This Week In Techdirt History: May 19th - 25th

from the so-that's-what-happened dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2014, we watched as the proposed NSA reform bill — the USA Freedom Act — got watered down by the House to the point that every civil liberties organization pulled its support for the law, and it started to look like Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger had pulled a fast one on us all. The House inevitably passed the now-useless bill (even without the votes of half of its original co-sponsors), so attention had to turn to the Senate and other ways of fighting back against the NSA, like a small victory in freeing the NIST from collaborating with the agency on encryption standards.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2009, various Attorneys General were still on the warpath against Craigslist (even those who had successfully busted criminals on the site) after it gave in to pressure the previous week. While some tried to draw odd conclusions from Craigslist's cooperation, the company was also fighting back and suing for declaratory relief against one AG. And we had to wonder as they did: why Craigslist, not newspapers or other websites?

Meanwhile, Perfect 10 was shot down yet again in an attempt to hold search engines liable for image thumbnails, while Joel Tenenbaum's lawyer was gearing up for a likely defeat with plans to defend downloading as fair use. And we read one pro-copyright book that surprised us by relying heavily on... Techdirt comments to make its case about how bad the pirates are.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2004, Jack Valenti was feuding with Quentin Tarantino over the latter's failure to condemn movie piracy, Italy was getting ready to put people in jail for file sharing, and California was considering doing the same. Google was making waves on two fronts: then-brand-new Gmail's unprecedented offering of 1GB of storage was spurring the competition to at least pretend to do the same (while a typo on Gmail itself led some people to think they might be getting a terabyte), and the Google IPO was leading absolutely everyone to try to find a way to benefit from the hype (not least the list of underwriters, which was basically all of Wall Street). But, the guy who had been selling fake "pre-IPO shares" to Wall Street insiders was one of two scammers facing jailtime, too.

Filed Under: history, look back

One Year Into The GDPR: Can We Declare It A Total Failure Yet?

from the click-here-to-pretend-we-respect-your-privacy dept

Tomorrow will represent a full year since the GDPR went into effect. In the run-up to the GDPR, we called out many of the problems with the regulation which, while well-intended, did not seem to deal well with the nature of the internet, speech, or what privacy actually means. In the year since, we've posted numerous stories highlighting the negative consequences of this poorly considered law.

Whenever we do that, however, many of the law's defenders insist that these unintended consequences are a small price to pay for either protecting our privacy or reining in the internet giants. So, it does seem worth investigating whether or not the GDPR has done either of those things. And, so far, the evidence is sorely lacking. Indeed, on the question of dominance, we pointed out late last year that the early returns suggested that the GDPR had only made Google more dominant, which hardly seems like a way to punish the company.

And now that we have more results, it seems more and more people are realizing that the GDPR has been an utter failure. As CNBC notes in its evaluation of the law, it's hard to see how the GDPR has resulted in any benefits to the public. Instead, it's just created a big mess:

...one year later, GDPR hasn’t lived up to its potential.

Among some consumers, GDPR is perhaps best known as a bothersome series of rapid-fire, pop-up privacy notices. Those astronomical fines have failed to materialize. The law has created new bureaucracies within corporations, and with those, tension and confusion. And it’s unclear if the EU data authority that oversees the law is adequately staffed to handle its demands.

In short, from the user side especially, all the GDPR has done is made people constantly need to click on annoying privacy and cookie notices that they don't read and don't find useful at all. This shouldn't have been a surprise. We've pointed out for many years that the entire concept of a privacy policy is backwards. It creates a situation where no one actually reads it, and it doesn't do much to protect anyone's privacy. I head someone recently note that they should really be called "data exploitation policies," and that, at least, would be a bit more accurate. But still wouldn't get anyone to read them or better protect anyone's privacy.

And, as Politico has pointed out, it appears that not only has the GDPR made the big tech companies more dominant, it's now laid out the rules of the road by which they can introduce even more privacy-destroying offerings:

New forms of data collection, including Facebook’s reintroduction of its facial recognition technology in Europe and Google’s efforts to harvest information on third-party websites, have been given new leases on life under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

Smaller firms — whose fortunes were of special concern to the framers of the region’s privacy revamp — also have suffered from the relatively high compliance costs and the perception, at least among some investors, that they can’t compete with Silicon Valley’s biggest names.

“Big companies like Facebook are 10 steps ahead of everyone else, and 100 steps ahead of regulators,” declared Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a privacy expert who helped uncover Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. “There are very big questions about what they’re doing.”

This entire approach is backwards and silly. If we want to have better control over our privacy we're not going to do it through demanding better privacy policies, or confusing data protection laws. We need to create the incentives to put the actual control of the data back into the hands of the users. And that doesn't just mean a right to download your info. It means that you have full control over your data and get to control what apps and services can access it and for what reasons. That's not the world we have today, and nothing in the GDPR gets us any closer to it.

And the answer is not "more enforcement." That just locks in the big companies even more and continues to present the roadmap to "follow" the rules, or to work the refs. Instead, if we moved to a system of protocols instead of platforms we could decouple the data from the service, putting real control of the data back in the hands of end users. Then things like privacy policies and GDPR enforces wouldn't matter so much, because we'd have direct control over our data.

Instead, all we have is a massive law that has harmed startups, entrentched big companies, failed to protect privacy and just served to annoy most users.

The reality is that many people, in order to save time, simply click “OK” on the never-ending stream of pop-ups and most everyone I spoke to confess that they just move on when unable to access the desired website. Or, as one Twitter user told expressed, “I read a lot fewer articles in US papers/magazines.”

And, sure, there have been a few fines of internet companies, but as recent GDPR complaints show, there does not appear to be any way to actually fully comply with the GDPR, which makes it a particularly useless law. If you can't actually comply, if it's not actually protecting privacy, and it's just annoying users and creating more bureaucracy, what good is it?

Meanwhile, Alec Stapp has collected a ton of stories and examples of the GDPR's negative impact. It notes much of the stuff above, but also highlights just how damaging it's been to innovation on the whole:

Startups: One study estimated that venture capital invested in EU startups fell by as much as 50 percent due to GDPR implementation. (NBER)

Mergers and acquisitions: “55% of respondents said they had worked on deals that fell apart because of concerns about a target company’s data protection policies and compliance with GDPR” (WSJ)

Scientific research: “[B]iomedical researchers fear that the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will make it harder to share information across borders or outside their original research context.” (POLITICO)

So now that we've had a year, can we admit that the GDPR has been a total failure by almost every possible measure? Supporters of the law will say to give it more time, or to say we need to "improve" the rules, but it should be obvious by now that the entire approach is the problem, not the implementation.

Filed Under: censorship, competition, compliance, data protection, dominance, eu, free speech, gdpr, privacy, tech

Several Pro And College Sports Teams Suspended From Twitter Over Mystery DMCA Notices

from the overkill dept

We've had many long discussions here, and have replicated those discussions through more official channels, as to how there are severe problems with the DMCA when it comes to its collision with free speech. One of the core issues is the way the DMCA sets up a system in which service providers feel forced to proactively take down the speech of others based on accusation in the form of a DMCA notice, rather than this working the way it does in nearly every other aspect of American law in which an accusation does not result in a penalty. And penalty truly is the right word, as the American system recognizes that speech is among the most fundamental of freedoms. And, yet, when service providers like Twitter get sent DMCA notices over copyright claims, they are heavily incentivized to take down the content and take action against the account holder -- or face potentially massive liability.

Such as the Twitter account for the Houston Rockets, which found itself suspended over a series of DMCA notices for old tweets that apparently contained some unlicensed music. The Rockets also weren't alone.

On Monday, the Houston Rockets Twitter account found itself among a handful of official sports team accounts, most of which were college team Twitters. The accounts were temporarily shut down due to DMCA complaints against them for the use of copyrighted music without obtaining those rights. The Rockets were joined by Auburn football, Rutgers football, Iowa State football, and Iowa football and gymnastics as prominent official accounts to be shut down either this weekend or on Monday.

“Our Twitter account has been temporarily suspended due to a few prior social media posts with copyrighted music,” the Rockets said in a statement. “We are working to correct the issue now.”

To my immense frustration, nobody appears to have any details as to what the tweets in question were, what music they contained, or who issued the DMCA notices. That is, frankly, fairly strange. It's also worth noting that the Rockets at one point had something of a rogue managing their Twitter account, and even fired that individual for behavior unrelated to copyright.

Still, it's instructive to witness what happened here. Twitter gets DMCA notices claiming infringement on the part of a rather marquis account for the Houston Rockets, does whatever review of the tweets in question it does, and then shuts down the account, ostensibly over the volume of tweets contained in the DMCA notice. In case it isn't obvious: that's crazy. Think of all the speech that got shut down that wasn't infringing when that occurred. And, yes, you might not be terribly concerned with the speech emanating from the account of an NBA team, but its more than 2 million followers did.

And it's also terribly frustrating that this system is set up in a way that shrouds all of this from the public, as though a matter of public speech should be treated like some kind of mystery of national security proportions. The public has an interest in the deletion or suspension of speech, and an interest in the fact that the DMCA is written in a way, and enforced in a way, that not only encourages service providers to take this proactive heavy-handed action, but also leaves those issuing DMCA notices when they shouldn't without punishment.

Today that was a bunch of sport team accounts. Tomorrow it could be speech you might care about.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, safe harbors, takedowns, tweets
Companies: houston rockets, twitter

Prosecutor On Forfeiture Reforms: Making Us Prosecute Drugs Cases Will Make It Harder To Prosecute Drug Cases

from the catch-22-is-non-fiction dept

I thought I had read the worst defense of civil asset forfeiture when I read a former Michigan police chief's argument against a conviction requirement being instituted in his state. Former Police Chief Robert Stevenson's argument was basically this: a conviction requirement makes it too hard for cops to take property from people without proof.

Law enforcement will be severely handicapped if state lawmakers succumb to the misconception that no forfeiture should take place without a conviction on proceeds under $50,000.

[...]

Drugs may not be present, but everything else confirms and indicates drug trafficking, i.e., ledger books, scales, pre-recorded narcotics buy funds and packaging materials. In this particular scenario, as well as a multitude of others, the police and prosecutors could not establish a case to seize anything if Michigan adopts the $50,000 threshold.

All this evidence and nothing to do with it, I guess. Like many in the law enforcement field, Stevenson clings to the myth that robbing random people at gunpoint somehow cripples drug cartels. This belief is backed by far less evidence than the long list of stuff Stevenson claims can't be cobbled into a successful prosecution. We're more than 40 years deep into a War on Drugs and the only thing that's changed for the positive is the public's attitude towards civil asset forfeiture.

Michigan's legislature is considering adding a conviction requirement for forfeitures under $50,000. Opponents of property rights and due process keep crawling out of the woodwork, offering up increasingly nonsensical defenses of forfeiture. But nothing is stupider than this prosecutor's objection:

”Since a conviction is now required, it will make it extremely difficult to prosecute high level drug dealers,” Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said via email.

REQUIRING PROSECUTORS TO PROSECUTE DRUG DEALERS WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO PROSECUTE DRUG DEALERS.

This kind of reasoning suggests the real problem with closing the deal, prosecution-wise, might be the prosecutor's arguments.

It doesn't get worse from there. But it certainly doesn't get any better. Allowing Worthy to expand on this theory does not bring enlightenment or clarification. It just makes the theory bigger and dumber.

“Often in these cases, witnesses are intimidated to the point that they do not show up for trial, sometimes losing their lives because of the retaliation,” Worthy said. “It is our fear that this will get worse now that drug dealers know that if there are no witnesses, there will be no conviction and they can get their property back.”

How in fuck do you draw the line from "taking cash from some dude cops pulled over" to "witness intimidation?" This is the brilliant legal mind handling prosecutions for Michigan's largest city. All this says is that forfeiture was never about keeping drugs and drug dealers off the street. It was always about the cash. We know this, but cops and prosecutors will never say it out loud. Worthy's attempt to portray almost-suspicionless cash seizures as leverage in prosecutions the government NEVER PLANS TO PURSUE is inadvertently transparent.

The only argument that could be worse than Worthy's defense is the truth: cops and prosecutors prefer taking property because it's easier and it enriches them personally. But we should expect nothing less (nothing more?) from a prosecutor who once asserted there's a link between real-life and video game violence, stating "no one" could "convince" her otherwise, no matter what evidence they presented. Seems like evidence and assertions are never in the same place when Worthy's in charge. I can see why she's so opposed to doing a job she's clearly not qualified to perform.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, drugs, kym worthy, legalized theft, michigan, prosecution, wayne county

Under DOJ's Own Theory For Prosecuting Julian Assange, Donald Trump Probably Violated The Espionage Act

from the no,-this-is-not-a-good-reason-to-support-it dept

Yesterday, I wrote about the new, superseding indictment of Julian Assange and noted how the theories behind it were absolutely insane and a blatant attack on the 1st Amendment. The Obama administration went after leakers using the Espionage Act, which already was really terrible (the law itself should be deemed unconstitutional, but to use it against whistleblowers, rather than actual espionage was horrific). Here, the Trump administration has taken it up a notch by trying to use it against a publisher. I've seen a lot of people defending this move by arguing that either (a) Julian Assange is a terrible human being, or (b) that Wikileaks is not a "real" or "legitimate" news organization.

Neither of those things matter. And if you think they should you are missing the point in an incredibly dangerous way.

The activities described in the indictment are things that many journalists do all the time. For example, in the first count, the government calls the following an offense against the United States under the Espionage Act:

To willfully communicate documents relating to the national defense—^namely, detainee assessment briefs related to detainees who were held at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. State Department cables, Iraq rules of engagement files, and documents containing the names of individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world, who risked their safety and freedom by providing information to the United States and our allies, which were classified up to the SECRET level—^from persons having lawful possession of or access to such documents, to persons not entitled to receive them, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 793(d);

But, as the NY Times' Charlie Savage notes in his article on the indictment this is indistinguishable from what the NY Times did with those very same documents.

Notably, The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government — the act that most of the charges addressed.

Some keep saying that this is somehow different because the NY Times is a "legitimate news organization" while Wikileaks is not, but that distinction is both ridiculous and legally meaningless. It is legally meaningless because there is nothing in the 1st Amendment that reserves any of the rights -- including the rights associated with "freedom of the press" -- to "legitimate news organizations." Indeed, having the government declare who is and who is not a "legitimate news organization" would be a fundamental violation of the 1st Amendment itself.

It's also stupid, because remember who our President is? He's been talking about "the failing NY Times" and insisting that it publishes "fake news."

Do you really want Trump's government determining who is and who is not a "legitimate news organization." No. You do not.

And speaking of President Trump, as lawyer Kurt Opsahl points out, the charges are so ridiculous and so broad, it would appear that Donald Trump himself violated the Espionage Act under the standard used:

Count 2 in the indictment is the following:

Between in or about November 2009 and in or about May 2010, in an offense begun and committed outside of the jurisdiction of any particular state or district of the United States, the defendant, JULIAN PAUL ASSANGE, who will be first brought to the Eastern District of Virginia, and others unknown to the Grand Jury, knowingly and unlawfully obtained and aided, abetted, counseled, induced, procured and willfully caused Manning to obtain documents, writings, and notes connected with the national defense, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense—^namely, detainee assessment briefs classified up to the SECRET level related to detainees who were held at Guantanamo Bay—^and with reason to believe that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation.

As Opsahl points out, if that's an Espionage Act violation, it seems that that saying "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press" would violate that same law.

And while I'm sure there are some people who would like to see the President charged under the Espionage Act, this is not a good reason to support this incredibly broad interpretation of the law.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, data gathering, doj, donald trump, espionage act, journalism, julian assange, sources
Companies: wikileaks

Daily Deal: TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

TREBLAB Z2 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones feature top-grade, high-performance neodymium-backed 40mm speakers. The Z2s use T-Quiet active noise canceling technology to drown out unwanted background noise and have a signal range of 38 feet. With a 35 hour battery life, you can listen for multiple days between charges. They're on sale for $79. Use the code WEEKEND15 for an additional 15% off.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Copyright Office Weighs In After Wannabe Satoshi Craig Wright Registers Copyright On Original Bitcoin Paper

from the it-never-ends dept

I was tempted to start this post with just a series of head-smashing-into-desk emojis, but I thought that might come off as a bit weird. Remember Craig Wright? He's the somewhat controversial guy who has claimed to have really been Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of people who do not believe Craig Wright, and have highlighted how Wright has failed to provide any of the fairly straightforward methods the original Satoshi could use to prove who he was, and instead used complicated methods that suggest gamesmanship, rather than actual proof.

As we've highlighted in our posts, Wright seems most focused on patenting everything he can with regards to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency -- which, at the very least, seems to go against the open, sharing nature that was a key part of the early cryptocurrency community that Satoshi Nakamoto supported.

And now comes the somewhat hilarious report that Wright has tried to register the copyright on the original Bitcoin whitepaper that Satoshi Nakamoto published. This is basically a troll move. Registering the copyright is meaningless. The Copyright Office does not review carefully if you are the actual creator. It's mostly a rubber stamp process -- and it's rarely an issue because in most cases if someone tried to fraudulently register someone else's copyright, that would come out pretty quickly and it would not take long to sort out what's real. But in this case, when you have an anonymous secret author, it gets a little more complicated.

As CoinCenter's Jerry Brito notes this is sort of a bug of the system, but he also notes that someone else could also register the copyright and see if Wright would actually sue over it (in which case, he'd have to establish to a court that he actually held the copyright):

The situation is getting so much attention, that even the Copyright Office has decided to weigh in, highlighting (as we note above) that it doesn't have any methodology for reviewing these registrations, or for anyone to contest them, and that any such situation would have to happen in federal court (most likely if anyone tried to enforce the copyright).

As a general rule, when the Copyright Office receives an application for registration, the claimant certifies as to the truth of the statements made in the submitted materials. The Copyright Office does not investigate the truth of any statement made.

A registration represents a claim to an interest in a work protected by copyright law, not a determination of the truth of the claims therein. It is possible for multiple, adverse claims to be registered at the Copyright Office. The Copyright Office does not have an opposition procedure for copyright registrations, such as the procedures available at the Patent and Trademark Office for patents and trademark registrations. Disputes over the claims in a registration may be heard before federal courts, including disputes over authorship of a work. Someone who intentionally includes false information in an application may be subject to penalties.

The Copyright Office also points out that it merely asks the applicant to state that they are the author of a pseudonymous piece of content.

In a case in which a work is registered under a pseudonym, the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author.

In the case of the two registrations issued to Mr. Wright, during the examination process, the Office took note of the well-known pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto,” and asked the applicant to confirm that Craig Steven Wright was the author and claimant of the works being registered. Mr. Wright made that confirmation. This correspondence is part of the public registration record.

So, this probably doesn't matter, because if Wright actually wants to enforce the copyright, then he'd have to go to court and prove that he was the legitimate holder of the copyright (and the registration by itself won't cut it). But, as a purely dickish way to try to game the system to pretend you have proof of being "Satoshi Nakamoto," it seems to fit in with a pattern of past behavior by Wright. Though not by Nakamoto. Still, it will be interesting to see if this copyright ever ends up in court.

For those of you who have been desperate for a crazy copyright case since the end of the monkey selfie case, I would nominate this potential lawsuit as a worthy followup.

Filed Under: bitcoin, copyright, copyright office, copyright registration, craig wright, satoshi nakamoto, whitepaper

House Dems Start To Wimp Out On Net Neutrality

from the ill-communication dept

Back in March we discussed the unveiling of the Save The Internet Act, a three page bill that would do one thing: restore the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules stripped away by Ajit Pai, as well as restore the FCC's authority over broadband providers. As we've long noted, the net neutrality repeal didn't just kill net neutrality, it gutted FCC authority over natural broadband monopolies, shoveling any remaining authority to an FTC experts have repeatedly warned lacks the authority or resources to adequately police giants like Comcast (the entire, often missed point of the telecom industry's lobbying gambit).

In April, the House passed the bill, though Senator Mitch McConnell stated the bill would be "dead on arrival" once it reached the Senate. McConnell was happy to ignore the fact that net neutrality protections have the bipartisan support of a majority of Americans, reiterating how so many tech policy decisions are inaccurately framed as partisan. Why? It helps encourage division and stall progress on any measures that challenge the revenues of the nation's biggest (and least liked) companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter Spectrum).

Realizing that the chance of Senate passage is dwindling thanks to McConnell, numerous House Democrats have no started to slowly walk away from the Save The Internet Act, instead saying they want the creation of a "net neutrality working group" (read: try to create an entirely new bill that actually will pass):

"Around three dozen lawmakers are crafting a letter to send to the House’s Democratic leadership—including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.)—expressing their desire for a working group to be formed in the wake of the Save the Internet Act not gaining traction in the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the bill “dead on arrival.”

The draft letter was signed by more than 30 Democrats in the House, and staffers for six lawmakers confirmed to the Daily Dot this week that their lawmakers signed it. The draft letter has not yet been delivered, according to two sources familiar with the matter."

For those who haven't followed the net neutrality fight closely, this might sound like a good idea. But the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules were already crafted after more than a decade of debate. They're the result of years upon years of workshops, meetings, hearings, and previous, failed efforts (like the FCC's flimsy 2010 rules). There's also the fact that the bipartisan majority of the public wants these rules restored intact, and they have the support of every consumer group of note in the United States. A new working group would effectively be starting this entire process over.

The problem of course is that if McConnell's senate won't pass the Save The Internet Act, it's equally unlikely it's going to pass any new bill worth the time it takes to debate it. Any bill that does make it through the Senate and gains the support of telecom industry BFFs like Marsha Blackburn is going to be so watered down and filled with loopholes as to be useless. That's of course been the goal of the telecom sector for a while: shovel some terrible net neutrality bill in name only that doesn't fix the problem, but does pre-empt any tougher state or federal law from taking root.

It's worth remembering that there's currently a lawsuit against the FCC that should be ruled on any day now. If won, that lawsuit, filed by 23 State attorneys general, consumer groups, and companies like Mozilla, would fully restore the FCC's 2015 rules (a major reason why telecom lobbyists are rushing toward new bills they'll help write that would pre-empt alternative options).

If you're a lawmaker genuinely interested in having tough net neutrality protections on the books, it makes far more sense to wait for the outcome of that case, and use Republican opposition to an idea with widespread bipartisan support as fodder in the 2020 elections. Then try again with a different array of lawmakers, some of whom, hopefully, are less prone to mindlessly kissing the ass of predatory telecom monopolies with thirty years of documented, anti-competitive behavior under their belts.

Filed Under: congress, fcc, net neutrality

The Wikimedia Foundation Asks The European Court Of Human Rights To Rule Against Turkey's Two-Year Block Of All Wikipedia Versions

from the probably-won't-do-much,-but-should-annoy-Gollum dept

As numerous Techdirt stories attest, the Turkish authorities -- and the country's notoriously thin-skinned President, Recep Erdogan -- are unwilling to accept even the slightest criticism of their actions, from any quarter. That has led to huge numbers of Turkish citizens being thrown in prison on the flimsiest pretexts, as well as many Internet sites being blocked in a similarly arbitrary way. Perhaps the most significant digital victim of Turkey's paranoia is Wikipedia. In April 2017, every language version of the site was blocked under a law that allows the authorities to ban access to Web sites deemed "obscene or a threat to national security". According to The Atlantic, Wikipedia was blocked because it refused to take down an article that claimed Turkey was "aligned with various terrorist organizations".

For the last two years, all Wikipedia sites have remained blocked in Turkey. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has had enough:

Today, we proceed to the European Court of Human Rights, an international court which hears cases of human rights violations within the Council of Europe, to ask the Court to lift the more than two-year block of Wikipedia in Turkey. We are taking this action as part of our continued commitment to knowledge and freedom of expression as fundamental rights for every person.

This is not a step we have taken lightly; we are doing so only after continued and exhaustive attempts to lift the block through legal action in the Turkish courts, good faith conversations with the Turkish authorities, and campaigns to raise awareness of the block and its impact on Turkey and the rest of the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation says that the block was applied because of two articles, not one, but gives no details. In its application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) -- not to be confused with the better-known Court of Justice of the European Union -- it argues:

the blanket ban of Wikipedia violates fundamental freedoms, including the right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention. Moreover, these freedoms have been denied to the more than 80 million people of Turkey who have been impacted most directly by the block, and to the rest of the world, which has lost the nation's rich perspectives in contributing, debating, and adding to Wikipedia's more than 50 million articles.

Even if the Wikimedia Foundation wins its case, there is not much that the ECHR can do to force Turkey to comply with a decision that the block should be lifted. It's true that Turkey is a long-standing party to the European Convention on Human Rights (pdf), and that the fundamental rights provided by the Convention are guaranteed in the Turkish Constitution. But given the track-record of the Turkish authorities of ignoring all outside calls and criticism, we can probably expect more of the same if the ECHR finds against Turkey. On the plus side, this kind of high-profile tut-tutting from arguably the top human rights court in the world would doubtless annoy Erdogan hugely, so there is that.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: european court of human rights, human rights, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey, website blocking
Companies: wikimedia foundation, wikipedia

Portland Trailblazers Streisand Stupid Local Article Into National Spotlight For No Reason At All

from the getting-blazed dept

While stories about the Streisand Effect here are legion, the most frustrating aspect of them for me is typically how pointless and petty the victims of it are. There are so many of life's problems that can be best taken on by being completely ignored and the simple fact is that many famous folk and large companies have a much larger capacity and ability to ignore petty shit than the average person. I mean, come on people, you have lawyers and PR teams.

The Portland Trailblazers certainly do. And, yet, they appear to have decided to Streisand a mildly trafficked big dumb stupid local publication into the national spotlight just by failing to ignore it. The setup here is a playoffs game 3 loss and Tim Brown, an editor of the Oregonian, doing the laziest of "articles."

Tim Brown, the “Sports Trending Editor” of the Oregonian, published a lazy and actually-not-obligatory roundup of tweets from Blazers fans, NBA watchers, and lame-brained viral-hunting meme jockeys. Maybe these kinds of Twitter roundups are meant to be cathartic for fans, but mostly they suck mondo ass.

There are 131 tweets embedded in Brown’s stupid post, mashing together bot-crafted shit like SportsCenter’s Twitter account recycling the grim success rate of teams down 3–0 in NBA playoff series—spoiler alert: it’s bad—with one each of every meme GIF ever made, plus, like, some internet blue check mark drearily firing off “This is a tough one.”

It goes on from there, but the point is that the post was lazy and dumb, constructed mostly of Twitter reactions that add roughly zero value to anyone looking for a piece on this particular game. These sorts of articles are also not rare, however, and pretty much every professional sports team, major market or otherwise, are the subject of similar "takes."  

The whole thing would have ended there, except that the post's headline yoinked a bad joke from a bad national sports journalist and then pumped the whole thing out onto social media sites for public consumption. Once the tweets and retweets, mostly limited to local Blazers fans, reached members of the team, one of them that should absolutely have known better decided to respond.

Predictably, this tweet was seen by members of the Trail Blazers organization, among them Chris McGowan, the team’s president and CEO. Probably the right thing for McGowan and those in his employ to do with this kind of internet junk is sigh and grit their teeth and ignore it, but here he has chosen another course:

Suddenly, what was a barely noticable dumb local post has not only entered the national attention category, but the Trailblazers come off looking petty. In fact, if you squint at this whole story in just the right way, the Oregonion appears to cut a sympathetic figure.

And why? Again, every team has to endure this sort of thing and most of them safely ignore it all. Why Streisand this big dumb stupid article with threats of pulling ad-buys from a local publication over all of this?

Filed Under: chris mcgowan, press attention, sports coverage, streisand effect
Companies: portland trailblazers