Clearview Forbids Users From Scraping Its Database Of Images It Scraped From Thousands Of Websites

from the don't-scrape-me-bro dept

Clearview continues to dominate the "Most Hated" category in the facial recognition tech games. And with Amazon tossing aside its "Rekognition" program for the time being (it's spelled with a K because the AI tried to spell "recognition" correctly and failed), Clearview has opened up what could be an insurmountable lead.

Clearview has been sued, investigated, banned by law enforcement agencies, and suffered numerous self-inflicted wounds. Underneath Clearview's untried and untested AI lies an underbedding composed of the internet. The ~4 billion images in Clearview's database have been scraped from public posts and accounts hosted by thousands of websites and dozens of social media platforms.

There's nothing inherently wrong with scraping sites to make use of information hosted there. In fact, this often controversial power can sometimes be used for good. The last thing we need is Clearview's questionable tech convincing legislators, prosecutors, and courts that scraping sites is something only criminals do.

Clearview called out Google's apparent hypocrisy on the subject of site scraping when Google sent a cease-and-desist demanding it stop harvesting images and data from Google's online possessions. But Clearview is apparently unable to recognize its own hypocrisy. While it's cool with site scraping when it can benefit from it, it frowns upon others perpetrating this "harm" on its own databases.

Eerily reminiscent of Disney's take on the public domain (good when Disney uses it, bad when Disney's copyrights are set to expire) is Clearview's take on site scraping. Its user agreement [PDF] with the Evansville, Indiana police department (obtained by MuckRock user J Ader) contains this paragraph:

The use of automated systems or software to extract the whole or any part of the Service or Website, the Information or data on or within the Service or the Website, including image search results or source code, for any purposes (including uses commonly known as “scraping”) is strictly prohibited.

Pretty sure a bunch of the sites scraped by Clearview have similar clauses in their terms of use. And if Clearview doesn't believe those terms should be honored, it shouldn't expect others to give it the respect it refuses to extend to others. I don't think anyone else should necessarily be in possession of everything in Clearview's facial recognition database but I do think someone needs to scrape the shit out of it on sheer principle.

Also bundled in this package of public records is Clearview's laughable "accuracy" test. It compares itself to Rekognition and its highly publicized failure. When Amazon's tech was tested, it misidentified several DC legislators as criminals, especially those that weren't white and male.

Clearview touts its own success in this document [PDF], which covers a non-independent test of its AI performed in 2019. Here are the results:

The test compared the headshots from all three legislative bodies against Clearview’s proprietary database of 2.8 billion images (112,000 times the size of the database used by the ACLU). The Panel determined that Clearview rated 100% accurate, producing instant and accurate matches for every one of the 834 federal and state legislators in the test cohort.

LOL. This is proof of nothing. Anyone with access to a reverse image search could perform this test with the same accuracy. While Amazon's AI was tested against arrestees' mugshots, Clearview's was tested against photos and info scraped from social media profiles and public websites. Of course it was able to positively identify politicians, most of whom maintain multiple social media accounts and websites. It would only be notable if the AI had failed to perform this simple task given the wealth of information it had to work with.

In conclusion, Clearview sucks. Its tech is unproven and its policy on scraping is the apex of hypocrisy. On the other hand, the company seems to be harvesting criticism as fast as its harvesting web content, so the prognosis on its continued survival remains refreshingly bleak.

Filed Under: facial recognition, hypocrisy, scraping
Companies: clearview

The SolarWinds Hack Is Just The Same Sort Of Espionage The US Government Engages In Every Day

from the ugly-and-inconvenient-truth dept

A historic hack of unprecedented scale has set off alarms in the US government -- itself a target of suspected Russian hackers who leveraged IT infrastructure company SolarWinds' massive customer base to compromise an unknown number of victims. Among those victims were several US government agencies, including the DHS's cybersecurity wing, which announced its own breach hours after issuing a dire warning to potentially affected government agencies.

Is it time to panic? No, says the lame duck president, who claims this is already "under control" -- something that very definitely isn't true. SolarWinds says it has 18,000 customers using the affected Orion software. And many of those customers (which include Fortune 500 companies and major telcos/service providers) have thousands of customers of their own -- all of which may be operating compromised systems. The DHS said the only way to ensure systems are clear of this threat was to airgap them and uninstall the infected software.

Others who have been briefed on the hack are far less cheery about its ongoing impact. Trump tweeted there was nothing to worry about. Republican allies seem more concerned than the man who won't have to worry about this for much longer.

Shortly after Mr. Trump’s tweet, Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla), acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was “increasingly clear that Russian intelligence conducted the gravest cyber intrusion in our history.”

Mr. Rubio added on Twitter that efforts to determine the extent and damage of the hack were ongoing and that remediation would take significant time and resources. “Our response must be proportional but significant,” he said.

The 2050s will be like 1950s, apparently: with America in the midst of another Cold War.

But is it true this is the "gravest cyber intrusion in our history?" Or is it just the "gravest" intrusion that's targeted us? After all, the Russians don't have a monopoly on government-ordained hacking. Our intelligence and security agencies deploy their own persistent threats -- something we've done for years with minimal blowback. These calls for a cyber war by pundits and government officials aren't anything to be applauded. I don't think America really wants to get involved in another forever war -- one whose wins and losses can't be tallied with temporary "liberations" and body bag back orders.

Let's be cautious, says Jack Goldsmith. Better yet, let's be aware of the hypocrisy of the stance some government officials are demanding we take.

The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day.

Turning a cyber war into a shooting war isn't just an overreaction. It's illegal under international law. That doesn't mean nothing should be done about it. It just means the US government can't pretend it doesn't engage in the same activities some now want to go to war over. What's happened here might be unprecedented in scale, but it's the same thing every government with enough resources has done for years. It's not a war waiting to happen. It's business as usual.

Peacetime government-to-government espionage is as old as the international system and is today widely practiced, especially via electronic surveillance. It can cause enormous damage to national security, as the Russian hack surely does. But it does not violate international law or norms.

In recent years, the US government has deployed more offensive weapons in hopes of deterring cyber attacks. It really hasn't worked. Meeting escalation with more escalation is unlikely to change the standard operating procedures of espionage, especially since the US government hasn't rolled back its offensive efforts in the wake of massive breaches.

But there may be a way forward -- one almost impossible to achieve but promising enough it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

[The US government] has not seriously considered the traditional third option when defense and deterrence fail in the face of a foreign threat: mutual restraint, whereby the United States agrees to curb certain activities in foreign networks in exchange for forbearance by our adversaries in our networks. There are many serious hurdles to making such cooperation work, including precise agreement on each side’s restraint, and verification. But given our deep digital dependency and the persistent failure of defense and deterrence to protect our digital systems, cooperation is at least worth exploring.

There's no moral high ground to claim here. And refusing to consider bringing some of our cyber boys back home leaves us with nothing but continuous escalation. This hack is raising uncomfortable questions about our own practices. Let's see if anyone in the White House is willing to honestly confront the consequences of our own actions and find another route towards safety and national security.

Filed Under: cyber war, cybersecurity, dhs, hacks, hypocrisy, nsa, russia, surveillance, us
Companies: solarwinds

The GOP's Blisteringly Hypocritical Road From Whining About Net Neutrality To Supporting Trump's Idiotic Attack On Social Media

from the you-have-zero-credibility-whatsoever dept

Mike has already highlighted FCC boss Ajit Pai's rank hypocrisy in his support of Trump's brain fart of an executive order targeting social media. This is, after all, a guy that crowed for literally the better part of the last decade about how some modest net neutrality rules (read: some basic consumer protections aimed at policing widely disliked telecom monopolies) was "government run amok" and a "government takeover of the internet." Now, as Trump attempts to bully the FCC into policing social media giants it has no authority over, a decade worth of purported principles are somehow, mysteriously absent.

Of course this grotesque, comical hypocrisy isn't reserved to Ajit Pai.

Back in 2014, before the former FCC passed net neutrality rules, the Obama White House expressed some basic support for net neutrality (and reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under the Communications Act to ensure the FCC could enforce the rules). This wasn't anything nefarious or even unordinary. President George W. Bush urged FCC Chairman Michael Powell to vote on deregulating media ownership. Bill Clinton wrote a public letter to Chairman Reed Hundt to ban hard liquor advertising on television. Ronald Reagan urged Chairman Mark Fowler to drop his proposal to rescind the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules governing TV networks.

We've had plenty of criticisms of Obama era policy. But Obama's support of net neutrality was legal, ordinary, and had the broad support of countless experts and the majority of U.S. consumers. That didn't matter to the modern GOP. In its now well-established bad faith style, the party (with AT&T and Comcast's covert help) immediately began circulating the talking point that Obama's support of net neutrality had broken some nonexistent law, and was, as countless news outlets parroted at the time, an effort to illegally "bully" the FCC into passing what were, despite a lot of pearl clutching, some fairly basic consumer protections:

"Just as Obama used executive actions in an unprecedented fashion on immigration, so too has he now set a precedent by bullying an independent regulatory body into following political orders."

This idea that Obama had broken the law or was "bullying" the FCC by expressing support for a very popular policy position would soon be utterly everywhere. An endless sea of GOP pundits could be found writing op-eds about how the Obama White House had broken the law by simply wanting the FCC to protect consumers from telecom monopolies. That Obama was strong-arming the FCC would soon become a gospel narrative. And the rhetoric was even supported by a certain former reality TV star and failed steak salesman of note:

That was, of course, all bullshit pushed by telecom monopolies that simply didn't want to face anything even resembling accountability for decades of anti-competitive behavior. But the narrative that Obama had somehow broken the law was also a favored talking of Ajit Pai, who also, repeatedly, tried to insist that Obama's totally legal support of a policy widely supported by the vast majority of experts and real fucking human beings was somehow a nefarious, illegal government power grab:

"On November 10, President Obama asked the FCC to implement his plan for regulating the Internet, one that favors government regulation over marketplace competition. As has been widely reported in the press, the FCC has been scrambling ever since to figure out a way to do just that. The courts will ultimately decide this Order’s fate. And I doubt they will countenance this unlawful power grab. Litigants are already lawyering up to seek judicial review of these new rules. Given the Order’s many glaring legal flaws, they will have plenty of fodder."

Fast forward to 2020. Net neutrality (and FCC authority over telecom in general) is largely dead thanks to AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon lobbyists and an FCC willing to ignore both objective data and sleazy efforts to manipulate the public record. And the same GOP folks who threw a monumental hissy fit about Obama's "illegal takeover of the internet" are dead silent as a corrupt, criminal buffoon tries to bully the FCC into shoehorning an incoherent brain fart into genuine, real-world policy that ignores the Constitution, common sense, and widespread concern from an absolute chorus of policy experts.

The same folks who repeatedly claimed that natural telecom monopolies shouldn't be treated as a common carrier, have pivoted 180 to claim that non-dominant social media platforms like Twitter should be. The same folks who spent years insisting the FCC had no right or authority over the parts of the internet it actually had authority over now insist the FCC must regulate the parts it has no authority over. The same folks who whined incessantly about the perils of the Fairness Doctrine now mindlessly support something arguably worse.

All to keep social media giants from policing toxic political disinformation to protect GOP power, now highly reliant on online disinformation to gloss over what are usually, much like the net neutrality repeal, largely unpopular policies.

Net neutrality was, we were told, government utterly run amok. It was, we were told, the very worst example of government out of control. Yet here we have a corrupt and unqualified president genuinely bullying the FCC to support the most idiotic power play imaginable, and the lion's share of the GOP sits nodding in bobble-headed support. Worse, when Commissioner Mike O'Rielly made some incredibly tame statements pointing out Trump's EO might not be enforceable, he was fired, soon to be replaced by someone more willing to kiss Trump's ass. Largely to crickets by the GOP.

There's Luddite politicians engaged in inconsistent policy, and then there's what the modern GOP has become: a bad faith dog and pony show, heavily reliant on disinformation, lodged somewhere in the telecom sector, Rupert Murdoch, and Oracle's lower colon, using a stunning array of disinformation, bogus data, ever-shifting talking points, and complete bullshit to justify corruption and feckless fealty to an idiot king. When the bill comes due for the GOP's blistering hypocrisy and bad faith bullshit (and sooner or later it will come due), it's going to be incredibly well earned.

Filed Under: ajit pai, barack obama, donald trump, fcc, hypocrisy, independence, interference, net neutrality, regulations, section 230, tom wheeler

Hypocritical AT&T Makes A Mockery Of Itself; Says 230 Should Be Reformed For Real Net Neutrality

from the oh-shut-the-fuck-up dept

I regret to inform you that AT&T is at it again. For over a decade now, the company has had a weird infatuation with Google. It seems to truly hate Google and has long decided that anything bad for Google must be good for AT&T. Because Google was an early supporter of net neutrality -- a concept that AT&T (stupidly and incorrectly) seems to think is an existential threat to its own business plans of coming up with sneaky ways to spy on you and charge you more -- over a decade ago, AT&T started floating the lame idea that if it's to be held to "net neutrality" Google ought to be held to "search neutrality." Of course, there's a problem with that: there's no such thing as "search neutrality" because the whole point of search is to rank results for you. A "neutral" search would be a useless search that ranks nothing.

However, now that the FCC (who knows better) caved in to the bumptious Trump demands to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, AT&T stupidly (and self-destructively) has decided that it's going to comment against Section 230. AT&T top lobbyist Joan Marsh put up a truly spectacularly dumb blog post about how this is "the neutrality debate we need to have" (i.e., about Google and Facebook's treatment of content, rather than AT&T's treatment of network connections):

This Wednesday, the FCC will take comments on NTIA’s petition on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision enacted in 1996 to address a narrow set of concerns involving nascent internet platforms that then played only a marginal role in American life.  The purpose of the provision made sense at that moment in internet history:  Section 230 sought to insulate the newly emerging technology companies from liability risks they might otherwise face if they were deemed a publisher or speaker in the traditional sense.

First off, this is bullshit. Section 230 was not written to "address a narrow set of concerns involving nascent internet platforms that then played only a marginal role..." It was a key aspect of figuring out how the internet would work and was, in fact, driven by the concerns of various ISPs who realized that it would create massive problems if they were held liable for actions of their users on the network. This includes AT&T, though at the time AT&T in whatever form you might consider it, since the modern AT&T is really the remains of different telco companies that purchased AT&T.

Congress had no way to foresee a quarter century ago that this provision, intended to protect struggling startups at the dawn of the internet, would ultimately be wielded by the largest and most powerful companies in the world as a shield not just from unfair and frivolous lawsuits, but from what many consider to be every day responsibilities.

This is bullshit and wrong. Both authors of Section 230 have said exactly the opposite -- that Section 230 was written with the recognition of how important the internet would be and that it's working as intended. Marsh is rewriting history.

Since that time, America’s tech platforms have grown from their humble beginnings into the most powerful forces in the global economy today.  Five tech giants (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google) alone make up about 25% of the S&P 500 with valuations growing, even in a pandemic.

Marsh leaves out that AT&T itself is worth over $200 billion. It's not exactly a slouch. And when you combine it with Verizon, Comcast and others, it also represents quite a powerhouse. One that has spent the last decade especially fighting back against any form of regulatory guidelines that impact how it runs its business. It has pressured the FCC to remove pretty much all of its authority over the company. So it's truly hypocritical for it to suddenly be claiming that the FCC needs to take a stand and regulate Google and Facebook.

Meanwhile, it's always been clear that AT&T has been among the absolute worst companies regarding its treatment of consumers. AT&T is famous for jacking up prices, including hidden fees, spying on its users (or wanting them to pay more for their privacy) and handing data over to the NSA freely. Google offers most of its key services for free, has built a reputation around giving users much more control over privacy, and has fought legally against NSA attempts to collect its data. And if you look at general consumer satisfaction surveys it shows. 90% of the public likes what they get from Google. Meanwhile AT&T remains one of the most hated companies in America.

The decisions these companies make on a daily basis – which search results to rank first, which products to promote, which news stories to feature, and which third parties they will deal with and on what terms – shape virtually every aspect of America’s economic, social and political life.

What? This is... just a myth. Yes, ranking well in search can help companies, but (1) it's not everything and (2) the way you rank well in search is by... actually doing a good job in providing people what they need. Unlike AT&T.

Yet those decisions are shrouded in obscurity, away from public view, in a world where black-box algorithms and non-negotiable terms pick winners and losers in every sphere of public life.

If Google was bad at this, then people would use other search engines. But they don't. Because Google tends to give good results. Why is AT&T mad about that?

In comments this Wednesday, AT&T will join the growing consensus of voices concluding that online platforms should be more accountable for, and more transparent about, the decisions they control that fundamentally shape how we communicate, learn, shop, and are informed and entertained. We argue first that the dominant online platforms owe the public greater transparency about the choices made on their platforms. Such transparency is considered table stakes in every discussion about broadband networks owned by ISPs.

I'm not against more transparency, but AT&T is one of the least transparent companies out there. Google was the first company to publish transparency reports about things like content takedowns and (importantly) government requests for data. AT&T resisted calls to do the same for years and then when it finally agreed to do so provided significantly less data than Google. So, seriously, to argue that Google needs to be more transparent is fucking rich from AT&T.

And, again, Google did this by choice and it did so at the same time that AT&T itself was arguing that the FCC should have no oversight over its business. For AT&T to now argue that the FCC should force Google to be more transparent is the height of hypocrisy.

We also argue that Section 230 immunity should be modified to reduce the gross disparities in legal treatment that have emerged between the dominant online platforms and the traditional purveyors of third-party content, such as book publishers, newspapers, or radio and television businesses. There is no longer any reason that the nation’s most powerful online platforms should enjoy legal immunities unavailable to similarly-situated traditional companies.

This is... simply ridiculous. Section 230 protects every company on the internet the same way. Including AT&T. AT&T knows that it enjoys Section 230's protections as well. It's why no one gets to sue AT&T when an AT&T account holder does something illegal over its network.

And as the net neutrality debate soldiers on, as it surely will, the Section 230 debate and the broader tech scrutiny underway should serve as a reminder of where the power to control access to content, websites and e-services on the internet really resides – and the neutrality debate that really matters. Adopting an ISP-only “neutrality” regime is as backwards looking as it is mistargeted. It would be akin to landing the plane, but on the wrong day, at the wrong gate, and in the wrong airport.

No. Network neutrality matters because internet access is a commodity product with very, very few choices and extremely high costs (and, especially, switching costs). People want to buy access to the entire internet, not the internet of companies who paid AT&T. Meanwhile, people want Google to rank results, because that's what search is. This whole blog post by AT&T is truly ridiculous.

This is all cynical nonsense from AT&T's top lobbyist, trying to stick a knife in Google, the company AT&T has been jealous of for over a decade because Google actually provided people a service people wanted (for free) while AT&T relies on regulatory capture, hidden fees, government handouts, and destroying your privacy.

Filed Under: fcc, hypocrisy, joan marsh, net neutrality, ntia, section 230
Companies: at&t, google

French Hypocrisy: Fines Google For Being Soft On Privacy; Now Angry That Google Won't Let It Spy On Users

from the who-said-what-now? dept

We keep trying to explain to people that privacy is always about trade-offs, and arguing for privacy laws that protect "privacy" as if it's a constant thing, will run into trouble. Most of that trouble is in the form of locking in big companies, but sometimes, the trouble is in showing you why understanding trade-offs matters so much.

France has been among the most vocal critics of "big internet companies" and demanding various regulatory pressures be used to punish them. Last year it fined Google $57 million for breaching privacy laws, and appears to be angling for even larger fines.

So it's difficult not to burst out in laughter after finding out that the French government is really, really mad that Google and Apple are protecting people's privacy, when suddenly the French government wants to use those companies to engage in contact tracing. Indeed, it's literally demanding both companies ease their privacy protections to help France track people who might have COVID-19.

France has become the first country to call publicly for Apple and Google to weaken privacy protections around digital contact tracing, after its government admitted that its current plans would not work without changes to smartphone operating systems.

The issue is that, as you likely recall, earlier this month, Google and Apple collaborated on an API system to enable some form of contact tracing in various apps, but that is (a) voluntary, (b) privacy retaining (via regularly rotating identifiers), and (c) limits how much information would be sent to the government. And apparently that's getting in the way of France's more aggressive tracking plans:

France wants to deploy its app by 11 May, without using the special measures Apple and Google have put in place, which are targeted for release in mid-May. That means the country will be forced to use the more limited features already built into iOS, unless Apple changes its policies and allows for far more invasive use of the Bluetooth radio at the heart of its devices.

It's quite incredible to see this play out in practice, in France of all places. Again, the French government has been among the most vocal and aggressive in attacking Google and insisting that its privacy practices are terrible... but as soon as those privacy efforts get in the way of the French government spying on people's whereabouts, its suddenly mad at these companies for doing too much to protect privacy? Maybe Google should see if the French government wants to pay back the fines it levied before it'll take the government's requests seriously.

Filed Under: contact tracing, covid-19, france, gdpr, hypocrisy, privacy
Companies: apple, google

Comcast Apparently Feels Qualified To Give Google Lectures On Monopoly Power

from the ill-communication dept

For several years the telecom sector has been quietly trying to spur additional regulation of Silicon Valley. Why? As giants like AT&T and Comcast increasingly push into the online advertising arena, they're keen on having competitors saddled with regulation, while they successfully eliminate oversight of their own problematic monopolies. Given the FCC (now headed by a former Verizon lawyer) just effectively neutered itself at telecom lobbyist behest while the DOJ (now headed by a former Verizon lawyer) goes the extra mile to vilify Facebook, you'd have to consider the gambit fairly successful so far.

To be clear, there are plenty of problems with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley giants that require attention and intelligent solutions by objective experts. And while a huge chunk of the animosity toward Silicon Valley giants is entirely genuine and well deserved, a lot of the "big tech" hyperventilation among lawmakers like (longtime AT&T ally) Marsha Blackburn is largely theatrical in nature and being driven by the telecom sector. Ferreting out which is which isn't easy, but looking at campaign contributions can certainly help.

The mainstream press, for its part, has been oddly unaware of how much of the animosity against "big tech" has been co-opted and amplified by telecom for what should be obviously selfish reasons. For example, telecom (hand in hand with Rupert Murdoch) has been making the rounds trying to suggest that Google's support of encrypted DNS somehow runs afoul of antitrust guidelines (it doesn't). And Reuters, for example, ran a story this week suggesting that Comcast had suddenly emerged as a "new antitrust foe" for Google, levying criticism at the company's ad business for the "first time":

"Comcast, one of America’s largest media and communications companies, is wading into the epic regulatory pile-on against big tech companies such as Google, according to people familiar with the matter...Comcast may be drawing a line in the sand and wants to avoid letting Google do to the video ad business what it has done to the online ad market. It is the first time one of the most powerful companies in the United States, with its own muscular lobbying apparatus in Washington, is taking sides in the antitrust battle looming over the world’s largest seller of online ads.

So for one thing, Comcast's efforts to push for a regulatory and antitrust crackdown of Google isn't "new." The cable industry's top lobbying organization, the NCTA (whose primary backer is Comcast) has been pushing for a crackdown on Silicon Valley for several years now. Former FCC boss Mike Powell, now the cable industry's top lobbyist, had this to say at an industry show in March of last year. Take special time to note how every criticism levied at Silicon Valley giants applies equally to telecom providers:

"Our governmental authorities need to get a handle on what kind of market power and harm flow from companies that have an unassailable hold on large pools of big data, which serve as barriers to entry, allowing them to dominate industries throughout the economy. For years, big tech companies have been extinguishing competitive threats by buying or crushing promising new technologies just as they were emerging. They dominate their core business, and rarely have to foreclose competition by buying their peers. Competition policy must scrutinize more rigorously deals that allow dominant platforms to kill competitive technologies in the cradle."

While there's plenty of individuals, groups, and companies that can provide helpful insight on the problems in "big tech," Comcast isn't among them. In large part because it's guilty of nearly all of the criticisms it levies at Google. After convincing the FCC to effectively neuter itself recently, Comcast has been enjoying a growing broadband monopoly across huge swaths of the country as the nation's telcos give up on upgrading aging DSL networks. Comcast then uses that monopoly to jack up prices, erect arbitrary barriers for competitors, and stifle emerging technologies (like better cable boxes).

And while Comcast tries to get DC lawmakers to impose all manner of new restrictions on Google, with its other hand it has successfully convinced DC (and a lot of policy folks who should know better) to ignore the problems with telecom entirely. Comcast has largely been criticizing Google via its advertising subsidiary Freewheel, and via its policy and lobbying extension organizations, while leaning on politicians like Marsha Blackburn whose sudden, breathless concern about tech monopolies mysteriously omits some of tech's worst offenders: telecom providers.

Yes, countless experts have noted for a decade than US antitrust enforcement has grown toothless and frail, and our definitions of monopoly power need updating in the Amazon era. Facebook's repeated face plants on privacy (and basic transparency and integrity) have only added fuel to the fire amidst calls to regulate "big tech." That said, if we're looking for expert insight into the genuine problems posed by "big tech," maybe skip taking advice from natural telecom monopolies whose only real motivation here is to elbow in on Silicon Valley advertising revenues while saddling competitors with layers of new regulation.

Filed Under: antitrust, broadband, dominance, hypocrisy, internet, monopoly power
Companies: comcast, google

James Woods Is Correct That Twitter Shouldn't Have Blocked His Account, But Still Hypocritical On Free Speech

from the you're-no-free-speech-martyr-jimbo dept

I think we've made our general feelings about James Woods perfectly clear. After all, he's the guy who sued an anonymous Twitter user for a somewhat mild comeback that referenced cocaine usage (leaving aside that Woods himself had tweeted very similar hyperbolic tweets suggesting people he was arguing with were on crack). In the middle of that lawsuit, the (still) anonymous tweeter died, leading Woods to gloat about "winning" the case and about the guy's death. Suffice it to say, Woods is -- in our opinion -- a terrible human being. Suing someone for being mildly critical of you is bad. Gloating over their death takes you up a few notches to being a horrible human being.

That said, when Woods' own free speech is attacked via a similarly bogus defamation lawsuit over his own tweets, we didn't support the plaintiff just because it was against Woods. We noted, instead, that we hoped he won the case -- and he did.

Now Woods is in another situation, where -- somewhat incredibly -- he's trying to make himself out as a free speech warrior. It seems that Twitter suspended his access to his account because of a meme he had tweeted. It was what appeared to be a fairly obvious satirical fake meme urging men to stay home on election day to let women's vote have more weight. Woods admitted that it was "not likely" to be real, but still noted "that there is a distinct possibility this could be real." First of all, there was no such distinct possibility. Second of all... none of it makes any sense. The meme is completely nonsensical no matter what your views on these issues are.

But, for this tweet, Twitter has suspended Woods, arguing that the meme violates its terms of service because it: "has the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election." It is, of course, fairly obvious how we got here. During the 2016 election, there were a bunch of memes -- some of which appear to have been placed deliberately by state actors seeking to influence our election -- that were actual attempts to suppress the vote. The various social media players, including Twitter, have been under great pressure (including from Congress) to try to avoid a repeat of such things in 2018. And thus, they created a rule against images that have "the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election." Then, that rule is handed off to one of the hundreds or thousands of content moderators working for Twitter, and they have basically a few seconds to review the tweet and say "does this break the rule?" If you look at the rule and the tweet... and nothing else... it's not hard to see why you'd choose the option that says "yup, he violated the rule."

Of course, this is entirely lacking in context -- and even as Woods is too silly to recognize that there's zero chance that this is real. And there is similarly zero chance that anyone reading Woods' feed would look at this meme and say "oh, right, sure, I'm not going to vote now." But, as professor Kate Klonick discussed in our recent podcast, you can't write "understand the context" into the rules. It's literally not possible. So you can only expect these low wage content moderators to follow the rules as written, no matter how silly the potential results. And, applied literally, that tweet violates that rule -- even if that leads to a totally ridiculous outcome.

This is why we keep trying to point out that moderating content at scale on these platforms is a case where it's impossible to do it well. There will be lots of "mistakes" like these, because there's no other way.

That's not to say that someone at Twitter shouldn't fix it. But, it's still tricky. If Twitter changes the ruling on this, then people will claim that it's not following its own rules... and (yup) a bunch of people will get angry again.

In the meantime, Woods is ridiculously trying to turn himself into a free speech martyr over this.

“Free speech is free speech — it’s not Jack Dorsey’s version of free speech,” Woods said, referring to Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.

Dude. You sued an anonymous troll for a mild bit of criticism on Twitter. You don't get to whine about a lack of "free speech" on Twitter without basically all of us calling you a total fucking hypocrite.

Woods, not surprisingly, also seems to have no clue how content moderation on internet platforms works:

He noted that his original tweet was reposted by his girlfriend on Friday and had been retweeted thousands of times by Sunday. His girlfriend’s account wasn’t locked, which he said was proof that he’d been singled out because of his large Twitter following.

No, dude. It just means that someone reported your tweet, but no one reported your girlfriend's. Twitter isn't proactively scanning every single tweet. It's just if someone reports it, then it goes through the process. In this case, since tons of people hate follow Woods to see what crazy statement he's going to make next, it shouldn't be that surprising that someone "reported" that tweet -- and then the process described above happened.

But Woods just keeps going on a tear about his free speech apparently being suppressed... and something about knives and pillows.

“The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact, their banning of me is the truly egregious interference,” Woods said. “Because now, having your voice smothered is much more disturbing than having your vocal chords slit. If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow.”

Woods said if he deletes the tweet, it would force him to watch his step with everything he says in the future, chilling free speech.

Let's just stop for a moment and recall that Woods sued another Twitter user for a mild criticism in the midst of one of Woods' many Twitter fights and then gloated when that guy died, initially making it appear that he had "won" the lawsuit, rather than having it closed due to the death of the defendant, and then later happily saying he hoped that the dead defendant died screaming Woods' name in agony. And now he wants to whine about the "chilling" effects of Twitter saying he can't tweet? Come on.

Anyway, yes, it's silly that Twitter suspended Woods' account, and the company should probably reverse that decision, even if it's totally understandable how it came about. But none of that changes Woods being a total free speech hypocrite and a really awful human being.

Filed Under: content moderation, free speech, hypocrisy, james woods
Companies: twitter

Wikileaks Refused To Publish Manafort Family Texts, So Someone Else Did

from the hypocrisy? dept

Update: A quick correction/clarification here. The hacked texts in questions were from Manafort's daughter, rather than Manafort himself, but included texts between Manafort and his daughter, as well as other texts about Paul that his daughter sent or received. Wikileaks, for its part, says it didn't publish the texts because they weren't verified. Except that multiple people confirmed the legitimacy of those texts including Paul Manafort himself. The point of the article still stands.

We just wrote about why it would be a dangerous move for press freedom for the DOJ to prosecute Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents. In that post, we noted that even if you think Julian Assange is a horrible human being and proactively trying to undermine US electoral sovereignty, the mere act of publishing leaked documents should not be criminal. But, that doesn't mean that Assange can't be hypocritical and one-sided. Obviously, during the 2016 election, when Wikileaks helped spread both John Podesta's emails and the DNC's emails, some wondered if Assange would have published similar messages from the Trump campaign. While publicly Assange insisted he disliked both campaigns equally, other reports and leaked (of course) chat messages certainly suggested otherwise, as did at least some of his apparent attempts to ingratiate himself with Trump insiders, including asking Don Jr. to leak his father's tax returns to Assange to "dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality."

Of course, when faced with an opportunity to post the equivalent of the Podesta emails on the Trump side, it appears that Assange decided not to do it. Public records-savant Emma Best recently chose to publish the entire collection of leaked Manafort family texts in a searchable database. These texts have long been out there and available if you knew where to look -- and had received widespread reporting in early 2017. However, beyond the excerpts, they were not fully available in a way that was searchable for most users.

Best communicated with Wikileaks, who admitted that it had the entire collection as well, but chose not to publish it -- which certainly can be read as hypocrisy on Assange's part, considering the similarities with the Podesta emails. As Best notes in discussing the decision to publish these in a more accessible format:

The public haven’t had access to the messages, and the press (including high profile and high budget outlets) haven’t had access to an easily searchable version – instead only to an unwieldy database.

This was nearly not the case, however – WikiLeaks had a copy of the database, but ultimately didn’t publish it, despite its newsworthiness and their willingness to publish unredacted information on the Democrats. Their unexplained decision not to put the database into a searchable format and make it public struck me as questionable at the time, but in light of the disclosure of their preference for the GOP it has become not only questionable, but hypocritical. WikiLeaks’ decision can no longer be trusted prima facie or viewed in terms of presumed good faith.

[....]

This noteworthy refusal, along with ongoing probes and charges filed against Manafort by the Special Counsel’s office, makes the text messages and their contents undoubtedly newsworthy. Their relevance to the general public may go beyond this, as the personal reality reflected in the messages presents the Manaforts as real people, rather than merely as abstract figures. This same reality is, of course, also relevant to news and current events, and to understanding the character and actions of those involved.

There may be reasons why Wikileaks chose not to publish these texts, but the fact that it eagerly published the Podesta emails, yet held back on publishing these texts should at least raise serious questions. Obviously, every publisher makes different decisions on what to publish and what not to publish. And there's no rule saying that you absolutely must publish every "equivalent" set of data or stories. But given all of the background here, and the high profile nature of this, it is noteworthy to point out the different approaches Wikileaks chose to take with two similar sets of data on different sides of the 2016 election.

Filed Under: emails, emma best, hypocrisy, john podesta, julian assange, paul manafort, texts, transparency
Companies: wikileaks

Cable Lobby Again Makes It Clear That Net Neutrality Didn't Hurt Broadband Investment

from the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too dept

So we've long noted how giant ISPs like Comcast have repeatedly tried to claim that the FCC's fairly modest 2015 net neutrality rules utterly devastated broadband industry investment. The problem for Comcast is that any time a journalist takes the time to review publicly-available SEC filings and earnings reports, that claim is proven indisputably false. Yet, no matter how many times this complete and total fabrication is pointed out by the media, broadband industry lobbyists simply continue to repeat the claim, hoping lazy reporters regurgitate it (which still somehow happens more often than not).

Not only does the broadband sector continue to repeat this claim, they contradict themselves on pretty much a monthly basis.

The latest case in point: the cable industry's top lobbying organization, the NCTA, this week published a blog post patting itself on the back for the amazing improvements and investments made in the sector in recent years. The group cites a recent report by Akamai (pdf), which notes the United States is now tenth worldwide in terms of average broadband speeds. The NCTA is quick to applaud itself for the industry's "aggressive deployment of new technologies" by the cable sector:

"This near quadrupling of internet speeds in just five years is the result of constant innovation cycles and aggressive deployment of new technologies across the country. Thanks to the constant process of growth and improvement, Gigabit cities are springing up across the country in both urban and rural communities, further driving average speeds into the stratosphere."

Most of the sector improvements are courtesy of either scattered fiber deployments -- or cable DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades, which allow for gigabit speeds over cable. That said, the fact that many telcos have given up on the residential fixed-line broadband market means the cable sector has established a fairly impressive monopoly over next-generation broadband speeds, allowing it to ignore customer service, raise prices, and expand unpopular usage caps and overage fees. It's part of the reason why speeds (or investment) alone shouldn't be used to determine the health of the telecom market.

Regardless, over on Twitter, the NCTA is again quick to use these upgrades as a shining example of the cable industry's ongoing commitment to investing in upgrades:

The problem, of course, is that the NCTA has consistently argued that this kind of investment wasn't happening due to net neutrality protections. That's one of the central, repeated, unyielding justifications for the FCC's decision to try and kill the agency's net neutrality rules this summer. Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica is quick to highlight the raging inconsistency of this position:

"As we can see, the NCTA has flexible messaging and applies conflicting arguments to different situations. When the NCTA tells the Federal Communications Commission that it should roll back net neutrality regulations, the association says that the rules harm investment and raise prices on consumers. But when trying to convince the public that US broadband is a marvel of innovation and that we should all be grateful to cable companies, the NCTA says speeds are soaring and that customers are paying less."

In short when the cable lobby wants to market its incredible "innovation" -- it points out all of the investments into next-gen broadband speeds it has been making. When it wants to kill FCC rules protecting consumers from growing monopoly behavior, suddenly all these investments magically disappear.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, hypocrisy, investment, net neutrality
Companies: ncta