are open to the public, that argument might mean something.
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Re: Infowars, journalism and Techdirt
He makes Alex Jones look reasonable.
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If you do find content that violates the youtube community guidelines (https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines) flag that video.
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What about blah blah blah? Your points are immaterial because yadda yadda yadda.
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Re: Infowars, journalism and Techdirt
Defending someone freedom of speech does not, and never has implied that the defenders will provide them with a platform, or even listen to their speech. So stop trying to make out freedom of speech means that other have to provide you with an audience, or have to listen to you.
So long as you can create your own platform on the Internet you have freedom of speech. If you cannot gain an audience then perhaps you should ask yourself why nobody wants to listen to you.
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Re: Re: Infowars, journalism and Techdirt
That “moral law” includes defending the freedoms of others, even when they hold different beliefs.
Have you any morals?
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Alex Jones is free to say whatever the fuck he wants.
He is not free to force any platform he does not own into hosting his speech.
Have you any knowledge of the law?
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We all have different moral characters. Defending the freedoms of those who hold different beliefs is a common American moral, though many on this site are not familiar with it (at all).
Defending the freedoms (the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness) of others, not just yourself at the expense of others, is very American. Some other countries have their own approximations. On the other hand, Globalist Socialist Assholes typically have no conscience and no morals whatsover. That’s how their reasoning works out for them. Abandon all morals and serve your selfish beliefs at the expense of others because no one has stopped you yet.
Have you read “Heart of a Dog” by Michail Bulkagov? It is a classic book and movie regarding the left’s absence of a moral center. A professor transforms a street dog into a person, who quickly becomes powerful in early Soviet Russia, before returning to his true dog nature. It’s a great exploration of the difference between legality and morality and the shallowness of the left’s socialist view.
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No, it is human. Stop acting as if the only people who ever defended anyone’s freedoms anywhere came from the colonies.
And like I said: I will defend Jones’s freedom to say whatever bullshit he wants (except for anything defamatory), regardless of whether I like what he says (which I do not). He does not, however, have the freedom—or the legal right—to force himself onto a platform and have his speech hosted against the will of that platform’s owners. That would be not just immoral, but legitimately evil.
We get it, you hate Jewish people.
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I would extend my moral concept of defending the rights of others to Shiva. He also has a right to the same freedoms as you and I, and should be free to persue his own happiness. I believe this site has done their best to damage those freedoms by calling him (quite unnecessarily) a liar and a fraud, repeatedly, and then having that echoed a million million times on Google and the Internet as a whole. My point is that Techdirt as a publication appears amoral to me, intent on destroying the freedoms of others and little else. Un-American and amoral.
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[citations other than the self-serving “testimony” of a single “journalist” needed]
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I add my voice to his (and Tucker’s) in defense of his freedoms, which seem to have been brutally stripped from him. Others here have pointed out that perhaps he is a charlatan, but no one has made a strong case for this. If the abuse he endured at the hands of the British Government are even partially as he describes them, we should all raise our voices in his defense.
Unless you are an amoral Globalist Asshole, of course.
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Similarly, no one has made a strong case for his “testimony” being 100% truthful, specifically by producing proof that backs up his claims. You citing his claims over and over do not make them any more true than if you cited Flat Earthers’ claims as proof that the world, like time, is a flat circle.
Yes, we should—if the abuse even happened in the first place. I would use “trust but verify” to describe this sort of situation, but having heard his claims and finding them outlandish from the get-go, "verify, then trust" seems more appropriate.
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To quote a famous action movie sidekick: “All of them, I think.”
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He was arrested and jailed, that much is verifiable fact. Everything else is bullshit until he can prove otherwise.
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Don’t you think that perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt? Isn’t the fact that he has been released by a superior court judge that has come to his defense indicative that perhaps his story is credible? No?
You’re quite a harsh fellow, Stephen. Do you have some personal history with this journalist that would lead you to give him less respect than others? If this happened to someone you knew or to a family member, would you be as doubtful and unconcerned?
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Given that he (and his supporters) lied about why he was arrested and jailed in the first place, thus proving him untrustworthy from the start, I have no reason to believe his claims of “torture” until he can prove them.
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Oh yeah ... Voting By Cell Phone
WTF does your ranting have to do with the topic at hand?
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If you want people to listen to what you have to say, try staying away from pejoratives. Your final line implies that anyone who disagrees with you is an "amoral Globalist asshole" - which immediately shuts down any actual discussion.
Based on this, I can only assume that you aren't actually interested in discussion, but are only interested in lecture, and only interested in agreement. You've started the conversation with labels of your own making, a move that smacks of an attempt to divide people into camps. It seems you are trying to immediately put yourself into the camp of the right and the righteous, and everyone else who may question you in the camp of the bad guy.
As such, I will not listen to what you have to say. I can't trust that I will have my questions answered. I can't trust that you will not lie to me, or that you will listen to me should I have a concern. I can't trust that you are a thinking person. I can't trust you.
Take your flag. If you want to talk, try again - and leave the labels at home.
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You are wise not to trust someone on the Internet, you should form your own opinions after listening to many.
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We get it, you hate Jewish people.
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Then what was your intention? Is there any point to the line except to divide the conversation into "good" and "bad?" It's a tactic that enflames interaction and creates an emotional, rather than rational, response. It's a tactic that I find sleazy, and by association, that makes you seem sleazy.
If you want to convince anyone, _don't insult them._
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On this site, there are stories that (some) people read and many more comment upon. These comments are related in some way to the story, is this too difficult for you?
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CBS crime
To the families of Abby Perlman, Brette Polin and Jonny Lichtenstein your children got involved in dangerous business with crazy CBS anchor Otis Livingston to steal money from some pr companies becareful if we will catch them they will go to jail !!!!!!!!!!
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