Is William Barr's Latest Attack On Section 230 Simply An Effort To Harm Tech Companies For Blocking His Desire To Kill Encryption?
from the this-makes-no-sense dept
Last month, we noted that Attorney General William Barr was making a bizarre attack on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, claiming that the DOJ was “studying Section 230 and its scope” and arguing — without evidence — that 230 might be contributing to “unlawful behavior” online. As we noted at the time, Section 230 explicitly exempts federal criminal charges from what it applies to, meaning that it literally cannot interfere with any DOJ prosecution. So it’s truly bizarre to see the DOJ concerned about the issue.
But Barr has continued to push forward with this anti-230 kick, and is going to host a “workshop” about 230 in a few weeks.
The U.S. Justice Department is hosting a workshop next month seeking ?a wide diversity of viewpoints? on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal statute that, with few exceptions, protections major internet companies and private website owners from liability when it comes to the posts and comments generated by users.
While the DOJ claims that this workshop will have that “diversity of viewpoints,” as we’ve seen in other contexts with the DOJ, that this is rarely the actual case. It may offer up a sacrificial lamb in support of 230, but it is likely to stack the deck against 230. This is the same thing that the DOJ has done, repeatedly, with regard to the encryption debate and questions around “going dark.” Indeed, we’ve noted before the similarities between the government’s efforts to attack encryption and the playbook that was used to attack Section 230 in 2018. In fact, we’ve heard that the very same former Hollywood lobbyist is a key player in both efforts.
Given the similarities in the playbook, and the fact that the DOJ is not hindered at all by 230, it makes you wonder if Barr and the DOJ are playing this anti-230 card simply as a method of punishing the internet industry for opposing his desire to gut encryption? The whole thing seems to be little more than an abuse of DOJ power to intimidate and threaten an entire industry for daring to support online security and free speech online against a government which would prefer neither thing be enabled.
Filed Under: cda 230, doj, encryption, section 230, william barr
Comments on “Is William Barr's Latest Attack On Section 230 Simply An Effort To Harm Tech Companies For Blocking His Desire To Kill Encryption?”
Barr wants to shoot the messengers, rather than going after the actual criminals. Like the FOSTA push, this about enabling charges to be levied against third parties, which are easier to find than those using third party services.
They might get 230 right. There are so many bigger issues though.
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And I might wake up next to a porn star tomorrow morning. Neither one is all that likely to happen.
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Actually, if you have a IOT security camera in your home, you stand a betterr chance of becoming a porn star the Barr being correct on anything tech related.
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Has government regulation ever gotten anything "right" the first time .. the second time .. ever?
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Sure. When left to experts and empirical data. Then someone comes by and "cuts the red tape", because when has turning a river into dry cleaning fluid ever hurt anyone?
Re: vengeance
What they might do is give website owners am excuse to ban them and say they don’t won’t be held liable for the brown that comes out of them.
There are no good options
Dangerously, willfully stupid, or dangerously petty and spiteful… yeah, I’m not really seeing a non-terrible explanation for his behavior here either way but even if he did have what he thought was a valid reason it still wouldn’t prevent his actions and goal from being hugely dangerous to the public.
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Those who have had their reputations destroyed because intermediaries spread defamation without accountability deserve better than to have their harm dismissed.
If someone on 4chan defames someone who loses a job because of GOOGLE, then GOOGLE inflicted the harm. It’s called "distributor liability." Publication and spreading the lie are two separate harms inflicted by two separate parties.
I should point out to Barr that my views here are being censored as well. Maybe that will tilt things.
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"It’s called "distributor liability." "
aka, bullshit
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Still haven’t got over Shiva Ayyadurai’s loss, have we?
You just won’t let this piece of shit you call an argument die, huh? Newsflash, bumfuck, 4chan hasn’t been relevant for a long time. 4chan hasn’t been relevant since 8chan decided it wanted to be bigger and badder. 4chan hasn’t been relevant since Anonymous took a pot shot at Scientology, then proceeded to fuck themselves over with the swastika stunts in HabboHotel. If an employer is dumb enough to use 4chan as a character reference over LinkedIn or Facebook, he’s a pro bono lawsuit waiting to happen.
And so is publicly announcing that you’re a litigious dumbass who wants the world to know. Milorad Truklja would literally have no one outside of Australia know of his dispute with a local newspaper had he not sued Google.
Oh, you wish your garbage was censored. The fact that I can still pull your responses (the Strike 3 ones are highly entertaining, incidentally, in a vitriolic Jerry Springer sort of way) in real time means that your trash isn’t censored. Your daddy Barr has bigger fish to fry, anyway. I imagine he’ll need to take an extended trip to Nunes’ ranch after Apple tells him to shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Two years waiting on a police investigation and press release because some no-name braggart got his fee-fees hurt on the Internet. I’m going to think that zero divided by anything is still jack fuckall and file this under the list of blanks you fired since late 2017 under this sad persona.
Re: Reputation
Again with this! Give it up, man!!
Remember how someone posted lies about me on various platforms, then contacted my employers to try to get me fired from my job?
post rebuttals and contact the platform with evidence that the troll’s "reviews" were false. Most of the platforms took the comments down; the one that left the comment up allowed me to post a rebuttal, so every time Hamilton brings it up, he’s linking to the rebuttal as well, which is why nobody ever takes him seriously.
Advise my employers it was troll activity
** Get a statement from the police to prove I wasn’t being investigated for the crimes the troll had falsely accused me of.
Result: no harm, I was promoted afterwards.
Why do you keep flogging the damn horse? It’s dead. Leave it. You’re making a mess.
It it walks like a duck, I mean troll…
No it won’t. They’ll see my posts too and realise what a prat you are. Stop repeating folly and nobody will think you’re dumb.
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No one is dismissing their harms. We’re just saying it’s stupid to hold innocent parties accountable for actions they never committed. Do we hold the post office responsible for defamation letters sent through snail mail? No. Do we hold phone companies responsible because they facilitated the phone calls that allowed people to call others and spread defamation that way? No. The internet and social media is no different.
What? How does defamation on 4chan have anything to do with google? The two aren’t even related.
Again, how? They aren’t related. Unless google is the one posting defamatory speech on 4chan. Which is also not happening.
Even if you were right, you aren’t, because google is not distributing the speech on 4chan. Technically 4chan isn’t either. So at best you would hold 4chan responsible as the "distributor" because the content is on their servers, not google, because it’s on 4chan’s site, not google’s. But you’re still wrong because websites are not distributors in that specific sense. They host, not distribute.
Neither of which is happening in your 4chan/google example. 4chan isn’t a publisher and doesn’t spread anything. And the same goes for google. If you want to go with that argument, then you also have to agree that libraries and the Dewey Decimal system also contribute to publishing and spreading defamatory content found in books.
Flagging your post is not censorship. Censorship is preventing you from speaking at all. You’re still able to speak and your posts are still there, just collapsed. It’s not even moderation. You might try actually learning how this all works.
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"What? How does defamation on 4chan have anything to do with google? The two aren’t even related."
He means that he thinks employers are constantly Googling their employees, and take the top results as gospel truth, never considering context or actual conduct by the employee. As soon as something negative appears, true or not, you’re out the door no matter what you’ve been provably doing while employed.
That’s silly and says a lot more about the kinds of jobs he’s been able to hold down than it does about Google, but that seems to be the mindset.
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I recently changed jobs; the crap still up about me on ROR made no difference to my boss’s hiring choices. In any case, he’s smart enough to be able to tell the difference between a troll post on the likes of 4chan and a genuine complaint.
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Yep, if a new employer takes the first page of a Google result as truth without investigating or asking you further, they’re probably not worth working for. If your existing employer does the same thing, you should be searching for the exit immediately.
I get that some of this stuff must be really uncomfortable on both sides, but an employer who just takes that stuff at face value probably isn’t very thorough in other parts of their business.
I suspect that our friend above has never been in a position beyond that of a vaguely mobile primate and they keep finding excuses to get rid of him when they realise he doesn’t even reach that level. So, the idea that an employer would do anything other than the shallowest of basic research must be beyond him.
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"He means that he thinks employers are constantly Googling their employees, and take the top results as gospel truth, never considering context or actual conduct by the employee. As soon as something negative appears, true or not, you’re out the door no matter what you’ve been provably doing while employed."
It’s more likely that his beef is that he really doesn’t want people to be able to google his real name and come up with a fraud conviction.
Bobmail/Jhon/Blue has been screaming in hysterics that people shouldn’t be allowed to talk about other people online since back in the day on Torrentfreak. And he let slip more than once that his beef was the bad reviews which keeps him from pursuing his business model. And pirates apparently nicking his mailing lists, for whatever reason.
That’s why he’s so angry with section 230 and Google in particular.
Of course it won’t get him any cred on most forums to just state that the lack of distributor liability hurts aspiring con men which is why he’s trying to phrase that occupation as a "job" you could lose if people started talking about you online.
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"It’s called "distributor liability.""
Oh, hey, it’s Jhon Smith again. Or should we call you bobmail or Blue today? Done on your Hamilton venting session at last?
And as usual you keep bringing up "distributor liability" which, if true, would scuttle most of the first amendment because at the end of the day the one who builds the road and the car is not responsible for the bank robber who uses both.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people have explained dual-use technology to you. Again, and again, and again…
If he claims others may be committing crimes online, it’s a sure bet that he is doing exactly that. Their projections are amazingly accurate.
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He is a plant for the Trump administration. The only surprise would be if one of them was not committing serious crimes on a regular basis.
No, he wants to punish everbody who exercises their right to speak.
It’s not a workshop, it’s a get-on-board-and-influence-Congress party.
Re: get-on-board-and-influence-Congress party.
I’m still waiting for Weird Al’s followup, "Party in the DOJ"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-CG5w4YwOI
Re: Re: get-on-board-and-influence-Congress party.
Good call. Nice one, centurion.
Tell me
At this point I have to ask: why are these people “Politicians etc” still allowed to use these services?
These people are on twitter calling the internet and everything on it horrible for things THEY are responsible for and they know it.
What is the benifit or keeping the man who is in the neighborhood trashing it around when you know what he’s going to do?
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Why should COMCAST or VERIZON be forced to provide internet access to people it doesn’t like?
BTW this CENSORSHIP ("moderation") is lame, and a perfect example of conservatives being targeted to manipulate the flow of online information.
Then there’s that lawyer-hacker MAFIA that deliberately defames people, and uses certain "media" sites as backchannels to further their agenda.
Heck, he’d have the power to investigate this and probable cause, wouldn’t he?
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Because people eventually get bored of you shooting your own foot all the time and permit your idiocy out of graciousness.
Remember the days of MyNameHere where you at least pretended you weren’t a fan of the Trump administration? I mean, you sucking whatever cock you think will get you what you want is hardly surprising, but still.
Ah, the old "pseudonym got offended, posts under signature writing styles, complains about the same damn topics in the same damn ways and can’t figure out why he keeps getting identified" chestnut.
Charles Harder failed to kill this site, get over yourself.
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What Barr is REALLY going to look at is the gang violence that is fueled by the 24/7/365 online conflicts that the ISPs and websites have no incentive to stop. Kids have been getting KILLED because of this (same for bullying videos that go up).
Immunizing sites from false advertising is also anathema to consumer protection.
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Doubling down to double posting, have we? Happy 2020 to you too, John Smith, you old impotent fuckwit.
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Barr is not going to stop the Nazis you think are going to form your one-size-fits-all excuse to ram whatever tech law shit you think you’re getting. Like you claim ISPs and websites do, he has no incentive to stop. Pandering to the violent rhetoric and scamming the people who drink it up is how this current Presidency has run things. If you think Barr is going to result in anything meaningful for your mailing list scam I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Laws against bullying videos have been attempted. They fail for very good reasons: neither the tech, nor the humanity, exists to moderate and enforce these laws at scale without fucking things up for everyone else.
However, as someone who was relentlessly bullied as a kid, I will take your sad attempt to use someone else’s plight and exaggerate it for your Techdirt hateboner and tell you sincerely to fuck off, not that I expect you to take the advice.
Your hatred of review websites is duly noted once again.
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"What Barr is REALLY going to look at is the gang violence that is fueled by the 24/7/365 online conflicts"
Because we all know that gang violence never happened before social media /s
"Immunizing sites from false advertising is also anathema to consumer protection."
Here’s a wild idea – why not go after the people who are creating false advertising, rather than the billboard they happen to post it on?
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"What Barr is REALLY going to look at is the gang violence that is fueled by the 24/7/365 online conflicts that the ISPs and websites have no incentive to stop. Kids have been getting KILLED because of this (same for bullying videos that go up)."
Bobmail, didn’t we wean you from the habit of going "but think of the children" every time your arguments were weak way back on Torrentfreak? And yet here we are again, you lauding an ultra-authoritarian thug once again – and as usual with no arguments.
No, Jhon. We won’t be abolishing modern mass communications and the concept of free speech online just because you want the law to render abuse even easier for copyright trolls and con men.
Barr is more a common thief criminal and seditionist then any social media site could ever be.
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the only issue i ever had with section 230 is that companies like backpage and others were using it to allow traffickers to post ads online of underage girls. while backpage and craigslist would reap millions off of these ads, (and in backpage’s case was found guilty of helping to facilitate these traffickers), backpage would exploit 230 to make millions
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So, the only problem you had was a fiction not based in reality? Congrats I guess, that means you have no problem with it.
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Except none of that was true… https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190826/17065842857/new-government-documents-reveal-that-backpage-was-actively-helping-law-enforcement-track-down-traffickers.shtml
Also, the case against Backpage has not been heard yet. The company has not been found guilty.
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"the only issue i ever had with section 230 is that companies like backpage and others were using it to allow traffickers to post ads online of underage girls"
So, you had a problem because Backpage were being stopped from being held responsible for the actions of other people, while supplying the police with a steady stream of evidence regarding the crimes of traffickers who were announcing their activities in public?
Yeah, that’s too easy. It’s far better to drive the criminals underground and make their crimes both harder to detect and harder to prosecute, while simultaneously holding innocent people responsible for actions they didn’t commit. That will work out so much better for the victims.
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CDA Section 230 is an ill conceived law giving claimed blanket liability immunity to uncaring Tech Giants allowing and promoting on their sites libelous/slanderous content directed toward, and at the expense of, innocent individuals and small businesses. They are more powerful than any other publishers on earth yet given a free pass to publish utter garbage about anyone and it goes out to the entire World and lives for a life time. Posters are often those types who don’t care about being sued, they have no assets, and actually invite the opportunity to get some more attention.
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The alternatives are either no moderation, or requiring third parties to decide whether what you want to say should be allowed. Neither option is any good for society, as the first leads to a the loudest and most obnoxious people overrunning a platform until they are the only ones left using it, and the second increasing moderation as those who would censor the speech of others demand stronger and stringer moderation based on what they view to be acceptable.
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…he said, while relying on CDA Section 230 to voice his opinions.
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‘Person posting anonymously on an open forum complains about law that allows posting anonymously and open forums’ is an own-goal/joke that never gets old, yes.
Is Barr doing something bad ...
Yes.
MyNameHere just hates it when due process is enforced.