Someone Impersonated New Jersey's Attorney General To Demand Cloudflare Takedown 3d Printed Gun Instructions
from the faking-takedowns dept
Buckle in, folks. Here's a crazy one involving 3D printed guns, angry lawsuits and an apparently forged letter from the New Jersey Attorney General.
Over the past few years, we've been highlighting a whole bunch of stories concerning the lengths that some people will go to in an effort to block certain content online. One version that we've seen quite a bit in the past few years is forging takedown demands, including forged court orders. However, now we've seen it expand to a different arena -- touching on another issue we've written about before. Last year (not for the first time) we wrote about the moral panic and hysteria around 3D printed guns that had resulted in a few states claiming the right to order 3D files offline.
Not much had seemed to happen on that front, until a week or so ago when various 2nd Amendment groups, including the somewhat infamous Defense Distributed (makers of 3D printer files for firearm components) filed a lawsuit, seeking an injunction against New Jersey's Attorney General, Gurbir Grewal, arguing that he had sent an unconstitutional takedown letter to Cloudflare, which was the CDN service that Defense Distributed was using for its website CodeIsFreeSpeech.com.
In theory, this was setting up an important potential 1st Amendment case. But, on Tuesday, something unexpected happened. The State of New Jersey showed up in court to say no one there actually sent the takedown -- and that they believed it was forged, and sent via a proxy service in the Slovak Republic. Really.
The Attorney General’s Division of Criminal Justice (DCJ) has concluded that a key document supporting Plaintiff’s TRO application—a “takedown notice” purportedly sent by DCJ to CloudFlare, Inc., which hosts one of the plaintiff’s websites, CodeIsFreeSpeech.com—was not in fact issued by DCJ, and appears to have been issued by some entity impersonating the Attorney General’s Office.
The filing recognizes that New Jersey's legislature did pass a law late last year restricting the distribution of such 3D printed instructions, but that the state's law enforcement arm has yet to do anything to enforce it, and most certainly did not send the letter in question.
As noted, we have no reason to believe the Attorney General’s Office filed this takedown notice with Cloudflare, and our investigation thus far demonstrates the office did not do so. We have conferred with all relevant parties within the Attorney General’s Office—including DCJ and the New Jersey State Police—and there is no evidence that anyone within the Office authorized its filing. In an effort to determine who, in fact, issued the notice, DCJ assigned two investigators to review the matter, who obtained the IP address of the device used to submit the notice to Cloudflare, and learned that the IP address is associated with a server located in the Slovak Republic. This IP address is not connected to DCJ, nor would DCJ use this type of proxy server for routine communications with third parties.
Intrigue.
Cloudflare has similarly posted a blog post giving its side of the story, noting that there were some oddities with the notice, but considering that it doesn't actually host the content in question, it followed its standard operating procedures of filing the notice along to the actual host. But then they started to notice some oddities:
A few days after we forwarded the complaint, we saw news reports indicating that the website operator and a number of other entities had sued the State of New Jersey over the complaint we had forwarded. That lawsuit prompted us to take a closer look at the complaint. We immediately noticed a few anomalies with the complaint.
First, when law enforcement agencies contact us, they typically reach out directly, through a dedicated email line. Indeed, we specifically encourage law enforcement to contact us directly on our abuse page, because it facilitates a personalized review and response. The NJ-related request did not come in through this channel, but was instead submitted through our general abuse form. This was one data point that raised our skepticism as to the legitimacy of this report.
Second, the IP address linked to the complaint was geo-located to the Slovak Republic, which seemed like an unlikely location for the New Jersey Attorney General to be submitting an abuse report from. This particular data point was a strong indicator that this might be a fraudulent report.
Third, while the contact information provided in the complaint appeared to be a legitimate, publicly available email address operated by the State of NJ, it was one intended for public reporting of tips of criminal misconduct, as advertised here. It seems unlikely that a state attorney general would use such an email to threaten criminal prosecution. On occasion, we see this technique used when an individual would like to have Cloudflare’s response to an abuse report sent to some type of presumably interested party. The person filing this misattributed abuse report likely hopes that the party who controls that email address will then initiate some type of investigation or action based on that abuse report.
Cloudflare further notes that, having learned that this notice was forged, it has now found "other abuse reports submitted from this IP address" and established "a clear pattern of fake abuse reports," such that abuse reports from that IP will no longer be allowed.
There are, of course, some larger issues here. As we've noted for years and years and years -- mainly with regard to the DMCA notice-and-takedown process -- when you have a process that allows for notice and takedown it will get abused. Widely and continuously. Expanding notice and takedown to other arenas only means it will get abused more and more, and the abuse will become increasingly sophisticated.
We should be especially concerned about things like the EU's Terrorist Content Regulation, which will not only deputize random law enforcement officials to send such takedowns to various platforms, but also mandate that platforms takedown any such content within one hour of the notice being sent. If you don't believe that process won't be abused in a similar manner to what we see above, you have not been paying attention. Giving people tools for censorship will lead to censorship, and often it will be done in very surreptitious ways.
We should be extra careful about enabling more such activity under the false belief that only the "good guys" will use such powers, and that they will only use them for good.
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Filed Under: 1st amendment, 2nd amendment, 3d printed guns, 3d printing, forgery, gurbir grewal, impersonation, new jersey, takedowns
Companies: cloudflare, defense distributed
Reader Comments
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Is it too much to hope that this might lead to a doctrine of legal recourse with real teeth against fraudulent takedown requests?
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Re:
It absolutely is.
We can expect it just as soon as the US confirms that it has jurisdiction over every other sovereignty in the world. Oh, and the MAFFIAA's create that database of all IP materials that can identify and verify every piece of IP they own so that no independent IP gets dinged, ever.
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forged court orders ... one might assume this is a felony in the US.
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This made it to court?
A simple PHONE CALL to NJ would have solved this.
Instead, NJ taxpayers just got shafted for the legal fees.
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Anomaly, 3D printing, impersonation: hits TD's template, but
doesn't have any wider import, especially now that exposed -- and the very limited relevance is another TD template fit.
Next story, please.
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Likely suspects?
Who would have an interest in doing such a thing? Anti-gun nuts?
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Re: Likely suspects?
Perhaps. Just as possible would be pro-gun nuts, as a false-flag operation. Or any number of other interests.
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Re: Anomaly, 3D printing, impersonation: hits TD's template, but
Fuck off, Blue. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
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Re: Anomaly, 3D printing, impersonation: hits TD's template, but
A fun game is watching how many times you scream "ANOMALY" as if isn't a pathetic self-defeating non-argument.
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WTF?
Seriously, If NJ knew this was a bogus request, why did they wait until they were sued in court to announce it? They were sued in Texas, and moved for dismissal due to lack of jurisdiction. Why didn't they just move for dismissal over it being a fake? It's like NJ didn't want to admit it was fake until the last possible second? Maybe to make the plaintiffs waste funds?
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Re: WTF?
The lawsuit in Texas was preemptive, an attempt to knock down the law before it was enforced. After that dismissal they got this demand letter, and that started a whole new legal fight.
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Re: Anomaly, 3D printing, impersonation: hits TD's template, but
Hey, I won this argument!!!!
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Re: Re: Likely suspects?
More likely a person/group with an axe to grind against the NJ Governor.
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Re: Re: WTF?
It also sounds like NJ didn't know the request had been made until the suit started - which makes sense if they didn't send it and no one told them about it until the suit started.
Or possibly someone did tell them about it, and they started looking into it then, and then the suit started while they were still tracking down details.
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Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
If one can be seen as socially harmful and taken off the Internet, why not the other?
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Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
Because gun plans don't immediately point to child abuse!!!
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Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
Because recent Supreme Court precedent has shown a reluctance to introduce new categories of unprotected speech.
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Re: Likely suspects?
There are many nutty people on both sides of this debate.
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Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
Particularly since 1200 children died in the US last year from gun violence.
Oh, and I’m just waiting for Lawrence’s Law to kick in...
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Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
You can have gun plans without guns, you can have child porn without child abuse
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Re: Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
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Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
And let me expand on that just a bit, how many guns exist that have never been used to injure or kill someone vs the amount of child porn that exists that doesn't include child abuse?
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Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
It's like Godwin's Law.
If Mike Godwin went into every conversation on the Internet and said "Hey guys, did you hear about that Godwin's Law thing? Someone's going to make a comparison to Nazis. I totally guarantee it. Godwin's Law!"
If your "law" were the brilliant predictive mechanism you claim it is, you wouldn't have to bring it up yourself, over and over.
If a person feels the need to constantly tell everyone how clever this thing he came up with is, what does that tell you?
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Re: Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
Shouldn't there be some sort of law that states:
As it seems to be a regular occurrence around here in many different topics of discussion.
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Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
This cultural problem is hardly addressed by banning data which can instruct a 3D printer to produce a firearm.
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One simple Fix
If printers can make illegal weapons, then ban all printers. If computers can view child porn, then ban all computers.
Simple!!
Because you can't stop the spread of software, only hardware..
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Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
0 children died last year from "gun violence," which is not an object that exists. The children who died where killed by individual actions taken by people who illegally used guns.
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Re: you can have child porn without child abuse
And yet it’s still deemed illegal and harmful.
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Re: individual actions taken by people who illegally used guns.
It’s the people we want to stop from having and using guns.
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Re: how many guns exist
The fact that the two things are comparable would seem to reinforce my point about drawing an equivalence between the two.
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Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
There are legitimate, legal reasons to own guns.
There are not legitimate, legal reasons to f*** a kid.
There are legitimate reasons to design, examine, and create guns.
There are no legitimate reasons to watch kids getting f****d.
Trying to argue that they're the same means arguing that your right to defend yourself from a machete-wielding burglar is the same as your right to violate a 10-year-old.
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Re: Re: Re: Why Are 3D Gun Plans Better Than Child Porn?
Lawrence D'Oliveiro : guns :: "Jhon Sandford" : CDA 230
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