Governments And Internet Companies Agree On Questionable Voluntary Pact On Extremist Content Online

from the well-meaning-but-misguided dept

Yesterday, there was a big process, called the Christchurch Call, in which a bunch of governments and big social media companies basically agreed to take a more proactive role in dealing with terrorist and violent extremist content online. To its credit, the effort did include voices from civil society/public interest groups that raised issues about how these efforts might negatively impact freedom of expression and other human rights issues around the globe. However, it's not clear that the "balance" they came to is a good one.

A free, open and secure internet is a powerful tool to promote connectivity, enhance social inclusiveness and foster economic growth.

The internet is, however, not immune from abuse by terrorist and violent extremist actors. This was tragically highlighted by the terrorist attacks of 15 March 2019 on the Muslim community of Christchurch – terrorist attacks that were designed to go viral.

The dissemination of such content online has adverse impacts on the human rights of the victims, on our collective security and on people all over the world.

The "Call" is not binding on anyone. It's just a set of "voluntary commitments" to try to "address the issue of terrorist and violent extremist content online and to prevent the abuse of the internet...." There are a set of commitments from governments and a separate set from social media companies. On the government side the commitments are:

Counter the drivers of terrorism and violent extremism by strengthening the resilience and inclusiveness of our societies to enable them to resist terrorist and violent extremist ideologies, including through education, building media literacy to help counter distorted terrorist and violent extremist narratives, and the fight against inequality.

Ensure effective enforcement of applicable laws that prohibit the production or dissemination of terrorist and violent extremist content, in a manner consistent with the rule of law and international human rights law, including freedom of expression.

Encourage media outlets to apply ethical standards when depicting terrorist events online, to avoid amplifying terrorist and violent extremist content.

Support frameworks, such as industry standards, to ensure that reporting on terrorist attacks does not amplify terrorist and violent extremist content, without prejudice to responsible coverage of terrorism and violent extremism.

Consider appropriate action to prevent the use of online services to disseminate terrorist and violent extremist content, including through collaborative actions, such as:

• Awareness-raising and capacity-building activities aimed at smaller online service providers;
• Development of industry standards or voluntary frameworks;
• Regulatory or policy measures consistent with a free, open and secure internet and international human rights law.

That mostly seems to stop short of demanding content be taken down, though that last point teeters on the edge. On the social media side, there is the following list of commitments:

Take transparent, specific measures seeking to prevent the upload of terrorist and violent extremist content and to prevent its dissemination on social media and similar content-sharing services, including its immediate and permanent removal, without prejudice to law enforcement and user appeals requirements, in a manner consistent with human rights and fundamental freedoms. Cooperative measures to achieve these outcomes may include technology development, the expansion and use of shared databases of hashes and URLs, and effective notice and takedown procedures.

Provide greater transparency in the setting of community standards or terms of service, including by:

• Outlining and publishing the consequences of sharing terrorist and violent extremist content;
• Describing policies and putting in place procedures for detecting and removing terrorist and violent extremist content.

Enforce those community standards or terms of service in a manner consistent with human rights and fundamental freedoms, including by:

• Prioritising moderation of terrorist and violent extremist content, however identified;
• Closing accounts where appropriate;
• Providing an efficient complaints and appeals process for those wishing to contest the removal of their content or a decision to decline the upload of their content.

Implement immediate, effective measures to mitigate the specific risk that terrorist and violent extremist content is disseminated through livestreaming, including identification of content for real-time review.

Implement regular and transparent public reporting, in a way that is measurable and supported by clear methodology, on the quantity and nature of terrorist and violent extremist content being detected and removed.

Review the operation of algorithms and other processes that may drive users towards and/or amplify terrorist and violent extremist content to better understand possible intervention points and to implement changes where this occurs. This may include using algorithms and other processes to redirect users from such content or the promotion of credible, positive alternatives or counter-narratives. This may include building appropriate mechanisms for reporting, designed in a multi-stakeholder process and without compromising trade secrets or the effectiveness of service providers’ practices through unnecessary disclosure.

Work together to ensure cross-industry efforts are coordinated and robust, for instance by investing in and expanding the GIFCT, and by sharing knowledge and expertise.

Facebook put up its own list of actions that it's taking in response to this, but as CDT's Emma Llanso points out, it's missing some fairly important stuff about making sure these efforts don't lead to censorship, especially of marginalized groups and individuals:

In response to all of this, the White House refused to join with the other countries who signed on to the voluntary commitments of the Christchurch Call, noting that it had concerns about whether it was appropriate and consistent with the First Amendment. That's absolutely accurate and correct. Even if the effort is voluntary and non-binding, and even if it makes references to protecting freedom of expression, once a government gets involved in advocating for social media companies to take down content, it's crossing a line. The Washington Post quoted law professor James Grimmelmann, who makes this point concisely:

“It’s hard to take seriously this administration’s criticism of extremist content, but it’s probably for the best that the United States didn’t sign,” said James Grimmelmann, a Cornell Tech law professor. “The government should not be in the business of ‘encouraging’ platforms to do more than they legally are required to — or than they could be required to under the First Amendment.”

“The government ought to do its ‘encouraging’ through laws that give platforms and users clear notice of what they’re allowed to do, not through vague exhortations that can easily turn into veiled threats,” Grimmelmann said.

And he's also right that it's difficult to take this administration's position seriously, especially given that the very same day that it refused to join this effort, it was also pushing forward with its sketchy plan to force social media companies to deal with non-existent "conservative bias." So, on the one hand, the White House says it believes in the First Amendment and doesn't want governments to get involved, and at the very same time, it's suggesting that it can pressure social media into acting in a way that it wants. And, of course, this is also the same White House, that has made other efforts to get social media companies to remove content from governments they dislike, such as Iran's.

So, yes, we should be wary of governments telling social media companies what content should and should not be allowed, so it's good that the White House declined to support the Christchurch Call. But it's difficult to believe it was doing so for any particularly principled reasons.

Filed Under: censorship, christchurch, christchurch call, extremism, free speech, human rights, social media, terrorist content, voluntary, white house
Companies: facebook, google, microsoft, twitter, youtube

FBI Acts Like It's Still 1960 With Its Report On 'Black Identity Extremists'

from the agency-eats-its-own-speculative-dog-food dept

We already knew Jeff Sessions was a throwback. The new head of the DOJ rolled back civil rights investigations by the agency while calling for harsher penalties and longer jail terms for drug-related crimes, while re-opening the door for asset forfeiture abuse with his rollback of Obama-era policy changes.

But it's more than just the new old-school DOJ. The FBI is just as regressive. Under its new DOJ leadership, the FBI (inadvertently) published some speculative Blue Lives Matter fanfic [PDF] -- an "Intelligence Assessment" entitled "Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Police Officers."

There's no hedging in the title, despite what the word "likely" usually insinuates. According to the FBI, this means there's an 80-95% chance it believes its own spin.

Here's the opening sentence:

The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.

And here's what the term "very likely" means when the FBI uses it:

Beyond that, the FBI says this:

The FBI has high confidence in these assessments…

And here's how the FBI defines "high confidence."

High confidence generally indicates the FBI’s judgments are based on high quality information from multiple sources. High confidence in a judgment does not imply the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong. While additional reporting and information sources may change analytical judgments, such changes are most likely to be refinements and not substantial in nature.

What's in this open-and-shut report? What key elements lead the FBI to believe "BIEs" will be killing cops in the future? Well, it appears to be nothing more than a recounting of recent cop killings, coupled with anecdotal evidence, like the expression of anti-white sentiment in social media posts. Beyond that, there's little connecting those who have killed cops with the ethereal FBI BIE ideal. There's certainly no organization behind the killings -- only a few common factors. And those factors -- if the FBI is allowed to continue to treat "BIE" as a threat to police officers -- will do little to discourage violence against police officers.

What it will do is allow law enforcement to engage in racial profiling and to overreact to social media rants by angry black men. And it will allow the FBI to turn into the same FBI that targeted Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists during the 1960s. In fact, it almost acknowledges as much in the report.

BIEs have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans, but had not targeted law enforcement with premeditated violence for the nearly two decades leading up to the lethal incidents observed beginning in 2014. BIE violence peaked in the 1960s and 1970s in response to changing socioeconomic attitudes and treatment of blacks during the Civil Rights Movement.

The composers of this report may have a lot of confidence in their assumptions, but no one else seems to.

Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security intelligence agent, when asked by Foreign Policy in October why the F.B.I. would create the term “B.I.E.,” said, “I have no idea” and “I’m at a loss.” Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, said the “Black Identity Extremists” label simply represents an F.B.I. effort to define a movement where none exists. “Basically, it’s black people who scare them,” he said.

“Could you name an African-American organization that has committed violence against police officers?” Representative Karen Bass asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions at Tuesday’s hearing. “Can you name one today that has targeted police officers in a violent manner?” It’s no surprise that he could not. Mr. Sessions, who confessed that he had not read the report, said he would need to “confirm” and would reply in writing at a later time. The F.B.I. itself admits in the report, that, even by its own definition, “B.I.E. violence has been rare over the past 20 years.”

If the report is acted on, it will be the 1960s all over again.

Although it’s unclear what actions the F.B.I. will take as a result of the report, the conclusions pave the way for it to gather data on, monitor and deploy informants to keep tabs on individuals and groups it believes to be B.I.E.s. This could chill and criminalize a wide array of nonviolent activism in ways that have terrifying echoes its infamous Cointelpro program, which investigated and intimidated black civil rights groups and leaders, including Marcus Garvey and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Under this program, F.B.I. agents concocted a false internal narrative connecting Dr. King to foreign enemies, allowing agents to justify threatening to publicize his private life and encouraging him to commit suicide. This is a reminder that while the “Black Identity Extremist” designation is new, the strategy of using a vague definition to justify broad law enforcement action is not.

This is what the report looks like from the outside. It's unclear if those inside the agency feel the same way. The leaked report confirms many people's suspicions about law enforcement agencies: they view minorities as threats and will concoct narratives to support these views. There's no evidence any sort of BIE organization exists, much less the existence of a concerted effort to inflict violence on police officers. But this report is a gift to every police officer and FBI agent who really wants to believe African Americans are out to get them. Given the administration's unqualified support for law enforcement, coupled with the Commander in Chief's off-the-cuff encouragement of violence, this report is basically an invitation to start policing like it's 1960, rather than 2017.

Filed Under: black lives matter, blm, doj, extremism, fbi

Repeal All UK Terrorism Laws, Says UK Government Adviser On Terrorism Laws

from the outbreak-of-sanity dept

It's become a depressingly predictable spectacle over the years, as politicians, law enforcement officials and spy chiefs take turns to warn about the threat of "going dark", and to call for yet more tough new laws, regardless of the fact that they won't help. So it comes as something of shock to read that the UK government's own adviser on terrorism laws has just said the following in an interview:

The Government should consider abolishing all anti-terror laws as they are "unnecessary" in the fight against extremists, the barrister tasked with reviewing Britain’s terrorism legislation has said.

…

the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, argued potential jihadis can be stopped with existing "general" laws that are not always being used effectively to take threats off the streets.

As the Independent reported, the UK government's Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Max Hill, went on:

"We should not legislate in haste, we should not use the mantra of 'something has to be done' as an excuse for creating new laws," he added. “We should make use of what we have."

Aside from the astonishingly sensible nature of Hill's comments, the interview is also worth reading for the insight it provides into the changing nature of terrorism, at least in Europe:

Mr Hill noted that some of the perpetrators of the four recent terror attacks to hit the UK were previously "operating at a low level of criminality", adding: "I think that people like that should be stopped wherever possible, indicted using whatever legislation, and brought to court."

This emerging "crime-terror nexus" is one reason why anti-terrorism laws are unnecessary. Instead, non-terrorism legislation could be used to tackle what Hill termed "precursor criminality" -- general criminal activity committed by individuals who could be stopped and prosecuted before they move into terrorism. Similarly, it would be possible to use laws against murder and making explosive devices to hand down sentences for terrorists, made harsher to reflect the seriousness of the crimes.

Even though Hill himself doubts that the UK's terrorism laws will be repealed any time soon, his views are still important. Taken in conjunction with the former head of GCHQ saying recently that end-to-end encryption shouldn't be weakened, they form a more rational counterpoint to the ill-informed calls for more laws and less crypto.

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

Filed Under: extremism, max hill, terrorism, terrorism laws, uk

Once Again, Rather Than Deleting Terrorist Propaganda, YouTube Deletes Evidence Of War Crimes

from the take-a-step-back-and-rethink dept

It really was just last week that we were discussing the problems of telling platforms like YouTube to remove videos concerning "violent extremism" because it's often tough to tell the difference between videos that many people think are okay and ones that those same people think are not. But in that post, we also linked back to a story from 2013 in which -- after getting pressure from then Senator Joe Lieberman -- YouTube started removing "terrorist" videos, and in the process deleted a channel of people documenting atrocities in Syria.

It appears that history is now repeating itself, because YouTube is getting some grief because (you guessed it), it's effort to keep extremist content off its platform has resulted in deleting a channel that was documenting evidence of war crimes in Syria.

YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East.

Middle East Eye, the monitoring organisation Airwars and the open-source investigations site Bellingcat are among a number of sites that have had videos removed for breaching YouTube's Community Guidelines.

This comes just days after YouTube announced it was expanding its program to remove "terror content" from its platform -- including better "accuracy." Oops.

Again, there are no easy answers here. You can certainly understand why no platform wants to host actual terrorism propaganda. And platforms should have the right to host or decline to host whatever content they want. The real issue is that we have more and more people -- including politicians -- demanding that these platforms must regulate, filter and moderate the content on their platform to remove "bad" speech. But in the over 4 years I've been asking this question since that last time we wrote about the shut down of the channel documenting atrocities, no one's explained to me how these platforms can distinguish videos celebrating atrocities from those documenting atrocities. And this gets even more complicated when you realize: sometimes those are the same videos. And sometimes, letting terrorists or others post the evidence of what they're doing, people are better able to stop that activity.

There is plenty of "bad" content out there, but the kneejerk reaction that we need to censor it and take it down ignores how frequently that is likely to backfire -- as it clearly did in this case.

Filed Under: extremism, platforms
Companies: youtube

Should Social Media Sites Be Forced To Pull Pastor Calling For War With North Korea?

from the countering-violent-extremism dept

There's been a lot of debate over the past few years about forcing internet platforms -- YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, mainly -- to respond to terrorists (oddly only Muslim terrorists) using those platforms for propaganda and agitation by taking down that content. It's often been discussed under the banner of "countering violent extremism" or CVE. These days, those and other platforms tend to have large staffs reviewing videos, and especially quickly pulling down videos of ISIS promoters calling for attacks on America and Europe. And, in some countries it's now required by law that internet platforms remove such content. And you can certainly understand the gut reaction here: someone calling you evil and encouraging attacks on you is seriously unnerving.

One of the points that we make about this, though, is that while many, many people think it's "easy" to determine which content is "good" and which content is "bad," it's not. The areas of gray are vast and murky. One example we pointed to is that when YouTube was first pressured into taking down terrorist propaganda videos, it resulted in YouTube killing a channel that was documenting atrocities in Syria. Understanding the difference between promoting violence and documenting violence is not easy.

And here's another example. You may have seen the following news clip floating around, involving a Trump-connected Pastor named Robert Jeffress explaining on a news program why the Bible says it's okay to assassinate Kim Jong Un and go to war with North Korea.

That video clip is all over the news this week and can be found all over the internet. The copy I'm posting above is from Twitter, but I'm sure it can be found elsewhere as well. But what if, instead of an evangelical pastor, that statement were coming from a Muslim cleric, and instead of North Korea and Kim Jong Un it talked about America and Donald Trump? Would it still be all over social media, or would people be demanding that the internet take it down?

And this question applies no matter what you think of the video above. I'm not making a statement one way or the other on the content of it, even if I have an opinion about that. My point is simply that when we demand that platforms pull down "radical" content pushing for "violent extremism," it's really, really difficult to distinguish between the video above and some of what, say, ISIS releases.

This is a point that I think frequently gets lost in these discussions. People think that it's easy to tell what's "bad" because it's easy for them to determine what is bad in their opinion or bad to them. But setting up general rules that scale across an entire platform is almost impossible. And even if you argue that the context of this video is different from my Muslim cleric example, you're only helping to make my point. Because that would mean that anyone reviewing the video to determine if it stays up or down would have to become knowledgeable in the overall context -- which in this case could require understanding centuries of global religious views and conflicts. I'm sorry, but Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and everyone else can't hire thousands of PhDs in all related fields to review these videos (within hours) with the level of understanding and context necessary to make a judgment call on each and every one.

None of this is to say that the platforms need to leave everything up (or take everything down). But if you're going to require platforms to police content, you need to at least recognize that any "rules" on this stuff will lead to rules you don't like. Rules that say a Muslim cleric's call for war on America is not allowed will almost certainly lead to the video above also not being allowed. Maybe some people are comfortable with neither being allowed, but the situation sure gets tricky quickly...

Filed Under: censorship, countering violent extremism, extremism, kim jong un, north korea, propaganda, robert jeffress, takedowns, threats, videos
Companies: facebook, twitter, youtube

AT&T, Verizon Feign Ethical Outrage, Pile On Google's 'Extremist' Ad Woes

from the manufactured-outrage dept

So you may have noticed that Google has been caught up in a bit of a stink in the UK over the company's YouTube ads being presented near "extremist" content. The fracas began after a report by the Times pointed out that advertisements for a rotating crop of brands were appearing next to videos uploaded to YouTube by a variety of hateful extremists. It didn't take long for the UK government -- and a number of companies including McDonald's, BBC, Channel 4, and Lloyd's -- to engage in some extended pearl-clutching, proclaiming they'd be suspending their ad buys until Google resolved the issue.

Of course, much like the conversation surrounding "fake news," most of the news coverage was bizarrely superficial and frequently teetering toward the naive. Most outlets were quick to malign Google for purposely letting extremist content get posted, ignoring the fact that the sheer volume of video content uploaded to YouTube on a daily basis makes hateful-idiot policing a Sisyphean task. Most of the reports also severely understate the complexity of modern internet advertising, where real-time bidding and programmatic placement means companies may not always know what brand ads show up where, or when.

Regardless, Google wound up issuing a mea culpa stating they'd try to do a better job at keeping ads for the McRib sandwich far away from hateful idiocy:

"We know advertisers don't want their ads next to content that doesn’t align with their values. So starting today, we’re taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content. This includes removing ads more effectively from content that is attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender or similar categories. This change will enable us to take action, where appropriate, on a larger set of ads and sites."

As we've noted countless times, policing hate speech is a complicated subject, where the well-intentioned often stumble down the rabbit hole into hysteria and overreach. Amusingly though, AT&T and Verizon -- two U.S. brands not exactly synonymous with ethical behavior -- were quick to take advantage of the situation, issuing statements that they too were simply outraged -- and would be pulling their advertising from some Google properties post haste. This resulted in a large number of websites regurgitating said outrage with a decidedly straight face:

"We are deeply concerned that our ads may have appeared alongside YouTube content promoting terrorism and hate," an AT&T spokesperson told Business Insider in a written statement. "Until Google can ensure this won’t happen again, we are removing our ads from Google’s non-search platforms."

"Once we were notified that our ads were appearing on non-sanctioned websites, we took immediate action to suspend this type of ad placement and launched an investigation," a Verizon spokesperson told Business Insider. "We are working with all of our digital advertising partners to understand the weak links so we can prevent this from happening in the future."

Of course, if you know the history of either company, you should find this pearl-clutching a little entertaining. In just the last few years, AT&T has been busted for turning a blind eye to drug dealer directory assistance scams, ripping off programs for the hearing impaired, defrauding government programs designed to shore up low-income connectivity, and actively helping "crammers" by making scam charges on consumer bills harder to detect. Verizon, recently busted for covertly spying on internet users and defrauding cities via bogus broadband deployment promises isn't a whole lot better.

That's not to say that all of the companies involved in the Google fracas are engaged in superficial posturing for competitive advantage. Nor is it to say that Google can't do more to police the global hatred brigades. But as somebody who has spent twenty years writing about these two companies specifically, the idea that either gives much of a shit about their ads showing up next to hateful ignoramuses is laughable. And it was bizarre to see an ocean of news outlets just skip over the fact that both companies are pushing hard into advertising themselves with completed or looming acquisitions of Time Warner, AOL and Yahoo.

Again, policing hateful idiocy is absolutely important. But overreach historically doesn't serve anybody. And neither does pretentious face fanning by companies looking to use the resulting hysteria to competitive advantage.

Filed Under: ads, extremism, moral panic, pearl clutching, search, video
Companies: at&t, google, verizon, youtube

White House Asked Google & Facebook To Change Their Algorithms To Fight ISIS; Both Said No

from the overreaction dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about how ridiculous the federal government's view of Silicon Valley seemed to be, in that they had this weird belief that by nerding a little harder, we could somehow "disrupt" ISIS. The thinking seemed confused, and somewhat typical of people who don't understand technology or how Silicon Valley works. It's "magic wand" thinking. People who don't understand technology tend to view technology as a sort of magic -- and thus, they assume it can do anything. And, right now, a bunch of those people in the White House want that magic wand to make ISIS disappear from the Internet.

Buzzfeed's Sheera Frenkel has a great detailed report looking "inside" the administration's attempt to have Silicon Valley help in the fight against ISIS. The main focus of a (not very secret) meeting held on Wednesday seemed to be entirely about fighting ISIS propaganda with American propaganda. As if that ever works. And, from the sound of it, the meeting was equally clueless about why ISIS propaganda is effective, while American propaganda flops.

“They wanted to figure out how to fight ISIS online, how to understand the psychology of those who support ISIS, and they invited almost no one who speaks for those of us in the Arab world, and from Arab communities, who have everything to lose from ISIS’ growing popularity,” said one Arab attendee, who estimated that less than 10% of the attendants were of Middle Eastern descent. “They don’t understand this community. That has been proven time and time again with their tone deaf messages. Why hold an event like this where there are ten white men outnumbering every Arab?”

Instead of taking on the real challenges and understanding why ISIS propaganda is effective (or even recognizing that it's likely not nearly as effective as they fear), the White House officials went for the pointless superficial plan: maybe try to make Google and Facebook change their algorithms to play up anti-ISIS stuff and play down pro-ISIS stuff. This is a profoundly ignorant idea, and thankfully one that both companies told the White House was not in the realm of reasonable:

Tech executives who have met with the Pentagon team told BuzzFeed News that some of their requests have been “jarring.” In at least one case, the Pentagon spoke with several companies — who asked not to be named as a condition of discussing the meeting with BuzzFeed News — about tweaking their algorithms to promote certain types of content. Both Google and Facebook have made it clear that they would not make changes to their algorithms to bury results supportive of ISIS.

“That’s something that is always brought up in meetings. And it shows how little they understand us,” said the Google representative. “This is a pandora’s box we won’t open, because if we answer a request by the U.S. government to feature one search result over another what’s to stop other countries from requesting the same? What’s to stop each country from tailoring the search results of their citizens to their agenda? It’s not a path we are willing to explore.”

Of course, to be fair, Google already cracked open that Pandora's box when it allowed its search results to be impacted by copyright takedown requests.

Even so, as the quote above notes, even suggesting this to companies is profoundly pointless. Not only is it a bad idea for the precedent it sets, it's unlikely to work at all. It's magic wand thinking of desperate people who don't want to actually confront the real reasons why ISIS has been successful.

Oh, and of course, the decision to force Apple to hack into the iPhone isn't helping matters at all if the federal government wants Silicon Valley to "work" with the government on this issue.

“It’s like, you’ve been asked to partner up and dance with the bully at school who keeps trying to trip you in the hallways,” one attendee told BuzzFeed News after the event. “And even though you want to learn to dance there isn’t a lot of trust to build on.”

An attendee from the government side told BuzzFeed News by phone, “We need help, but it’s like, one part of government keeps fucking this up for other parts of government. We can’t seem to get it right.”

We keep hearing from the White House how Silicon Valley has to stop treating the government like an adversary, and the only proper response to that needs to be: you first.

Filed Under: algorithms, extremism, isis, search, social media, white house
Companies: facebook, google

UK Prevent Strategy For Identifying Potential Terrorists Identifies 3 Year Old Because Of Course It Did

from the no-child-left-uncovered dept

We've talked a lot about the UK's ambitious plan to marry Orwellian thought crime designations with Minority Report style crime-prediction when it comes to stopping all the terrorism that's barely occurred in the country. The basic idea is that the government will create a boogeyman-list of suspected future-terrorists, people who are not strapping bombs to themselves and blowing up marketplaces filled with children -- but might! -- while tasking the educational system with weeding out tiny, little terrorist children using software so laughably flawed that it ought to belong on HBO's Silicon Valley. In other words: hey, great plan!

Well, counted amongst the fruit of all that idiotic labor is the result we all probably saw coming: a goddamn three-year-old has found his/her way onto the watchlist.

The three-year-old in the programme is from the borough of Tower Hamlets, and was a member of a family group that had been showing suspect behaviour. Many of the government's counter-extremism measures typically relate to older children and adults - buy very young children can be referred if authorities are concerned about the effect of their families on them.

The idea being that the UK government's "concern" is centered around extremist parents will produce extremist children as a matter of course and the best way to combat these must-eventually-be extremist toddlers is by putting them on a watchlist run by the same people who did all the stupidity I mentioned in the first paragraph. Sigh.

As it turns out, the number of people getting caught up in this prevent strategy system is pretty astounding.

They show that a total of 1,069 Londoners have been referred to the government’s “Channel” counter-extremism programme since the start of 2012. That means that the capital accounts for about a quarter of the 4,000 referrals to the programme nationwide since then. The Standard, which obtained the figures from the London Assembly, can also reveal that: Since September last year, 400 Channel referrals were made for teenagers and children under 18.

This is exactly what you'd expect when the government tasks a great many people who have no formalized training in identifying bad guys with identifying bad guys. It's also exactly what you should expect when the government plan for building up a watch list of future-terrorists, including hundreds of innocent children as young as three years old, comes with a complete lack of common sense and is instead the product of fear mixed with nationalism. And this doesn't even touch on the potential or real-life cases of abuse of the system, which are as inevitable as the sunrise.

Look, security is important, and terrorism is an actual thing, but going off the deep end to the point where you've got government eyes on toddlers isn't a solution to any problem.

Filed Under: 3 year old, children, extremism, reporting, terrorist, uk

Russia Blocks The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine Over A Single Page

from the keep-history-buried dept

Over the last few years, Russia has really been ramping up its efforts to censor the internet to hide content it doesn't like. As is often the case when the government gets the power to censor, that censorship starts spreading farther and farther.

The latest? Apparently in the effort to hide a single archive of a site that the Russian government doesn't like, the entire "Wayback Machine" from the Internet Archive has been blocked:

The Russian government has blocked the Internet Archive, the San-Francisco-based website that provides the popular Wayback Machine, which allows users to view archived webpages. The decision to ban the Internet Archive appears to be the work of Russia's Attorney General, meaning that police determined that the website contains extremist content.

Rublacklist.net says police targeted the Internet Archive because of a saved webpage called “Solitary Jihad in Russia,” a short text that claims to offer information about the “theory and practice of partisan resistance.” At one point, the text states that Islamic sharia law “must be instituted all across the world.”

According to the website Rublacklist.net (a censorship-monitoring project operated by the Russian Pirate Party), the page in question* on the Internet Archive was added to Russia's official registry of banned websites on June 23, 2015. Because the Internet Archive uses https, some Russian ISPs will have to block the entire website in order to comply with the blacklisting, since encrypted traffic won't allow them to differentiate between different pages of the same site. According to TJournal, users of mobile Internet provider Yota were unable to access the page, the Wayback Machine, or the Internet Archive on June 25.

As you hopefully already know, the Wayback Machine is a tremendously useful tool for looking up archived versions of websites. It is a kind of library of our internet history. Of course, as the article at Global Voices notes, part of the reason the entire site is getting blocked is due to the use of HTTPS. While some might argue that this is a reason why sites shouldn't go to default HTTPS, I'd argued the opposite: it shows the value in HTTPS in that it makes censorship much more difficult such that when it occurs, the results are so ridiculous that it hopefully leads to greater pushback on the ridiculous attempts to censor.

Filed Under: censorship, extremism, filters, https, internet, russia, wayback machine
Companies: internet archive