This Shouldn't Need Saying: Threatening To Kill Anyone Over Net Neutrality Is Idiotic

from the bring-back-civility dept

It's indisputable that Ajit Pai's attack on net neutrality was a facts-optional hatchet job of historical proportions. Pai ignored the public, the experts, ethical boundaries, and FCC guidelines as he rushed to give a sloppy wet kiss to some of the most disliked and anti-competitive companies in any American industry. Making matters worse, Pai repeatedly rubbed salt in the wound by behaving like a tone-deaf ass at numerous points during the bizarre and amateurish gambit.

That said, however terrible Ajit Pai has been (and he has been historically terrible), it should go without saying that threatening the FCC boss or his family is both idiotic and counterproductive.

You'll recall that Pai was forced to cancel his appearance at CES back in January due to death threats. And late last week, the Department of Justice announced that it had arrested a 33-year old California man for sending e-mails that threatened both Pai's and his family's lives:

"The first email accused Chairman Pai of being responsible for a child who allegedly had committed suicide because of the repeal of net neutrality regulations. The second email listed three locations in or around Arlington, and threatened to kill the Chairman’s family members. The third email had no message in its body, but included an image depicting Chairman Pai and, in the foreground and slightly out of focus, a framed photograph of Chairman Pai and his family."

The full affadavit offers a little more detail, noting that the FBI didn't have to work very hard to identify the man behind the STUBBLEMANLINESS@GMAIL.COM address, from which the threats were made:

"The next day, on or about December 20, 2017, at approximately 3:47 p.m. EST, an email was sent from STUBBLEMANLINESS@GMAIL.COM to Federal Official 1 's government and personal email addresses. The subject line of the email was "Cheers" and the body of the email listed the names and addresses of three preschools located in or around Arlington, Virginia, followed by the following sentence: "I will find your children and I will kill them."

Again, it really shouldn't need saying that threatening any government official or their family over tech policy (net neutrality or anything else) is obviously utterly terrible, obnoxious and disgusting. It's also utterly counterproductive and self-defeating. In reality, this kind of behavior comprises a tiny, tiny fraction of the massive number of folks angry about the repeal. But Pai's staff has enjoyed singling out and highlighting these folks whenever possible to try and imply that opponents to Pai's ISP-cuddly policies are generally unhinged and unreasonable.

Besides, Pai has made it easy to dismantle his policy positions in an entirely civil manner without resorting to boorish behavior. This is an agency boss who not only turned a blind eye to fraud and identity theft during the public comment period, but also apparently helped make up a DDOS attack just to try and downplay the massive, bipartisan opposition to his policies. Pai doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to the facts -- so just stick to them.

Filed Under: ajit pai, death threats, fcc, net neutrality

Alex Mauer Gets Another Game Taken Down From Steam Via DMCA As She Sends Imagos' Lawyer Death Threats

from the whoo-boy dept

Last month, we discussed a strange spate of DMCA notices going out from Alex Mauer, a video game music composer. Through her DMCA blitz, she managed to get a game removed from Steam, as well as getting several DMCA strikes against several YouTubers that had covered that game, all apparently as a result of a contract dispute she had with Imagos Softworks and her general inability to understand contractual language and copyright law. The tone of that post was justifiably critical, but some are now concerned that there is a well-being issue at hand. For starters, Mauer has now targeted a second game via DMCA takedown and has managed to get Steam to remove the game from its listings.

A copyright claim by a composer with a tendency to attract legal drama has led Steam to remove the game River City Ransom: Underground. The developers are disputing the claim and say they expect the game to be back on Steam at some point in the future.

On Friday, July 14th, Steam removed River City Ransom: Underground due to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claim filed by composer Alex Mauer. In the claim, Mauer said that music she produced for the game was being used without her permission.

Mauer goes on to note that she doesn't have any documentation of her arrangement with Conatus Creative, developers of the game, but that this actually strengthens her claim, reasoning that if her music appears in the game and there is no written permission, it's copyright infringement. That seemingly sensical stance is rebutted, however, by Conatus, who does claim to have documentation proving its side of the argument.

Let me make it absolutely clear – Alex Mauer’s claim that the game violates her copyright is false. She is a co-creator of the music, with Dino Lionetti and Rich Vreeland. Our written license agreement is with Rich, who subcontracted Alex and Dino. When Rich offered to pay Alex an equal share of the music fee for her contribution to the game soundtrack, she emailed back: “oh that's awesome man i'm all for it thanks!” Rich has shown us the documentation that Alex was paid in full.

Our lawyers advise us that there is no legal basis for Alex’s DMCA take-down claims. That’s undeniable by anyone except Alex. But being legally right is only half the story – as a practical matter, the costs of legal action would put console development plans on hold, perhaps indefinitely. We don’t have any interest in spending our time and our energy dealing with this matter further.

So, we’re swapping out the soundtrack. When it’s completed, we hope that it will delight you, and we hope that you keep taking a chance on independent games, on Kickstarter projects, and on all labors of love. They’re worth it.

If all of that is true, and only one side of this fight is claiming to have documented evidence of their position, you can once again see how reckless abuse of the DMCA system can be undertaken by a party that is blatantly in the wrong as a matter of copyright law, while at the same time forcing their targets into unwanted actions due to the costs of the legal action. This, it goes without saying, cannot be what copyright is supposed to be for. If someone can falsely file DMCA notices with this kind of ignorant alacrity, where the most charitable reading of the situation is that Mauer is flatly confused about copyright and contract law, and where the more realistic reading is that she is running a DMCA extortion program, and there are no serious consequences for that abuse, then the DMCA system is plainly broken.

But there are also more serious accusations flying around as part of this, including the legal staff for Imagos, Mauer's initial DMCA target, being on the receiving end of death threats from her.

After the publication of this story, several people pointed us to a message from Imagos Softworks’ lawyer, Leonard French, claiming that Mauer had sent him death threats. We reached out to Mauer about this and she confirmed that it was true. She said that she had been receiving her own set of threats in the wake of claims by French and other YouTubers, which she reported to the police. “The police told me it was ok for these people to make death threats to me because of freedom of speech,” she said in a private Twitter message. “So my immediate response was to issue death threats to the people who started the defamation crusade against me.”

First, making death threats is a crime, if they are truly serious death threats. I doubt a law enforcement officer told her they are simply "ok because of freedom of speech." And to then take that as a reason to send more death threats in reply is petulant at best.

Regardless, it should go without saying that through punishment or otherwise, Mauer's DMCA abuse needs to stop.

Filed Under: alex mauer, censorship, contract dispute, copyright, death threats, dmca
Companies: conatus creative

Twitter Bot 'Issues' Death Threat, Police Investigate

from the am-I-my-bot's-keeper? dept

We've seen a partial answer to the question: "what happens if my Silk Road shopping bot buys illegal drugs?" In that case, the local police shut down the art exhibit featuring the bot and seize the purchased drugs. What's still unanswered is who -- if anyone -- is liable for the bot's actions.

These questions are surfacing again thanks to a Twitter bot that somehow managed to tweet out a bomb threat.

This week, police in the Netherlands are dealing with a robot miscreant. Amsterdam-based developer Jeffry van der Goot reports on Twitter that he was questioned by police because a Twitter bot he owned made a death threat.

As van der Goot explained is his tweets (all of which can be viewed at the above link), he was contacted by an "internet detective" who had somehow managed to come across this bot's tweet in his investigative work. (As opposed to being contacted by a concerned individual who had spotted the tweet.)

So, van der Goot had to explain how his bot worked. The bot (which was actually created by another person but "owned" by van der Goot) reassembles chunks of his past tweets, hopefully into something approaching coherence. On this occasion, it not only managed to put together a legitimate sentence, but also one threatening enough to attract the interest of local law enforcement.

The explanation didn't manage to completely convince the police of the bot's non-nefariousness. They ordered van der Goot to shut down the account and remove the "threatening" tweet. But it was at least convincing enough that van der Goot isn't facing charges for "issuing" a threat composed of unrelated tweets. The investigator could have easily decided that van der Goot's explanation was nothing more than a cover story for tweets he composed and issued personally, using a bot account to disguise their origin.

The shutdown of the account was most likely for law enforcement's peace of mind -- preventing the very occasionally evil bot from cobbling together algorithmically-derived threats sometime in the future. It's the feeling of having "done something" about an incident that seems alarming at first, but decidely more banal and non-threatening by the end of the investigation.

The answer to the question of who is held responsible when algorithms "go bad" appears to be -- in this case -- the person who "owns" the bot. Van der Goot didn't create the bot, nor did he alter its algorithm, but he was ultimately ordered to kill it off. This order was presumably issued in the vague interest of public safety -- even though there's no way van der Goot could have stacked the deck in favor of bot-crafted threats without raising considerable suspicion in the Twitter account his bot drew from.

There will be more of this in the future and the answers will continue to be unsatisfactory. Criminal activity is usually tied to intent, but with algorithms sifting through data detritus and occasionally latching onto something illegal, that lynchpin of criminal justice seems likely to be the first consideration removed. That doesn't bode well for the bot crafters of the world, whose creations may occasionally return truly unpredictable results. Law enforcement officers seem to have problems wrapping their minds around lawlessness unmoored from the anchoring intent. In van der Goot's case, it resulted in only the largely symbolic sacrifice of his bot. For others, it could turn out much worse.

Filed Under: autonomous computing, bots, death threats, investigation, jeffry van der goot, police, tweets

The Fact That The US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits To Fantasies Of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can't Be Trusted

from the scary-shit dept

We've mentioned things in the past like former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden "jokingly" talking about how he'd like to put Ed Snowden on a "kill list" while simultaneously suggesting that the NSA should be a part of determining who to target. While some would dismiss this as a tasteless "joke" it seems like he's not the only one in the intelligence community with such thoughts. We just recently noted that reporter Steven Levy, who spent over two hours interviewing NSA officials, had said that they appear to have a real and passionate hatred towards Snowden.

Now, Benny Johnson, over at Buzzfeed, has been able to get a bunch of intelligence community and military officials to comment anonymously, but on the record, about how much they want to kill Snowden, often including full descriptions of how they'd do it -- and the fact that they don't see any reason to support things like basic due process. The quotes are chilling.

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”

[....] “His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

[....] “I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

While it may be understandable that those still on the inside of the intelligence community and the military have this emotional reaction to Ed Snowden, it actually helps to demonstrate exactly why the NSA cannot be trusted. NSA officials like to talk about all of the training everyone in the intelligence community has, and how it's "in their DNA" to protect the Constitution and the American way. The NSA official in charge of dealing with the Snowden leak even told Levy that if there was any abuse of the NSA's data, there would be "lines at the Inspector General's office here, and at Congress as well--longer than a Disneyland line." And yet... here are lots of those very same insiders who clearly are overcome with an emotional, rather than logical, response to the situation. They appear to have no problem tossing aside ideals like freedom, due process -- or even the 4th Amendment which Snowden was trying to restore support for. And instead of all that: they just want blood. They want to kill. They don't want a trial.

Do people like that sound like the kinds of people you can "trust" to not abuse their power? Do they sound like people you can "trust" to not spy on people they don't like? They've already admitted that they're willing to kill someone they don't like just because they don't like him.

The article is chilling not just because of what these employees of the American public are openly discussing doing to someone who sought to inform the American public -- but because it shows the lengths they will go to to trample the American ideal and the Constitution, which they took an oath to uphold. They are directly admitting that all of that, all logic, all reason goes right out the window when someone pisses them off.

And that's the very reason why the NSA needs to be reined in. The people working there seem to be bloodthirsty and emotional, prone to lashing out and dismissing the very basis of the Constitution. After hearing those statements, I don't see how anyone in the NSA can possibly claim that the American public can "trust" them not to abuse the system. They appear bloodthirsty and eager to abuse the system.

Filed Under: death threats, ed snowden, emotions, intelligence community, killing, nsa, surveillance

Epic Win/Fail: Bullied Bus Monitor Sparks Overwhelming Support, But Also Death Threats To Kids

from the best-of-the-internet,-worst-of-the-internet dept

A few years ago, I noted the seeming irony in the fact that there appeared to be a decent amount of overlap between groups of people doing amazing altruistic things on sites like Reddit, while also doing amazingly troll-tastic things in places like /b/. Groups getting together to "do something" are a powerful force, and often are a powerful force for good. But they can also get out of hand, and turn into questionable mob-like vigilante-ism. However, it's not often that you see both such forces come together in the same story. However, that appears to be the case with the amazing story concerning upstate NY school bus monitor, Karen Klein. If you've been buried under a rock somewhere, Klein, a 68-year-old grandmother, has a low-paying job as a school bus monitor for a middle school in upstate NY (Greece, near Rochester). Middle school kids can be incredibly cruel, and a group of kids spent a bus ride mercilessly mocking Klein and filming the interaction. Someone else saw the video being passed around on Facebook and posted it to YouTube, where it quickly racked up millions of views, with tons of downvotes. The video is heart-wrenching for the cruelty from the boys in question. Just horrifying: It also appears this was not a one-incident either. There are at least two other such videos.

However, in response to this, someone set up an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for Karen to go on vacation. And, wow, did the internet ever come through in a massive outpouring of altruism, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in a day. As of this writing, it's already around half a million and there's still nearly a month to go. That's going to be quite a vacation.

Cue tons of great stories about how wonderful the internet can be.

But... then there's the flipside of it. The part where tons of people on the internet who find out about this story then barrage the school, the kids and anyone they think is related to this with nasty calls and emails including death threats:

The names of some of the alleged perpetrators — all juveniles who have yet to be charged with any crimes — and their parents and details about where they live ended up online. And since Wednesday, they’ve been barraged by death threats and harassing phone calls.

Greece police Capt. Steve Chatterton said Thursday that someone even made a false 911 call claiming there were people being held hostage inside one of the students’ homes. He said officers have been assigned to run special patrols down the youths’ streets to ensure their safety.

“We have a cellphone of one of the boys and he’s received more than 1,000 missed calls and more than 1,000 text messages threatening him,” he said. “Threats to overcome threats do no good.”

Karen herself has come out to say:

“This is going too far,” she said. “This is no better than the kids who did that on the bus.”

Exactly. If you're so upset by people acting totally obnoxiously to someone, there are a lot better ways to express yourself than to call them with a death threat.

Filed Under: altruism, bullying, death threats, karen klein, steve chatterton
Companies: 4chan, indiegogo, reddit