We're big supporters of the EFF, but I can't get on board with the idea that somehow it's wrong or a slippery slope for Tier 1 ISPs to be blocking Kiwifarms.
Haven't done this in a while, but let's take a look at some of the fine people making sure Kiwifarms stays online.
Passive DNS says kiwifarms[.]net has been resolving for at least the past 10 months through 103.114.191[.]1, which is assigned to the Autonomous System 1002.
For an AS # that low (there are tens of thousands of them), you'd think it was a big ISP. But it's not. This ISP -- Veilios Hosting -- doesn't even have a website. But it has an OG autonomous system #, and quite a bit of IP space, considering.
Who runs Veilios? A young Canadian man named Curtis Gervais. In 2014, Gervais was arrested for perpetrating more than 30 swatting attacks and bomb threats, including multiple swatting attempts of our home.
@DanielRThomas But to answer your question, I believe yes there is a very interesting story behind the history of that AS, specifically the penultimate owners.
@briankrebs Are you sure about this? That domain does resolve to the 103.114.191.1 IP, but that’s announced by AS 397702 currently. That’s 1776 Solutions LLC, in Wyoming.
@briankrebs@QRSS_Test APNIC Whois returns 5 different route records for the /24 in 5 different ASs.
pWhois (whob) is returning the 397702 route with a 8/28 originating date.
@briankrebs Oooh, this is a neat conversation! Thanks for sharing!!
What are your thoughts?
Personally (and before reading through everything), I think there's a balance to be struck.
In a perfect world, if the ISP doesn't want to be associated with certain groups or ideologies -- whether that's gay rights and global warming, to election conspiracies and -- I think they should be allowed to say what is and isn't allowed on their service.
Capitalism would imply that a new ISP would rise up to service those folks... Though the capital required to create that network may be prohibitive, and the effective monopolies in certain areas would be an enormous issue.
In the end, I feel stuck. Personally and morally, I'd like to ban certain types of content and speech -- as would my political opponents -- because I think I am "right." But, since it would be "wrong" for the other side to do it to me, do either of us have the ethical right to dictate or otherwise police speech?
And if neither of us have that right, then does it mean we must submit to a free-for-all, laissez-faire Internet that has things we all agree are heinous, like murder for hire or child porn?
... Though perhaps that's a step too far, since those are already illegal, but I'm thinking of the furry crackdown on Tumblr that decimated the community for the sake of legality.
Sigh Complicated topic for a Wednesday. Still, thanks for sharing! Looking forward to reading through the full thread.
@GossiTheDog@briankrebs
TBT the EFF is a bit of an extremist on this (and also, e.g., they opposed and I think still oppose the search warrant changes that enabled botnet takedowns).
Such as where is the right for (a not actual monopoly) business to not do business with raging assholes who are more grief than they are worth? And also by their analogy, if you are doing crime through the mail, it makes sense to cut off postal service.
@GossiTheDog like the ACLU I’m very glad they exist but they sometimes lack balance at the expense of real peoples’ safety. It’s all so academic and idealistic.
@GossiTheDog called police yesterday for a welfare check on my father from some similar shady characters. They don't have a way to look up addresses to take action.
@briankrebs The EFF were describing email spam filtering as “a form of Internet abuse and a direct assault on the health, growth, openness and liberty of the Internet.” 20+ years ago. None of this is new.
@briankrebs EFFs argument is that the legal frame work should handle it (and it might be the case that it isn't good enough ...). "Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.". I fully support that argument. ISPs censoring isn't the solution to getting rid of evils.
@amszmidt@briankrebs But it doesn't. The authorities are absolutely aware of KF, they simply ignore it. Pressure campaigns on ISPs and hosting companies have been the only effective means to slow the proliferation of hate-speech from organizations like this. It takes a large amount or privileged to say "nah the cops should handle it" and walk away. While the cops do nothing, KF continues to harass people into suicide.
People who say "the authorities should handle it" in full knowledge that the authorities will not, do not intend to, and have never handled it are the sort of people who think that "tomato is a fruit actually" counts as serious biology research.
@passenger@GrayGooGirl@briankrebs The authorise do handle it, in countries with a sensible legal system -- the US being one that does not have that. This nonsense of tossing every single country into the same box of problems is getting quite pathetic...
@GrayGooGirl@briankrebs it is still the wrong solution to the problem, doesn’t matter that it works. One should pressure the democratic system to create better protections instead of resorting to vigilantism which is just a slippery slope.
@amszmidt@GrayGooGirl@briankrebs So, you don't like the solution being presented. Why don't you go pressure the democratic system to make sure your preferred solution is implemented instead?
@briankrebs What a bad take from someone I thought I was intelligent enough to actually read an article and remove their personal feelings towards Kiwifarms before crafting a response.
They don't support KF. They support Tier 1 ISPs doing their job of transporting packets without bias, without deep moderation and without interference.
@briankrebs what i found most ridiculous about it was the statement said leave it to the law, and a couple of sentences later admitted that the law wasn't working here. seriously unimpressed.
@briankrebs Justice Potter Stewart famously his test for deciding obscenity: "I know it when I see it." Turning a blind eye to every type of conduct regardless of how it impacts society is not the dispassionate aversion to oversight it seems, but an abandonment of responsibility because of a failure to define minimum standards for behavior.
@briankrebs the exact problem is people like yourself think this type of censorship ends at the easy cases of nazis or all-but-criminals, but we have endless historical examples of how brunt of these types of unaccountable censorship regimes come down hard on peaceful, leftist and progressive elements of society.
Look at the McCarthy hearings, communist blacklists, and economic warfare committed against organized black and indigenous peoples over the last 50-60 years.
What happens if and when hardcore right wing elements gain control of Tier 1 ISPs and they declare LGBTQ activists as terrorists? They will ruthlessly cut access to anything even approaching civil rights speech for those communities.
The idea that private corporations ought to regulate internet access based on personal belief is downright laughable. Only unserious people even consider this. If the opportunity to destroy free expression, even in its entirety, was believed to have market advantage, corporations would not hesitate in the slightest to bring down the axe. Permanently if necessary.
It’s incredibly shortsighted to restrict internet access to these awful people no matter how egregious. It isn’t an issue of reactionary politics or “freedumb”. There are already many laws that have far reaching powers to stop actual criminal activity. The expression in question is merely objectionable. There really isn’t much of an argument in opposition. You either believe in free expression as a human right or you don’t.
i'm mostly a huge fan of EFF and ACLU. problem is that at some point, they go off the deep end on purity of principle over real world damage to actual folks.
@briankrebs When people learn that hate speech, etc., is on their servers and they do nothing to remove it and prevent more from showing up, they've decided to share responsibility for distributing the stuff with the people who created it.
This seems obvious to me. Just as obviously, the constant playing of the free speech card by the people profiting from that traffic is entirely disingenuous, a fig leaf of faux morality to cover their complicity.
@briankrebs The lack of transparency on the part of HE is, to me, the most compelling of EFF's arguments. It may or may not be a slippery slope, but lack of established procedures and transparency tend to make it slipperier, and harder to police by the Internet community.
@briankrebs In the alternate universe where Tier 1 ISPs and governments don't already filter objectionable (and "objectionable") content, they'd have a point.
Here in the real world, we're already at the bottom of the slippery slope, so we might as well use the viscous goo we're all bathing in for some good for once.
@briankrebs this is very ACLU ‘we defend all free speech’ of them, yet it’s not as clear cut as they make it seem, to me. if Tier 1 ISPs get into the blocking game or what they call “policing”, then it does open the door to pressure from the state because the paradigm has shifted, but this also discourages people on the inside of companies like Hurricane Electric trying to make things right who know that change through legislation is a slow, multi-year, cumbersome process that’s just unrealistic when it comes to the rate of change in technology. to funnel all energy toward solely combatting censorship AND seemingly suggesting it should only be done through legislative channels instead of widening the playing field to encourage -everyone- to fight for a better internet on every front—from multiple angles, using a variety resources and tactics—seems like a shift in the wrong direction. but then again, maybe this has always been their stance and some of us are just evolving to realize legislation is not only not enough, but wholly inadequate even at its best.
@briankrebs I think it's a dumb hill to die on, but they're right-ish: normalising this will further normalise weaponisation of ISPs to block "illegal" distribution of copyrighted content (which they're already often deputised to do) and to block porn. And since many ISPs do have regional monopolies, users don't have the opportunity to vote with their wallet.
So while these are clearly terrible people who shouldn't be on the internet, my morals are not universal and I don't trust others.
@briankrebs As much as I hate KF I must agree with them on this though.
There is something fundamentally wrong to blocking content without prosecution or it being ordered by a judge. Otherwise you'll have ISPs acting like Facebook and banning stuff because it's not "advertiser friendly" or whatever.
The real problem with KF is that the owners are known and still not in prison.
Get a warrant, close the site with a judicial order and arrest the owners.
@briankrebs This part illustrates the problem with zealots: they demand that we abstain from pragmatic solutions that can be implemented, in favor of a total restructuring of society into a utopia.
Or to put it less charitably, why I keep a strong separation between cannabis and policy analysis.
This is like me saying that the solution to racial disparities in medicine is to teach people to be less racist. It's not wrong, just...it really straddles a line between earnestness and dishonesty.
@briankrebs I hear you, but think EFF makes a compelling case nonetheless: “To put it even more simply: When a person uses a room in a house to engage in illegal or just terrible activity, we don’t call on the electric company to cut off the light and heat to the entire house, or the post office to stop delivering mail. We know that this will backfire in the long run. Instead, we go after the bad guys themselves and hold them accountable.”
@briankrebs I will admit my first thought whenever I see one of these allegedly principled "oh no you shouldn't block <some loathsome people or bit of the internet>" is... "they're your pals, right? Or you're doing the thing that would be blocked?"
Not always, to be sure. Sometimes it really is a principled defense, and occasionally even well argued. Just... that reflex is there.
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