Tuesday News: Online spying, speech, censorship, and piracy
Publishing NewsATT / censorship / defamation / domestic surveillance / email / First-Amendment / national security / NSA / piracy / social privilege / speech rights6 Comments
What We Know About the NSA and AT&T’s Spying Pact – We talk about mergers like the AT&T + DirectTV deal from an anti-trust standpoint, but new information about AT&T’s “highly collaborative” relationship with the NSA provides a new level of concern about the consolidation of companies with control over a great deal of data and the means by which it is transferred. AT&T’s control over so much internet traffic made so much data and information available that domestic spying was actually a pretty easy endeavor. AT&T was actually building secret rooms to monitor all this data, in projects that sound a lot like they belong in a Bourne thriller. Is it still going on? No one apparently knows (or is, at least, telling), and how many are convinced they’ve actually stopped?
According to the Times, AT&T began turning over emails and other internet data to the spy agency around October 2001, even before the secret rooms were built, in a program dubbed “Fairview.” The program forwarded 400 billion Internet metadata records to the NSA’s headquarters at Ft. Meade in Maryland—which included the senders and recipients of emails and other details, but not the content of the correspondence. AT&T also forwarded more than one million emails a day to be run through the NSA’s keyword selection system. In September 2003, AT&T apparently enabled a new collection capability for the spy agency, which amounted to a “‘live’ presence on the global net.” The Times doesn’t elaborate on what this involved.
In 2011, AT&T also began handing over phone metadata to the NSA, including call records for 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calls a day. –Wired
Reddit caves to Russian censorship – Ah, Reddit: the company that champions free speech when it comes to shaming women and fat people, but not when, say, Russia doesn’t want people accessing a post on how to grow psychedelic mushrooms. Yeah, no philosophical or political conflicts here. And it’s tough, because there really are legitimate discussions to be had around when and why one set of rights or responsibilities trumps another, but given Reddit’s historical tolerance to some of the Internet’s most vile content, I don’t know how thoughtfully or circumspectly they’re contributing to the sorting out of these complicated balancing acts.
A law enforcement agent going down a Reddit rabbit hole has resulted in another round of censorship announcements from the “front page of the Internet.” Reddit announced on its ChillingEffects subreddit Thursday that the company will comply with countries’ local laws, blocking access to content a country deems illegal whenever it receives a request to do so. –Fusion
Lawsuit over two-word tweet—“actually yes”—can move ahead, judge finds – Another interesting facet of speech issues as they relate to K-12 schools and students, this time involving a student who was targeted after a two-word tweet sent in response to another tweet asking if he “made out” with a specific teacher. Minnesota high school student Reid Sagehorn responded “actually, yes,” to the question, which he said was intended as a joke, and not as a literal confirmation. Regardless, Sagehorn was suspended, ultimately had to change schools, and was subjected to some pretty serious accusations from the police chief, whose comments reflect an, uh, interesting interpretation of protected speech and defamation. Now Sagehorn is suing, while the school claims that the tweet was “obscene” and therefore legitimately subject to their policing. Although school students have more limited speech rights (e.g. Morse v. Frederick, the famous “Bong hits 4 Jesus” case), the boundary is under constant negotiation.
In the ensuing weeks, Rogers Police Chief Jeff Beahen likened the comment to screaming “fire!” in a crowded theater.
Beahen told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, adding that the offense was likely a felony: “If you say something on a very public forum, there are consequences. This young, innocent teacher is the victim here.”
The local prosecuting attorney later confirmed that Sagehorn had committed no crime and the police chief apologized. Sagehorn, for his part, also said he had written an apology to the teacher in question: “I never meant to hurt anybody.”–Ars Technica
Piracy gave me a future – This is the kind of article that I imagine makes anti-piracy zealots vibrate with rage and righteous anger. After all, Daniel Starkey likens piracy to “searching the web for information,” which may justify the argument that there are not enough deterrents to illegal downloading. But that’s not Starkey’s interest in writing this essay. Rather, he’s focused on the economic inequities that make some information and content unavailable to those who do not have the economic means. Which raises larger questions around who has power and how the online environment often reflects and reinforces hierarchies of socio-economic privilege.
Deus Ex was the first game I’d seen that listed its primary influences, which included philosophers like Hobbes, Voltaire, Locke. They were wealthy men, to be sure, but learning about their work set me on the path to learning about sociology, about history, about how much all media is one long chain of slightly modified ideas, with each new link adding a new twist or perspective. The game’s themes also spoke to some of the most personal concerns of my life, including economic class, injustice, about the disempowered fighting against a wealthy ruling class.
It was also a game where actions had serious consequences, and taking the quick, easy path could cause enormous harm to innocent bystanders. It was a message I took to heart. Playing through Deus Ex helped me realize that there are always consequences you can’t quite see, and that my thefts over the years had surely left a wake of victims who had suffered—particularly the ones where I had taken physical goods and money. If they worked for minimum wage, even my quick, pilfered fiver could have been an hour or more of their life.
But what I learned from the game also helped solidify my belief that online piracy, at least in the context of my own circumstances, was still justified. Yes, downloading an illicit digital work can cause a sort of a harm to the creators or corporations that aren’t receiving revenue, particularly independent developers, but when I weighed it against the desperation of my poverty and the worthlessness it made me internalize, there was no comparison. –Boing Boing
I feel for the teacher in the Sagehorn case. Careless insinuations like that have led to teachers losing their jobs, and sometimes their certifications.
At this point, do we expect anything different from reddit?
“I never meant to hurt anybody.” Guess that makes it all ok.
Well, my son is in HS and I must say, the standard HS kid is not very mature. IMHO, the school and the police should have taken that into consideration. Maybe the kid was 18, but that still gives him all the maturity of judgment of an HS boy (ie not much).
I can completely believe the boy in question sent out a tweet designed to make his pals laugh spending all of 10 nanoseconds thinking it through, and in none of those nanoseconds did it occur to him that someone might take it seriously — or that anyone beyond his best buddies would read it.
RE Piracy:
In many parts of the world, where corruption is the norm, people have to make choices about where to draw a line between acceptable and unethical behavior.
When people have not access to a book, movie, or song either through regional restrictions, lack of market (where everyone torrents, legal markets can be hard to find and not sell much) or lack of money, they have to decide if downloading it is a crime or not.
Most people decide that the rights’ holder has lost no money regardless of whether the potential consumer foregoes the item or pirates it, so there’s no harm in pirating it.
However, someone who pirates a game (I mean after all, he could have gone to his local library instead and read a book, which might have sparked the same intellectual curiosity) in America, regardless of how poor he is, doesn’t get much sympathy from me.
I work in an industry where piracy is a major issue and concern, but I really try to keep it separated out from personal judgement — I know plenty of people who pirate for various reasons, and the reasons really don’t matter to me, it’s none of my business (even when they’re telling me about it, sigh). I do my best to make sure developers/content creators get money from me, be it donating $5 for a free program that solved a problem I was having or well, buying games on Steam sometime after the first 3 months and the price drops drastically. However, I’m also able to do so, so I’m not hovering in judgement over people. I have had people ask me where they can get free books (“the library” is my honest, non-snarky answer), etc. I’ve been ramen-and-spaghetti-os poor, and still managed to use a library card, borrow games from friends, etc. I do like giving people references to abandonware, and various companies/authors/etc who are like “Yeah, you can’t buy this anymore legally, so like, do what you will, and if you feel guilty buy a t-shirt or something”, which works for me.
Then again, when family members are crowing over spending $200 for a rig that connects them directly to torrent sites so they can watch all the pirated movies ever, I am pretty sure that’s what having a minor aneurysm feels like. Family members have also outright rejected like, copies of movies/TV serieseses I know they really enjoy, because “I can just download it for free” and it makes me cringe, but that’s why I get a gift receipt. :/
The majority of the reasoning behind piracy (of video games, at least) is “because I want it now, and for free”. If folks own up to it, whatever. They’re adults. It directly affects me, but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except keep trying to make stuff people feel is worth buying… and keep making fabulous “cracked” versions of the game to seed that change the language to Hungarian after 10 minutes, or lock all doors permanently, or keybind open door to rocket launcher, or give all enemies a million health.
I guess I’d just rather people be honest about what they’re doing and stop rationalizing that it’s totally harmless and doesn’t affect anyone. The comparison of the pirating games to shoplifting and theft was really interesting, as most people vehemently deny that they do the latter when they do the former. I’m not sure that “desperation of poverty” is anymore a valid reason than “I want it now and for free”, or is just the same reason couched in different language, and while I’m always really glad when a game touches someone’s life, apparently it didn’t actually change this person’s life all that much anyhow.