Google Blocked An Article About Police From The Intercept... Because The Title Included A Phrase That Was Also A Movie Title

from the but-content-moderation-is-easy dept

A week before Christmas, Radley Balko published a typically excellent story about the police chief in Little Rock, Arkansas, Keith Humphrey. It's a good story, and you should read it. Humphrey, who was appointed police chief as part of a reformist campaign, has faced on ongoing campaign to try to take him down from stalwarts within the Little Rock police department, including a few others who wanted his job -- but mainly by the local police union, the Fraternal Order of Police. Anyway, what caught my attention was that a few days after the article went live, The Intercept reported that it had been removed from Google search due to a DMCA copyright takedown notice.

This raised a lot of eyebrows, including questions of whether or not some of the characters who come out of the story negatively were abusing the DMCA to get the story disappeared from Google. It also surprised some people who didn't realize that you could issue a DMCA complaint to Google to get something removed from search. Over the holidays, however, the actual story came out and it's even dumber and more pointless than you could have imagined, but it does highlight (yet again) just how incredibly broken the copyright system is these days.

First off, the "Google removal" bit is nothing new. Even though you might think that DMCA takedowns should only be handed to sites that actually host the content in question, hosts are only one part of the DMCA 512 rules. That's the part that most are familiar with, 512(c) with the rules for dealing with "information residing on systems or networks at direction of users." That's the part that has all the standard notification and takedown rules. But there's also 512(d), which is for "information location tools" and says that if such a tool is notified of infringement -- using the same method in 512(c) -- you have to "respond expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.

In other words, yes, if someone wants to block something from being found via Google, they can try to file a DMCA takedown claim, saying that the content is infringing. We've seen this used and abused plenty over the years. You may remember revenge pornster Craig Brittain who sought to use this system to get links to a bunch of articles about him removed from Google (this included the press release from the FTC about him settling with them for his sketchy revenge porn efforts). In fact, Brittain tried this multiple times.

Indeed, many copyright holding entities don't even bother to go after the hosting of infringing materials -- they find it more expedient to just have that content de-linked from Google. As Google notes in its transparency report, it has been asked to delete 5.5 billion URLs from its index. For what it's worth, elsewhere, Google has reported that the vast majority of URLs it is told to delete aren't even in its index -- but it's still pretty crazy. And while Google at least has a team that tries to review these requests, mistakes happen, because mistakes always happen at this scale.

In this case, this was clearly a mistake. But it's an incredibly stupid mistake, so it's worth highlighting. Notably, Google put the link to Balko's story back into Google a few hours after The Intercept publicly complained about it, but it took another week or so until the actual DMCA notice made its way to the Lumen Database where we could finally see just what caused it. Was it the annoyed Fraternal Order of Police in Arkansas? Or just other annoyed cops?

No. It was a cybersecurity company that is apparently really bad at it's job.

The notice came from Group IB a "cyber threat" company based in Singapore that claims to specialize in the "prevention of cyberattacks, online fraud, and IP protection." It claims to be an "industry-leading cybersecurity solutions provider" but it frankly looks like most of the other companies in the space which probably shouldn't exist. This notice was sent on behalf of a Russian firm: ООО "РАЗВЛЕКАТЕЛЬНЫЙ ОНЛАЙН-СЕРВИС." As far as I can tell this seems to translate into Online Entertainment Service Limited Liability Company -- about as generic a name as you can find. The company was only created in the summer of 2020, so it's a relatively new company.

And, apparently, it hired Group-IB to issue takedown notices for a bunch of Netflix shows and movies. From the notice, I would guess that the Russian company is supposed to be trying to take down Russian translations of these Netflix shows, because while all of the names listed in the notice are from Netflix, they're each listed with their English name... and their Russian name. And most of the URLs in the notice do appear to be to various sketchy film download sites. Also, in listing the "original URLs" (which are supposed to show the original copyright covered content), the notice lists both the American IMDB site URLs... and the Kinopoisk.ru links, which is a Russian IMDB-like site owned by Yandex, the big Russian internet company.

So, for example, the takedown for "Stranger Things" in this notice looks like this:

DESCRIPTION: series "Stranger Things / Очень странные дела" (2016)
ORIGINAL URLS:
01. https://www.kinopoisk.ru/series/915196/
02. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334

So... it's actually possible that this company was hired by Netflix, but that's not entirely clear. Still, how does this lead to The Intercept having its story taken out of Google? Well, one of the takedowns was for the film The Old Guard, which is a Netflix production starring Charlize Theron, released in 2020. I'd never heard of it but it gets decent reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and apparently a sequel is being made.

Of course, you still may be shaking your head as to what any of this has to do with The Intercept's story about Police Chief Keith Humphrey. But it's right there in the takedown demand:

The other URLs listed do seem to lead to sketchy download sites, meaning they likely are pirated versions of the film. But, why is The Intercept article targeted? It seems the most obvious explanation -- as stupid as it sounds -- is that the subhead to The Intercept story mentions... "the old guard" as those trying to takedown Chief Humphrey.

If you can't see that, it shows the title and sub from The Intercept:

So... the most likely explanation here, as stupid as it seems, is that Netflix has some sort of deal with this silly Russian company, which hired the Singaporean "cybersecurity" firm Group IB to try to "police" the internet of infringing works in Russia... and in their lazy Googling for infringing copies of these Netflix shows and movies, they searched for "the old guard" and just grabbed various URLs, and didn't check all of them, meaning that The Intercept's story about Chief Humphrey got caught up in the mess... and, especially over the holidays with probably a lot of Google's copyright takedown checkers on vacation, nobody caught that this was obviously a mistake until The Intercept (understandably) raised a stink.

For most normal people this would be yet another sign of how broken our copyright system has become, but unfortunately it's the way things work these days.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, journalism, little rock, radley balko, reporting, russia, takedowns, the old guard
Companies: google, group-ib, netflix, the intercept

Paper That Couldn't Be Bothered To Report On Local Police Misconduct Fires Off Editorial Insulting Writer Who Actually Did

from the unearned-superiority dept

As we recently covered here, a few Aiken, South Carolina, police officers engaged in a steady procession of Constitutional violations during a traffic stop predicated on nothing more than a (fully legal) temporary plate. Shirts were lifted and breasts exposed. At least one cop spent a considerable amount of time probing the passenger's anus. For all intents and purposes, it was a roadside raping, performed under the color of law.

The horrific traffic stop is the focus of a federal lawsuit… and a whole lot of belated scrambling by law enforcement and city officials. Radley Balko of the Washington Post, who broke the story, found himself on the receiving end of a sneering, condescending editorial by the Aiken Standard -- the local paper which had no interest in covering the lawsuit until after national internet hellfire began raining down on the town it serves.

The editorial is worth reading all the way through, if only to experience the surreality of being talked down to by an editor who wouldn't know unbiased journalism if it showed up at his desk wearing a blue uniform and told him to kill an unflattering story.

First, the editorial -- even as it throws shade at Balko for being a mere "blogger" -- acknowledges that it didn't even pick up on this story until after it had been covered at Balko's Washington Post blog. From that point, it only gets worse. These three sentences are enough to give you some idea of how underqualified the Aiken Standard editorial staff is to be entering into a heated debate over journalistic priorities or law enforcement misconduct. (It also must be noted that the paper feels perfectly fine criticizing Balko's blogging while not providing readers a link to his post so its readers can view the source material for themselves.)

We’re not criticizing the blog writer’s assertions since we are as ardent protectors of the First Amendment as is The Washington Post.

Our point is that The Washington Post blog was rooted in opinion, which is how the blog should be regarded. It’s not a news story conveying information from a neutral perspective. The incident also didn’t happen last week or even last month. It happened 17 months ago.

First off, the First Amendment not only protects criticism, it practically demands it. This editorial -- as horrendous and misguided as it is -- is the "more speech" the First Amendment encourages. If you don't like something someone wrote, write something of your own rebutting it. There's no need to pretend the First Amendment is there to saddle up your High Horse and act as your squire during your trip down the High Road. And, for that matter, the editorial does criticize Balko's assertions, along with taking cheap shots at his lowly blogger status (for the Bezos-owned paper serving one of the nation's largest subscriber bases).

As for the Aiken Standard being concerned about "neutral perspectives," it would have been nice for it to have any perspective at all prior to a mere "blogger" making public news that it should not only already have known about, but should have addressed in print months ago.

Even stupider is the idea that horrific violations have some sort of expiration date. Lawsuits take time -- generally being the tail end of a process in which other, less expensive options are exhausted first. Just because it didn't happen within the last week doesn't mean it's not worthy of coverage. But that's apparently the Aiken Standard's standard.

Towards the end of its piece, it takes time to thank law enforcement for the hard work they do when not violating citizens' rights.

Police officers face danger every day. They’re not perfect, but they lay their lives on the line every day so we can be safe.

For a paper making the claim that "opinions" from "bloggers" are worth less than its "neutral" reporting that allows "every stakeholder" to have their say, it sure sounds like the Aiken Standard is issuing absolution before all the facts are in.

Ken White at Popehat responded to the Aiken Standard's blog-slamming editorial with an opinionated blog post of his own. Again, his is worth reading all the way through, but for much different reasons than the Aiken Standard's. He calls the paper out for claiming to be the arbiter of neutrality and civility with two paragraphs that should serve as a stinging rebuke for every reporter granting law enforcement officials vast amounts of deference while still claiming to be a member of the Fourth Estate.

Civility is a good thing, even when discussing controversial subjects. It's a goal I often fall short of, but a goal nonetheless. Civility even on heated subjects is a good thing because of humility: we may be wrong about the things we are angriest about. It's a good thing because of proportionality: our sense of what is outrageous enough to provoke incivility may be idiosyncratic. It's a good thing because of perspective: the world is full of people ready to be uncivil to us about things we have every damn right to do, and if we encourage incivility we'll get what we ask for.

[...]

But civility can take pernicious forms. It's pernicious if we shy from calling out outrageous and despicable conduct. It's pernicious when we give armed government officials the benefit of the doubt because the culture tells us they're brave and nice. It's pernicious when we don't demand public explanations for conduct because the conduct is horrifying and unseemly. Most of all, it's pernicious when we decide that civility is substantive rather than procedural. Civility weighs against gratuitous shouting, insults, and threats. But civility does not require that we let the government beg the question. It does not require that we accept, as true, the premises about government power that have been served to us since birth.

Balko's response to the Aiken Standard editorial is just as damning, but his closing paragraph really nails everything the Aiken Standard got wrong when it started believing subservience to law enforcement was the same thing as "neutral reporting." If you want to sling arrows of journalistic superiority, you'd best have your shit nailed down tight.

The most important function of the press is to be a watchdog on power. I’d think that when made aware an incident such as this, caught on video, a good newspaper would start digging around to see if there had been similar incidents. (Here’s a tip for the paper’s assignment editors: If it’s happened once, it’s probably happened before.) Instead, the Aiken editorial board has chosen to praise police and local officials, and to reserve its skepticism for the publication that reported the incident. For all its derision toward me (the 665-word editorial uses the word “blog” 10 times), maybe the Aiken Standard could stand to take a lesson or two from opinion journalism. Do that, and perhaps the next time there’s national news in Aiken, the town’s newspaper will be the outlet that breaks it.

Since the point the Washington Post broke the story the Aiken Standard couldn't be bothered to cover until it became unavoidable, there's been all sorts of attentiveness from the local paper. Multiple stories have appeared covering the fallout of these officers' actions -- which includes everything from the hasty installation of a citizen complaint review board to the city asking the FBI to open its own investigation into the incident. But nowhere in this flurry of coverage will you find the Aiken Standard walking back its petty attack on Balko and his "blogging." I suppose now that it's finally performing acts of journalism, it feels it's too far above the fray to offer an apology to Balko for its snide editorial, or to its readers for its journalistic failings.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, aiken, illegal search, police, radley balko, south carolina
Companies: aiken standard, washington post

Should The Punishment For Falsely Accusing People Of A Crime Match The Punishment For The Crime Itself?

from the false-accusations-everywhere dept

Two very different stories, but both with some startling parallels.

First, Radley Balko's story about how police and attorneys in Louisiana apparently flat out lied to claim that a process server "assaulted" a police officer he was serving (in a police brutality case, no less). There are lots of details there, but suffice it to say, the process server, Douglas Dendinger, did not assault Chad Cassard at all -- even though he was soon arrested for it, and Cassard managed to present seven witnesses (including police officers and two prosecutors who witnessed Dendinger serving the papers on Cassard). Dendinger went through two years of hell because of this, before the case was dropped when cell phone videos made by Dendinger's wife and nephew showed that there was no assault at all. Police and prosecutors lying to protect one of their own? Sure, it happens. But now that it's been exposed, Balko has an important question:

Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one.

Second, we have last week's story about Total Wipes sending an automated takedown notice to Google demanding tons of perfectly legitimate, non-infringing web pages be taken out of Google's index for infringement. Total Wipes blamed it on a "bug" in its program, which would be more convincing if it hadn't happened before.

This second story has Rick Falkvinge, quite reasonably, wondering why the penalties for false takedowns aren't equivalent to the penalties for infringement, saying that this is the way it works in other parts of the law:

The thing is, this should not even be contentious. This is how we deal with this kind of criminal act in every – every – other aspect of society. If you lie as part of commercial operations and hurt somebody else’s rights or business, you are a criminal. If you do so repeatedly or for commercial gain, direct or indirect, you’re having your ill-gotten gains seized. This isn’t rocket science. This is standard bloody operating procedure.

The copyright industry goes ballistic at this proposal, of course, and try to portray themselves as rightsless victims – when the reality is that they have been victimizing everybody else after making the entire planet rightsless before their intellectual deforestation.

The irony is that at the same time as the copyright industry opposes such penalties vehemently, arguing that they can make “innocent mistakes” in sending out nastygrams, threats, and lawsuits to single mothers, they are also arguing that the situation with distribution monopolies is always crystal clear and unmistakable to everybody else who deserve nothing but the worst. They can’t have it both ways here.

Of course, his claim that this is true in "every" other area is proven somewhat false by the first story above. But the underlying factors in both cases are nearly identical, and it actually goes back to a previous concept that Falkvinge has written about: the "high court" and the "low court." The "nobility" gets a special court when they break the law, with limited consequences. The lowly commoners have to go to the "low court" where the consequences are quite severe. Falkvinge's original point is that we still seem to have the same thing today, and that's clearly shown in both stories above.

If you're in power, you can lie about things to accuse others of serious things that can have serious consequences for them, and there's no real punishment. Instead, it's brushed off as not being important -- sometimes with expressions of understanding about how "these things can happen." I'm reminded of the phrase that we "judge ourselves according to our intentions, but others based on their actions," and that seems to be partly at work here as well (though I question the "intentions" of the prosecutors who lied above). The lies are written off as minor "mistakes," whereas those accused are given no such benefit of the doubt. It's a big problem in the copyright space, certainly, but it's true in many other areas of society as well.

Filed Under: assault, copyright, crime, false accusations, high court, lies, low court, process server, punishment, radley balko, rick falkvinge
Companies: total wipes

And Another One: CNN Found 'Ripping Off' Others' Reporting

from the this-happens-all-the-time dept

Remember a few weeks back when a Washington Post reporter claimed that Gawker was "ripping off" his reporting, despite the fact that the Gawker piece linked back to the original article three times? Since then, we've noted how common it is for the mainstream press to do much worse to bloggers, quite often giving them no credit at all and pretending they came up with the stories entirely on their own.

Well, here we go again...

If you're a reader of Reason, you're probably well aware of the massive amount of work that writer Radley Balko has put into investigating Steven Hayne, a controversial Mississippi medical examiner, whose testimony and autopsy practices were called into serious question by Balko's research and reporting. Balko has spent years exposing Hayne (and some of his colleagues) for practices that, if true, are abhorrent. Balko's investigative research and reporting has been instrumental in overturning questionable verdicts. If you're looking into Steven Hayne, there's simply no way you can avoid Balko's reporting and research on the subject.

And, it appears that CNN didn't avoid Balko's research and reporting either, in its own reporting on Hayne, as a part of Anderson Cooper 360. Much of what was done by CNN appears to have come straight from Balko's research -- and sources quoted by CNN told Balko that CNN claims it found them via his articles. But, does CNN credit Balko for any of it? Nope. Not at all.

Because, you see, it's only "ripping off" when it's the "alternative media" properly citing the mainstream press... not when the mainstream press doesn't credit the alternative media at all.

As Tim Lee notes, there's nothing wrong with what CNN did, but it does show how silly it is to claim that it's these other sites or "parasitic aggregators" that "rip off" the mainstream press, when the mainstream media has been doing the same thing for ages -- and continues to do it without any qualms whatsoever. Tim notes:

Now this isn't illegal. Nor should it be. But it is rather unprofessional. And I think it's a good illustration of what's wrong with the standard story about large media organizations producing the news and blogs cutting and pasting. Not only does the sharing goes in both directions, but I think people have a skewed perception of which direction is more common precisely because blogs do a better job of crediting their sources. When Gawker builds on a Washington Post story, they don't try to pretend it was original reporting; they give credit, provide a link, and they'll often just quote the original story rather than re-interviewing all the same sources. So it's obvious who's copying whom. In contrast, when a mainstream media outlet like CNN decides to build on the reporting of an online source, they do a lot of extra (and possibly unnecessary) work to avoid giving credit. One consequence is that only in really blatant cases (like this one) does anyone catch them.

There's a clear double standard here. If it's wrong for a blogger to build a story on a mainstream media story with attribution and a link, it's even more wrong for a mainstream media outlet to build on a blogger's story without a word of credit. CNN owes Radley a prominent link to his past work. And an apology.

Indeed. But whereas the story from the Washington Post reporter kicked up a huge discussion on ethics of reporting, who wants to bet that this one dies a quiet death without the mainstream media mentioning it at all?

Filed Under: anderson cooper, journalism, radley balko, ripping off, steven hayne