GoDaddy Reignites Debate Over Infrastructure Layer Moderation By Banning Texas Anti-Abortion Snitch Site

from the never-ends dept

The debate over content moderation at the infrastructure (rather than edge) layers of the internet stack is heating up again. For what it's worth, we'll be hosting our next Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse on this very subject later this month (if you're interested in contributing, please reach out). Last week Reuters claimed that Amazon was going to more aggressively police sites that rely on AWS (which created a bit of a furor earlier this year when the company booted Parler). Amazon has denied these claims, but it certainly raised some eyebrows.

Then, on Friday, hosting company GoDaddy announced that it had given Texas Right To Live 24 hours notice that it was shutting down the snitch site that organization was running as part of Texas's ridiculously unconstitutional plan to allow anyone to sue anyone for vaguely "aiding and abetting" someone getting an abortion. As some commentators noted, such a site appeared to violate some of GoDaddy's policies -- and that's exactly what GoDaddy said in telling the site it had 24 hours to find a new host.

GoDaddy claimed that the snitch site violated multiple policies, but the one that everyone has focused on is Section 5.2 of its terms:

You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent.

I have to admit that that clause is... pretty vague. I understand the intent behind it, certainly, but the language could be applied to lots of sites that collect some information for purely non-nefarious purposes. Under this policy, would it be against GoDaddy's terms to create a private site that allowed people to discuss -- for example -- incidents of sexual harassment, such as what happened during the #MeToo movement?

There was, separately, the issue of the fact that the site was being (somewhat hilariously) flooded by bogus snitching reports, designed to make the site useless. Some enterprising coders had even hacked together a simple script to flood the site with bogus snitching info.

Either way, within hours, the site was back up on Digital Ocean... and then was kicked off again (again, for claims of policy violations). It quickly then found another home on Epik, which is kind of the last hosting refuge of assholes who piss off every other hosting company (it has worked with Gab, Parler, and 8chan at times). Update: And apparently even Epik wanted nothing to do with the site and told the operators that it violated Epik's terms of service as well...

As we discussed when the Parler situation hit, we should look at infrastructure-level moderation as being fundamentally different from edge layer moderation. There are different things at play, and the impact is much greater. Moderation at the infrastructure layer can not be narrowly targeted. It is, by default, a sledge hammer approach. That said, (again as we noted in the Parler situation), it is not as big of a concern when there is widespread competition. The larger concern appears in non-competitive markets. Thankfully, as the site's ability to bounce around and find new hosts quickly has demonstrated, the hosting market still is pretty competitive.

That's not to say that there don't remain some concerns about what happens at the infrastructure layer of the internet and who should have the power to shut down entire websites. It's just to note that the issue a lot more complex than any simplistic analysis will entail. Either way, stay tuned for the Greenhouse posts later this month...

Filed Under: abortion, content moderation, domain registrars, domains, hosting, infrastructure, texas
Companies: digital ocean, epik, godaddy, texas right to live

FTC Decides Maybe It's Time To Start Asking Why McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Broken All The Damn Time

from the let-the-ice-cream-flow! dept

In unsurprising news, the McDonald's McFlurry machine is down. In actual surprising news, the FTC is looking into it. (Paywall ahead, but here's another option.)

The FTC reached out to McDonald's franchisees this summer seeking information on what, exactly, is going on with the broken ice cream machine problem, according to a letter it sent, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, and people familiar with the matter. The FTC declined to comment.

Well, it's a start. The notoriously unreliable machines are pretty much the only option for McDonalds franchise owners, who are tied into lengthy service contracts that include immediate termination of warranties should any McDonalds employees have the gall to repair their own machines. And knowing what is in need of fixing is deliberately obscured by the manufacturer, Taylor Commercial Foodservice, which weaponizes obscure error codes and overall inscrutability to ensure a steady stream of service call revenue.

There's another solution out there, but it doesn't have the approval of the McDonalds corporation. And, since it could severely diminish one of Taylor's revenue streams, attempts have been made by the company to remove the competitor from the equation.

Two years ago, a company called Kytch Inc. developed a device that attaches to Taylor's ice cream machines and sends franchise owners messages alerting them to possible breakdowns and other problems that demand attention. It also makes sense of Taylor's nonsensical codes, allowing owners to actually take care of the issues, rather than just tell customers the machine is down yet again and wait for a Taylor rep to arrive.

Taylor was so opposed to Kytch helping people repair the machines they had purchased that they spent months trying to trick Kytch into sending one so the company could, allegedly, reverse engineer it. That's the accusation Kytch is making in court, where it has just secured a small win that compels Taylor to stop doing whatever it's doing with the Kytch device it obtained and return the device to its maker.

In a recent legal victory, a judge awarded a temporary restraining order against Taylor after Kytch had alleged in a complaint that the McFlurry machine manufacturer had gotten its hands on a Kytch Solution Devices with the express intention of learning its trade secrets. The complaint also alleged that Taylor had told McDonald’s and its franchisees to stop using Kytch machines on the grounds that they were dangerous, and that the company had begun development on its own version of the Kytch system at the same time.

Now, all of this has dovetailed into the involvement of the FTC: the years of flaky performance by Taylor ice cream machines, the mostly unheeded complaints of McDonalds franchise owners, the apparent attempt to strongarm Kytch out of the repair business. But, at this point, the FTC is really only investigating the possibility of opening an investigation. This is a "preliminary investigation" which mainly involves asking for some input from Taylor machine owners and, if there's enough alleged to move forward, the FTC will presumably do that. But it's a start. And there will be at least one party listening to the complaints of franchise owners: the federal government.

Filed Under: ftc, mcflurry, ownership, repairs, right to repair
Companies: kytch, mcdonald's, taylor commercial foodservice

Daily Deal: The Complete Guitar Lessons Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Complete Guitar Lessons Bundle has 14 courses to help you master playing guitar. By the end of these courses, you'll be playing chords in songs, soloing, strumming various patterns, reading the guitar tab, and generally understanding your guitar. You'll be able to teach yourself any song you want to learn. Courses will also introduce you to electric guitar, blues and jazz guitar, and more. It's on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Lessons Learned From Creating Good Faith Debate In A Sea Of Garbage Disinformation

from the it's-possible dept

A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Will Oremus and Gerrit De Vynck from the Washington Post published one of the most fascinating -- and in some ways, most important -- discussions of social media and dealing with "disinformation" that I've seen in a while. It touches on two things I've written about recently -- how the way we talk about disinformation is not helpful and the difficulty in determining how to deal with bad faith actors.

The WaPo article talks about a group on Facebook -- set up by concerned mothers -- that focuses on having thoughtful debate about vaccines -- an area that is fraught with misinformation, disinformation, utter nonsense, and propaganda. But where there may be legitimate causes for debate and concern. But the problem is that the space is so flooded with nonsense that it feels like any attempt to discuss stuff seriously quickly slides into the nonsense zone and everyone backs into their usual corners. But what this article notes is that it is possible to have a good faith debate on such topics, even with people who believe strongly in debunked nonsense. The real trick? Having strict rules and following them:

“The most important rule was ‘civility,’ ” Bilowitz said. “There are some groups online where people just yell at each other. We wanted to just be able to talk to one another without it getting that way.”

Vaccine Talk now has nearly 70,000 members, each of whom must gain administrators’ approval to join and commit to a code of conduct. Strict rules prohibit users from misrepresenting themselves, offering medical advice and harassing or bullying people. Another key rule: Be ready to provide citations within 24 hours for any claim you make. Twenty-five moderators and administrators in six countries monitor the posts, and those who flout the rules are kicked out.

So, there is heavy moderation going on in the group, but they're not just banning people who spout nonsense. They ask that they cite the evidence for such nonsense, and those who don't live up to the rules face consequences. It's not surprising that bad faith actors have trouble following the rules:

“Usually, the hardcore anti-vaxxers cannot follow the rules,” Bilowitz said. “They are usually spamming people with their commentary. I think it’s hard for them: They are basically coming out of an echo chamber.”

And the interesting bit is that this community seems to be working in actually convincing some skeptics:

Monica Buescher, a 32-year-old teacher in Vacaville, Calif., said she went “deep down the rabbit hole” of anti-vaccine misinformation when she had her second child in 2019. Convinced that shots were dangerous, she nonetheless wanted to hear the pro-vaccine side. She found her way to Vaccine Talk, which she said had a reputation among anti-vaccine groups as being “mean” for banning those who made claims without scientific evidence.

On Vaccine Talk, Buescher credits a handful of people with walking her through the scientific evidence and persuading her that routine childhood vaccines are safe and effective. Now, Buescher is helping her friends and family navigate conflicting information about coronavirus vaccines.

There are other examples as well.

Of course, the story also reinforces the idea that expecting the big companies to do all the moderation and enforcement themselves leads to questionable outcomes as well:

Vaccine Talk represents exactly the type of conversations Facebook says it wants to cultivate. But Bilowitz said the social network’s often clumsy and heavy-handed enforcement of covid misinformation policies has made their work more difficult. In June, Facebook temporarily shut down the group because someone posted an article deemed to be misinformation. But the poster had been seeking advice on how to rebut the article.

“We were just caught up in the algorithm,” Bilowitz said, “and felt there wasn’t a human in charge of the process.”

The article highlights how the constant drumbeat of people (including the White House) demanding that Facebook "do more" is often counterproductive.

“Facebook is attempting to shut down misinformation by shutting down all conversation entirely,” she said. “I strongly believe that civil, evidence-based discussion works, and Facebook’s policies make it extremely difficult for that to happen.”

There's a lot more in the article that is worth thinking about with regards to these debates about mis- and disinformation and how to deal with it. And it is notable that this is a successful, decently large community, that doesn't just shut down dissent, but rather simply requires those spreading it to back it up, and makes it clear that if you cannot, you face consequences. And it's also useful in highlighting how the general demands to put all the responsibility on big companies like Facebook can backfire.

I honestly think this article is one of the most important ones we've seen on various content moderation debates regarding misinformation, and I expect to cite back to it often.

Filed Under: anti-vax, content moderation, covid-19, evidence, rules, vaccines
Companies: facebook

Every Streaming Company Not Named Apple Receives A Lousy Grade On Privacy

from the unimportant-afterthoughts dept

While streaming providers and hardware companies see significantly higher consumer satisfaction rates that traditional cable TV, their privacy practices still leave something to be desired. That's according to a new breakdown of streaming service privacy policies by Common Sense Media, which doled out terrible grades to pretty much everybody not named Apple:

"Our privacy evaluations of the top 10 streaming apps indicate that all streaming apps (except Apple TV+) have privacy practices that put consumers' privacy at considerable risk including selling data, sending third‐party marketing communications, displaying targeted advertisements, tracking users across other sites and services, and creating advertising profiles for data brokers."

Of course their privacy practices suck because being terrible on privacy is perfectly legal in a country that can't manage to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era. Not a law cracking down on the dodgy behavior by third party data brokers. Not a law that implements some basic transparency requirements so consumers know what's being collected and who it's being sold to. And not a basic law that implements something vaguely resembling real accountability for companies that can't be bothered, time and time again, to properly secure their networks, devices, and servers from intrusion.

The firm took a deep dive into the data collection and sharing practices of 10 different streaming services and hardware vendors, from Netflix and Disney+ to Roku. They closely examined what data was being collected, how much of that collection was transparent to the end user, and where that data was sent. They also took a close look at device security using the Consumer Reports' Digital Standard, a promising new metric that attempts to standardize security practices so they can be included in product reviews.

Some of the failures were downright ugly, like making no real exceptions for the data collection of children. Many of the issues revealed weren't the end of the world, but they make it repeatedly clear that companies aren't being transparent about what is collected, and often enjoy making opting out of data collection and monetization as cumbersome and annoying as possible:

"The Roku Streaming Stick+ set‐up process did not display notice of privacy settings or choices a user can make about sharing data. Only after the Roku device has completed setup can users navigate to the "Settings" menu, and choose to opt in to the single privacy setting "Limit Ad Tracking" which is not enabled by default. This setting is worded in such a way that it may be misleading that opting in to limiting a worse practice is actually opting out of use of your data for that worse practice, which is not a principle of privacy by design."

There's a consistent drumbeat of arguments that tend to focus on how it's simply impossible for our Luddite Congress to pass a useful privacy law. But again, it wouldn't be at that difficult to write a clear law, with input from major stakeholders, that simply mandates clear communication on what's being collected and how to opt out of it. But we can't even do that. Instead we've got complete apathy toward the privacy and security internet shit show on the federal level, which created a discordant wave of less than impressive and often convoluted state-level laws.

Filed Under: data collection, privacy, streaming
Companies: apple

Investigation Finds NSO Malware Being Used By The Bahrain Government To Target Activists And Dissidents

from the truly-unsurprising-development dept

More bad news for Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group. Despite its contradictory and simultaneous claims that it does not allow its customers to abuse its products and that it has no way of monitoring use of its products, more evidence continues to surface that shows the company's customers are deploying NSO's malware to target journalists, activists, prominent politicians, and religious leaders.

Citizen Lab -- which has uncovered plenty of abusive use of NSO malware previously -- has released another report showing an abusive government abusing NSO spyware to spy on activists opposed to the country's current leadership. The investigation also confirms something NSO has repeatedly denied: that the list of numbers leaked to journalists and investigators is actually a list of potential targets of NSO's customers. That list included plenty of journalists, activists, politicians, and religious leaders.

Perhaps the most worrying thing about this report is the use of an exploit that bypasses security measures activists would logically adopt: refusing to click on links sent by unknown senders.

We identified nine Bahraini activists whose iPhones were successfully hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and February 2021. Some of the activists were hacked using two zero-click iMessage exploits: the 2020 KISMET exploit and a 2021 exploit that we call FORCEDENTRY.

The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two exiled Bahraini dissidents, and one member of Al Wefaq (a Shiite Bahraini political society).

And here's at least partial confirmation that the leaked list of potential targets has something to do with NSO Group and its customers:

We shared a list of the targeted phone numbers we identified with Forbidden Stories. They confirmed that numbers associated with five of the hacked devices were contained on the Pegasus Project’s list of potential targets of NSO Group’s customers, data that Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International describe as dating from 2016 up to several years ago.

If NSO Group is serious about preventing abuse of its products, the first step it could take is refusing to sell exploits to abusive governments. As Citizen Lab points out, Bahrain's government has a long history of human rights abuses. While things improved slightly and briefly around the turn of the century, everything reverted back to the abusive mean a decade later, when reforms were rolled back and the government went back to imprisoning and torturing dissidents, critics, and anti-government activists.

And you can't find people to jail and torture without domestic spying, which the Bahraini government enthusiastically engages in. That apparently includes spying on activists and dissidents who have left the country. The report says two Bahrain citizens who now live in London were hit with NSO malware. But this may have been a proxy hack on behalf of the Bahrain government. Citizen Lab notes it has only seen the Bahrain government deploy malware in its own country or in neighboring Qatar. So, these hacks may have been performed on its behalf by a friendly government with its own set of NSO malware.

In conclusion, NSO Group is complicit in the surveillance, imprisonment, torture, and silencing of activists around the world. The company claims it is selective about who it sells to and that it takes action when there are reports of abuse, but neither of these statements can possibly be true.

While NSO Group regularly attempts to discredit reports of abuse, their customer list includes many notorious misusers of surveillance technology. The sale of Pegasus to Bahrain is particularly egregious, considering that there is significant, longstanding, and documented evidence of Bahrain’s serial misuse of surveillance products including Trovicor, FinFisher, Cellebrite, and, now, NSO Group.

Once again, if NSO's statements about preventing abuse are going to be taken seriously, the company needs to dump customers with proven track records of human rights abuses. That's the bare minimum it can do to prevent its exploits from being used to target people governments just don't like. If these tools have been developed to fight dangerous crime and terrorism, the worst thing to do is place them in the hands of governments whose actions are criminal and often indistinguishable from terrorism.

Filed Under: activists, bahrain, dissidents, malware, pegasus, spyware, surveillance
Companies: citizen lab, nso group

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the so-they-say dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous entry in a long-running debate — I won't provide all the context (you can check it out for yourself) because frankly the source of the debate is getting a bit tiresome and well-placed smackdowns like this shouldn't even be necessary anymore, but apparently they are:

Yet neither has to do with this bill. While you're here, answer this: why is your right to speech more important than my right not to associate with your speech?

In second place, it's James Burkhardt in another branch of said debate, responding to the assertion that social media platforms could escape liability by just not moderating at all, and this would somehow be a good thing:

This is the end conclusion reached by the logic behind the ruling in Prodigy v Oakmont, the case whose ruling was so bad congress wrote a law to overturn it. Congratulations getting to that conclusion, 20 years later. Of course, to claim the logical decision would be to stop moderating assumes that a lack of moderation would have no effect on the business.

Evidence from Youtube's various Adpocalypses and Techdirt's own issues with advertisers speaks to the contrary. They wont want ads next to child porn. Pro-Terrorist content. A post with rampant racial slurs.

This ignores that just hosting, no matter how ignorant, pro-terrorist content, child porn, or instructions on how to get an abortion, is a legal liability until a court rules. Possession of Child Porn is a crime regardless of ignorance. You are still providing material support to terrorists. And its not clear that in the case of the abortion bill that courts would require red flag knowledge (as copyright law does), rather than just the knowledge that the tool is being used, somewhere, to violate the law (as regularly argued by copyright holders).

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from That One Guy about the Texas legislature saying what schools can't teach, and what social media must host:

Now tell us what you REALLY think texas republicans...

'Teaching that racism exists is terrible, divisive and makes the racists feel bad so that's right out! Now about those 'the jews had it coming, sometimes terrorists have a point and vaccines are the mark of the beast and cause autism' posts that social media must host...'

Always nice when politicians slip up and tell everyone what they really think even if it's all sorts of disturbing(if not in any way surprising at this point) that 'pro-holocaust, pro-terrorism and anti-vaxx-in-the-middle-of-a-gorram-pandemic' are apparently top priorities of things to not just protect but enshrine as untouchable positions for texas republicans.

Next, it's Bruce E responding to a commenter who criticized our post about tech industry bias by asserting that they want (and believe they have personally achieved) a bias-free meritocracy:

If you believe you are free from bias you might be just fooling yourself. Even honourable people who think sexism, racism, anti-transism, etc. are wrong subject to bias.

The point is to constantly be on the lookout for your own bias first, then help others with theirs.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad with another comment on that post, this time responding to someone who went on a bizarre rant in a failed attempt at an analogy, while also saying they find the subject embarrassing:

I mean, if I'd just responded to an article about sexism by rambling about football jerseys for eight paragraphs, I'd be embarrassed too.

In second place, it's David responding to our description of some comments from Marjorie Taylor Greene as "utterly nonsensical, zero calorie, idiot theater":

Well, that's how we know that Greene has not been misquoted.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Samuel Abram responding to the observation that adult content bans so often have exceptions for Playboy:

It must be the articles.

Finally, it's one more comment from That One Guy, this time in response to the question of what exactly the difference is between the GOP and the Mafia:

One of them is a criminal organization that is willing to protect their interests using any means available, are big fans of suits and grandiose statements and sees the legal system as a tool to be corrupted and used at their leisure.

The other is the mafia.

That's all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: August 29th - September 4th

from the as-it-happened dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2016, a leaked copyright proposal in the EU was a complete mess with lots of terrible ideas — though that didn't stop Hollywood from finding something in it to freak out about — while a report from the UK government pretty much accused Facebook, Twitter, and Google of being unrepentant supporters of terrorism. On the flipside, we were surprised that the EU adopted net neutrality guidelines that didn't suck. James Comey was calling for an "adult conversation" about encryption but still refusing to listen to experts, while the DHS's new Election Cybersecurity Committee also lacked any cybersecurity experts, and we noted the Clinton Campaign's hypocrisy on encryption. And, of course, the monkey selfie debacle continued, this time with PETA losing its "next friend" status.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2011, we saw more of how ridiculous the lawsuits were from US Copyright Group and the Hurt Locker producers, the DOJ was battling Puerto 80 in court over its domain seizures (leading the latter to appeal on First Amendment grounds), and we took another look at the total lack of evidence for the supposed necessity of a fashion copyright. A DMCA takedown "prank" led to all of Justin Bieber's videos being removed from YouTube, and so all of a sudden record label executives were concerned about DMCA abuse (while Twitter was having its own problems with highly questionable DMCA claims leading to account suspensions). Meanwhile, an appeals court ruled that arresting a man for filming the cops violated the First and Fourth Amendments, but at the same time a man who filmed the cops in Illinois was facing 75 years in jail at the hands of an Assistant AG who insisted there is no right to record the police.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2006, cablecos and telcos seemed to be suddenly realizing that their service sucks, not that they would be fixing that anytime soon, while we took a closer look at the telco shills polluting the net neutrality debate. A weird internal copyright battle at the UK Cabinet Office led to one part of the office pulling another part's videos off YouTube, while the New York Times was blocking an article for UK readers for fear of liability under the country's problematic laws. In the midst of the world learning about its highly questionable conditions, Foxconn was threatening reporters with life-destroying consequences, but then tried to back down. Meanwhile, the MPAA was using its rating powers to obstruct a documentary about its rating powers, and the RIAA (which at the same time was still fighting for the right to scour people's hard drives) was following the MPAA's lead and creating an "educational campaign" to brainwash people about the evils of piracy.

Filed Under: history, look back

Mystery Over Fake Section 1201 Takedown Claims Sent By 'Video Industry Association of America' Deepens

from the no-such-agency dept

It was only a week or so ago that we discussed the latest example of the type of fake DMCA notices that Google gets to delist certain URLs from search results. In this instance, a couple of factors made these DMCA notices even more problematic than usual. For starters, they claim to be coming from the U.S. Copyright Office, which very much does not send in DMCA notices like this. On top of that, the notices claim they are being sent by the U.S. Copyright Office on behalf of the Video Industry Association of America which, as I noted in my original post, doesn't seem to actually exist. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these are notices for Section 1201 claims, which deal with anti-circumvention aspects of copyright law, that target mostly stream-ripping sites and sites that cover or guide legit uses of those sites. Notably, Google does not have an appeal process for 1201 notices, leaving anyone who got delisted basically screwed.

Well, now the mystery somewhat deepens. The Section 1201 DMCA notices have continued to flood Google, but now they are being supposedly sent directly by the Video Industry Association of America, with whoever is sending these dropping the pretense that they're coming from the US Copyright Office. But that isn't actually clearing much up other than to highlight, again, that the organization doesn't actually exist and is coming from Russia.

A mysterious group called the 'Video Industry Association of America' is trying to wipe the homepages of dozens of reputable sites from Google search. The targets, which stand accused of violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention policy, include Verizon, Pinterest, and Engadget. Google says that it's aware of these fraudulent notices but, thus far, they are not without damage.

The ‘American’ organization starts one request off in Russian and finds it hard to construct proper English sentences. In another notice, it complains of sites and apps that circumvent the copyright protection of streaming services, while classifying these as “software cracks.” Things get even more problematic when we look at the URLs that are reported. While these include tools such as DVDFab and YouTube-rippers, which some rightsholders see as problematic, various legitimate sites are targeted as well.

So what's going on here? Well, it seems that whoever is behind these DMCA notices is taking shotgun approach to them. Anything that has to do with providing or informing the public on matters of stream-ripping, legit or otherwise, are being targeted. Plenty of other tech news organizations have been targeted as well, such as Engadget and CNET. Most of the takedown requests have gone ignored by Google, but several have not. Many smaller tech sites have been delisted as a result of all this.

For at least one of the sites, Google has acknowledged that the delist request was not legit, but also said there is no current appeals process.

Fossbytes reported the issue to Google, which informed the site that there is no official counter-notification process for these anti-circumvention takedowns. As such, the URLs remain deindexed for now.

“There is no formal counter notification process available under US law for circumvention, so we have not reinstated these URLs,” Google replied, requesting a detailed explanation from the site.

Meaning the onus is still on the victims of this crap to get themselves re-listed. And, once TorrentFreak got its hands on a copy of the takedown request, it illuminates how blatantly fraudulent all of this is.

This reveals some interesting details that are not available in the Lumen database, including the name, email address, and geolocation of the ‘Video Industry Association of America’ representative.

As can be seen above, the sender is actually located in Russia and identifies itself as “Wolf Fang,” which isn’t a typical name, not even in Russia. The email address, which we won’t publish, comes from Gmail and references another animal’s fangs.

Again, what's going on here? Is this some coordinated Russian effort to delist a bunch of prominent or otherwise American news sites? Not likely. Instead, this is more likely a form of the kind of fraud-based attack we've seen from overseas sites that abuse the DMCA process in order to take down both its competitors and references to competitors wherever possible.

For now, it remains a mystery who’s behind these notices. It wouldn’t surprise us if the “Video Industry Association of America’ is actually a direct competitor of the stream-ripping and DRM circumvention tools that are reported.

This is a strategy we have seen several times in the past. A competitor targets URLs from competing apps and sites, so their own site will end up higher in Google’s search results.

In other words, the only real good these bullshit DMCA notices are doing is to further highlight the wide open avenues for fraud and abuse in our current DMCA takedown process.

Filed Under: copyfraud, dmca, dmca 1201, dmca 512, fake takedowns, russia
Companies: google, video industry association of america

Ten Seconds Of Doing Nothing Is Reasonably Suspicious, Says The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court

from the can't-make-crime-fighting-omelettes-without-breaking-a-few-Constitutional-eg dept

How much does it take to establish reasonable suspicion needed to subject a person to an at least temporary removal of most of their rights? Not much, says the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, which appears willing to keep poking the SCOTUS bear with its mind-boggling interpretations of Constitutional rights and the power of law enforcement to bypass them.

This recent decision, highlighted by defense lawyer/"Constitutional cultist" Andrew Fleischman, says all cops need are a few seconds of observation and some vague assertions about criminal activity in the general area.

Here's the setup, as presented by the Fifth Circuit [PDF]:

Otha Ray Flowers, convicted of a federal gun violation, appeals the denial of his motion to suppress evidence as a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The questions on appeal are whether Flowers and Jeremy Mayo were “seized” when five or six patrol cars parked behind and around Mayo’s Cadillac with their patrol lights flashing, and if they were seized, whether Officer Stanton had reasonable suspicion to conduct a “Terry stop.”

Some cops were doing some cop stuff in the area. According to the facts on record, the officers were "looking for suspicious behavior," a supposedly "proactive" effort in an allegedly high-crime area that is meant to deter criminal acts by, apparently, rolling up en masse on anyone viewed as suspicious by these Direct Action Response Team (yes, that spells DART) officers.

Flowers and Mayo were sitting in the parking lot of a convenience store. The officers were in the area because their supervisor had directed them to patrol near there because of "recent violent crimes and burglaries." This sounds suspiciously like "predictive policing," which sends cops to where crimes have been committed under the assumption that lightning strikes twice/people are less white. The Jackson, Mississippi panopticon works, I guess. But only on the assumption that people living, working, or temporarily idling a vehicle in a high-crime area have fewer rights than those fortunate enough to be elsewhere.

So, what were these two "suspects" doing that raised enough suspicion a stop involving five police cars and six officers was warranted? Failing to do anything other than sit in a car for less time than it takes to read the previous two paragraphs:

As Officer Stanton was turning from Capitol Street onto Road of Remembrance, he saw a silver Cadillac parked in the south end of a small parking lot connected to an open convenience store. It was dark outside, but Officer Stanton observed that the vehicle was occupied by two men, one in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger’s seat. Officer Stanton observed the vehicle “for approximately 10 to 15 seconds” and noticed the occupants “didn’t appear to be exiting the vehicle, [and] didn’t appear to be patronizing the establishment.” Therefore, he decided to conduct what he characterized as a “field interview.”

Apparently, even non-movements can be furtive. The response to this momentarily-observed lack of activity was a literal swarm of police officers.

Officer Stanton testified that at this point, he and five to six other officers, all in separate patrol cars, converged upon the silver vehicle with their blue lights activated. The parking lot in front of the store was narrow, with very little space or room to maneuver. Officer Stanton later acknowledged that it would have been impossible for the silver vehicle to leave the parking lot because of the way the officers parked their cars around it.

Behold the majestic absurdity of the following assertion:

Officer Stanton got out of his patrol car and approached the silver vehicle, as did other officers. He testified that the men in the vehicle were still free to leave at this point in the encounter, but he did not communicate that to them.

Who amongst us with five or six police cars surrounding our car would feel "free to leave," whether or not that option was communicated to us by one of the six surrounding the car? No one. Not a goddamn person would feel this encounter was still voluntary.

At least the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court said it was a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Pretending it was still consensual was a step too far for even this notoriously law enforcement-friendly circuit. But the very least a court should do when presented with this kind of assertion is to apprise officers that literally no one -- not even the officer making this sworn statement -- actually believes this kind of "interaction" is consensual.

The end result was the discovery of some marijuana, a gun, and an outstanding warrant. This led to felony charges. And the Fifth Circuit is fine with this outcome because, hey, don't sit in a car in a high crime area, I guess.

It bears repeating that apart from the presence of a number of police cars, the tenor of Officer Stanton’s encounter with Flowers was entirely benign until Stanton smelled marijuana. He conducted no physical frisk of Flowers’s person but simply approached the Cadillac to ask some questions. If this course of conduct is constitutionally impermissible, then it is difficult to see how any active policing can take place in communities endangered and impoverished by high crime rates.

That's the takeaway from this decision. Cops can wander over Constitutional lines as long as a court is willing to grant their "high crime area" assertions credibility. There's no legal definition of "high crime," so it can be whatever cops want it to be. And when they assert this in front of judges prone to grant every benefit of a doubt to fellow government employees, it will work nearly every time.

Flow our proxy tears, the court advocating on behalf of the policeman said:

Officers in such areas may well require safety in numbers, while the law-abiding citizens desperately need protection that will be denied if law enforcement officials believe that incriminating evidence will be suppressed or they will be sued for alleged violations of rights.

If the cops can't roll over rights to fight crime, how can they possibly fight crime? That's the question the Fifth Circuit is asking. And it should have an answer that says cops can't disregard rights just because they're patrolling areas where criminal activity is claimed to be "higher" than theoretical areas where it's apparently lower. But instead, the Appeals Court gives us this:

Under the circumstances of this case and viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the Government, assuming arguendo that these individuals were seized, there was reasonable suspicion to do so. We AFFIRM.

And that is that. The court has basically written a permission slip for stops based on nothing more than a few seconds of observation backed by officers' assertions that criminal activity has occurred nearby at some point in the past. Looking past the legalese, the Appeals Court is telling people their rights mean less if they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the "wrong time" being a few seconds of non-movement while observed by officers trained to view literally anything as suspicious.

If there's any saving grace to this published decision, it's the dissent, which casts a whole lot of shade on the majority's conclusions while taking a shot at the overreacting cops.

As for the “dawdling” of approximately ten to fifteen seconds, the men could have been finishing a conversation, responding to text messages, watching with curiosity as a six-car police caravan passed, or engaging in other reasonable behavior that explains the delay. The facts in this case simply do not support an officer’s reasonable suspicion.

That should have been the majority's conclusion. Instead, it chose once again to elevate police officers over the policed, and ensured the poorest of the police can be treated the worst without officers feeling they might be held accountable in a court of law for the rights violations they've committed.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th circuit, high crime areas, jeremy mayo, otha ray flowers, police, predictive policing, searches, suspicion