Twitter Suspends Reporter For 'Posting Private Info' That Is Merely Internal Deutsche Bank Email That Could Implicate Trump

from the content-moderation-at-scale dept

Once again, I need to refer you to Masnick's Impossibility Theorem, on how it is effectively impossible to do content moderation at scale well. The latest example? Twitter suspended the account of Scott Stedman, the founder of the investigative news site, Forensic News. A few weeks back, Forensic News had a pretty incredible scoop, highlighting how a Russian government-controlled bank, Gazprombank, sent over $500 million to the American subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, at about the same time that very same subsidiary was lending nearly $400 million to Donald Trump. Deutsche Bank has run into trouble for its handling of Russian government-connected money, including its role in helping the Russians launder money.

The new evidence appears to come from Val Broeksmit, the stepson of a former senior Deutsche Bank exec. Broeksmit's story -- as covered in the craziest NY Times article you'll ever read -- is quite incredible and worth reading up on, as it shows how he has access to all of this internal Deutsche Bank info. In this case, the key detail of interest was an internal "breach report" sent to the senior Broeksmit, showing that the bank's liabilities exceeded its assets. As the report goes on to note, an absolutely huge percentage of the American subsidiary of Deutsche Bank's liabilities were to Russia in 2013. As the article details, nearly $3 billion of its liabilities were Russian in origin, approximately triple the next largest creditor, Switzerland.

All that's very interesting, but what does any of it have to do with content moderation? Well... right after the Forensic News report went out, Stedman noted that his website was under attack, and it looks like someone went after his Twitter account as well, trying to report it. They were successful, as it turns out. At issue was one key piece of evidence that Forensic News used in its report: the emails about the "breach report." Stedman posted images of this email to show the basis of the story. And, it appears that enough people reported it to Twitter, that they suspended his account for "posting private information":

If you somehow can't see the embedded image, it shows the notice from Twitter saying that his tweet showing "the original email" about the breach report violated Twitter's rules for "posting private information... without their express authorization and permission." If you look for that original tweet now, you currently see this:

It is not difficult to see how this happened. It seems likely that a lot of folks who'd rather this story go away took to reporting various Stedman tweets to try to silence him. The reported tweets get reviewed by a content moderation staff, and one of the "rules" is no posting of private information. The evidence is someone's private email. And, so, a content moderator says "that violates the rules." Now, of course, there's supposed to be a "newsworthy exception" to content moderation practices, but is the harried outsourced moderation person, who has a giant queue to get through, going to take the time to understand that this revelation of an email was key to a pretty big news story? Of course not. There's some spam or whatnot to takedown next.

Obviously, it would be great if it were humanly possible to carefully investigate each of these reports, but if that happened, the queue would just get longer and longer and longer, and we'd hear complaints in the other direction, about how Twitter never responds to legitimate reports of tweets that violates its rules.

In the end, there's really no great answer -- though I will note that it's really only because of this effort to silence Stedman's reporting and evidence that I became aware of this story in the first place... There's some sort of name for that kind of thing, I think.

Filed Under: content moderation at scale, content moderation is impossible, emails, newsworthy, private info, scott stedman, val broeksmit
Companies: deutsche bank, forensic news, twitter

Sony Goes One Ridiculous Step Further: Threatens To Sue Twitter Over Leaked Email Screenshots

from the don't-they-have-lawyers-who-understand-the-law dept

David Boies is a bigtime lawyer -- perhaps one of the most famous lawyers around. He worked on the antitrust cases against both IBM and Microsoft. He was Al Gore's lawyer over the contested 2000 election. He was even Napster's lawyer when it got sued by the RIAA. Of course, he also represented SCO in its ill-fated lawsuits. He was Oracle's lawyer in its lawsuit against Google over the use of Java in Android. Come to think of it, Boies -- despite all his fame -- seems to come out on the losing end of an awful lot of these high profile lawsuits. And, these days, he's representing Sony Pictures in trying to deal with the hack. As mentioned, a week or so ago, he sent off a bunch of very ill-advised threat letters to news publications writing about the Sony hack (tragically, we never received one, though someone from Boies' office did appear to call us and hang up before leaving a message -- seriously). Then, we just had a story about someone from Sony threatening a Twitter user for posting screenshots from leaked emails.

But, now, Boies has taken it up a notch and is apparently threatening to sue Twitter itself for not blocking those screenshots:

The letter—sent from David Boies, the lawyer Sony has hired to help guide it through the aftermath of the hack, to Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel—says that if “stolen information continues to be disseminated by Twitter in any manner,” Sony will “hold Twitter responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by Twitter.”

You have to assume that someone with Boies' stature, or at least one of the young lawyers that must be employed by his firm, is familiar with Section 230 of the CDA, because this is a classic case in which Twitter has absolute immunity from any kind of legal threat. And just the fact that Boies would threaten Twitter over this seems monumentally stupid. Not only does it make Boies and Sony look like bumbling fools, it just calls more attention to the fact that people are tweeting details from the Sony hacks.

You can read the full letter [pdf], which was provided by Vice's Motherboard blog which broke this story, and see how ridiculous this is. Most of the letter is really focused on arguing that Twitter should kill the account of the user we mentioned yesterday who Sony is trying to intimidate. It goes through all sorts of twists and turns to argue that the user, Val Broeksmit, is breaking Twitter's terms of service and his account should be closed. It mostly focuses on the tired publishing "Stolen Information" as if that's a thing. So Boies argues that it violates Twitter's terms of service, and then throws out a somewhat random selection of laws -- almost all of which certainly don't apply to Broeksmit or Twitter:

We understand that the Account Holder’s publication of this Stolen Information is (and any other account holder’s similar use would be) in violation of numerous provisions of Twitter’s Terms of Use, including the prohibitions against (i) publishing copyrighted materials and “other people's private and confidential information... without their express authorization and permission,” and (ii) use of Twitter “for any unlawful purposes or in furtherance of illegal activities.”

The possession, use, and publishing of the Stolen Information implicates numerous federal and California state laws, including, but not limited to, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. §§ 501, et seq.), the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access & Fraud Act (Cal. Penal Code § 502), California's Stolen Property Law (Cal. Penal Code § 496), the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (Cal. Civ. Code §§ 3426, et seq.), and the California Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17200, et seq.), among others, especially when such actions are taken knowingly in furtherance of federal and state crimes committed by the perpetrators, including extortion.

Of course, here's the main problem: while some of the laws likely apply to whoever hacked Sony, basically none of them apply to someone then publishing the leaked documents. As has been explained time and time again, the First Amendment protections for publishing such information are pretty strong and there's miles of case law to support that. Boies' attempt to get around that is a massive stretch. His argument that posting this information violates Sony's copyright is, of course, ridiculously weak. The fair use arguments for publishing such info are very strong. Even worse is that the CFAA claim applied not to the original hackers, but to Twitter users posting information, seems based on Boies pretending that a terms of service violation is a form of hacking. But that's a theory (thankfully) been rejected in recent years by the courts. The state law claims also seem fairly weak on a variety of levels and just reek of piling on.

And as Popehat points out, Boies may be committing an ethical violation in using threats of criminal prosecution (under the CFAA -- which has both criminal and civil parts) to gain civil advantage -- which violates California's rules of professional conduct for lawyers. Of course, these are the kinds of rules that aren't often applied to lawyers, and especially not those with Boies' stature.

Taking it a step further, even if Broeksmit were breaking the law, Twitter is -- as mentioned -- protected from nearly all liability via Section 230 of the CDA. Not that Boies appears to care:

If Twitter does not comply with this request, and the Stolen Information continues to be disseminated by Twitter in any manner, SPE will have no choice but to hold Twitter responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by Twitter, including any damages or loss to SPE or others, and including, but not limited to, any loss of value of intellectual property and trade secrets resulting from Twitter’s actions.

Yeah, that's not how the law works. Of course, Boies brings up intellectual property because the CDA explicitly doesn't apply to intellectual property -- but, again, the IP claims raised by Boies are already pretty weak and Twitter has other pretty strong protections for the copyright side of things. Furthermore, Twitter would have a strong argument that Boies is just claiming IP as a weak attempt to get around the Section 230 protections. Finally, it would seem that this is a pretty clear attempt at a SLAPP, giving Twitter the protections of California's strong anti-SLAPP laws -- meaning that if Sony actually sued, it may have to pay Twitter for bringing a frivolous suit designed to shut people up. Basically, Boies is making a lot of noise without much legal basis -- and, in the process, calling tremendous attention to one guy who's been finding a bunch of interesting things in the emails.

We've already discussed how bad Sony's computer security strategy has been -- and now it seems like its legal strategy is equally brain-dead.

Filed Under: cda 230, cfaa, copyright, david boies, section 230, sony hack, threats, val broeksmit, vijaya gadde
Companies: sony, twitter

Sony Demands Twitter User Remove Posts Containing Images Of Leaked Documents

from the goddamn-nails-everywhere!-hand-me-my-hammer! dept

Sony's lawyer, David Boies, recently made an attempt to silence media outlets' coverage of leaked Sony documents. Without stating any legal basis for Sony's demands, Boies' letter ordered journalists to stop reporting on the leaked documents, destroy whatever they had in their possession (as if that effort would make any difference…) and sit on their hands until they received further instructions on what was/wasn't of "public interest" from the studio itself.

Needless to say, the only thing this cease-and-desist managed to do was increase the amount of criticism heaped on Sony's head. Boies presumably is still employed by Sony, as are whichever executives signed off on this suicidal move.

Sony's legal team is still hoping to shut people up, but it appears to be casting a far wider net. Jason Koebler at Vice reports that a musician who has performed his own digging into the leaked Sony docs and posted the interesting bits to his Twitter account has received legal threats from the studio.

Val Broeksmit, a California-based musician, has been combing through gigabytes worth of documents and has been tweeting out screenshots of leaked emails that he finds newsworthy for a couple weeks now. Amongst those are emails that talk about green lighting upcoming films, paying actors to tweet about films, emails sent to Sony by the purported hackers of the company (the “Guardians of Peace”), and internal bickering.

Last week, Elliott Ingram, a copyright specialist who works with Sony in the United Kingdom, reached out to warn him that if he did not delete the posts, the company would have to ask Twitter to do it for them.

This polite person-to-person request from Ingram was ignored by Broeksmit, despite the fact that it (politely) bandied about a number of legal terms for scariness' sake, like "trade secrets," "copyright" and "privacy laws." Broeksmit says he ignored it because it "didn't come from a Sony Pictures email account."

Because Broeksmit failed to cave, the threats have escalated. Gone is the cheery and accommodating British politeness. In its place is a rehash of the threatening letter sent to journalists last week, full of demands and excess capital letters ("Stolen Information," etc.)

And once again, one of the studio's lawyers (Sean Jaquez) asks for an ultimately meaningless gesture as a sign of compliance/good faith.

The email asks Broeksmit to delete his tweets and to “arrange for and supervise the destruction of all copies of the Stolen Information in your possession [and to] confirm that such restriction has been completed.”

Sure, Sony doesn't actually care if any deletion actually occurs. (Well, it cares a little.) What it wants is a leak-free future. But Broeksmit isn't caving, even if his grasp on the legality of his sharing might be a bit shaky.

“I’m not with a newspaper and I think I can get away with it,” he said. “It’s important—the reason is it’s so new and different from anything we’ve seen before. This is a billion dollar company being made bare to the public. It’s crazy I have these emails, and it’s fascinating to learn how these companies work.”

Confidence is a great thing, but a private citizen generally finds his/her rights to be a bit diminished as compared to the press, rather than vice versa.

Ultimately, it appears Sony will have to talk Twitter into removal of these tweets rather than going straight to the source. It made two pitches and missed with both. Now, it remains to be seen whether Twitter will view Broeksmit's document screenshots are actually infringing on Sony's copyrighted material. As of now, the disputed tweets are still up… and Sony's reputation is still sliding in a downward direction.

Filed Under: david boies, free speech, journalism, sony hack, threats, val broeksmit
Companies: sony pictures