Bhutan's Gross National Unhappiness: In The Wake Of The Country's First Facebook Defamation Lawsuit, Fears Of Censorship Rise

from the well,-that's-sad dept

The Kingdom of Bhutan is probably best known for its splendid location in the Himalayas, and for eschewing measurements of Gross Domestic Product in favor of Gross National Happiness. In the one Techdirt story so far about the nation, we also reported that Bhutan's government seemed to lack a sense of humor when it came to the Internet. Three years later, the online situation threatens to deteriorate further:

Bhutanese journalist Namgay Zam is facing defamation charges over a Facebook post, marking the first time that anyone in the Himalayan country has been taken to court over their social media activities.

As the detailed Global Voices post makes clear, this is a complicated story, involving not just journalists, but also senior judges and powerful business and political figures. The ramifications of this case are likely to be serious. Here's what the country's prime minister said, quoted on the Bhutanese Web site Kuensel Online:

As of now, Bhutanese are using social media in a sensible manner but often we come across news that takes an unhealthy trend. For that, we do have a social media policy coming into force where we have incorporated certain restrictions regarding what we can share on social media and what we can't share or what kind of news can come into the social media, among others.

It remains to be seen what that new policy will entail, and the extent of the censorship imposed. But it's sad to see a country that cares about maximizing national happiness taking precisely the same route as less enlightened nations.

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

Filed Under: bhutan, censorship, defamation, free speech, internet

UK Gov't Report: Facebook, Twitter, And Google Are Pretty Much Unrepentant Terrorist Supporters

from the a-raging-hate-on,-disguised-as-an-official-report dept

The internet is for porn terrorism.

That's according to a report by the UK's Home Ministry, which claims the medium is inseparable from the message, especially if it's a US tech company.

Facebook, Twitter and Google and are deliberately failing to stop terrorists from using their websites to promote terrorism because they believe it will "damage their brands", MPs have warned.

MPs warned that social media websites are becoming the "vehicle of choice" for spreading terrorist propaganda but websites are policing billions of accounts and messages with just a "few hundred" employees.

I'm pretty sure giving terrorists free rein is more "damaging" to "brands" than the current status quo. Sure, chasing terrorists off the internet is just another form of whack-a-mole, but it's not as though these companies aren't trying. Facebook's policing of content tends to lean towards overzealous. Twitter just removed over 200,000 terrorist-related accounts. And as for Google, it's busy bending over backward for everyone, from copyright holders to a few dozen misguided governments. But the internet -- including terrorists -- perceives censorship as damage and quickly routes around it.

The argument can be made (and it's a pretty good argument) that it might be more useful to have terrorists chatting on open platforms where they can easily be monitored, rather than pushing them towards "darker" communications methods. But it's tough to reason with lawmakers who find big corporations to be the easiest targets for their displeasure.

And, really, their complaints are nothing more than a cheap form of class warfare, one that tacitly asks millions of non-terrorist internet users to sympathize with a government seeking to gain more control over the platforms they use.

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the committee, said: "Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter, with their billion-dollar incomes, are consciously failing to tackle this threat and passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational legal status, despite knowing that their sites are being used by the instigators of terror."

That's what the MPs are really seeking: a way to carve off a slice of these billion-dollar incomes. Vaz fears the "Wild West" internet (one filled with Middle Eastern desperadoes, apparently…) because it's "ungoverned" and "unregulated." If both of those "problems" are fixed, he'll presumably be able to sleep better -- perhaps warmed by the flow of a new revenue stream or soothed by an expansion of his government's powers. Either way, these companies should have to shoulder the blame for terrorism's continued existence.

Some might make the argument that the government isn't doing enough to fight terrorism. After all, "billions" of dollars go towards this battle every year, and every year nothing appears to change.

The report points specifically to the supposedly "low" number of employees policing posted content.

"It is alarming that these companies have teams of only a few hundred employees to monitor networks of billions of accounts..."

Apparently, these billion-dollar companies are expected to move towards a 1:1 ratio of moderators to users. Vaz also claims these companies need to take a "no questions asked" attitude towards law enforcement demands to have content taken down. If so, perhaps the UK government should start hiring more law enforcement officers and move the needle more towards a 1:1 ratio of constables to internetizens… or at least a 1:1 ratio of constables to platform content moderators.

The report also points to various "failures" within the UK government, suggesting anti-terrorism laws just aren't quite strict enough. It notes that police have allowed alleged terrorists to leave the country while on bail because they haven't seized their passports. And an official from Scotland Yard asserts -- with wording that suggests the UK doesn't have quite enough restraints on speech yet -- that existing laws can't shut down the sort of thing the report complains that Google, Facebook, and Twitter aren't shutting down quickly enough: namely, posts by Anjem Choudary, a "hate preacher" who was convicted of supporting the Islamic State.

Richard Walton, the former head of Scotland Yard's counter terrorism command, today warns that existing British laws would not prevent preachers who followed Choudary's example and acting as "radicalisers".

Obviously, the answer is MORE LAWS. That should fix it. That and blaming tech companies for third-party content, something they already police about as well as they can, considering the number of users on their respective platforms. It's always handy to have a scapegoat to beat like the dead horse these arguments are, especially when the scapegoat can mixed-metaphorically be portrayed as fat cats electro-fiddling while social media burns.

Filed Under: free speech, internet, isis, keith vaz, moderation, open internet, platforms, terrorism, uk
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Remember Claims That Cord Cutting Was On The Ropes? It's Actually Worse Than Ever

from the numbers-don't-lie dept

Despite the obvious realities that ratings are down and consumers are cutting the cord, there's a vibrant and loyal segment of executives and analysts who still somehow believe cord cutting is a myth. Every few months, you'll see a report about how cord cutting is either nonexistent or overstated. Earlier this year, these voices were quick to argue that the industry had cord cutting on the ropes because several of the biggest cable providers saw modest subscriber gains in the fourth quarter (ignoring several that saw net subscriber losses for the year).

Those folks have been pretty damn quiet the last few weeks as second quarter earnings show cord cutting is worse than ever.

A new report by Leichtman Research notes that the pay TV industry collectively lost about 665,000 net video subscribers last quarter, a number some other analysts say was closer to 757,000. Dish Network alone lost 281,000 subscribers, while the new, larger Charter (after acquiring Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks) lost 143,000 subscribers. "Phone" companies were hit particularly hard, telcos alone losing 500,000 subscribers in just one quarter. In fact, with AT&T and DirecTV now being one company, every single pay TV provider saw a net loss in TV subscribers during Q2:

It's kind of hard to spin this kind of bloodshed, so cord cutting denialists are likely to remain quiet -- at least for a few months.

Most analysts believe that these losses are due in large part to folks that are moving to a new home or apartment, and not bothering to sign back up for cable when they do. But if you factor in that these numbers aren't scaling alongside housing growth, things are even uglier than the numbers indicate. But because companies like Comcast occasionally see quarters with very modest subscriber gains (thanks in part to their monopoly over broadband and bundling), you'll still somehow see folks trying to argue that cord cutting is either non-existent or an over-hyped fad.

But occasionally somebody will step back and take an intelligent big picture look at the numbers, making the overall trend pretty damn apparent:None of this is to say that cable providers couldn't quickly change the entire narrative by simply competing more seriously on TV service price (at the cost of higher broadband bills, of course). But instead, most cable sector executives still desperately cling to the narrative that cord cutting is a fad that stops once Millennials procreate. This is, they clearly believe, just a touch of cash cow indigestion that will magically resolve itself, so there's no reason to stop hitting consumers with biannual rate hikes for bloated bundles of unwatched channels.

Filed Under: cord cutting, internet, tv

Donald Trump Says He'll Turn Off The Internet For Terrorists

from the uh,-how? dept

This isn't the first time he's said this, but on Monday, Presidential candidate Donald Trump once again insisted that part of his plan to "Make America Great Again" is to stop bad people from using the internet:

My Administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cutoff their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting. We cannot allow the internet to be used as a recruiting tool, and for other purposes, by our enemy – we must shut down their access to this form of communication, and we must do so immediately.

Almost no one covered this because everyone was focused on other stuff in the speech about his new "tests" for letting foreigners into the country. But this still remains a pretty big concern, in part because of just how technically clueless this is. Sure, we've seen some others suggest similarly dumb ideas, but no one seems to bother to think through how this might be done and what a mess it would create.

There's no way you can "disrupt" or block them from using the internet without also cutting off millions of innocent people -- many of whom almost certainly rely on the internet for all sorts of important things. And, on top of that, any solution would be of only limited effectiveness in the long run anyway. There are increasingly new ways and new paths to get online -- whether through wireless mesh networks or, eventually, from things like drones and satellites. Thinking that you can magically take an entire group of people off the internet is profoundly silly.

At the same time, as we've noted, the most ridiculous part in this idea that we should kick terrorists off the internet is the fact that the intelligence community has said that tracking what they're saying online has been tremendously beneficial in tracking terrorists, their views and their plans. Why would you want to cut off such a source of intelligence gathering?

The whole thing, like so much of this Presidential campaign, seems to be yet another example of a candidate saying what people want to hear with little to no thought about what it actually means, whether it would do any good or how to implement the plan.

Filed Under: donald trump, free speech, internet, isis, open internet, terrorists

How The EU Might Keep Internet Access Open To The Public

from the net-neutrality-redux dept

Earlier this summer, the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) took in around a half million public comments on its draft guidelines for member states on implementing end user protections for fixed and mobile Internet connections.  The largest telecoms in Europe are lobbying hard for weakened interpretations of the so-called “net neutrality” Regulation passed late last year, which also covers data roaming and the EU Digital Single Market.

A few weeks ago, the largest telecom ISPs issued a 5G Manifesto in which they threatened not to invest in 5G wireless networks unless BEREC waters down its guidelines for enforcement of open Internet access.

Fortunately for American consumers, startup entrepreneurs and small businesses, the FCC was not swayed by similar ISP threats about how common carrier law would kill network investment here. And so even with U.S. open Internet law now firmly in place after a recent court decision, Verizon has announced significant continued investment in 5G networks and field testing in multiple locations.

But carriers in Europe, that don’t face competition from cable broadband providers like American phone company ISPs do, enjoy even stronger market dominance that allows them to intimidate regulators attempting to defend end user rights. The current generation of online startups needs to be able to count on the same open Internet connectivity that the most popular global platforms enjoyed in their infancy a decade or two ago. Only now it’s a battle against corporate lobbyists to get it.

In recognition of this opposition, over one hundred founders of European tech companies and startups along with their international investors and trade groups signed an open letter to underscore the critical importance of BEREC’s upcoming action to innovation and job-creating growth in the digital economy. They made it clear that if telecom ISPs are able to manipulate and subsidize data plan costs for users of established big name platforms, they will put up new barriers to online market entry. Earlier up front capital will be required in a “pay to play” environment, and those entrepreneurs who can’t pay up will find it much harder to be discovered online, scale up and compete for business. No such price of admission ever held back American tech startups, although many of their investors had grown very uneasy prior to the FCC’s decisive action in early 2015.

While BEREC has displayed a comprehensive understanding of real new threats to open Internet access, several loopholes in the draft guidelines must be closed if Europeans expect effective safeguards to protect their Internet access service from commercial interference. Specifically ISPs should not be allowed to use the “specialized services” exception to circumvent the ban on charging online content and application providers for priority transmission on the public Internet.

Secondly, given provisions in the Regulation prohibiting discriminatory commercial practices, BEREC should ban zero rating schemes that favor certain online platforms by exempting them from data caps. Zero rating is as harmful to startups and other competing platforms as technical network discrimination. Zero rating of an ISP’s own content is particularly anticompetitive. Finally network traffic management should be application-agnostic whenever possible. ISPs should not favor some classes of traffic and delay others, such as encrypted content, except under unusual circumstances.

Open Internet access law supports a digital innovation economy in which all online content is equally accessible regardless of the identity of one’s ISP or its business deals with online platforms. In the US, all zero rating is not banned, but the FCC is actively investigating sponsored data and zero rating plans for compliance with its open Internet order. In response to the EU Regulation, the Netherlands already has banned zero rating.

All ISPs have a natural economic incentive to partner with or acquire popular content providers in order to maximize monetization of their network facilities. As a practical matter, only the big ones like Comcast (NBC, Netflix) and Verizon (Aol, Yahoo!) can pull it off, but they can really change the game for others.

Sweden uniquely is less concerned about commercial interference with Internet access because the Swedish government itself built and owns the enviable universal fiber optic Internet access network there. Use of that infrastructure is licensed to dozens of competing IT providers, and Stockholm is beginning to resemble a Scandinavian Silicon Valley.

Elsewhere in Europe though, ISPs are in business to provide sufficient capacity to transmit the data traffic of all their customers without “fast lanes” for some and interruptions and buffering for everybody else.  Startups in Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Bratislava, Cyprus, Dublin, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Paris, Riga and Vienna are among their customers. So far the Dutch are in the lead in terms of proactively implementing the Regulation’s open Internet access provisions, which took effect this past spring.

While BEREC properly focuses on shielding consumers from the downsides of ISP commercial discrimination, it should also tailor its guidelines for the sake of Europe’s tech startups looking to attract investment funding and access global markets online. Other policymakers around the world will be watching whatever the EU decides at the end of August about enforcement of Internet access rights.

Cathy Sloan is a telecom and Internet industry lawyer and consultant

Filed Under: broadband, eu, europe, internet, net neutrality, open, open internet, telcos

MPAA Front Group, Pretending To Represent Consumer Interests, Slams CloudFlare For Not Censoring The Internet

from the that's-not-how-it-works dept

So you may have seen reports last week charging CloudFlare and some other tech companies with "aiding" internet malware pushers. The "report," called "Enabling Malware" was announced in a press release last week from the Digital Citizens Alliance -- a group that describes itself as representing consumer interests online:

Digital Citizens is a consumer-oriented coalition focused on educating the public and policy makers on the threats that consumers face on the internet and the importance for internet stakeholders – individuals, government and industry - to make the Web a safer place.

And while the story wasn't picked up that widely, a few news sources did pick it up and repeated the false claim that DCA is a consumer advocacy group. TorrentFreak, FedScoop and Can-India also picked up the story, and all simply repeated DCA's claim to represent the interests of "digital citizens."

But that leaves out the reality: DCA is a group mostly funded by Hollywood, but also with support from the pharmaceutical industry, to systematically attack the internet and internet companies, for failing to censor the internet and block the sites and services that Hollywood and Big Pharma dislike. DCA has been instrumental in pushing false narratives about all the "evil" things online -- "counterfeit fire detectors! fake drugs!" -- in order to push policy makers to institute new laws to censor the internet. DCA buries this basic fact in its own description, merely noting that it "counts among its supporters... the health, pharmaceutical and creative industries."

The organization was formed in late 2012, partly as a response to the MPAA's big loss around SOPA. Recognizing that it needed to change tactics, the MPAA basically helped get DCA off the ground to push scare stories about horrible internet companies enabling "bad things" online, and how new laws and policies had to be created to stop those evil internet companies. Much of this was merely speculation for a while, based on the fact that every DCA report seemed to wrongly blame internet companies for other people using those tools to do bad things online. However, it became explicit thanks to the Sony Hack, which revealed that a key part of the MPAA's anti-Google plan, dubbed Project Goliath, involved having the DCA pay Mississippi's former Attorney General Mike Moore (who mentored its current AG, Jim Hood), to lobby Jim Hood to attack Google.

That doesn't sound like a project of organizations just interested in "digital safety." It sounds like a project designed to attack internet companies. And, thus, it should be no surprise that every time DCA's name pops up, it's attacking internet companies. It was the organization that put out a report getting a variety of state Attorneys General (sense a pattern here?) to attack YouTube, because some criminals posted videos on YouTube. Rather than recognizing that this is a way to gather evidence and go after actual criminals, DCA decided that YouTube should be blamed for not taking those videos down fast enough. It was also the organization that put out a laughable report declaring the cloud storage site Mega a "haven" for piracy, where the methodology made no sense. Mega encrypts its content, but DCA and its researchers didn't seem to understand that, so they simply found a few links inbound to infringing works, and extrapolated out that a huge percentage of files on Mega were infringing.

DCA's boss, Tom Galvin, magically was chosen to present to the National Association of Attorneys General back in 2013, just months after the organization was founded, and in timing that (coincidentally, I'm sure) lines up almost exactly with the MPAA's decision (as revealed in the Sony emails) to focus on state Attorneys General to attack Google. DCA's Twitter feed regularly retweets the MPAA and various other front groups set up by the legacy copyright industries, such as the Copyright Alliance.

In short, the Digital Citizens Alliance is not an alliance of "digital citizens" at all. It's a front group set up by the MPAA and some big pharmaceutical companies to pressure policy makers into getting internet companies to censor the internet. Don't buy it.

Filed Under: censorship, internet, piracy
Companies: cloudflare, dca, digital citizens alliance, google, mpaa, youtube

Putin's Internet Trolls Mercilessly Smear Finnish Reporter Simply For Pointing Them Out

from the disinformation-nation dept

We've noted numerous times now that a cornerstone of the Putin regime has been the use of internet trolls to flood the internet with propaganda. These 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 24 hours a day. The practice was recently exposed by journalist, activist and mother Lyuda Savchuk, who spent three months employed as such a troll -- before successfully suing the Russian government for a single ruble on principle.

Criticize this practice as a writer anywhere on the internet and you'll pretty quickly find yourself the target of anonymous attacks in the comment section -- or significantly worse. Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro recently found this out the hard way after profiling Putin's online propaganda efforts in a series of reports for Finland's state broadcaster Yle Kioski. Since the reports, Aro has found herself under attack by an ocean of internet pugilists that have filled the internet with claims Aro is everything from a professional drug dealer to a paid NATO stooge:

"In response to her reporting, pro-Russian activists in Helsinki organized a protest outside the headquarters of Yle, accusing it of being a troll factory itself. Only a handful of people showed up. At the same time, Ms. Aro has been peppered with abusive emails, vilified as a drug dealer on social media sites and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a music video posted on YouTube. “There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,” said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March.

...She (also) received a call late at night on her cellphone from a number in Ukraine. Nobody spoke, and all she could hear was gunfire. This was followed by text and email messages denouncing her as a “NATO whore” and a message purporting to come from her father — who died 20 years ago — saying he was “watching her.”

Finland is an EU member but has contemplated joining NATO -- talks about which accelerated after Russia's not-so-subtle invasion of the Ukraine. Russia, in turn, has started leaning heavily on its online disinformation puppets to try and turn public sentiment against such a move. Part of the effectiveness of Putin's paid trolls is that it's impossible to differentiate them from the usual wash of vitriol and idiocy that coats online interactions on any given day. As such, it's not entirely unlike trying to have a fist fight with a running stream, reflected in the Finnish media's confusion on how to tackle the problem outside of things like "open letters":

"The false claim that Ms. Aro was a drug dealer triggered an unusual open letter signed by more than 20 Finnish editors infuriated by what they denounced as the “poisoning of public debate” with “insults, defamation and outright lies.” The Finnish police began an investigation into the website for harassment and hate speech.

“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”

The European Union doesn't appear to be particularly prepared for this new world of online information warfare either, and has embraced arguably outdated concepts like "the truth" or by cataloging the most egregious claims in a weekly report dubbed the "Disinformation Review." And while disinformation and propaganda is certainly nothing new (especially here in the west), it's clear that Putin has taken online information warfare to an entirely new level. One the international community isn't quite ready for -- and is certain to respond to with no limit of bad ideas and even worse laws over time.

Full disclosure before you read about it in the comment section: I'm a former opium salesman paid by the CIA to unfairly malign absolutely everybody.

Filed Under: finland, internet, jessikka aro, propaganda, russia, trolls
Companies: yle kioski

Investigation Shows GCHQ Using US Companies, NSA To Route Around Domestic Surveillance Restrictions

from the introducing-MS-Loophole-365! dept

Late last year, UK Parliament members held an "emergency debate" over the GCHQ's surveillance programs after learning that [gasp] their data and communications could be legally hoovered up as if they were mere commoners. Of course, were there any actual oversight of GCHQ's activities, this shock would have been blunted by years of foreknowledge. But the GCHQ, like other intelligence agencies, preferred to keep its overseers in the dark about its access to the NSA's PRISM firehose.

The mortified Parliament members claimed the GCHQ's decision to include them in its data haul violated a long-held "gentlemen's agreement" between the two entities -- one that had no legitimate legal basis. Supposedly, this "agreement" forbade GCHQ from targeting Parliament members for surveillance. (Any incidental collection was considered unavoidable.) A panel review found GCHQ's targeting of Parliament members to be completely legal, if a bit on the rude side.

Duncan Campbell and Bill Goodwin of Computer Weekly have performed their own examination of MP's communications, finding that both GCHQ and the NSA have access to intercepted emails sent to and from Parliament members, including communications with their constituents.

GCHQ wouldn't normally have access to these emails as it is not supposed to be collecting information about purely domestic communications. But thanks to the software Parliament uses and the location of data centers used to route the emails, it can comply with its surveillance restrictions while still collecting email data/communications sent from UK email addresses to other UK email addresses.

Part of the process involves Microsoft's willing assistance in past domestic spying efforts, which preceded both Snowden's document dumps and its current, more combative stance.

The controversial decision by Parliament to replace its internal email and desktop office software with Microsoft’s Office 365 service in 2014, means that parliamentary data and documents constantly pass in and out of the UK to Microsoft’s datacentres in Dublin and the Netherlands, across the backbone of the internet.

Computer Weekly performed forensic analysis of emails it had received from MPs, using header info to trace its path across the internet. It found that nearly two-thirds of "domestic" emails actually left the country on their way to local email addresses, allowing GCHQ -- through its "Tempora" program -- to intercept data and communications using its NSA-provided PRISM hookup.

Microsoft's above-and-beyond assistance makes its widely-used Office products a valuable contributor to the agencies' data haul.

The NSA’s Prism system offers access to all parliamentary documents and email through Microsoft Office 365 software, as a result of secret directives given to Microsoft under controversial US 2008 surveillance laws. The directives were implemented at the same time as Microsoft was selling its cloud system, Office 365, to the Houses of Parliament.

Post-Snowden, Microsoft is far more reluctant to continue acting as Little Brother. As Computer Weekly points out, leaked documents have led to the company's hasty erection of two UK data centers in order to protect its UK users from GCHQ's exploitation of normal communication routing techniques to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance.

Microsoft isn't the only US company assisting the UK intelligence agency in its harvesting of domestic data/communications.

Computer Weekly’s investigation also confirmed that MPs’ incoming and outgoing emails are automatically scanned through a network run by MessageLabs, a subsidiary of another US corporation, Symantec, which has been contracted by Parliament to provide services including spam filtering and malware detection.

MessageLabs provides GCHQ with direct access to parliamentary emails, through a secret cyber security network called Haruspex, according to GCHQ’s “Cyber Defence Operations” legal policy instructions disclosed by Edward Snowden. The scanning system has been in operation for at least a decade.

MessageLabs scans for keywords to prevent the circulation of spam and malware. But it also can be configured to flag other terms and return those results to intelligence agencies.

Once again, officials are not amused their positions do not exclude them from GCHQ surveillance.

Labour deputy leader Tom Watson MP told Computer Weekly: “This will shock many of my parliamentary colleagues and provides a further illustration of why it is right for the government to give additional protections in law to MPs, lawyers and journalists. Theresa May has the opportunity to do this during the passage of the IP Bill in Parliament.”

There's a nice nod to a few other citizens not in elected positions contained in that statement, but there needs to be a solid, unified push from UK legislators during the debate over the Investigatory Powers Bill if this domestic surveillance loophole is going to be closed. As Computer Weekly notes, amendments have been made to the bill which prevent law enforcement agencies from accessing MPs' communications data, but that concession would not apply to GCHQ.

Filed Under: gchq, internet, nsa, parliament, surveillance, uk

Top Internet Companies Agree To Vague Notice & Takedown Rules For 'Hate Speech' In The EU

from the who-defines-what-hate-speech-is dept

It's easy to say that "hate speech" is bad and that we, as a society, shouldn't tolerate it. But, reality is a lot more complicated than that, which is why we're concerned about various attempts to ban or stifle "hate speech." In the US, contrary to what many believe to be true, "hate" speech is still protected speech under the First Amendment. In Europe, that's often not the case, and hate speech bans are more common. But, as we've noted, while it seems like a no brainer to be against hate speech, the vagueness in what counts as "hate speech" allows that term to be expanded over and over again, such that laws against hate speech are now regularly used for government censorship over the public saying things the government doesn't like.

So consider me quite concerned about the news out of the EU that the EU Commission has convinced all the big internet platform companies -- Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft -- to agree to remove "hate speech" within 24 hours.

Upon receipt of a valid removal notification, the IT Companies to review such requests against their rules and community guidelines and where necessary national laws transposing the Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA, with dedicated teams reviewing requests.

The IT Companies to review the majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours and remove or disable access to such content, if necessary.

In addition to the above, the IT Companies to educate and raise awareness with their users about the types of content not permitted under their rules and community guidelines. The use of the notification system could be used as a tool to do this.

In other words, it sounds a lot like these companies have agreed to a DMCA-like notice-and-takedown regime for handling "hate speech." Let's be clear here: this will be abused and it will be abused widely. That's what happens when you give individuals the ability to remove content from platforms. Obviously, these companies are private companies and can set whatever policies they want on keeping up or removing content, but when they come to an agreement with the EU Commission about what they'll remove and how quickly, reasonable concerns should be raised about how this will work in practice, what definitions will be used to determine "hate speech," what kinds of appeals processes there will be and more. And none of that is particularly clear.

And, of course, very few people will raise these issues upfront because no one wants to be seen as being in favor of hate speech. And that's the real problem. It's easy to create rules for censorship by saying it's just about "hate speech," since almost no one will stand up and complain about that. But that opens up the door to all sorts of abuse -- whether in how "hate speech" is defined, as well as in how the companies will actually handle the implementation. Two major human rights groups -- EDRi and Access Now have already withdrawn from the EU Commission forum discussing all of this in protest of how these rules were put together:

Today, on 31 May, European Digital Rights (EDRi) and Access Now delivered a joint statement on the EU Commission’s “EU Internet Forum”, announcing our decision not to take part in future discussions and confirming that we do not have confidence in the ill considered “code of conduct” that was agreed.

Their main concern was that the whole thing was set up directly between the EU Commission and the internet companies behind closed doors -- and when you're talking about issues that impact human rights and freedom of expression, that needs to be done openly and transparently.

In short, the “code of conduct” downgrades the law to a second-class status, behind the “leading role” of private companies that are being asked to arbitrarily implement their terms of service. This process, established outside an accountable democratic framework, exploits unclear liability rules for companies. It also creates serious risks for freedom of expression as legal but controversial content may well be deleted as a result of this voluntary and unaccountable take down mechanism.

I recognize why many people may cheer on this move, thinking that it's a way to stop "bad stuff" from happening online, but beware the actual consequences of setting up an opaque process with a vague standard for pressuring platforms to censor content based on notices from angry people. If you don't think this will be abused in dangerous ways, you haven't been paying attention to the last two decades on the internet.

Filed Under: censorship, eu, eu commission, hate speech, internet, notice and takedown, platforms
Companies: facebook, google, microsoft, twitter, youtube

The NSA's Guide To The Internet Is The Weirdest Thing You'll Read Today

from the nectar-on-the-ambrosia dept

The NSA has a well-earned reputation for being one of the tougher agencies to get records out of, making those rare FOIA wins all the sweeter. In the case of Untangling the Web, the agency's 2007 guide to internet research, the fact that the records in question just so happen to be absolutely insane are just icing on the cake - or as the guide would put it, "the nectar on the ambrosia."

MuckRock's Michael Morisy initially requested the guide after finding an entry on Google Books. A month later, the NSA responded with a complete release, minus the authors' names ...

Which was a bit odd, seeing as Michael had provided them in his initial request. But hey, gift horses and all that.

Now, at 650 pages, there's far too much to go into in depth here, but fortunately, as you can see from the table of contents...

you don't have to go very far before this takes a hard turn into "Dungeons and Dragons campaign/Classics major's undergraduate thesis" territory.

The preface employs a comical number of metaphors to describe what the internet is and isn't - sometimes two a paragraph. But don't take our word for it!

According to the NSA, the internet is ...

A Persian's personal library:

Sisyphus' boulder ...

A Freudian psycho-sexual pleasure palace ...

A Borgesian world-consuming knowledge-cancer ...

A labyrinth (with bonus Mino-Troll):

Two quick asides - one, in case your memory needed jogging as to what a clew was, the footnote helpfully provides that information ...

and two, before you cry foul that the beast in the center of the labyrinth is clearly a centaur, Ovid technically just describes the Minotaur as "half-man and half-bull" without specifying which half is which, so that interpretation is valid, if a bit needlessly obscure.

But while we're on the subject of pedantic footnotes ...

A shape-changing sea-god:

And finally, jumping ahead 600 pages, an endless frontier/a cemetery of dead ideas/a reminder of your aunt's 15-minutes of fame:

After that journey of discovery, Untangling the Web ends perhaps the only way it could: with a back cover design that looks cribbed from a ‘90s Christian rock album.

Read the full thing embedded below, or on the request page:

Filed Under: internet, nsa, wtf