The Pulitzer Prize In Bullshit FUD Reporting Goes To... The Sunday Times For Its 'Snowden Expose'

from the journalism! dept

Let's start with this. Soon after Daniel Ellsberg was revealed as the source behind the Pentagon Papers, White House officials started spreading rumors that Ellsberg was actually a Soviet spy and that he'd passed on important secrets to the Russians: None of it was true, but it was part of a concerted effort by administration officials to smear Ellsberg as a "Soviet spy" and a "traitor" when all he really did was blow the whistle on things by sharing documents with reporters.

Does that sound familiar? Over the weekend, a big story supposedly broke in the UK's the Sunday Times, citing anonymous UK officials arguing that the Russians and Chinese got access to all the Snowden documents and it had created all sorts of issues, including forcing the UK to remove undercover "agents" from Russia. That story is behind a paywall, but plenty of people have made the text available if you'd like to read the whole thing.

There are all sorts of problems with the report that make it not just difficult to take seriously, but which actually raise a lot more questions about what kind of "reporting" the Sunday Times actually does. It's also worth noting that this particular story comes out just about a week or so after Jason Leopold revealed some of the details of the secret plan to discredit Snowden that was hatched in DC. Even so, the journalism here is beyond shoddy, getting key facts flat out incorrect, allowing key sources to remain anonymous for no reason, and not appearing to raise any questions about the significant holes in the story.

Snowden has made it clear for well over a year that once he gave the documents to the original journalists, he got rid of them and no longer had them -- so he wouldn't even be able to give them to anyone else, even if they wanted them. Yet, the article insists that the Russians got them, and originally included a claim that supposedly ties the documents to Snowden in Moscow:

It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden’s data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 “highly classified” intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.

During the ensuing court hearing Oliver Robbins, then deputy national security adviser in the Cabinet Office, said that the release of the information “would do serious damage to UK national security, and ultimately put lives at risk”.

Except, that middle paragraph is simply factually incorrect -- as basically any report on the original detention would have made clear. Miranda had been in Berlin with Laura Poitras, and not in Moscow with Snowden. After this rather important factual error was pointed out repeatedly... the Sunday Times simply deleted it with no retraction or correction. Down the memory hole. Well, except if you have the paper copy: Considering that that point is sort of a key string in the narrative of putting the documents in Russia -- the fact that it is flat out false (despite the easy fact checking) should call into question the rest of the story. But there are even more problems with it the deeper you dig. Craig Murray, a former ambassador and diplomat for the UK has written the best explanation saying that the story "is a lie." He highlights five very serious problems with the story, starting with the fact that the terminology is wrong. In the article, the anonymous government official is quoted as follows:

A senior Downing Street source said: “It is the case that Russians and Chinese have information. It has meant agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information."

Except, as Murray notes, no actual government source who was familiar with these things would mistake an "agent" for an "officer."

Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

He also dismisses the "blood on his hands" money quote given in the article. That line was directed at Snowden -- though, it was almost immediately undercut within the same exact article by someone noting "there is no evidence of anyone being harmed." It's almost as if no one actually bothered to think through the propaganda message. Murray points out that the idea that any officers would be in danger is hogwash. Beyond the fact that the Russian and Chinese don't kill western spies (they just kick them out of the country), there's the simple fact that such info would never be in the documents Snowden had:

Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified.

This same point is further confirmed by Ryan Gallagher, one of the journalists who does have access to the Snowden files and says that there is no such information in them.

This was a surprise to me because I've reviewed the Snowden documents and I've never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents. Were the agents pulled out as a precautionary measure? Keeping in mind that the UK government does not actually know exactly what Snowden leaked, how do these officials know there were documents in there that implicated MI6 operatives and live operations in the first place?

Murray further notes that the Russians are already pretty sure they know who the UK's spies are (and vice versa) and even if they were revealed in the documents, which he doesn't think is true, there'd be no reason to remove anyone anyway.

The Sunday Times piece further repeats the long repudiated claim that Snowden's cache included 1.7 million documents -- a number that even the NSA now admits was bunk and based solely on the number of documents he "touched," not those Snowden actually took.

Then there's this point, raised by security professor Matthew Green: If the intelligence agencies really believed that Snowden was carrying such damaging documents on his person, why would they strand him in Moscow by pulling his passport? Another potential problem: at one point, the article implies that Snowden may have handed the documents over as part of a "deal" with the Russian or Chinese, but in another part of the article, it discusses how the Russians and Chinese cracked the encryption on the stash. So which is it? Did he hand them over, or were they encrypted?

The whole thing is such a shoddy piece of propaganda that it seems almost hilarious... and would be if actual serious news sites weren't repeating the claims, often with little question. The BBC was quick to put up a piece repeating the claims -- though it has since added a few dissenting viewpoints. Many other UK tabloids have more or less repeated the claims. The only paper that seems to be strongly pushing back is The Guardian (which published the first Snowden revelation and many later ones as well). It has been raising lots of questions about the original reporting, demanding answers from the UK government about the claims and actually willing to call out the report as "low on facts, high on assertions."

Is it possible that others have access to these documents? Sure. Of course, the world itself has seen many of them, thanks to reporters revealing them publicly (something Snowden himself never did).

Still, even back when Snowden was in Hong Kong, intelligence community defenders insisted it meant that China had the documents. And the second he was in Moscow, they insisted that Russia had them too. In this case, it honestly sounds like the naive reporters at the Sunday Times took that "speculation" and wrote an entire story about it, searching for quotes that would confirm the thesis, but not doing any actual journalistic activity. So they got their story, and it's now quite easy to poke it full of very large holes.

Of course the timing on this is even more suspect. It comes out just as a report was published in the UK that slammed some aspects of government surveillance, and it seems noteworthy that right before this, there was a sudden upsurge in ridiculous and slightly unhinged fear mongering about Snowden himself -- none of which comes with any actual evidence, only angry speculation. It's almost as if governments pushing for greater surveillance powers might mount a coordinated propaganda campaign to smear the one guy who has been exposing their bullshit.

Filed Under: china, ed snowden, journalism, leaks, propaganda, reporting, russia, surveillance, uk
Companies: sunday times

Putin's Internet Propaganda War Is Much Bigger And Weirder Than You Think, Now Extending Into The States

from the ministry-of-truth dept

We've been writing lately about how Putin and Russia have shifted their internet propaganda forces into overdrive, employing multiple factories operated by a company named Internet Research, filling the internet with Putin-friendly drivel twenty-four-hours a day. The insight into these efforts has become more and more interesting as whistleblowers have started exposing (and most recently suing over) them the last six months. Contrary to similar efforts in other countries (U.S. included), there's absolutely no subtlety on display here, and the scale is unlike anything the internet has ever seen.

Interestingly, many of the comments to my last piece made some really compelling points regarding what Putin is up to. Here's a small smattering:

"Karl Bode, author of this very article, has most likely unwittingly fallen for an ukrainian-made honey-pot propaganda trap."

"I cant help see this article as another stone in the western propaganda campaign against Putin the last few months, and not really about social media propaganda."

"The story of that Russian propaganda factory that caught Karl Bode's attention (assuming the story is even true and is not itself a counter-propaganda gig similar to 'WMD') seems very amateurish in comparison to the depth and sophistication to the US military's sock-puppetry programs."

"By writing this horse shit, all Techdirt has done is shown that it's writers are easily manipulated. I expect more pro-US, anti-Russia propaganda from them in the future."

Anybody who knows me remotely would find accusations that I'm "pro-US" pretty damn funny given how I've spent most of my career criticizing US government policies. Are these comments ingenious satire? Russian propagandists? Domestic garden-variety home-grown tin-foil hatters? The benefit of propaganda is you just can't tell. But science pretty consistently shows that comments can pretty easily impact discourse, even if what's being posted is relatively unhinged from reality. So to be clear, it's true: I'm a total lackey for western imperialists; a pawn of the NSA and CIA, and as most people know, I make a killing freelancing as a propagandist for AT&T corporation.

Moving on. While there's no doubt the United States has employed similar tactics for years (profitable wars and shitty foreign policy don't sell themselves, you know), that doesn't make the sheer scale of Putin's troll army any less impressive...or real.

The New York Times Magazine has an outstanding exploration of Putin's propaganda efforts and Russia's Internet Research Agency, connecting a series of incredibly well-constructed hoaxes using fake YouTube videos, fake Wikipedia entries, and thousands of Twitter accounts -- many of which were designed to pollute the global discourse pool here in the States. Author Adrian Chen headed to St. Petersburg to track down and talk to whistleblower Lyudmila Savchuk, who goes into greater detail than ever before about the program. Again, there's propaganda, and then there's what Putin's up to, which is a factory-grade internet assault on reality injected with steroids and caffeine:

"As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian."

These efforts have become so massive, local journalists claim they have, at least for now, managed to subvert the historical anti-authoritarian and free speech benefits of the internet:

"All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. “The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.” Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction."

The piece repeats previous claims that Russia's industrial-grade propaganda apparatus has fixed its gaze upon the United States, and while so far some of these efforts on places like Facebook are so ham-fisted as to be comical, some of them are absolutely astounding in their scope and architecture. Like the Facebook group of Russian trolls that encourage followers to visit an art exhibit named "Material Evidence" hosted in Chelsea, New York City. The effort, funded by anonymous overseas donors, claims to show the "other side" of the Ukranian conflict and Syrian civil war not shown by Western media:

"Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show’s decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia. On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City?

Let that sink in for a second. Armies of fake U.S. Facebook accounts, sending followers to an entirely fake art exhibit in New York, promoted by an army of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts -- all of it tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency. At one point in his documentation efforts, Chen makes contact and meets up with a supposed Internet Research Agency employee and her brother, only to later discover the entire meeting is a staged photo op, later used by "news organizations" tied to Internet Research to discredit Chen as a neo nazi supporter. That story soon ballooned into a series of other Russian news stories accusing Chen of being BFFs with the NSA, CIA, and neo nazis, accompanied with snazzy videos to "prove" it.

So again, yes, most countries engage in propaganda. That's not really being disputed. Most Americans at this point are at least marginally aware of the propaganda used to sell recent wars conducted by the United States -- and the complicit behavior of the media in these efforts to this day stinks up the hallowed halls of most "respected" American news outlets (the same outlets that love to lecture bloggers on what news really is). But what Putin is up to is a propaganda war against the entire internet, and it makes dystopian visions by the likes of Orwell and Terry Gilliam look like Hardy Boy mysteries. Of course none of that matters because I'm clearly a Western imperialist puppy murderer, and this article was funded by the CIA, as commenters below will be sure to illustrate.

Filed Under: adrian chen, comments, propaganda, russia, social media, trolls, vladimir putin
Companies: internet research agency

Putin Has Shifted His Internet Propaganda Army Into Overdrive

from the truth-should-not-be-relative dept

While propaganda is certainly not the exclusive territory of Putin's Russia, it has become clear that Putin and friends -- when not busy arranging accidents for administration critics -- have taken internet propaganda specifically to an entirely new level. Back in April, reports started emerging detailing how Putin has built entire factories dedicated to soiling and seeding the internet with propaganda. Armies of paid sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation twenty-four hours a day.

It has been fascinating to watch whistleblowers at these factories coming forward in recent months, detailing how they're shocked by how effective such efforts are on shaping public discourse:

"The scariest thing is when you talk to your friends and they are repeating the same things you saw in the technical tasks, and you realize that all this is having an effect,” the former worker said."

Interestingly, one of the workers at these factories was recently courageous enough to put her name in print. Journalist and single mother Lyuda Savchuk states she knew she was entering an "Orwellian universe" when she took the job, but found things notably worse than she ever imagined once inside:

"I knew it was something bad, but of course I never suspected that it was this horrible and this large-scale," she said in an interview in her apartment, which has colorful drawings on the walls for her two preschool-age children. She described how the trolls manage several social media accounts under different nicknames, such as koka-kola23, green--margo and Funornotfun. Those in her department had to bash out 160 blog posts during a 12-hour shift. Trolls in other departments flooded the Internet with doctored images and pro-Putin commentary on news stories that crop up on Russian and Western news portals."

While the AP report states Savchuk quit, other reports suggest that she was fired only after speaking to the media. Not only that, Savchuk is suing the government, focusing on the lack of paperwork outlining her responsibilities or the reason for her firing (apparently the Russian government isn't keen on a paper trail). She's also organizing an activist retaliation to the propaganda efforts:

"The ‘troll factory’ operates based on very weird schemes, but all those firms are connected to each other, even though they are separate legal entities,” Savchuk was quoted as saying. Since her dismissal, Savchuk has been organising a public movement against online trolling called Informatsionny Mir – a name that can be translated both as “Information World” and "Information Peace." "There are both opposition activists and supporters of the government among us, but we all believe that such methods of information war are unacceptable,” she said."

Several of the reports note that there has been a concerted effort to hire more English speaking trolls to try and influence thinking in the United States as well, as Russia gleefully annexes the Ukraine and tries to defend its atrocious positions on gay rights. Internet Research, the company that runs the operation and is owned by a friend of Putin, has also taken to hiring more Serbian trolls to try and pull Serbia off of its trajectory as a future EU member. As has long been the case, this propaganda operates hand in hand with the use of violence to silence opposition:

"When Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed in Moscow in late February, the Serbian trolls were quick to react. "Who is to gain from this assassination but America? It must have been CIA," was the dominant mantra that took hold in discussions on Serbian news sites. "Likes" went into the hundreds, while comments such as "Putin is responsible" received widespread ridicule."

Putin's problem? Propaganda usually only works well when it's not easily identifiable as propaganda. Putin and friends appear to believe they can overcome this problem by simply operating on a massive scale, using not only its troll factories but tens of thousands of Twitter bots to shout nonsense from every internet street corner. Of course you'd like to think the pillars of truth have their roots in firmer bedrock, and on most of these issues (like gay rights) Putin's simply throwing money at a thunderstorm. But on other issues (like eroding support for Serbian EU integration or fostering support for Russia's invasion of the Ukraine), Putin's army of disinformation jackasses have been worryingly effective.

Filed Under: internet, internet trolls, lyuda savchuk, russia, russian trolls, trolls

Russia Threatens To Block Access To Facebook, Google And Twitter Unless They Obey New Bloggers Law

from the getting-serious dept

Last year, Techdirt wrote about yet another of Russia's new laws aimed at taming the troublesome internet world. Its most striking feature was that bloggers with more than 3,000 visitors a day were required to register on a special list, and to abide by general mass media restrictions. We noted then that blogs located overseas were not covered by the new law. But according to this report in The Guardian, based on a story in Izvestia, it seems that the law is now being applied to foreign service providers too: Facebook, Google and Twitter are all being threatened with fines or even bans for non-compliance:

The [Russian communications agency's] deputy director, Maksim Ksenzov, had issued a warning to the three companies on 6 May, telling them they were in violation of the bloggers law because they had not provided requested data on the number of daily visitors to several users' pages, as well as information allowing the authorities to identify the owners of accounts with more than 3,000 daily visitors.

The companies are threatened with fines, but these are relatively modest: up to 300,000 roubles ($6,000) for the first offense. Subsequent infringements lead to bigger fines or a ban on the website for up to 30 days. As The Guardian points out:

If the companies did not take steps to delete from their sites "information containing calls to participate in mass rioting, extremist activities" or unsanctioned public events, the watchdog would "limit access to the information resource where that information is posted", Ksenzov warned.

The problem is that regional Internet service providers might not be able to provide much granularity when limiting access to these pages, leading to services from the companies concerned being blocked completely in those areas. As the Izvestia article explains, although the Russian authorities are very keen for the US companies to obey Russian law, and point out that they are simply following in the footsteps of the the European Commission, it's not clear how they could force compliance or collect any fines they imposed.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: blocks, blogger's law, filters, freedom of expression, intimidation, russia
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Crowdfunding Weaponized Drones In Ukraine

from the not-a-toy dept

Although it rarely makes it into the Western media these days, the bloody conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues to smoulder along a vague and shifting front. The lack of direct support from the West means that the Ukrainians have had to come up with other approaches to counter Russia's massive superiority in both technology and resources. According to a fascinating article in the Guardian, one way they are doing this is by using lost-cost drones, paid for by crowdfunding. One of Ukraine’s top IT outsourcing companies, Eleks, has been helping with the technical side:

Eleks, which is a private company based in both Ukraine and Nevada, pays healthy salaries. It allows staff to work on software and drone hardware projects that receive no government support or funding during work hours. They are doing this because, as their project manager, Ivan Dmytrasevych, told us, "We know we have to invest in the defence of our country. If our research works, and we can show the people that it works, then we will turn to crowdfunding to realise it."

Eleks is working on a number of drone projects. One is to help Ukrainian drones return to base automatically if signals are jammed by the Russians:

Ivan says that the Russian forces have highly advanced systems to jam and intercept Ukrainian drones, which can easily send them off course and into enemy hands. "They have $7m systems to jam drones that cost thousands of dollars,” he explains. "We just can’t match their resources." However, if they can slow down these types of losses, they can build up a useful force.

Another is to use drones to map Russian forces on the ground to provide coordinates for shelling:

"Just imagine that you take a map of some territory from Google Maps, and then your drone flies over the territory to take a picture. Artillery teams need exact coordinates from enemy positions shown on those images. Our software will help them get it instantly."

That's an indication that these crowdfunded drones are not just digital toys for the combatants, but designed to cause serious casualties in the real world. Indeed, they already have -- on the Ukrainian side, during attempts to construct drones that could drop bombs on the Russians. According to the Guardian report, some of the engineers were killed as they worked on this project:

Firstly, these were essentially homemade and potentially faulty bombs. Secondly, the fact that they were launching drones multiple times from the same position quickly exposed their location. From what I'd been told, a mortar or sniper attack was guaranteed at this point.

Those risks are unlikely to dissuade engineers from using these up-to-the-minute means to counter the huge disparity between the opposing forces, since the Ukrainians don't really have many other options.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: crowdfunding, drones, russia, ukraine

Major Record Labels Use Lawsuit Against MP3Skull To Try To Backdoor In SOPA

from the another-backdoor-attempt dept

Another week, another attempt by the legacy copyright players to find a way to enact SOPA via the backdoor. As we've been covering quite a bit lately, the Sony hack has revealed how "site blocking" (the key part of SOPA -- which is more accurately described as censoring parts of the internet) is still a major priority for the the legacy copyright industry, and they're exploring all sorts of ways to make it happen, from new lawsuits to new legislation to trade agreements to pressure on third parties to local politicians to the International Trade Commission to attacks on encryption and more.

It appears that the strategy of using lawsuits is now well underway with the major labels all teaming up to sue the site MP3Skull. That site has been around for a while, and is one quite frequently cited by copyright maximalists as an example of a "bad" player in helping people find unauthorized copies of music. At first I wasn't even sure if it was worth covering the lawsuit as it seemed rather typical of similar lawsuits that the legacy entertainment industry has filed against a variety of sites and services. Frankly, I don't know nearly enough about how MP3Skull works to have much of an opinion on the legal basis for the lawsuit, but it does seem odd that the labels are suing in Florida, when they're mostly based in NY and MP3Skull is most likely based in Russia. I'm guessing the MPAA's win against Hotfile in Florida may have something to do with the choice of venues.

But the reason this story is worth covering has little to do with MP3Skull itself. Rather, it's the remedies the labels are asking for: which is basically to have the court issue an insanely broad order that no one can ever point anyone to MP3Skull's websites or in any way help MP3Skull. Basically, the record labels are asking the court to pretend SOPA is the law despite it failing as a law:

...entry of an Order, pursuant to Section 502 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 502), 28 U.S.C. § 1651(a), and this Court’s inherent equitable powers, (A) enjoining Defendants and all third parties with notice of the Order, including any Web hosts, domain-name registrars, domain name registries or their administrators, from facilitating access to any or all domain names, URLs and websites (including, without limitation, www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to) through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights;

(B) requiring domain name registries (including VeriSign, Inc.) and/or registrars holding or listing Defendants’ domain names and websites (including, without limitation, www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to) through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights to: (a) disable www.MP3Skull.com, www.MP3Skull.to and any related domain names specified by Plaintiffs through a registry hold or otherwise, and to make them inactive and non-transferable, and (b) transfer Defendants’ domain names to a registrar to be appointed by Plaintiffs to re-register the domain names in Plaintiffs’ names and under Plaintiffs’ ownership;

(C) enjoining all third parties with notice of the Order from maintaining, operating, or providing advertising, financial, technical or other support to MP3Skull and any other domain names, URLs or websites through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights, including without limitation www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to; and

(D) enjoining all third-party distributors of applications, toolbars or similar software with notice of the Order from distributing any applications, toolbars or similar software applications that interoperate with any domain names, URLs or websites through which Defendants infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights, including without limitation www.MP3Skull.com and www.MP3Skull.to.

That's a lot of text, but what it's saying is that the labels want the court to issue an order that the labels can then wave around to basically anyone, saying they cannot provide any services to the site and cannot link ("facilitating access") to MP3Skull. The labels chose their target carefully. It seems unlikely that MP3Skull is going to show up in a Florida court to defend itself if the site really is run by a group of mysterious folks in Russia who haven't revealed themselves. Thus, there's a half decent chance that a judge could just issue a default judgment, and possibly just sign off on giving the labels exactly what they're asking for. This doesn't always happen in default cases, but certainly is more likely when there's no real adversarial hearing to point out how insane and questionable the proposed remedy is.

Courts should generally try to avoid putting burdens on third parties entirely unrelated to the case in question. The labels must know this, but are hoping that without an adversarial process, they can present a very one-sided (and potentially misleading) story, and get the kind of ruling it wants, and then use that as a precedent for as long as they can.

Whether or not MP3Skull itself broke the law (and it's certainly possible the site did), everyone should be extremely concerned about the excessive remedies being sought and the way the labels are looking to get a judge to effectively pretend that an extreme version of SOPA is already the law.

Filed Under: copyright, russia, site blocking
Companies: arista, atlantic, capitol records, elektra, emi, mp3skull, riaa, sony music, universal music, warner music group, zomba

Details Leak From Inside Putin's 'Humourless And Draconian' Internet Troll Army

from the ministry-of-truth dept

With fifteen years under my belt writing about astroturf, think tanks, fauxcademics, and other dirty lobbying and policy tricks, I've always had a hobbyist's fascination with propaganda, especially online. When done "correctly," disinformation or guerrilla marketing is utterly invisible. When done poorly -- you get more comedic, ham-fisted attempts at information control, like Scientology's personal website's attacks on the new HBO documentary "Going Clear" or, well, ISP-paid sockpuppets who insist they fight net neutrality because they just love internet freedom so very much.

Of course, the one-two punch of violence and propaganda has for some time put Putin's Russia on another level of intellectual aggression. The Guardian recently penned a pretty fascinating interview with several members of Putin's internet troll army, paid to spam forums, websites, and social networks around the globe with pro-Putin propaganda. Working in twelve-hour shifts in a nondescript building marked "business center," hundreds of writers work in "humourless and draconian" teams dedicated toward supporting Putin's worldview for 45,000 rubles ($790) a month. And it often works:

"The scariest thing is when you talk to your friends and they are repeating the same things you saw in the technical tasks, and you realize that all this is having an effect,” the former worker said.

Marat, 40, worked in a different department, where employees went methodically through chat forums in various cities, leaving posts. "First thing in the morning, we’d come in, turn on a proxy server to hide our real location, and then read the technical tasks we had been sent,” he said. The trolls worked in teams of three. The first one would leave a complaint about some problem or other, or simply post a link, then the other two would wade in, using links to articles on Kremlin-friendly websites and “comedy” photographs lampooning western or Ukrainian leaders with abusive captions.

The staffers work around the clock creating and maintaining proxied, viable fake personas, sure to discuss their favorite music and recipes, peppered authentically with rants about the Kiev government being fascist. Hand in hand with tens of thousands of Twitter bots, they create a massive sound wall that makes Apple's reality distortion field look like a nineteenth century circus performance. The Guardian points to websites like this one set up with Internet memes to make mocking Putin opponents that much easier:

"Many of them have obvious racist or homophobic overtones. Barack Obama eating a banana or depicted as a monkey, or the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in drag, declaring: “We are preparing for European integration.” The trolls have to post the photographs together with information they can pull from a website marketed as a “patriotic Russian Wikipedia”, featuring ideologically acceptable versions of world events."

Of course, as Glyn noted earlier this week, the Russian government has moved to "clarify" existing law and is now declaring all internet memes illegal -- unless of course you're paid by the government to twist and distort the very fabric of online reality. It probably goes without saying that the United States certainly is no saint on this front (industry astroturfing or the media coverage of the Iraq war quickly leap to mind), but Putin's frontal-assault on the internet is starting to make Orwell's darkest predictions seem like playful childhood fiction.

Filed Under: internet trolls, memes, russia, troll army, vladimir putin

Latest Russian Censorship Move: Banning Internet Memes Using Photos Of Celebrities

from the just-putin-it-out-there dept

For a while now, Techdirt has been tracking the continuing efforts of the Russian government to rein in the Internet, at the cost of squeezing much of the life out of it. As an article on Global Voices reports, this has now reached ridiculous levels:

Russian censors have determined that one of the most popular forms of Internet meme is illegal. According to Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin's media watchdog, it's now against the law to use celebrities' photographs in a meme, "when the image has nothing to do with the celebrity's personality."

Roskomnadzor's statement is the result of a decision by a court in Moscow, which decided that a particular photo meme violated the privacy of Russian singer Valeri Syutkin -- the Global Voices post has the fascinating details. Although no new law is involved, Roskomnadzor's power is such that it is able to make these kinds of rule changes -- and enforce them. Along with a ban on the use of celebrities' photographs in what are termed "image macros," the new ruling also forbids the creation of parody accounts or sites (original in Russian.) The key problem with the image macro part is the following:

Roskomnadzor's vague new policy threatens to do more than crack down on potentially defamatory juxtaposition, however. By saying it is illegal to add celebrities' images to memes that "have nothing to do with the celebrity's personality," the Kremlin could be opening the door to banning a whole genre of absurdist online humor.

Even if the policy is not rigorously enforced, it could have a chilling effect on the Russian online space, already under pressure because of previous censorship moves. And that's probably precisely what the authorities are seeking to achieve here. After all, when it comes to Russian celebrities' photographs with witty captions, what name springs to mind?

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Filed Under: censorship, free speech, memes, russia

Modders Un-Region-Restricting Halo Online Undeterred By Microsoft DMCA

from the back-in-the-ussr dept

One of the most wonderful sights to see in the gaming community, particularly in the PC gaming community, is what a combination of a loyal fan-base and a strong modding community can produce. This is particularly so when the mods released are clear and active attempts at doing nothing more than making the original product even better. You see this all the time in PC gaming -- old games being yanked into the present, an increase the replayability of a classic, and even all-new sub-games created out of the original. All of this done through a modding community that loves the original work produced by game designers. Some gaming companies embrace the modding community, while some don't. Which way they go is typically decided by just how much control the company generally wants to exert over its product.

Guess which way Microsoft tends to go? Well, they tend to be the protectionist sort, but a recent story about the release of a new free-to-play Halo game, Halo Online, both puzzled me and amused me. The puzzled part came from Microsoft firmly insisting that the release would be available for play in Russia only, which...what the hell? Even the excuse of a long testing period in a Russia-only beta setting is, well, kind of strange.

Microsoft: Right now our focus is on learning as much as we can from the closed beta period in Russia. Theoretically, any expansion outside of Russia would have to go through region-specific changes to address player expectations.

Note that availability of the game to markets outside of Putin-ville is theoretical at this point. Except not really, of course, and that's where the amusement came from. Because if the alchemy ingredients for mods is a loyal fan-base, something begging for modification, and a capable modding community, everyone had to know that restricting this to Russia was going to be a barrier tested by the public before too long. It turns out that "before too long" meant in the past few weeks, because modders were already posting information on their work to free Halo from Russian imprisonment when Microsoft caught wind and fired off a DMCA notice to the host site.

Modders have been mucking about with the leaked Halo Online files to unlock features, with one team creating a game launcher called ‘ElDorito.’ But all that work came to screeching halt yesterday after Microsoft sent a DMCA takedown notice to Github, who was hosting the files. The site quickly complied. Microsoft sent the following notice to Github:

"We have received information that the domain listed above, which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to, copyrighted works published by Microsoft," the company wrote in a DMCA notice to Github.

Under other circumstances, that might be the end of the story, except that these are game modders we're talking about. When they commit, they're committed, and their work tends to mean that they're the sort of types who know how to route around these sorts of attacks. Now, to be clear, Microsoft certainly has the right to try to kill off these modders' work, but they're going to have to try a lot harder than a single DMCA if they want to really have this battle.

"In terms of DMCA/C&D mitigation, we have made redundant git backups on private and public git servers. This is to ensure we will always have one working copy. These are being synchronized so that data is always the same," [modder] Woovie explains. "Further DMCAs may happen potentially, it’s not really known at the moment. Our backups will always exist though and we will continue until we’re happy."

Team member Neoshadow42 says that, as a game developer himself, he sympathizes with Microsoft to a point about protecting ones copyrighted material:

"As someone involved in game development, I’m sympathetic with some developers when it comes to copyright issues. This is different though, in my opinion,” the dev explains. "The game was going to be free in the first place. The PC audience has been screaming for Halo 3 for years and years, and we saw the chance with this leak. The fact that we could, in theory, bring the game that everyone wants, without the added on stuff that would ruin the game, that’s something we’d be proud of."

Making the moral equation here slightly more complicated is that the things that "would ruin the game" don't only refer to the geo-restrictions, but to other game "features" as well, such as in-game microtransactions that almost uniformly piss off the PC gaming community. The modding team has aimed at removing those from the game as well, which, given that this is a free-to-play game, might break the business model Microsoft set up for the game. I expect Microsoft to continue battling for control of its product, as well as for the game's restrictions and microtransactions.

Ultimately, this is a damned shame, because there's a lesson to be learned from all of this and that lesson is not that the modding community is the enemy of the game designer. This is pure market testing at its finest. What this entire episode clearly outlines for Microsoft, were it willing to listen, is that potential customers want wider availability for the beta version of the game (as in, not restricted along national borders) and don't want annoying microtransactions in a Halo game. And if they want those things, fans will be willing to pay for them. Should Microsoft continue with its plan to not meet customer demand, those customers likely won't go unfulfilled, they'll simply find their pleasure in the form of a mod from a strong modding community that Microsoft wants to play whac-a-mole with, rather than listen to the wants of its customers.

Filed Under: community, copyright, dmca, geoblocking, modders, regional restrictions, russia, takedowns, video games
Companies: microsoft

New Anti-Corruption Social Network In Russia Requires Numerous Personal Details To Join: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

from the how-secure-is-that-database? dept

As the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov last week reminds us, the political situation in Russia is not just difficult, but extremely dangerous. Presumably hoping that technology might offer a relative safe way to cope with this situation, a Russian NGO has announced that it will be launching a nationwide social network dedicated to fighting bribery and corruption. You might expect that anonymity would be a crucial aspect, given the risks faced by those who choose to join. And yet, as this RT article explains, that's not the case (via @prfnv):

the new project will have one major difference from existing social networks -- a complete lack of anonymity. Membership will only be granted by invitation from existing members, and even when this condition is met, the institute that launches the project promises to open accounts only after verifying the identity of potential members in real life.

The users will have to provide a lot of details about themselves -- from name and date of birth, to place of work, e-mail and phone numbers. The people launching the project say that this is a necessary measure to prevent attempted slander, which they see as the main danger threatening their network.

That people could use the network to spread false accusations is certainly a risk, but hardly the main danger, which is surely that those accused of corruption may decide to settle things in the same way as Nemtsov's enemies. Creating a network of anti-corruption activists and lawyers will make its membership database extremely desirable for many nefarious actors, who would doubtless find things like place of work and phone numbers useful for future attempts to "dissuade" people from coming forward with information about bribe-taking. Let's just hope the new social network's security advisers are really good.

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Filed Under: anonymity, corruption, privacy, russia, social networks, whistleblowers