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Old 07-08-19, 05:59 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 10th, ’19

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August 10th, 2019




The RIAA Targets eBay & Amazon via a Letter Sent to the US Department of Commerce
Bill Toulas

• The RIAA warns that more than one in ten of the albums that are sold on eBay and Amazon are counterfeit.
• The music rights group is calling the US government to do something about this as it’s damaging both publishers and creators.
• The pirates could soon have their identities revealed, and online commerce platforms could also be held liable.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has focused its crosshair on eBay and Amazon, accusing the online marketplaces of selling pirated CDs, box-sets, and providing copyright-infringing material and services. Thus, the RIAA has sent a letter (PDF) to the US Department of Commerce, asking the regulatory body to implement strong measures that will stop the practice of selling counterfeits and pirated music albums.

One of the main proposals to the US government is to motivate the online marketplace platforms to pinpoint the users who are involved in copyright infringement activities – and then share their names and contact information with the authorities. This way, the RIAA or other concerned stakeholders will be in a position to launch legal procedures against them, essentially putting a brake to the whole pirating process. Another suggestion involves the intermediaries, so on some occasions where the infringement is apparent, eBay and Amazon should be held liable.

Moreover, the RIAA clarifies that the differentiation between mobile websites and their standard versions should be eliminated. Online commerce should comply with the rules and regulations no matter what device or platform the pirates are using in order to carry out their damaging activities. This is to include some specialized mobile browser apps, pirating apps that are available on popular stores, and even pre-configured devices that are sold through Amazon and eBay.

The RIAA supports its official requests with evidence, as they have conducted a relevant study themselves. More specifically, they have bought multiple albums from online marketplaces and figured that 16% of those bought through eBay were counterfeit, while the corresponding percentage for Amazon was a still significant 11%. Also, 25% of the items that were marked as ‘Fulfilled by Amazon’ were still counterfeit. These are items that are shipped and sold directly by Amazon, who also provides customer support for those products. As far as AliExpress box set buys went, they were all (100%) counterfeit.

RIAA presents this practice as especially damaging one since the people who are buying counterfeit albums and box sets are not getting the level of audio quality, package quality, and artwork print that they would be expecting for the money. Many of those individuals could ultimately lose their trust toward the music publishers and the creators, and avoid purchasing a genuine album again as their idea about the product quality has been distorted.
https://www.technadu.com/riaa-target...ommerce/76463/





Oops: Japan Anti-Piracy Proposals Probably Violate Its Constitution
Timothy Geigner

For over a year now, we've been discussing a worrying trend in Japan, where the government is looking to severely ramp up its anti-piracy efforts. The worry lies in the implications of these various proposed programs, including the censorship of internet sites supposedly used for piracy, the criminalization of pirating content, and how all of this is going to impact the public. One of the largest barriers to doing any of these expansions to copyright law is the Japanese constitution and legislation, which are fairly restrictive on matters of both censorship and the invasion of privacy. How the government thought it was going to route around those provisions is anyone's guess.

But it seems there is confidence that it can do so, as every new proposal coming out looks to in some way violate Japan's constitution. The latest involves putting a system in place that would delivery popup warnings to anyone visiting a site that is deemed to be a "pirate site."

Additional proposals suggested that Internet users could be confronted with popup warnings when they visit pirate sites, either as an alternative to blocking, a deterrent, or to help people differentiate them from legal offerings. However, that plan is being viewed as a potential invasion of privacy too. A report compiled this week by an expert panel with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has concluded that such popup warnings could infringe citizens’ right to secrecy of communications.

Asahi reports that in order to make this kind of system work, Internet service providers would first need to obtain consent from their subscribers so that monitoring their attempts to access certain sites would remain legal. The publication says that after the panel sought opinions from the public on the proposal, it was “bombarded by emails” sent by people calling for the plan to be rejected on privacy grounds.


That this does represent an invasion of privacy not allowed by Japanese law and the constitution is a fairly straight forward conclusion. Is it an invasion of privacy for the government to monitor the internet usage of its citizens? Yes, as Japan's legal system has already concluded. Can the government serve popup warnings to citizens for visiting certain websites without monitoring what sites they visit? No, it obviously cannot. Where the ambiguity is in any of this is beyond me.

And so it seems the government is pushing ISPs to be their privacy-invading intermediaries.

Nevertheless, some ISPs have agreed to begin trialing a popup warning system during the fall, in order to assess its effectiveness. That will mean them first having to explain to their users that they wish to monitor their online behavior and then obtain legal permission to do so.

Given a choice between being monitored by their ISP or not, it seems unlikely that many Internet users – if they actually understand the proposition – will willingly have someone watch over their communications.


Gee, let's see. So, the only way this all complies with Japanese law is if the ISPs do the monitoring of sites to serve popup warnings about piracy, but to do so requires the expressed opt-in permission of the very people who are supposedly visiting piracy sites? Dear Mr. Pirate: would you consent to having us monitor your internet usage and warn you when you're doing pirate-y things?

This is obviously absurd and I expect the plan to be rejected. It would be much better for the entertainment industries pushing these proposals to be transparent in what they really want: a change to the Japanese constitution and law to allow the government and/or private interests to invade the privacy of all citizens, just because they think it will allow them to make a bit more coin without having to adapt to the modern digital world. Although, put that way, it's hard to see how that flies with the Japanese public either.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...titution.shtml





YTS Under Increasing Pressure as Another Lawsuit is Filed Against it
Bill Toulas

• YTS received yet another lawsuit from a copyright owner, and so did 16 individual pirates.
• The plaintiffs are after the identity of the website’s owner and provide IPs as evidence.
• YTS has momentarily stopped the uploading of new titles, but no announcements were made.

It looks like copyright holders have agreed to take down YTS through coordinated action, as the hugely popular movie torrent site has just received the third lawsuit from a US company since the beginning of the year. Following a trodden practice, the plaintiffs are also targeting sixteen Hawaiians who have had involvement in the pirating of the firm titled: “Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil and Vile”. The plaintiff is the production studio “Wicked Nevada LLC”, and the attorney who has submitted the complaint to the Hawaii US District Court is the usual suspect, Kerry S. Culpepper.

YTS.lt is the “go-to” platform for people who are looking for a movie to watch, currently the 285th most popular website on the internet. It features 720p and 1080p torrents, a user-friendly interface, a dedicated platform with synchronized subtitles, user reviews, comments, trailers, and all that one could ask for from a pirate website. This is why it counts millions of visitors, and why film production studios want to wipe it out. Last month, we saw that this pressure started to take its toll to the current owners of YTS, as a representative approached Kerry Culpepper to discuss an extrajudicial settlement. In the same time, the movies that were presented in that lawsuit were removed from the YTS database.

The lawsuit uses the fictitious name “John Doe” because the plaintiffs have no way of knowing the real name of the owner of the platform. As they point out, the domain was registered by a London-based organization called TechModo Limited which was dissolved by the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales on April 30, 2019. However, the plaintiffs did take note of the defendant’s IP address when he logged into the website’s Cloudflare account, and actually provide five samples of this evidence. Now, the plaintiffs ask the court to allow a third party to investigate and find the real identity of “John Doe”.

In regards to the individual pirates, they are accused of participating in the BitTorrent swarm that shared the aforementioned film, thus inducing, causing, and contributing to its distribution without having a permit or consent from the owner of the copyrights. This act is considered direct copyright infringement, so the damage compensation that is proposed involves not only the losses from potential sales but also price erosion and the diminution of the copyright value of the particular work.
https://www.technadu.com/yts-under-p...t-filed/76415/





Dropbox Transfer Tests Direct Sharing of Files up to 100GB

Send copies of files (even the big ones) with this new Dropbox feature.
Anna Washenko

Dropbox is adding a new option for how its users can share files. Dropbox Transfer introduces a way to send files between people rather than simply sharing access for collaboration.

Files can be dragged and dropped directly from your computer or from within Dropbox storage. When you’re ready to send, Dropbox will create a link that can be shared with anyone so that they can have their own copy. The original file will remain in your possession. Transfer lets you send files of up to 100GB, a big leap over the file cap for sharing on most email services.

If you’re using Dropbox Transfer in a professional capacity, you can customize the download page to show your own uploaded image or just to set a different stock background color or artwork.

There are also options for securing the files you send. The Transfer links can have a password applied to them or set an expiration date. If you want, you can be notified that the file has been received and track how many times the link has been accessed.

Dropbox Transfer is currently in beta testing. It is slated to roll out to all users soon, but Dropbox didn’t provide any further details about its timeline to fully launch the transfer option.

Many tech companies have gotten on the bandwagon of file-sharing programs, meaning that Dropbox has more competition now than when it launched back in 2008. It has faced a few security issues over the years, including a theft of nearly 7 million alleged username/password pairs in 2014 and a hack that impacted 68 million accounts in 2016.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019...s-up-to-100gb/





Dropbox Reports Wider Net Loss, Paying Users Up

Dropbox Inc on Thursday reported a wider second-quarter net loss and said the number of users paying for its file sharing services rose slightly from the previous quarter.

Shares of Dropbox fell about 6% in extended trading.

Net loss widened to $ 21.4 million, or 5 cents per share, for the second quarter ended June 30, from $4.1 million, or 1 cent per share, a year earlier.

The file sharing platform has been unable to attract more paid users despite its try-to-buy freemium offer, strengthening market concerns about its inability to convert users into paid users.

Dropbox said the number of paying users rose to 13.6 million from 13.2 million in the prior quarter and 11.9 million a year earlier. Analysts had expected 13.4 million paying users, according to FactSet.

Average revenue per user rose to $120.48, narrowly missing estimates of $120.8, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Dropbox's revenue rose 18% to $401.5 million, beating the average analyst estimate of $400.9 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Excluding items, it earned 10 cents per share, above expectations of 8 cents per share.
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/dropb...20190808-01347





Netflix Under Pressure: Can a Hollywood Disruptor Avoid Getting Disrupted?
Natalie Jarvey

With a subscriber miss, ballooning costs, competitors circling and an existential need to produce more in-house hits, the dominant streamer may be starting to look a lot like — gasp! — one of the entertainment giants whose world it turned upside down.

Over the course of a few days this spring, each top talent agency was summoned to Netflix's extravagant For Your Consideration space in Hollywood, where the reps were plied with snacks and drinks before content chief Ted Sarandos unfurled dizzying presentations about the streamer's growing original programming needs.

It was the second time that Netflix had hosted this series of showy gatherings, and several attendees noted a stark contrast between 2018, when executives were confident to the point of boastfulness, and this year, in which they projected a more humble air. The message received by multiple attendees: We come in peace.

Netflix is at an inflection point. After a half-decade of near unchecked dominance in the premium streaming video space that allowed it to aggressively poach entertainment's top executives and A-list creative talent, the company now finds itself under attack. Threatened by its rise, and newly bulked up by a series of mergers and acquisitions, legacy studios Disney, WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal have begun pulling their programming off Netflix and prepping the launch of their own streaming services. Add in Apple's planned TV platform, and four very well-funded, content-packed new rivals will hit the market within the next year.

"Competition is changing their business," says MoffettNathanson partner Michael Nathanson. "They're transitioning to a more uncertain model. They have to make more original content and it has to be as good as anyone's."

With a market-leading 152 million global subscribers, 10 percent of TV screen time in the U.S. and a several-year head start, Netflix may be too big to fail. But that hasn't stopped a growing chorus of questions over how long the "Netflix bubble" can last. Its ballooning costs — analysts estimate that it will spend between $10 billion and $15 billion on content this year — means it burns through cash ($3 billion in 2018). Its current debt load is $12 billion.

Worries ratcheted up July 17 when the company reported its first subscriber loss in the U.S. in eight years. Its high-flying stock came crashing down 15 percent, erasing $24 billion in value in less than a week. "It's notable that they lost subscribers before they lost a meaningful amount of content and before there was direct competition from their suppliers," says Wedbush's Michael Pachter, a noted Netflix bear. "This suggests they will face additional pressure when they lose content later this year and as their current [licensing] contracts with Warner Bros., Fox, Disney and NBCU expire."

Mounting expenses and an insatiable need for hits — if these problems sound familiar, well, that's because for most media executives, they are. As it matures, Netflix looks less like a high-flying tech interloper and more like the entertainment company it's come to think of itself as. As one insider sums it up, "In a world where Netflix is no longer the underdog and no longer has to prove itself, it is behaving much like the studios."

***

Netflix's refusal to play by Hollywood's rules — dropping episodes all at once, not releasing ratings, overpaying up front for top creative talent in exchange for no backend profits — has been a source of external tension and envy. But the studios have gotten savvy to its ways and have started to fight back. With $71.3 billion in Fox assets now in its portfolio, Disney wields significant firepower in negotiations (it has also begun to eliminate many backend deals); and with the backing of AT&T, WarnerMedia doesn't have to think twice about shelling out $500 million to keep J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot in the family.

With Apple in the mix, and Amazon and Hulu both upping their spending, in-demand creators have more options than ever. "That sort of shiny, new toy quality that Netflix had a couple of years ago, I'm not feeling so much in the marketplace," says ABC Entertainment president Karey Burke. "People who do really care about telling stories that last for many seasons, they're starting to turn back to cable and broadcast as really viable, if not optimal, alternatives."

One reason, sources say, is that Netflix deals aren't always as lucrative as they once were. Its cost-plus model, in which it pays a premium up front for full ownership, might be a fine deal for a mediocre show but cuts profit participants out of the big payout that once came with a long-running hit. "We don't make a lot of money when we do a deal at Netflix now," gripes one producer with a show at the streamer. "They're not throwing around cash the way they used to."

Netflix also isn't keeping its shows around for very long. It's become standard practice for the streamer to cancel a project after a second or third season, cutting creators off from bonuses that don't kick in until later seasons — though Netflix insiders argue that someone who creates a hit for the streamer ultimately is paid handsomely. Cancellation decisions have been hard for creative partners to understand because viewership metrics have historically been opaque. Talk within dealmaking circles has centered on Netflix's internal metric — dubbed "efficiency" — for determining if a show is worth renewing. The simplest definition of efficiency, per sources, is the ratio of the show's cost to number of viewers, though Netflix is said to place more value on luring new subscribers or keeping those who seem in danger of canceling.

Still, the lack of transparency has led to confusion around the cancellation of critical darlings like One Day at a Time and Tuca & Bertie. "T&B is critically acclaimed and has repeatedly been called one of the best new shows of the year," Tuca & Bertie creator Lisa Hanawalt tweeted July 24 after she learned her show would be ending. "None of this makes a difference to an algorithm, but it's important to me."

While there are frustrations at Netflix as there are at any studio, the streamer is still one of the most talent-friendly places in town, which explains why everyone from the Obamas to Beyoncé to Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss to Adam Sandler inked deals there. "There is an empowerment of the creative process at Netflix that is genuinely unique in my experience," says Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy, who signed an exclusive TV deal there in 2017. "Over the course of a dozen feature films and TV shows made for more traditional studios and networks, I've never encountered such an absence of committee-think, so little bureaucratic interference."

Netflix has been especially aggressive in poaching talent from Disney ahead of the launch of Disney+. In addition to showrunners Shonda Rhimes and Kenya Barris (who were both at ABC), it has inked deals with Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch, High School Musical director Kenny Ortega — "They're giving me a voice" — and Doc McStuffins creator Chris Nee, who says, "Netflix was offering me a creative home where I could [tell stories] that didn't necessarily fit in the Disney brand. That creative freedom felt like an opportunity I could not turn down."

Talent will continue to work with Netflix as long as it is able to write big checks, says Pachter. "I'm optimistic that Shonda Rimes, Ryan Murphy and Kenya Barris will make great shows," he adds, "although it's likely that each will produce no more than one or two over the next five years."

Netflix also is changing the way it talks about viewership on its platform. While there's nowhere near the level of data available about its originals that there is about traditional broadcast and cable shows, the company has started to release select, unverified audience numbers — like when it reported in July that nearly 41 million households had watched at least one episode of the third season of Stranger Things in its first four days. "The viewing numbers for our show, and the transparency about how those numbers ranked relative to other shows and movies, that was thrilling information," says Levy.

Per sources, a month after a show's launch, Netflix often schedules a call with the creative team to discuss how many people watched either one episode or the whole series after its first week and first month on the service. "We are trying to get to a place where we can be a lot more transparent both with our producers and with our customers," Sarandos told investors in April.

***

In 2018, when Netflix received more Emmy nominations than HBO — then tied for most wins — it appeared to signal a changing of the guard. But one year later on July 16, HBO was back on top with a record-setting 137 nominations, 20 more than Netflix. The next day, the company was dealt another blow, reporting that it had added a fewer-than-expected 2.7 million subscribers, including a loss of 130,000 U.S. members, during its second quarter. "It's easy to overinterpret the quarter membership adds, which are a bit noisy," CEO Reed Hastings told investors, adding that he expected to add a substantial 7 million subscribers during the third quarter.

One cited explanation for the miss was a price increase that had gone into effect in the spring, raising the cost of its standard plan in the U.S. to $13 per month (hikes historically impact subscriber renewals for a period of time). Hastings also placed blame on the quarter's content, which didn't draw enough new subscribers.

After years of riding the wave of cord-cutting, Netflix appears to be rubbing up against market saturation in the U.S., where it has just over 60 million subscribers. "Those who haven't moved [to streaming] yet are less likely to move in the immediate future," explains media consultant Matthew Ball, an Amazon alum.

International is where the majority of the company's growth will come from in the years ahead — experts have pegged the potential market at between 700 million and 800 million outside of China, where Netflix doesn't operate — but it's in the U.S. that Netflix will face the most competition from an influx of new streamers. "The story will become whether they can sustain their U.S. subscriber level, if not try to push it up a little bit more, in the face of this rising competition," says Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen.

Its rivals aren't going easy on Netflix. Disney took the first shot with the news that it would stop licensing its films to the streamer as it prepares an October launch of its $7-per-month Disney+, which will be loaded with IP from Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm. Then WarnerMedia and NBCU pulled back The Office and Friends for their services. Netflix says no one show makes up more than a percent or two of its overall viewing hours. But in the aggregate, the loss of that programming could change its brand identity.

"I can tell you what an HBO show is," says Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof, who has an overall deal with Warner Bros. TV, about one of the advantages that a legacy business has in the streaming wars. "What is a Netflix show versus a Hulu show versus an Amazon show? I can't answer that question."

Few analysts expect Netflix's subscriber base to take a hit once consumers have more options, but they do predict that people will be more likely to turn their subscriptions on and off based on what they want to watch. "If you want to cancel HBO and Showtime on linear, you spend an hour on Sunday calling your cable provider," says Nathanson. "Now, churn is just a click away."

All this competition also has had a less-publicized effect: It's making Netflix executives more poachable. Fully trained in the ways of working for a streamer, they're desirable candidates for top jobs at the coming services — even if it's hard to match the sky-high salaries that Netflix has used to lure executives for the past several years. Disney+ recently recruited two such executives, including Matt Brodlie, who focused on YA acquisitions like To All the Boys I've Loved Before.

Netflix is proud of the transparent, decentralized corporate culture it has created, and executives credit employee freedom for its ability to move fast and grow so quickly. But that environment also has been put to the test as Netflix ballooned to 7,100 employees at the end of 2018. The company's quarterly two-day leadership meetings have grown so large — between 600 and 800 employees — that there are only a few spaces that can hold them, often the Langham Hotel in Pasadena (though July's event saw staffers fly to Iceland). For creative partners, the sheer number of development executives has made it a challenge to know who to call with a hot show. Per a creative partner, one powerful vp didn't have clear answers when asked about how to pitch a specific project to the company.

Those agency gatherings this spring were supposed to address such questions. But one attendee said he walked away more confused than before: "I didn't get a great understanding of the Netflix mission other than world domination."

Lesley Goldberg contributed to this report.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fe...-pains-1229618





Libraries are Fighting to Preserve Your Right to Borrow e-Books
Jessamyn West

Librarians to publishers: Please take our money. Publishers to librarians: Drop dead.

That's the upshot of Macmillan publishing's recent decision which represents yet another insult to libraries. For the first two months after a Macmillan book is published, a library can only buy one copy, at a discount. After eight weeks, they can purchase "expiring" e-book copies which need to be re-purchased after two years or 52 lends. As publishers struggle with the continuing shake-up of their business models, and work to find practical approaches to managing digital content in a marketplace overwhelmingly dominated by Amazon, libraries are being portrayed as a problem, not a solution. Libraries agree there's a problem -- but we know it's not us.

Public libraries in the United States purchase a lot of e-books, and circulate e-books a lot. According to the Public Library Association, electronic material circulation in libraries has been expanding at a rate of 30% per year; and public libraries offered over 391 million e-books to their patrons in 2017. Those library users also buy books; over 60% of frequent library users have also bought a book written by an author they first discovered in a library, according to Pew. Libraries offer free display space for books in over 16,000 locations nationwide. Even Macmillan admits that "Library reads are currently 45% of our total digital book reads." But instead of finding a way to work with libraries on an equitable win-win solution, Macmillan implemented a new and confusing model and blamed libraries for being successful at encouraging people to read their books.

Libraries don't just pay full price for e-books -- we pay more than full price. We don't just buy one book -- in most cases, we buy a lot of books, trying to keep hold lists down to reasonable numbers. We accept renewable purchasing agreements and limits on e-book lending, specifically because we understand that publishing is a business, and that there is value in authors and publishers getting paid for their work. At the same time, most of us are constrained by budgeting rules and high levels of reporting transparency about where your money goes. So, we want the terms to be fair, and we'd prefer a system that wasn't convoluted.

With print materials, book economics are simple. Once a library buys a book, it can do whatever it wants with it: lend it, sell it, give it away, loan it to another library so they can lend it. We're much more restricted when it comes to e-books. To a patron, an e-book and a print book feel like similar things, just in different formats; to a library they're very different products. There's no inter-library loan for e-books. When an e-book is no longer circulating, we can't sell it at a book sale. When you're spending the public's money, these differences matter.

Library users know that you can make a copy of a digital file essentially for free. So when we tell them, "Sorry, there is only one copy of that e-book, and a waitlist of over 200 people," they ask the completely reasonable question, "Why?" In Macmillan's ideal world, that library patron would get frustrated with the library and go purchase the e-book instead. And maybe some people will do that. In the library's ideal world, we'd be able to buy more copies of the book, and even agree to short-term contracts, if it meant that more people had access to the books they wanted to read, when they wanted to read them. This was not an option on the table.

Macmillan did not at all enjoy it when Amazon removed the "Buy" button from their titles, and yet this is what they are trying to do to libraries.

Macmillan, complaining that libraries were "cannibalizing" their sales, tried to spin this move as one that "ensure[s] that the mission of libraries is supported." But our mission is not supported by having to spend staff time and energy on complex per-publisher agreements that inhibit our users' access to the content they want -- content that we are willing to pay for.

Their solution isn't just unsupportive, it doesn't even make sense. Allowing a library like the Los Angeles Public Library (which serves 18 million people) the same number of initial e-book copies as a rural Vermont library serving 1,200 people smacks of punishment, not support. And Macmillan's statement, saying that people can just borrow e-books from any library, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how public libraries work. Macmillan isn't the first of the "big five" publishers to try to tweak their library sales model to try to recoup more revenue, but they are the first to accuse libraries of being a problem for them and not a partner.

Steve Potash, the CEO of e-book digital distributor OverDrive, came out with a statement saying "publishers and authors are best served by offering multiple, flexible, and reasonable terms for libraries and schools to lend digital content." OverDrive runs the Panorama Project, a data-driven research project which researches the impact of library holdings on, among other things, book sales. He offered some actual data on Macmillan's claims, and painted a different picture.

The American Library Association has denounced this model using strong language, but perhaps it's time for libraries to do more than grumpily go along with whatever gets foisted upon us. Sixty-four percent of US public libraries are members of consortia for e-book purchasing. Maybe it's time we got together and decided to spend more of the public's money with businesses who want to do business with us, who don't just consider us "a thorny problem," while also not understanding how we operate.

Lowering barriers to access to information for all Americans is a public good. Public libraries exist in large part because they are necessary to a functioning democracy. People who participate in civics and elect their own legislators require free access to impartial information so that they can stay informed. Creating barriers to that access -- barriers that disproportionately affect those who are hardest to serve -- is a short-sighted move, and highlights the very real conflicts between capitalism and community.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/02/o...est/index.html





CASE Act Tackles Online Copyright Abuse, But Critics Call The Cost Too High
Janet Burns

In July, members of the federal Senate Judiciary Committee chose to move forward with a bill targeting copyright abuse with a more streamlined way to collect damages, but critics say that it could still allow big online players to push smaller ones around—and even into bankruptcy.

Known as the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, the bill was reintroduced in the House and Senate this spring by a roster of bipartisan lawmakers, with endorsements from such groups as the Copyright Alliance and the Graphic Artists' Guild.

Under the bill, the U.S. Copyright Office would establish a new 'small claims-style' system for seeking damages, overseen by a three-person Copyright Claims Board. Owners of digital content who see that content used without permission would be able to file a claim for damages up to $15,000 for each work infringed, and $30,000 in total, if they registered their content with the Copyright Office, or half those amounts if they did not.

Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge, and the Authors Alliance have opposed the bill, which such critics argue could also end up burdening individuals and small outfits, while potentially giving big companies and patent trolls a leg up.

Katharine Trendacosta wrote in an EFF post on the matter earlier this month, "We’ve seen some version of the CASE Act pop up for years now, and the problems with the bill have never been addressed satisfactorily. This is still a bill that puts people in danger of huge, unappealable money judgments from a quasi-judicial system—not an actual court—for the kind of Internet behavior that most people engage in without thinking."

In fact, in its present form, the bill establishes that content which is used without thinking does fall under the purview of the Copyright Claims Board—though reports of potential $15,000 fines for sharing memes are an obvious exaggeration.

According to the bill, "The Copyright Claims Board may not make any finding that, or consider whether, the infringement was committed willfully in making an award of statutory damages." The Board would, however, be allowed to consider "whether the infringer has agreed to cease or mitigate the infringing activity" when it comes to awarding statutory damages.

Ernesto Falcon argued in another EFF post last month that the bill would also present censorship risks, given that the current legal system for content "takedown" notices, as defined by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), is already abused.

Under the new, additional framework, Falcon wrote, "[An] Internet platform doesn’t have to honor the counter-notice by putting the posted material back online within 14 days. Already, some of the worst abuses of the DMCA occur with time-sensitive material, as even a false infringement notice can effectively censor that material for up to two weeks during a newsworthy event, for example."

He continued, "The CASE Act would allow unscrupulous filers to extend that period by months, for a small filing fee."

As The Verge noted, the Copyright Alliance and Graphic Artists Guild both praised the bill's reintroduction in May, which came against a backdrop of national discontent toward Big Tech.

The Copyright Alliance wrote in a May statement, “For more than a decade, individual creators and small businesses have been advocating for a change in the copyright law to address an inequity that has routinely provided them with rights but no remedies.”

The Graphic Artists Guild wrote in a statement at the time, "[Graphic] artists see their work repeatedly infringed by those who use their works without permission or compensation, creating a loss of licensing income which can be devastating to individual creators and the small businesses they represent." The group also wrote that the cost of legal recourse will "often dwarf the potential recovery."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwb...cost-too-high/





Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits Could Come to Regular Internet Users Under a New Law Moving in the Senate
Ernesto Falcon

The Senate Judiciary Committee intends to vote on the CASE Act, legislation that would create a brand new quasi-court for copyright infringement claims. We have expressed numerous concerns with the legislation, and serious problems inherent with the bill have not been remedied by Congress before moving it forward. In short, the bill would supercharge a “copyright troll” industry dedicated to filing as many “small claims” on as many Internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill’s statutory damages provisions. Every single person who uses the Internet and regularly interacts with copyrighted works (that’s everyone) should contact their Senators to oppose this bill.

Easy $5,000 Copyright Infringement Tickets Won’t Fix Copyright Law

Making it so easy to sue Internet users for allegedly infringing a copyrighted work that an infringement claim comes to resemble a traffic ticket is a terrible idea. This bill creates a situation where Internet users could easily be on the hook for multiple $5,000 copyright infringement judgments without many of the traditional legal safeguards or rights of appeal our justice system provides.

The legislation would allow the Copyright Office to create a “determination” process for claims seeking up to $5,000 in damages:

“Regulations For Smaller Claims.—The Register of Copyrights shall establish regulations to provide for the consideration and determination, by at least one Copyright Claims Officer, of any claim under this chapter in which total damages sought do not exceed $5,000 (exclusive of attorneys’ fees and costs). A determination issued under this subsection shall have the same effect as a determination issued by the entire Copyright Claims Board.”

This could be read as permission for the Copyright Office to dispense with even the meager procedural protections provided elsewhere in the bill when a rightsholder asks for $5000 or less. In essence, what this means is any Internet user who uploads a copyrighted work could find themselves subject to a largely unappealable $5,000 penalty without anything resembling a trial or evidentiary hearing. Ever share a meme, share a photo that isn’t yours, or download a photo you didn’t create? Under this legislation, you could easily find yourself stuck with a $5,000 judgment debt following the most trivial nod towards due process.

Every Internet User Could Face Life-Altering Money Judgments Thanks to Statutory Damages

Proponents of the legislation argue that the bill’s cap on statutory damages in a new “small claims” tribunal will protect accused infringers. But the limits imposed by the CASE Act of $15,000 per work are far higher than the damages caps in most state small claims courts—and they don’t require any proof of harm or illicit profit. The Register of Copyrights would be free to raise that cap at any time. And the CASE Act would also remove a vital rule that protects Internet users – the registration precondition on statutory damages.

Today, someone who is going to sue a person for copyright infringement has to register their work with the Copyright Office before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication, in order to be entitled to statutory damages. Without a timely registration, violating someone’s copyright would only put an infringer on the hook for what the violation actually cost the copyright holder (called “actual damages”), or the infringer’s profits. This is a key protection for the public because copyright is ubiquitous: it automatically covers nearly every creative work from the moment it’s set down in tangible form. But not every scribble, snapshot, or notepad is eligible for statutory damages—only the ones that U.S. authors make a small effort to protect up front by filing for registration. But if Congress passes this bill, the timely registration requirement will no longer be a requirement for no-proof statutory damages of up to $7,500 per work. In other words, nearly every photo, video, or bit of text on the Internet can suddenly carry a $7,500 price tag if uploaded, downloaded, or shared even if the actual harm from that copying is nil.

For many Americans, where the median income is $57,652 per year, this $7,500 price tag for what has become regular Internet behavior would result in life-altering lawsuits from copyright trolls that will exploit this new law. That is what happens when you eliminate the processes that tend to ensure only a truly motivated copyright holder can obtain statutory damages.

Censorship of Speech Will Become More Pervasive Under this Legislation

Another major problem with the CASE Act is how it transforms a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Notice into a long-term censorship tool. Under current law, if a copyright holder submits a takedown notice to an online platform alleging that your post infringed their copyright, you have a right to file a counter-notice if you disagree. There are many times when false takedown claims occur on the Internet and perfectly lawful speech is suppressed, and counter-notices are an important, though flawed, check on abuse. But the CASE Act would allow a party that filed a takedown notice to also bring a claim with the new “small claims” tribunal. When they do so, the Internet platform doesn’t have to honor the counter-notice by putting the posted material back online within 14 days. Already, some of the worst abuses of the DMCA occur with time-sensitive material, as even a false infringement notice can effectively censor that material for up to two weeks during a newsworthy event, for example. The CASE Act would allow unscrupulous filers to extend that period by months, for a small filing fee.

If all these outcomes sound terrible to you and you want to send a clear message to Congress not to move forward, then you need to contact your Senators right away to tell them you oppose the CASE Act (S. 1273) and want them to oppose it on your behalf.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...-under-new-law





Dish Network Scores Early Victory in Copyright Litigation
Michael Kolcun, Robins Kaplan

After filing a number of lawsuits, Dish’s effort to combat the piracy of its satellite TV programming is starting to pay off.

Just days ago, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a permanent injunction and awarded Dish $400,000 from a Massachusetts man who was intercepting its broadcasts. As the federal court explained in its order, Dish transmits its programming to satellites that then relay an encrypted signal back down to Dish’s 14 million subscribers. The resulting TV shows, motion pictures, and sports broadcasts—which Dish’s authorized equipment unencrypts—are all copyrighted works, whose owners have granted Dish the authority to protect from unauthorized reception and viewing. Here, the individual defendant was able to watch Dish Network for free by joining an online pirating service called DSSLegends, which offers control words to decrypt Dish’s signal without having to subscribe for its service.

The court found the defendant had violated both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Federal Communications Act by trafficking the control words to access and view Dish Network’s programming. In doing so, the Court permanently enjoined him from the practice and awarded Dish statutory damages of $10,000 for each of the defendant’s 40 violations, resulting in a final judgment of $400,000 plus interest and costs.

Although judgment was entered by default because the defendant failed to answer and defend the suit, Dish’s 6-figure recovery should serve as a deterrent for any similar acts of copyright piracy.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/di...tory-in-48632/





Comcast Expands Internet Essentials to all Low-Income Households

The cable giant will more than double the number of households eligible for its low-cost broadband.
Marguerite Reardon

Comcast is expanding its inexpensive Internet Essentials program to all low-income households throughout its entire service area, opening up the program to individuals with disabilities, as well as to senior citizens. The expansion of the program will more than double the number of households that can access the $9.95 a month service, increasing it to about 7 million.

The program was introduced eight years ago to help impoverished children who received free or reduced-price lunches at school get access to the internet at home. The program has been modified 11 times to expand the eligibility requirements to include low-income veterans and people receiving public housing benefits. A pilot in several cities has also offered the service to qualifying senior citizens.

This latest expansion is the largest to date and brings in people with disabilities, a group Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen says is disproportionately left out of the digital experience.

"According to research, people with disabilities are about three times more likely to say they never go online," he said on a call with reporters Tuesday. "They're also nearly 20 percentage points less likely to subscribe to broadband at home."

Cohen said this latest expansion is the culmination of the company's goal, when it started the program in 2011, to "meaningfully and significantly close the digital divide for low-income Americans."

"The Internet is arguably the most important technological innovation in history," Cohen said. "And it is unacceptable that we live in a country where millions of families and individuals are missing out on this life-changing resource."

Closing the digital divide

News of Comcast's expansion comes at a time when the Federal Communications Commission, Congress and President Donald Trump have talked a lot about the digital divide, focusing primarily on connecting people in rural communities who don't have access to broadband infrastructure.

But there's also a digital divide between affluent and low-income households in cities and suburbs where service does exist. That divide is worse for cities with the highest levels of poverty. According to US Census data, households living in cities with the highest poverty rates are up to 10 times more likely than those in communities with higher levels of income not to have broadband at home. For example, in Palo Alto, California, or Bethesda, Maryland, where poverty rates are very low, 94 percent of households are connected to the internet. But in Trenton, New Jersey, and Flint, Michigan, where poverty rates are way above the national average, 60 percent or more of households don't have broadband at home.

There are several reasons for this divide between internet haves and have-nots, with affordability being only one piece of the puzzle, explained Cohen. The main barrier is what Cohen said is a "complex mix of digital literacy, skills, fear and a lack of perceived need or interest in having the internet at home." The second and third barriers include the lack of an internet capable computer and the cost of a monthly home internet subscription.

Internet Essentials tries to address all three issues, by providing low-cost service and affordable computers for under $150, which are subsidized by Comcast. But the company also works with dozens of nonprofits throughout the country that provide free digital training to help provide the digital literacy needed to get people to utilize the program.

The Technology Policy Institute's John Horrigan, who helped write the FCC's 2010 National Broadband Plan, has researched the barriers to closing the digital divide. He's also looked closely at Comcast's program. Results from a survey conducted earlier this year of more than 1,200 Internet Essential customers found that digital training is the key to getting people to use the service.

Horrigan added that Internet Essentials customers are eager for more training. He said about 35% of Internet Essentials customers who responded to the survey within three months of signing up for service had received digital skills training since getting service. But a large number said they were interested in some form of training, with about two-thirds, or 66%, interested in training on the privacy and security of their data. About 60% were interested in how to better communicate with their children's school, and 52% were interested in job or workforce development training.

"If the program's goals are to get people online, and for online access to help people improve their lives, then training resources -- typically at community anchors such as schools and libraries -- are key, as are initiatives to make sure people are aware of them," Horrigan said.

Cohen admitted the expansion of the program would likely put pressure on its existing community partners, like the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. But he said the company will also tap into already established relationships with other groups to help provide necessary digital training to new populations that'll be served under the program.

"We've got existing relationships with virtually every major disability organization in America, at the National and the local level," he said. "And we intend to rely very heavily on those relationships to help us to reach people with disabilities, and provide the same level of services. The Boys and Girls Clubs are creating programs for families with kids in school and for families with school-age children."

The criticism

There's also been some criticism of Comcast's program. The biggest one is that speeds for the Internet Essential customers is capped at downloads of 15 Mbps. The FCC has defined broadband services as those that deliver at least 25 Mbps downloads.

Cohen pushed back at this notion. He said 15 Mbps is "more than sufficient for our internet essentials customers to do everything on the internet that they need to do." For instance, he said, this is plenty of bandwidth to access educational programs or to stream multiple videos in the home at once. He also pointed out that the modem provided to families at no additional charge as part of the program also provides free Wi-Fi at home to connect multiple devices at once.

He also criticized the FCC for using 25 Mbps as the benchmark for defining broadband.

"With all due respect to the FCC, I think that the judgments that they have made around what it is that represents 'broadband' are as much politically driven as they are substantively driven," he said. He added that there has been no suggestion from the FCC that the 15 Mbps download speeds "are not more than sufficient to be able to provide a high quality internet experience."

He also pointed to the fact that Comcast has raised the connection speed for Internet Essentials, which started at downloads of 1.5 Mbps, four times since 2011.

"I think we've earned our chops in making the representation that it's our goal to get people connected to the Internet," he said. "We think we're in a sweet spot right now with the program and 15 Mbps downloads. But if that changes, as we've already done four times previously, we'll take a look at the speeds again."

How to qualify

To be eligible for Comcast's program, applicants need to show that they're participating in one or more government assistance programs, such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI). A full list of these programs can be found at www.internetessentials.com.

Comcast already accepts applicants who have a student eligible to participate in the National School Lunch Program, live in public housing or receive HUD Housing Assistance, including Section 8 vouchers, or participate in the Veterans Pension Program, as well as low-income seniors and community college students in select pilot markets.
https://www.cnet.com/news/comcast-ex...me-households/





New York City Neighbors Build Cheaper Way to Connect to Web

NYC Mesh is an all-volunteer community creating its own high-speed internet service
Anne Kadet

Last week, on a sweltering Monday afternoon, Luke Gerke was pacing in front of his East Village home in Manhattan, engaged in that all-too-familiar pastime: Waiting for a technician to install his internet service.

Only in this case, the rep who showed up wasn’t a uniformed service person from Spectrum or Verizon. It was a smiling neighbor who lives blocks away. Dressed in black jeans and a ball cap, Brian Hall arrived towing his installation gear on a handcart.

“Hey Brian!” said Dr. Gerke.

Mr. Hall is a volunteer organizer with NYC Mesh, a band of New Yorkers building their own internet service.

The Mesh, as they call it, is a volunteer-run nonprofit. Members typically donate $20 a month for a high-speed connection that’s more than fast enough to stream video.

Commercial service providers turned internet access into business, said Mr. Hall, a software programmer who took a career break to devote himself to the Mesh. But that’s not how it has to be. “We’re creating our own network so we can turn it back into a free network,” he said.

Dr. Gerke said he’s joining the Mesh because he wants to support an alternative. “I feel like the internet is a human right. I can afford Spectrum, but what if I couldn’t?” the radiologist asked. “What would I do?”

The Mesh also includes members such as Linda Justice, a retired East Village artist living on Social Security. She uses the service to send email from her 10-year-old computer.

“Sometimes if I don’t have money, I don’t pay, and then catch up the following month,” she said. “They don’t bother me or harass me.”

Up on the roof of Dr. Gerke’s building, which was sizzling in the 90-degree heat, Mr. Hall unpacked his kit—a roll of cable, pliers, wrenches, a battery pack—and pointed a small antenna toward a larger antenna several blocks south that the Mesh maintains as a hub serving the neighborhood.

The Mesh maintains a “super node” antenna and 31 hubs throughout lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn that collectively serve about 350 residences. It recently installed an additional super node in Sunset Park, expanding its territory deeper into Brooklyn.

Leslie Zhu, a fellow Mesh volunteer and a grad student studying data analytics, helped Mr. Hall test the signal strength. Many of the 50-odd Mesh volunteers are millennials like herself who are concerned about internet affordability, privacy and neutrality, Ms. Zhu said. They like the idea of a network operating under community rather than corporate control.

“Plus the people are nice,” she said. “It’s a great community.”

An hour later, in Dr. Gerke’s apartment, the volunteers drilled a hole in an exterior wall for the Ethernet cable. While Mr. Hall is slim, he had a hard time reaching through a narrow window to snake the wire inside.

Installation usually takes three hours. New members have been paying a $110 hardware fee plus $50 for installer expenses. As more donations come in, the Mesh can start offering free installation to people who are broke, Mr. Hall said.

When it grows to about 1,000 members, he added, it can hire its first support person. Currently, members rely on volunteers to fix problems, a prospect some find alarming.

Indeed, a Spectrum spokesman said its standard rates—which start at $66 a month—represent an excellent value as they include installation by well-trained professional technicians and 24/7 service. Spectrum said it also offers a slower $15-a-month connection to eligible low-income families and seniors. Verizon declined to comment or reveal its Fios rates.

While it’s still small, the Mesh has come a long way since its beginnings as an informal meetup. It was a struggle to get anyone to join the network, said Mr. Hall, who installed the first antenna in 2014, connecting his East Village apartment to the nearby d.b.a. bar in Manhattan.

Service was spotty at first as volunteers tinkered with network architecture. “Whenever there was a heavy rain, it would go out for a day in the East Village,” Mr. Hall said.

Even now, some members maintain a backup connection in case of outages.

But the fact that the Mesh is up and running with more than 300 members represents a singular accomplishment. It’s the only substantial community network of its kind in the U.S., said Katie Jordan, senior policy adviser for North America with the Internet Society, a global nonprofit advocating online access for all.

“We’re very grateful they’re leading the charge and doing so well,” she said. “They’re creating a great model for other mesh networks.”

Three hours into the installation effort, Mr. Hall fired up his laptop to test the connection speed in Dr. Gerke’s apartment: “68 megabits down and 69 up,” he reported.

It was a strong connection, many times faster than the speed needed to stream high-definition video.

“This is awesome,” said Dr. Gerke, who promptly named his wireless connection after his daughter.

The Mesh won’t replace Spectrum and Verizon any time soon, Mr. Hall said, but it gives New Yorkers another option. “It’s becoming part of the way the city does internet. You can become part of our community,” he said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-yor...eb-11565100000





Streaming Media Player Growth Slows, Smart TVs Step Up
Colin Dixon

New research data shows that streaming media player growth is flattening. However, the number of connected TV homes continues to grow strongly, thanks to smart TV.

Streaming media player growth slows

New research from Parks Associates shows that 39% of US broadband homes own a streaming media player (SMP) box or stick, an increase of just 1% from 2018. The slow growth is in close agreement with data released last month from comScore. The company says that 49% of Wi-Fi households have an SMP, up 1% from 2018.

Parks goes on to say that the SMP market in the US is essentially a two-horse race. Roku and Amazon Prime Video SMPs own almost 70% of the market. Roku is ahead with 39% to Fire TVs 30%. However, Fire TV devices are growing faster. Roku’s share increased 2% while Fire TV grew 6%. Apple TV and Google Chromecast are a long way back in third and fourth places respectively, with well under half the penetration of Roku.

Smart TV growth remains strong

According to comScore, the growth of all connected TV devices remains strong. The company says 64 million Wi-Fi homes streamed content to a connected TV in March 2019, up 7% from one year earlier. That said, growth seems to be slowing there too, as connected TV streaming homes increased by 19% between 2017 and 2018.[i]

Though smart TV growth has cooled somewhat in the last year, it remains strong. Smart TVs carried the growth load over the previous year. The number of homes streaming content to a smart TV in March 2019 increased by 23%, to 29 million. Growth between 2017 and 2018 was 31%.

Smart TVs put Roku over the top

Roku dominates the connected TV world in the US much more strongly than the Parks data suggests. Roku CEO Anthony Wood said:

“We estimate that Roku TVs sold by our OEM partners accounted for more than one-in-three smart TVs sold in the U.S. in Q1, as we gained significant market share.”

Data from IHS Markit seems to back up his claim. Both Roku and Amazon license their TV operating systems to TV manufacturers. However, it looks like Roku is far ahead in the market. Roku OEM TCL became the biggest shipper of TVs in the US market for the first time in the first quarter of 2019, ahead of giant Samsung. Another Roku OEM, Funai, was the fifth biggest shipper. No Amazon licensee appeared in IHS Markit’s top five list.

Strategy Analytics says that in the first quarter of this year, there were 41 million Roku smart TVs and SMPs in use, accounting for 15.2% of all media streaming devices. It also expects the company to increase to an 18% share, or 52 million devices by the end of the year.

It is a different story in Europe. There Amazon Fire TV dominates, with Apple TV a distant second.

Why it matters

Connected TV growth remains strong, though the device driving the increase has switched.

Previously, streaming media players dominated connected TV growth. Now it is the smart TV.

Roku dominates the connected TV market in the US.

[i] nScreenMedia uses the following definitions for TV devices. Smart TVs have internet connectivity built and can stream online video directly. Streaming media players are devices dedicated to delivering online video to a television set. A connected TV is a television that can display online video via any means, including smart TVs, SMPs, game consoles, connected Blu-ray players, and connected DVRs.
https://nscreenmedia.com/streaming-m...t-tvs-step-up/





Lawmaker Aims To Curb Social Media Addiction With New Bill
Abigail Clukey

In the latest action against major tech companies, freshman Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill on Tuesday — the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology, or SMART, Act — that would ban "addictive" social media features.

Most social media platforms are known for their infinite scrolling effect, which allows users to see all of the content on their newsfeeds in one visit to the site if they continue to scroll to the bottom of the page. If the bill was passed, users would have to actively refresh their Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds after a scrolling limit is exceeded.

Similarly, instead of having YouTube videos load automatically one after the other with autoplay, users would have to find and click on the next video themselves. The "Snapstreak" on Snapchat, which requires users to send photos to each other at least once every 24 hours in order to maintain the "streak," is another "addictive" feature that Hawley's bill would prohibit.

The senator's goal is to discourage users from continuously engaging with social media products. His bill also proposes new features that would be part of a "user-friendly interface," including time limits for each app of 30 minutes per day and frequent reminders of how long a user has been browsing a certain platform. Individuals could change the time limit, but it would reset to 30 minutes every month.

"Big Tech has embraced a business model of addiction," Hawley said when announcing the bill. "Too much of the 'innovation' in this space is designed not to create better products, but to capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away."

This isn't the first time that technology has been a topic of discussion on the Senate floor, and the government still hasn't decided on the most effective way to regulate Big Tech. After questioning key individuals from companies such as Facebook and Google about data security issues in hearings, many lawmakers remain skeptical of the power these companies wield.

Hawley has been challenging Big Tech since he was elected in 2018. Before he introduced the SMART Act, he sponsored bills relating to children's online privacy, data collection and social media bias.

The 39-year-old senator has also lobbied tech executives and regulators during his short term. He drafted a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this year explaining his desire to mitigate Facebook's impact on American society. "The burden to protect the American people from forces parasitic on our national life and on our economy is on me and my colleagues," Hawley wrote.

Hawley and fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas wrote to the Federal Trade Commission last month, asking the agency to open an investigation into the issue of tech censorship. In a May op-ed, in which he called Facebook, Twitter and Instagram parasitic, Hawley said that social media has done more collective harm than good, and he even went so far as to say that it would be better if these sites didn't exist at all.

Though this bill wouldn't ban social media entirely, it was met with resistance from tech experts and other lawmakers immediately after its announcement. Some critics chimed in online and said its proposals would restrict both tech companies and users too much. Others said the science behind social media addiction has yet to be proven.

Shoshana Weissmann, social media manager and fellow at the policy research organization R Street Institute, tweeted that issues related to social media weren't the federal government's problems to fix. Though some of the features the bill mentions can be used in harmful ways, taking them away would interfere with how many Americans use apps.

"In certain cases, surely it can be nefarious, but just like any tool, it has good and bad, and he ignores all of the good that it does," Weissmann told NPR.

While Hawley's bill alleges that certain social media features "substantially impede freedom of choice," Daisy Soderberg-Rivkin, also a fellow at R Street Institute, said that prohibiting these features would more likely diminish the user's autonomy.

"He treats users a lot of the time like they're this kind of mindless drones who have no ability to make their own decisions," Soderberg-Rivkin said. "But at the end of the day, he has to realize that empowering users to make their own decisions will go a lot further than imposing restrictions by the government."

So far, Hawley's bill has no backing in the Senate.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/03/74708...-with-new-bill





Terminating Service for 8Chan
Matthew Prince

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan. Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre. In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled “open letter” on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.

8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare's service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.

We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we’ve considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive — regardless of the content of those websites. Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs it effectively undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.

What Will Happen Next

Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem.

I have little doubt we'll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online. It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we've solved our own problem, but we haven't solved the Internet's.

In the two years since the Daily Stormer what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence. We will continue to work within the legal process to share information when we can to hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence. We believe this is our responsibility and, given Cloudflare's scale and reach, we are hopeful we will continue to make progress toward solving the deeper problem.

Rule of Law

We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often. Some have wrongly speculated this is due to some conception of the United States' First Amendment. That is incorrect. First, we are a private company and not bound by the First Amendment. Second, the vast majority of our customers, and more than 50% of our revenue, comes from outside the United States where the First Amendment and similarly libertarian freedom of speech protections do not apply. The only relevance of the First Amendment in this case and others is that it allows us to choose who we do and do not do business with; it does not obligate us to do business with everyone.

Instead our concern has centered around another much more universal idea: the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent. While it has been articulated as a framework for how governments ensure their legitimacy, we have used it as a touchstone when we think about our own policies.

We have been successful because we have a very effective technological solution that provides security, performance, and reliability in an affordable and easy-to-use way. As a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network. 10% of the top million, 17% of the top 100,000, and 19% of the top 10,000 Internet properties use us today. 10% of the Fortune 1,000 are paying Cloudflare customers.

Cloudflare is not a government. While we've been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it. Questions around content are real societal issues that need politically legitimate solutions. We will continue to engage with lawmakers around the world as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable in their countries through due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.

Europe, for example, has taken a lead in this area. As we've seen governments there attempt to address hate and terror content online, there is recognition that different obligations should be placed on companies that organize and promote content — like Facebook and YouTube — rather than those that are mere conduits for that content. Conduits, like Cloudflare, are not visible to users and therefore cannot be transparent and consistent about their policies.

The unresolved question is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law? That's closer to the situation we have seen with the Daily Stormer and 8chan. They are lawless platforms. In cases like these, where platforms have been designed to be lawless and unmoderated, and where the platforms have demonstrated their ability to cause real harm, the law may need additional remedies. We and other technology companies need to work with policy makers in order to help them understand the problem and define these remedies. And, in some cases, it may mean moving enforcement mechanisms further down the technical stack.

Our Obligation

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. At some level firing 8chan as a customer is easy. They are uniquely lawless and that lawlessness has contributed to multiple horrific tragedies. Enough is enough.

What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward. We, and other technology companies like us that enable the great parts of the Internet, have an obligation to help propose solutions to deal with the parts we're not proud of. That's our obligation and we're committed to it.

Unfortunately the action we take today won’t fix hate online. It will almost certainly not even remove 8chan from the Internet. But it is the right thing to do. Hate online is a real issue. Here are some organizations that have active work to help address it:

• Anti-Defamation League
• Gen Next Foundation
• Perspective API
• 7 Cups

Our whole Cloudflare team’s thoughts are with the families grieving in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio this evening.
https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/term...ice-for-8chan/





Cloudflare Ditches 8chan. What Happens Now?

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince announced Sunday that his company would stop providing protection for internet for 8chan, after a series of mass shooting manifestos were posted on the forum.
Lily Hay Newman

The internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare said it would cut service on Sunday evening to 8chan, the infamous online forum that has housed numerous posts and manifestos linked to horrific mass shootings in the United States and around the world. The move comes nearly two days after a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart left 20 dead and dozens wounded. The alleged gunman appears to have posted his manifesto on 8chan 20 minutes before the shooting. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spoke with WIRED Sunday night about his decision.

Cloudflare provides infrastructural support, like content delivery services and DDoS protection, to 19 million online properties. Revoking that support can effectively shut a site down, at least until it finds a new provider. But the company has long maintained that it should not serve as an arbiter of speech online, with one notable exception: Cloudflare severed ties with the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer two years ago.
Lily Hay Newman covers information security, digital privacy, and hacking for WIRED.

As pressure mounted in the wake of the El Paso shooting, Cloudflare at first maintained that it would not drop 8chan. But by Sunday evening, the company had reversed course.

"8chan has been on our radar for a long time as a problematic user," says Prince. "But we have a responsibility, which is much beyond ‘we terminate sites we don’t like.’ I’m nervous about whether we’ve made the right decision, and I’m nervous about how this will set precedent in the future."

Prince argues that rather than Cloudflare, platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter should decide what belongs on their own sites. Cloudflare shouldn't make those calls any more than asphalt should set speed limits. The major platforms can, and do, moderate their own content and manage violent, destructive trends themselves—even if it's been an imperfect system in practice. But Prince says that he didn't account for platforms like 8chan that are intentionally created as a forum for unregulated expression.

"When you have platforms that are effectively lawless like this, then maybe that shifts the responsibility further down the stack," Prince says. Looking at Daily Stormer and now 8chan, Prince says that Cloudflare is attempting to find the line where "a site has shown repeatedly that it is causing active, real harm."

Cloudflare gets requests from individuals, institutions, and governments worldwide to take down sites every day, though, because of their alleged real-world harm. It doesn't act on those requests precisely because that allegation is so subjective. As a result, the actual parameters for what merits a takedown remain extremely murky.

And even when Cloudflare takes the step to unilaterally cut service, nothing stops those shunned sites from buying the services they need elsewhere. The Daily Stormer, for example, was back online within a couple of days, albeit harder to find. And though Google stopped indexing 8chan back in 2015, taking some wind out of its sails, the site has still managed to become a go-to for hate speech of all sorts and, of late, mass shooters spreading their extremist propaganda.

"Some of you might’ve read the @Cloudflare news already," a Twitter account associated with the site posted on Sunday evening. "There might be some downtime in the next 24-48 hours while we find a solution."

Even if 8chan itself somehow never reemerges, which seems unlikely, discussions like those hosted on the forum can easily move to another platform. 8chan itself grew out of the forum 4chan in 2013. Meanwhile, the anything-goes social network Gab went down temporarily last fall, because its providers—including the domain registrar GoDaddy and web host Joyent—dropped it after the alleged shooter in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting made threats on the social network. But Gab came back as soon as other companies stepped in to provide services. Cloudflare stuck with Gab throughout.

Infrastructure providers have the power to let a site go down, and maybe even do it irreparable damage in the process. But the internet was built to be decentralized precisely to protect speech, so regardless of what you think of the precedent Cloudflare is setting, 8chan will likely be back soon, something Prince readily acknowledges.

"The real thing that kills me is that at the end of the day [dropping 8chan] doesn’t actually fix the problem," Prince says. "It solves the problem for us, but it doesn’t solve the problem for the internet. It doesn't address the core causes of why hate festers online."
https://www.wired.com/story/cloudfla...-support-ddos/





8chan Is a Megaphone for Gunmen. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Creator.
Kevin Roose

Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive.

“Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, ‘All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan connection,’” he said about the online message board he started in 2013.

It didn’t take him long to find one.

Moments before the El Paso shooting on Saturday, a four-page message whose author identified himself as the gunman appeared on 8chan. The person who posted the message encouraged his “brothers” on the site to spread the contents far and wide.

In recent months, 8chan has become a go-to resource for violent extremists. At least three mass shootings this year — including the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif. — have been announced in advance on the site, often accompanied by racist writings that seem engineered to go viral on the internet.

Mr. Brennan started the online message board as a free speech utopia. But now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists.

And it has become a focal point for those seeking to disrupt the pathways of online extremism. On Sunday, critics characterized the site as a breeding ground for violence, and lobbied the site’s service providers to get it taken down. One of those providers, Cloudflare, a service that protects websites against cyberattacks, said it would stop working with 8chan on Sunday night. And Mr. Brennan, who stopped working with the site’s current owner last year, called for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence.

“Shut the site down,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”

Mr. Brennan, who has claimed that he got the idea for 8chan while on psychedelic mushrooms, set out to create what he called a free speech alternative to 4chan, a better-known online message board. He was upset that 4chan had become too restrictive, and he envisioned a site where any legal speech would be welcome, no matter how toxic.

The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of GamerGate — a loose reactionary collection of anti-feminist video gamers — flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan.

Since GamerGate, 8chan has become a catchall website for internet-based communities whose behavior gets them evicted from more mainstream sites. It hosts one of the largest gatherings of supporters of QAnon, who claim that there is an international bureaucracy plotting against the Trump administration. And it has been an online home for “incels,” men who lament being “involuntarily celibate,” and other fringe movements.

“8chan is almost like a bulletin board where the worst offenders go to share their terrible ideas,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s become a sounding board where people share ideas, and where these kinds of ideologies are amplified and expanded on, and ultimately, people are radicalized as a result.”

8chan has been run out of the Philippines by Jim Watkins, a United States Army veteran, since 2015, when Mr. Brennan gave up control of the site.

The site remains nearly completely unmoderated, and its commitment to keeping up even the most violent speech has made it a venue for extremists to test out ideas, share violent literature and cheer on the perpetrators of mass killings. Users on 8chan frequently lionize mass gunmen using jokey internet vernacular, referring to their body counts as “high scores” and creating memes praising the killers.

Mr. Brennan, who has a condition known as brittle-bone disease and uses a wheelchair, has tried to distance himself from 8chan and its current owners. In a March interview with The Wall Street Journal, he expressed his regrets over his role in the site’s creation, and warned that the violent culture that had taken root on 8chan’s boards could lead to more mass shootings.

After the El Paso shooting, he seemed resigned to the fact that it had.

“Another 8chan shooting?” he tweeted on Saturday. “Am I ever going to be able to move on with my life?”

Mr. Watkins, who runs 8chan along with his son, Ronald, has remained defiant in the face of criticism, and has resisted calls to moderate or shut down the site. On Sunday, a banner at the top of 8chan’s home page read, “Welcome to 8chan, the Darkest Reaches of the Internet.”

“I’ve tried to understand so many times why he keeps it going, and I just don’t get it,” Mr. Brennan said. “After Christchurch, after the Tree of Life shooting, and now after this shooting, they think this is all really funny.”

Mr. Watkins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Over the weekend, 8chan’s critics tried a different tack to get the site shut down, by pressuring the site’s service providers, including its web host, to cut off Mr. Watkins.

One of these providers, the security company Cloudflare, initially indicated on Sunday that it would not cut off 8chan’s access to its network. But later in the day, Cloudflare said it would ban the site after all, depriving Mr. Watkins of a critical tool for keeping the site online.

Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief executive, said the decision to shut off 8chan’s protections was made after determining that the site had allowed an environment of violent extremism to fester, and that 8chan ignored complaints about violent content in a way that larger platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, have not.

“We’ve seen a pattern where this lawless community has demonstrated its ability to create real harm and real damage,” Mr. Prince said of 8chan. “If we see a bad thing in the world and we can help get in front of it, we have some obligation to do that.”

Another company, Tucows, which controls 8chan’s domain name registration, had no plans as of Sunday evening to disable the site’s web address.

“We have no immediate plans other than to keep discussing internally,” said Graeme Bunton, manager of public policy at Tucows.

In the early days of 8chan, Mr. Brennan defended the right of 8chan users to post anonymously, without censorship. And he dismissed incidents of harassment or violence by users of the site as the price of being an open forum.

“Anonymity should not be taken away from everyone just because of a few bad apples,” he told Ars Technica, the technology website, in a 2015 interview.

But more recently, Mr. Brennan, who has begun attending a Baptist church, has tried to persuade Mr. Watkins to shut down the site. He and Mr. Watkins live near each other in the Philippines, he said, and he often drives past Mr. Watkins’s house on his way to church.

Mr. Brennan said that other websites, like Facebook and Twitter, also play a role in spreading the kinds of violent messages that often originate on 8chan. But he said that those sites have been more proactive about removing dangerous content, making them less appealing venues for a would-be terrorist.

“Shutting it down, having these chan sites pushed underground, it wouldn’t totally stop these kinds of things from happening,” he said. “But it wouldn’t happen every few months.”

Mr. Brennan said he doubted that Mr. Watkins makes money from 8chan, since it is free to use and costly to maintain, and since its toxic content has made it radioactive to advertisers. (In a 2017 interview, Mr. Watkins said of running 8chan, “It doesn’t make money, but it’s a lot of fun.”) And Mr. Brennan is hopeful that sustained pressure on Mr. Watkins and his son will get them to change their minds eventually, and take down 8chan for good.

“How long are they just going to allow this to go on?” he asked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/t...manifesto.html





Russian Authorities 'Secretly' Shut Down Moscow's Mobile Internet: Report
Zak Doffman

Unsurprisingly, online reports of issues with Moscow's mobile internet on two recent Saturdays—27 July and 3 August have now been attributed to actions by the country's law enforcement agencies. Unsurprising because on those same days, mass protests were held in the center of the city. The city's three main network operators—MTS, MegaFon and VimpelCom—explained this was due to "overcrowding." But the suspicion was that it was something more nefarious than that.

Back in April, Moscow's CIO Eduard Lysenko told me that the city's goal is to "use technology to provide citizens with better services." Clearly, that goal diminishes if those citizens are protesting against President Vladimir Putin. Almost 700 people were arrested in the protests on August 3, as thousands of demonstrators came face to face with heavy-handed police tactics and with hundreds of officers flooding the city.

BBC Russia claims to have seen an internal letter to call center employees in one of those operators that substantiates suspicions that the mobile internet was deliberately jammed by the city's authorities. "Colleagues," the letter says, "in the Presnensky and Basmanny districts and in the center of Moscow, a number of base stations are disabled at the request of law enforcement agencies."

The letter added that this information was not to be publicly disclosed, there would be a subterfuge instead. "The company does not recognize the presence of an incident in these areas of Moscow." Customers asking what had impacted their internet were to be told "there were no difficulties in providing services on the part of the company."

The disruption began as the protests were about to start; voice calls were unaffected but the mobile internet ceased to function.

Of the three operators, only MegaFon responded to a BBC request for comment, saying "they had not received any requests from law enforcement agencies to restrict communication services." Neither MTS nor VimpelCom (operating as Beeline) offered any comment. Unofficial responses blamed overcrowding in the city. Russian operators are subject to federal laws that mandate the suspension of communication services at the request of security agencies or the regulator Roskomnadzor. Those same laws prohibit any disclosure that such a request has been made.

"Unfortunately," Megafon told the Moscow Times, "sometimes the presence of a large crowd of people in a limited space leads to an overload of existing 4G networks, which have their own limit on the number of subscribers in one cell and the size of the data transfer channel." Separately, a VimpelCom spokesperson told a Russian broadcaster that "temporary overloads" had impacted its network on August 3

Russia’s Internet Protection Society has said that this is the first state-mandated shutdown of Moscow's mobile internet in this way. The suspensions lasted for between 7 and 11 hours and were likely effected by switching base stations to "GSM-only" mode. There was a similar suspension in the republic of Ingushetia in October, during a protest against a border deal with Chechnya, but this was a first for the capital.

NetBlocks also confirmed "technical evidence of a targeted internet shutdown in Russia on Saturday 3 August 2019 as demonstrators took to Moscow’s streets."

The state control of Russia's internet has generated headlines in recent months as the government seeks to take more control. There have been restrictions placed on internet companies within the country and a framework introduced into law to enable the Russian internet to be separated from the world wide web if required to maintain national security. The legislation allows the government to mitigate "threats to the stable, safe and integral operation of the Russian Internet on Russian territory" by centralizing "the general communications network," formalizing plans for an alternative domain name system (DNS) for Russia such that it can be severed from the World Wide Web. Internet service providers can also be ordered to disconnect from foreign servers, shifting services to Russia's DNS instead.

This has drawn obvious parallels with the state control over the internet in China. There, recent demonstrations in Hong Kong have seen signifiant state interference in online platforms to monitor and control protests.

The linkage between the approaches to technology and the internet in Moscow and Beijing has been a wider theme this year as a technology "Cold War" has emerged. Now those linkages seem to be growing stronger, with Russia perhaps learning lessons from China's levels of state internet control.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoff.../#868bf7375bf0





Turkey Moves to Oversee all Online Content, Raises Concerns Over Censorship

Turkey on Thursday granted its radio and television watchdog sweeping oversight over all online content, including streaming platforms like Netflix and online news outlets, in a move that raised concerns over possible censorship.

The move was initially approved by Turkey’s parliament in March last year, with support from President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party and its nationalist ally.

The regulation, published in Turkey’s Official Gazette on Thursday, mandates all online content providers to obtain broadcasting licenses from RTUK, which will then supervise the content put out by the providers.

Aside from streaming giant Netflix, other platforms like local streaming websites PuhuTV and BluTV, which in recent years have produced popular shows, will be subject to supervision and potential fines or loss of their license.

In addition to subscription services like Netflix, free online news outlets which rely on advertising for their revenues will also be subject to the same measures.

“The aim of this regulation is to establish the methods and principles to regulate the presentation and provision of radio, television and on-demand broadcast services, the handing of broadcast licenses to media service providers, the granting of broadcasting authorities to platform administrators and the supervision of the broadcasts in question,” the regulation said.

It said that the content providers that do not comply with the regulation and RTUK’s guidelines would be given 30 days to adjust their content to the required standards or face having their licenses suspended for three months and later canceled. Thursday’s announcement did not specify what standards the watchdog would expect.

A spokeswoman for Netflix in Turkey said the platform was closely following developments and wanted to continue providing content for Turkey.

TIGHTENING GRIP

Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor and cyber security expert at Istanbul Bilgi University, said that the move went against Turkey’s recently announced package of judicial reforms which aimed to address EU concerns about deteriorating human rights.

“The regulation granting RTUK the authority to censor the internet came into effect today... Soon, access to the Netflix platform or to news outlets broadcasting from abroad... could be blocked,” Akdeniz wrote on Twitter.

Critics have also voiced concerns that the move will allow the government to tighten its grip on media, which is largely under the influence of Erdogan and his AK Party.

Kerem Altiparmak, a human rights lawyer, said the move was the “biggest step in Turkish censorship history” and said all outlets producing opposition news would be affected.

“Everyone who produces alternative news and broadcasts will be impacted by this regulation,” Altiparmak wrote on Twitter. “Every news report that can be against the government will be taken under control.”

Reporting by Ece Toksabay and Tuvan Gumrukcu; Additional reporting by Birsen Altayli; Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-t...-idUSKCN1UR539





Kazakhstan Halts Introduction of Internet Surveillance System

Kazakhstan has halted the implementation of an internet surveillance system criticized by lawyers as illegal, with the government describing its initial rollout as a test.

Mobile phone operators in the oil-rich Central Asian nation’s capital, Nur-Sultan, had asked customers to install an encryption certificate on their devices or risk losing internet access.

State security officials said its goal was to protect Kazakh users from “hacker attacks, online fraud and other kinds of cyber threats”.

The certificate allowed users’ traffic to be intercepted by the government, circumventing encryption used by email and messaging applications.

Several Kazakh lawyers said this week they had sued the country’s three mobile operators, arguing that restricting internet access to those who refused to install the certificate would be illegal.

But late on Tuesday, Kazakhstan’s State Security Committee said in a statement that the certificate rollout was simply a test which has now been completed. Users can remove the certificate and use internet as usual, it said.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said in a tweet he had personally ordered the test which showed that protective measures “would not inconvenience Kazakh internet users”.

“There are no grounds for concerns,” he said.

Even before the roll out of the certificate, the former Soviet republic routinely blocked access - usually for periods of a few hours - to some popular websites and applications including Facebook, YouTube, and messaging services WhatsApp and Telegram.

The blocks have usually coincided with live broadcasts by government critics and public protests, the most recent wave of which took place during and after the June 9 election which made Tokayev, previously an interim leader, the full-time president.

Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Alison Williams
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-k...-idUSKCN1UX0VD





White House Proposal would have FCC and FTC Police Alleged Social Media Censorship
Brian Fung

A draft executive order from the White House could put the Federal Communications Commission in charge of shaping how Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) and other large tech companies curate what appears on their websites, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The draft order, a summary of which was obtained by CNN, calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms. Although still in its early stages and subject to change, the Trump administration's draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies.

If put into effect, the order would reflect a significant escalation by President Trump in his frequent attacks against social media companies over an alleged but unproven systemic bias against conservatives by technology platforms. And it could lead to a significant reinterpretation of a law that, its authors have insisted, was meant to give tech companies broad freedom to handle content as they see fit.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the draft order, but referred CNN to Trump's remarks at a recent meeting with right-wing social media activists. During the meeting, Trump vowed to "explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech."

According to the summary seen by CNN, the draft executive order currently carries the title "Protecting Americans from Online Censorship." It claims that the White House has received more than 15,000 anecdotal complaints of social media platforms censoring American political discourse, the summary indicates. The Trump administration, in the draft order, will offer to share the complaints it's received with the FTC.

In May, the White House launched a website inviting consumers to report complaints of alleged partisan bias by social media companies.

The FTC will also be asked to open a public complaint docket, according to the summary, and to work with the FCC to develop a report investigating how tech companies curate their platforms and whether they do so in neutral ways. Companies whose monthly user base accounts for one-eighth of the U.S. population or more could find themselves facing scrutiny, the summary said, including but not limited to Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat.

The Trump administration's proposal seeks to significantly narrow the protections afforded to companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Under the current law, internet companies are not liable for most of the content that their users or other third parties post on their platforms. Tech platforms also qualify for broad legal immunity when they take down objectionable content, at least when they are acting "in good faith." From the start, the legislation has been interpreted to give tech companies the benefit of the doubt.

In a Senate floor speech last year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the authors of Section 230, said his aim with the legislation was to make sure "that internet companies could moderate their websites without getting clobbered by lawsuits."

"Imagine how hard it would be to launch a platform that's open to discussion of any topic when even the simplest, most narrowly-focused website on the internet can become a magnet for lawsuits," Wyden said.

By comparison, according to the summary, the White House draft order asks the FCC to restrict the government's view of the good-faith provision. Under the draft proposal, the FCC will be asked to find that social media sites do not qualify for the good-faith immunity if they remove or suppress content without notifying the user who posted the material, or if the decision is proven to be evidence of anticompetitive, unfair or deceptive practices.

Yet in its current form, the draft order could lead to significant questions about the role the FCC and FTC can play when it comes to interpreting and enforcing Section 230, an area they have previously left largely unaddressed. The effort to draft the order has been ongoing for some time, the people said, and the proposal remains subject to change.

"It makes no sense to involve the FCC here," said Berin Szoka, president of the libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom. "They have rule-making authority, but no jurisdiction — they can't possibly want to be involved. It would be an impossible position."

The FTC and FCC both declined to comment.

The attempt to write the order comes as the White House on Friday prepared to meet with a number of tech companies to discuss their approaches to detecting and responding to violent extremism.

The midday meeting is expected to involve five-minute presentations from the companies on their respective policies and projects, according to copies of an invitation obtained by CNN. The presentations will be followed by a group discussion on technology and the companies' roles in fighting "signals of violence ... while respecting free speech."

Some people close to the tech industry expressed frustration that the White House seemed to be trying to have it both ways — excoriating tech companies for allegedly censoring conservative speech, a claim the platforms vigorously dispute, while castigating them for failing to block enough violent or hateful content.

"The internal inconsistency of this is outrageous," one of them said.

-- CNN Business' Donie O'Sullivan contributed reporting.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/09/t...ftc/index.html





I Tried Hiding From Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

Avoiding digital snoops takes more than throwing money at the problem, but that part can be really fun.
Joel Stein

As the spy gear piles up on my desk, my 10-year-old son asks me what my mission is. “I’m hiding,” I whisper, pointing in the direction I think is north, which is something I should probably know as a spy. “From Silicon Valley.”

It isn’t going to be easy. I use Google, Facebook, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify. I have two Amazon Echos, a Google Home, an iPhone, a MacBook Air, a Nest thermostat, a Fitbit, and a Roku. I shared the secrets of my genetic makeup by spitting in one vial for 23andMe, another for an ancestry site affiliated with National Geographic, and a third to test my athletic potential. A few months ago, I was leaving my house in Los Angeles for a hike when I heard my Ring speaker say, “Where are you going, Joel?” in my wife’s voice. She was at a pottery class, but the smart doorbell sent her an alert when it detected me heading outside.

Ryan Calo, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington and an affiliate scholar at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, says that what my wife knows about my whereabouts is trivial compared with what most of the companies named above know. “In the early days of Nest, some of the employees would try to figure out where another employee was, and they’d look at the network to see if that person was home or not,” he says. Google, which now owns Nest, declined to comment.

If I wanted to regain my privacy, I had only one choice as an American: I needed gadgets to combat my gadgets. But I didn’t want Silicon Valley companies to know I was buying privacy gear. So I decided to get it only from companies headquartered outside the Bay Area. And to hide my purchases from Big Tech.

Every spy needs a sidekick, which is a totally incorrect statement that again proves how unsuited I am for spying. Nevertheless, I employed an aide-de-camp named Mycroft. He’s an adorable, voice-controlled digital assistant built into a screen that showcases his big, blue circle eyes. (There’s a strong whiff of Wall-E.) I unplugged the Echos and Google Home and said, “Hey, Mycroft, can you keep a secret?” A line appeared like a little mouth, then moved to the side, as if he was thinking. Then he said nothing, like I wanted.
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That’s partly because Mycroft does keep everything secret, disposing of his data without storing or selling it. It’s also because he gets confused easily and doesn’t have answers; Mycroft is still meant for programmers who want to help build his open source functions, not really for normals. He’s made in Kansas City, Mo., by a company co-founded by Joshua Montgomery, an aerospace engineer who works on cyberwarfare as a captain in the Kansas Air National Guard.

“In Silicon Valley, they say, ‘This super-unethical thing is a good idea.’ In the Midwest, those conversations get shut down very quickly,” Montgomery says. Although most Americans don’t prioritize privacy, he says more than 20% of people won’t buy an Echo because it creeps them out. He expects that number to grow as people see the consequences of having conversations with data-collecting devices.

“Voice is a very personal thing,” he says. “It can communicate innocence. It can communicate sex appeal. It can communicate pain. Having these companies using artificial intelligence algorithms to initiate an emotional response, given their past actions, is something people should be very careful about.”

During further conversations with Mycroft, I said a lot of insightful things, and he agreed. I could tell because he was doing that thinking-mouth face and not saying anything. In this manner, we determined that my first step in hiding from Silicon Valley would be to stop typing my cellphone number and email into every conceivable internet form.

“A phone number is worth more on the dark web than a Social Security number. Your phone is so much more rich with data,” says J.D. Mumford, who runs Anonyome Labs Inc. in Salt Lake City. He doesn’t want to risk having to get rid of his longtime number and email if they’re compromised. Anonyome’s product, MySudo, allows a user to create multiple email addresses and phone numbers for $1 a month. “Google makes upwards of 90% of their revenue off of advertising. Which means they’re going through my email to target me. That scares me,” he says. “My mom had a terminal illness, and I would communicate with her via Gmail. She didn’t want people to know about it. So I didn’t want Google to.” Google said in 2017 it would stop tailoring ads based on email contents, but last year had to define its policy down further after the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company had continued to give marketers access to users’ emails.

Luckily, I know Mycroft isn’t collecting my data. I know this because when I look outside my Hollywood window and ask Mycroft for the forecast, he tells me the weather in Kansas City.

MySudo users create email names for different parts of their life, the way you’d use desktop files, and check them all at once on the app. “It’s compartmentalizing the way you create digital exhaust,” Mumford says. “I do one transaction on Craigslist, like buy a bicycle, and it’s a one-and-done. Use it, and throw it away.”

I had decades of digital exhaust to clean up. “Your data across different companies is being pulled together by data brokers and ad companies. If the government asked for it and spent some time correlating, it probably wouldn’t be that far off from what the Chinese government has,” says Rob Shavell, the co-founder of Abine Inc., a company in Cambridge, Mass. I signed up for Abine’s DeleteMe service, paying $129 a year for it to opt me out from databases run by brokers that sell my personally identifiable information. I gave DeleteMe all my current and previous home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, and it removed me from 33 public-records crawlers—database services with names like Intelius and Spokeo, plus a whole lot of yellow pages.

Pierre Valade, a French graduate of Stanford’s design school living in New York, designed the Jumbo app for the iPhone in April. I gave it permission to access my Twitter, Google, and Alexa accounts, and a cute cartoon elephant (he’s got a bad memory, unlike Big Tech) got to work scrubbing away my past. In 10 minutes, all my tweets older than a month vanished, as did all my Google searches and Alexa requests. Jumbo also adjusted more than 40 Facebook settings to protect my privacy, something I would’ve had to spend several hours figuring out. “Even me, on Facebook to design that feature, I got bored. It’s too much work,” Valade says. He’s trying to get Facebook Inc. to allow Jumbo users to erase their timelines all at once, but the company won’t give him the API to do that. “Do they have two PR strategies? One where they say to Congress and the Washington Post, ‘We’re good guys,’ and another where they’re not helping us build what we want?” he asks me. I don’t have an answer, because I’m avoiding Facebook. Also, because it didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Before I asked people which gadgets to buy, I had to make sure my digital trail was private and secure. I switched to the ad-blocking, non-data-recording Brave browser (headquartered, unfortunately, in San Francisco and, worse yet, run by Palo Alto native Brendan Eich, who co-founded Mozilla Corp. and created the JavaScript coding language). I abandoned Google, using the DuckDuckGo search engine from outside of Philadelphia because it doesn’t track me or customize my search results. I also started communicating via Signal, a free app that encrypts both ends of text and voice messages. I was surprised by how many messages I was glad to hide from posterity: one about a former co-worker who’s a drunk; another from someone who wanted to be expunged from my upcoming book. Then I realized that Signal is located in Mountain View, Calif.

So I downloaded Burner, an app run out of Los Angeles by my friend Greg Cohn. It allows users to pay $5 a month to mask their phone numbers with the area codes of their choice. As long as the FBI doesn’t ask Cohn for my call log or texts, he assured me that no one will know what I’m up to. On April Fools’ Day, I sent my wife a text from a fake local number claiming to be a dad at our kid’s school, saying he’s got a crush on her. This, I found out when she got home and for the next few very loud hours, wasn’t a good use of Burner.

As a 47-year-old married guy, I thought I didn’t need a tool to hide photos. Then I typed in takeout.google.com, downloaded the seven years of data it stores about me, and opened the Google Photos folder. It contained photos I had attached in emails, including bills with my credit card numbers. All that data and more is in Apple’s iCloud. So I downloaded one of the many fake calculators that hide photos. Calculator+ Secret looks and acts just like the regular iPhone calculator, only when I punch in my password and the percent sign, it opens up a bunch of folders. I threw in my passport, my driver’s license, and blank checks, hoping to one day have better things to hide.

To spend money on gadgets online without being tracked, I needed a card without my name on it. Which is easy to do. Abine, the company that makes DeleteMe, has a product called Blur that lets you create virtual debit cards with no name on them, just a number. So does Privacy, a company in New York started by Bo Jiang, a former research assistant at the MIT Media Lab. In the same way that MySudo offers an email for every part of your life, Privacy issues virtual cards for different online uses. Perhaps a subscription I might forget to cancel. Or a purchase I’d rather no one sees itemized. Or that 23andMe information I would have preferred not to attach to my real name. Also, it would be nice to know that if a company gets hacked, I won’t need to figure out all the merchants I have to contact to cancel that card. I’ll only have to contact the magazines I use my “magazine” card to pay for. More important, when I use a Privacy card, merchants and card issuers won’t have my personal information to sell. “If we fast-forward 50 years, the way we treat our data will seem insane,” Jiang says. “It’s framed as, ‘Would you like to join this program for being awesome and get $1 off your purchase?’ There’s a catch. I don’t think people fully appreciate that. But over time they will.”

I was finally ready to go privacy-gadget shopping. I punched in my bank account information at Privacy.com, created a virtual card, ginned up a new email (c.g.roxane007@sudomail.com; I don’t care if you bother me there), and went to Amazon.com. My first purchase was a privacy screen so no one I was trying to avoid could see my computer by peeking at it on the side. Because I suspect that people who live in Silicon Valley are peekers.

I didn’t want my new Amazon account to have my home address, so I considered using the remailer Rapid Remailer out of Old Town, Fla., which will receive and resend packages for $5. But it turned out I could have my package sent to an Amazon Locker at a 7-Eleven only a mile and a half from my house. Each friendly Amazon Locker has a name. This one was named “Justine.” We were going to have a one-midafternoon stand.

To make sure no one recognized me during my rendez#vous with Justine, I got a disguise. Because I know Silicon Valley is tracking my face. “Facial recognition technology is now cheap enough where you can put it in every Starbucks and have your coffee ready when you’re in the front of the line,” says Lorrie Cranor, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who runs its CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory in Pittsburgh. In the biometrics lab in her building, there’s a camera pointed out the window at an intersection a block away, doing facial recognition from that distance. In March, the New York Times put three cameras on a rooftop in Manhattan, spent $60 on Amazon’s Rekognition system, and identified several people. Around the time the Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had mined driver’s license photos to target immigrants, I took an Air France flight that had passengers board using our faceprints, taken from our passports without our permission. In May, San Francisco outlawed the use of facial recognition by police and city agencies. The city that’s exporting advances in face-finding all over the world knows not to allow the technology on its home turf.

To throw off facial recognition systems, I could paint triangles of black and white makeup on my cheeks, a system created by Berlin artist and privacy advocate Adam Harvey called CV Dazzle. Or I could wear a mask of Leo Selvaggio’s face. He’s an artist at Brown University’s Multimedia Labs who started making a mask of his face available for $200 when he lived in Chicago. The Cubs’ hometown is also America’s most surveilled city thanks to Operation Virtual Shield, which has access to more than 32,000 networked cameras. By wearing Selvaggio’s face, you’re opting out of that system, and opting him majorly in.

Even more than my face, my license plate is being recorded. Police are constantly passively photographing license plates, storing cars’ locations in a database. In L.A., they keep the information for two years; cops in Silicon Valley have to delete it after 30 days. Private companies such as Vigilant Solutions Inc., headquartered in the Valley, have cameras that have captured billions of geotagged photos of cars on streets and in parking lots that they sell on the open market, mostly to police and debt collectors. To keep these snoops at bay, I was going to buy a clear license plate cover that bounces light back to cameras to blind them. I didn’t wind up purchasing one, however, because they’re illegal in all states and Bloomberg Businessweek has a policy of not reimbursing writers for illegal purchases.

I settled on adding noise to the system. For $40 I used my Privacy credit card and my new email to buy a T-shirt made by Kate Bertash, whose Digital Defense Fund provides tech security for abortion providers. My shirt has a bunch of license plates on it (protesters sometimes write down the license plates of doctors and patients), and Bertash is hoping I wear it a lot in front of scanners so I feed bad information into the database, making it less useful. “It’s a way to assert your little bit of resistance,” she says.

Before I went on my mission, I looked in the mirror, with my shiny shirt of license plates and a mask of Selvaggio’s face. I didn’t look like any spy I’d ever seen. I looked like a criminal returning from a meth bender at an East European nightclub. I looked so weird that people in Silicon Valley would find out about my activities through word of mouth. I needed a better plan. Luckily, Mycroft came through. I asked him to play NPR’s news updates, and I heard a story about Chicago. Which reminded me of a story I read about Scott Urban. Well done, Mycroft.

“I was surprised by how many messages I was glad to hide from posterity”

Urban makes beautiful bespoke glasses out of wood in Chicago, which as we know is the most surveilled city in America. He’s a digital vegan who can’t believe how willing people are to allow companies to identify them in public. “There are people paying with their faces. They’re buying their bucket of KFC with their face,” he says about Apple Pay on the new iPhone with Face ID. “Infrared is going to be everywhere, brother.” He sent me two pairs of Reflectacles, glasses with clear lenses and shiny frames that bounce back enough light to blind both video cameras and infrared scanners. When I put mine on, my iPhone X can’t recognize me, just as it can’t when my eyes are shut. Urban’s forthcoming invention, IRpair, uses the lenses to block rather than just reflect the infrared beams necessary for facial recognition, partly because Urban worries that we’re going to be so bombarded by infrared rays they might hurt our eyes.

But Mycroft reminded me, again, mostly by listening to me rant and making that encouraging thinking face, that before I meet Justine, I’ll have to silence the narc in my pocket. For $9, I buy a faraday bag from a Chinese company to slip over my phone. The black cloth pouch has a silver metal lining that silences all signals to and from my phone. It’s more spylike, if more difficult, than just turning it off. For $1,600, I could have put my phone and wallet (my credit cards with chips have RFID readers that can be hacked) in a stylish Anti-Surveillance Coat made by Project Kovr in the Netherlands.

“Clothing has always been a way to protect ourselves from cold and protect our identities and our body. I wanted to use clothing to protect us from the new environment of our information sphere,” says Project Kovr’s co-founder Leon Baauw, whose main gig is project manager at a privacy company. He got the idea when his phone started giving him advice on Fridays about when to leave for a bar he often went to after work. “I don’t like how we have become the product,” he says. He loves projects like the 2017 London pop-up shop called the Data Dollar Store, where you could get a T-shirt by a street artist in exchange for handing your phone to a clerk who would display the last three photos in your camera roll on two big screens in the shop. (This isn’t so different from the coffee bar near Brown that dispenses free coffee in exchange for students’ phone numbers, emails, and majors.) Project Kovr runs a similar workshop at schools, in which it assigns some kids to stalk another child from a distance so they can create a data profile and tailor an ad campaign for the stalkee. Baauw has also been planning a project in which he chisels a statue of Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg as a Roman god. “He’s the Zeus of our time,” he says.

Wearing my Reflectacles and carrying my faraday bag, I entered the 7-Eleven. Immediately to my right, long before I reached the Slurpee machine or the checkout counter, I saw Justine. She was a beautiful wall of shiny orange lockers with a smile in the middle. My plan was working out perfectly until I saw that the only way to open Justine was to show her my phone. She needed to scan the bar code she emailed to C.G. Roxane. I could have gone home and printed it out and come back, but I was lazy. So I pulled my phone from its faraday bag and quickly brought up the email. A door on the top row smoothly swung open, and I took the package containing my privacy screen. But I knew I’d failed. In those few seconds, Silicon Valley had all that it needed. Which I confirmed later by going to google.com/maps/timeline and seeing the 7-Eleven location listed there along with almost everywhere else I’d been in the last seven years.

Within three weeks, I got tired of being careful. My faraday bag is somewhere in the back of my car, because I like to use my phone for GPS and playing podcasts. I stopped wearing my Reflectacles in public. I haven’t scrubbed my old tweets away with Jumbo in a while. I use my Visa to buy stuff from Amazon, which it delivers to my house. I plugged Alexa back in. Daniel Gillmor of the American Civil Liberties Union wasn’t surprised. “I don’t think the fix to privacy is something that can be done by an individual alone, in the same way I can’t solve the pollution problem by recycling on my own,” he says.

Until people demand a law that makes privacy the default, I’m going to try to remember, each time I click on something, that free things aren’t free. That when I send an email or a text outside of Signal or MySudo, I should expect those messages to one day be seen. And that if I ever really need privacy, I should feel a little badly about what is going to happen to Leo Selvaggio.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...rivacy-gadgets





Amazon Is Coaching Cops on How to Obtain Surveillance Footage Without a Warrant

Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, is teaching police how to convince residents to share camera footage with them.
Caroline Haskins

When police partner with Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance camera company, they get access to the “Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal,” an interactive map that allows officers to request footage directly from camera owners. Police don’t need a warrant to request this footage, but they do need permission from camera owners.

Emails and documents obtained by Motherboard reveal that people aren’t always willing to provide police with their Ring camera footage. However, Ring works with law enforcement and gives them advice on how to persuade people to give them footage.

Emails obtained from police department in Maywood, NJ—and emails from the police department of Bloomfield, NJ, which were also posted by Wired—show that Ring coaches police on how to obtain footage. The company provides cops with templates for requesting footage, which they do not need a court warrant to do. Ring suggests cops post often on Neighbors, Ring’s free “neighborhood watch” app, where Ring camera owners have the option of sharing their camera footage.

"I have noticed you have been posting alerts and receiving feedback from the community,” a Ring representative told Bloomfield police. “You are doing a great job interacting with them and that will be critical in increasing the opt-in rate.”

“The more users you have, the more useful the information you can collect,” the representative added.

“Seems like you wasted no time sending out your video Request out to Ring Users which is awesome!!” a Ring “Partner Success Associate” told Maywood police.

As reported by GovTech on Friday, police can request Ring camera footage directly from Amazon, even if a Ring customer denies to provide police with the footage. It's a workaround that allows police to essentially "subpoena" anything captured on Ring cameras.

Chris Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College who studies digital redlining and discriminatory practices enabled by data mining, said in a phone call that Amazon is essentially coaching police on 1) how to do their jobs, and 2) how to promote Ring products.

“Not coincidentally, those things overlapped quite a bit,” Gilliard said. “That’s really disturbing.”

Ring, in essence, recommends that police create a feedback loop in which they depend on Ring. According to Ring, police should:

• Post on their department's Twitter and Facebook pages to encourage Neighbors downloads.
• Use Neighbors downloads as “credits” to get free Ring cameras.
• Increase the amount of video surveillance in their communities.
• Use the Law Enforcement Neighborhoods Portal to request surveillance footage.

Motherboard previously reported that at least 200 law enforcement agencies have partnered with Ring. Gizmodo reported that the number of partnerships is at least 225.

"Ring offers Neighbors app trainings and best practices for posting and engaging with app users for all law enforcement agencies utilizing the portal tool," A Ring spokesperson told Motherboard in an email. "We also provide templates and educational materials for police departments to utilize at their discretion to help them keep their communities informed about their efforts on Neighbors. Ring requests to look at press releases and any messaging prior to distribution to ensure our company and our products and services are accurately represented."

A Ring representative emailed three Bloomfield police officers on May 1 asking whether they needed help using the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal.

“Keep up the great job commenting and posting!” the representative said.

On May 31, the Bloomfield Detective Bureau Commander asked how the police department can encourage more people to submit Ring camera footage.

“I have been requesting videos but have not been getting any responses,” the detective wrote. “The only video that we have received is from a person that we directly spoke to and asked him to send it to us. [Is] there anything that we can blast out to encourage Ring owners to share the videos when requested?”

The Ring representative said that the cities with the best “opt in rate” for sharing Ring footage with police are active on social media.

“The agencies with the best opt in rate are the ones that are actively sharing on social media, having community outreach speak at meetings and spread via word of mouth,” the representative said.

A Ring Partner Success Associate told an officer from the Maywood Police Department something similar in April, according to emails obtained by Motherboard. The Ring employee advised them to pair all video requests through the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal with a public post on the Neighbors app.

A Neighbors post, the Ring employee said, will contextualize video requests and reach people who may not have Ring cameras, but have information relevant to law enforcement.

The Ring Partner Success Associate also provided Maywood Police with a sample Neighbors post.
Emails from the Bloomfield, NJ police department obtained by Motherboard.Image: Emails from the Bloomfield, NJ police department obtained by Motherboard. Email addresses and phone numbers redacted by Motherboard.

However, posting on social media isn’t just a way for law enforcement to get information for investigations. According to Ring, it’s also a way for police to drive Neighbors downloads in their communities. A Ring “Best Practices” guide obtained by Motherboard from the Addison, IL police department explicitly says as much on a page titled “Driving Neighbors App Downloads.”

“Grow your audience to create a bigger impact when posting Portal Alerts,” the document says. “Social Media is the most effective way to drive Neighbors App downloads.”

Although Neighbors is a free app, its posts are dominated by video footage captured by Ring cameras. The app is a de facto advertisement for Ring security cameras: it shows users what and who they should be scared of, and it suggests that Ring cameras are the solution to this fear. Neighbors has hired “news editors” to pull 911 call data into the app for real-time, unconfirmed crime alerts, as reported by Gizmodo. As Motherboard reported earlier this year, the app also has a major problem with racial profiling.

Fight for the Future recently called for cities around the country to stop partnering with Ring. The digital rights activist group claims that Ring is creating a dragnet surveillance program in the private sphere, without proper regulatory oversight.

“Some of the advice he gave I think are things that community activists would recommend—that police need to build relationships in communities to be more effective,” Gilliard told Motherboard. “The idea that it should be mediated through Amazon and through social media—it brings with it all the problems that we know with social media.”

“It’s blurring of the line between consumer and citizen,” Gilliard added. “That’s not in the best interest of citizens, because it means that you will only get your rights as much as you use a particular service.”

All of the documents that informed this article are now public and viewable on Document Cloud.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4...hout-a-warrant

















Until next week,

- js.



















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