censorship – rainey reitman's blog

The Kafkaesque battle of Soulseek and PayPal

Does your business follow copyright law to the best of its ability? Not good enough. At least that was the case for one long-standing peer-to-peer network, which had its payment processing shut down after more than 14 years of being a loyal PayPal customer.

A version of this article was originally published on EFF Deeplinks.

Soulseek, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, faced a Kafkaesque battle with PayPal. When its donors were cut off from making payments to Soulseek, the network struggled to figure out what it had done wrong—or even get a response from PayPal to its questions. Thankfully, Soulseek reached out to EFF. We got in touch with Paypal and helped convince them to reinstate the network.

PayPal did the right thing by restoring Soulseek’s account, and we commend them for that. But we’re also concerned: it’s not scalable for EFF to intervene whenever a law-abiding website is shut off from a payment provider (as we have done with an online bookseller and a short story archive). In addition, we think of Soulseek’s situation as indicative of a larger trend of Web censorship, as websites that haven’t violated any laws are choked of funds—a situation that was disastrous for WikiLeaks and is currently tightening a noose around the electronic neck ofBackpage.com.

Soulseek describes itself as “an ad-free, spyware free, just plain free file sharing network for Windows, Mac and Linux.” The passion project of a husband and wife team, Soulseek itself doesn’t host files for users. Instead, users can join the network, connect with one another, and share files directly.

The platform is donation-driven. Without ads or fees, the service relies on the good will of the community to contribute back to keeping Soulseek going. While hardly profitable, this has been enough to keep the servers running and the software updated for many years.

And that was all fine, until the summer of 2015.

Not Granting Pre-approval at This Time

Instead, Roz Arbel, who runs the site with her husband Nir, heard from users who were unable to send in donations using MasterCard. I spoke with Roz in November and she briefed me on what happened. Roz called PayPal, and spoke to a general support agent. Through that agent, Roz learned that PayPal had sent Soulseek a questionnaire because, as Roz reported hearing from the PayPal representative, MasterCard was coming down on PayPal regarding filesharing networks.

Roz hadn’t seen any questionnaire from PayPal, so they sent a new one over. Roz was assured that service would be reinstated within 48 hours after the questionnaire was completed and returned.

Roz and Nir answered the questions promptly (see below for a list of the questions) and sent the questionnaire back. Most of the questions related to copyright infringement and whether the site was taking the necessary precautions to stay on the right side of the law. Soulseek has existed for as long as it has in large part because it has complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions. For example, Soulseek has a DMCA agent and a policy of blocking user accounts that get repeated copyright infringement notifications.

A week went by with no word from PayPal. It was now October, and Soulseek had been limping along without donations from MasterCard users. Roz again contacted PayPal. This time she heard from a representative of the company that the questionnaire had been received, but nobody inside PayPal had looked at it. Roz was assured that it would be escalated and dealt with immediately.

Within an hour, Soulseek received an email from PayPal stating that the account was being permanently limited. Funds could be withdrawn, but Soulseek would not be able to receive donations through PayPal. No reasons were provided for this decision. There wasn’t even a phone number.

As Roz and Nir Arbel explained in a blog post,

We have asked repeatedly for an explanation of this behavior, but we have been stonewalled at every turn, and have received only form emails telling us that we needed to be “pre-approved” for an account. When we asked what we need to do to be pre-approved, they emailed back and said that they are “not granting pre-approval at this time.”

After this, Roz reached out to EFF. We were able to connect with PayPal and discuss our concerns about the situation. We were happy that PayPal was willing to reverse its decision.

A Little Bit of SOPA

Payment networks blacklisting those accused of copyright infringement without due process is not a new idea. In fact, we saw something remarkably similar in SOPA, the notorious Internet blacklist bill introduced in 2011:

[A] payment network provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after delivery of a notification under paragraph (4), that are designed to prevent, prohibit, or suspend its service from completing payment transactions involving customers located within the United States and the Internet site, or portion thereof, that is specified in the notification under paragraph (4). (text)

One of the most troublesome aspects of SOPA was that it did not require a neutral magistrate to consider the merits of a case and then rule on whether a site was actually engaged in copyright infringement. Instead, SOPA empowered payment providers to start shutting down websites as soon as they received written notification from a copyright holder.

This was a bogus idea in 2011, and was defeated in the single most powerful Internet protest to date. So Congress knows that the Internet community won’t stomach this type of censorship, and hasn’t dared to move a similar bill since.

Instead we’re seeing this sort of thing: quiet pressure from content holders aimed at putting pieces of SOPA into place without actually passing a bill.

These kinds of actions come with real costs. As Roz said in a phone interview, “It’s drastically reduced the number of donations we receive. It’s free for our users but it’s not free for us…we’re not doing anything wrong. We’re totally above board, and we’ve always tried to be.”

Free Speech On the Line

While the First Amendment imposes strict limitations on how the government can squelch online speech, corporations have more leeway. The argument, of course, is that consumers have choices about the companies they patronize, and companies also have certain First Amendment rights to choose what sorts of customers they want to allow.

When it comes to payment providers, that’s not exactly true.

Payment platforms are currently extremely centralized, creating what in practice is a duopoly. MasterCard and Visa are behemoth payment service providers, able to dictate through their internal policies what types of speech will and won’t be acceptable online. Other payment providers, including smaller entities like PayPal, Stripe, and many of the Bitcoin payment service providers, are bound by their agreements to Visa and MasterCard.

Until another payment alternative gains widespread popularity in processing online payments, websites are beholden to the terms set up by MasterCard and Visa. So the idea of consumer choice is entirely false.

Threats to free expression online can come in many forms, but shutting down or limiting a law-abiding website is censorship. While the situation with Soulseek turned out well in the end, we’re concerned about the many websites we haven’t heard from that may be facing similar problems. It’s time for the payment providers to start erring on the side of supporting legal speech and let courts—not arbitrary corporate policies—decide what content should be censored.

Questionnaire from PayPal (provided by Roz Arbel)

Business Overview. Please provide a general overview of your business, identifying all related website URLs or apps, describing the services you offer and how revenue is earned, and indicating how you use or would like to use PayPal’s services. (The terms “you” and “your” refer to your business in the remainder of this questionnaire.)
Typical Usage. Please describe the kinds of files that are most often stored or transferred using your services (indicating, for example, typical file types, sizes, content and/or other relevant attributes) and, to the extent of your knowledge, the typical purposes that your customers have for using your services.
Incentives for Uploaders. Do you offer rewards, cash payments or other incentives to some or all users who upload files? If so, please describe your related practices, including the criteria used to determine the nature and amount of incentives that users are entitled to receive.
Membership Tiers and Benefits. Please describe any membership tiers, subscription plans or service levels that you offer (e.g., “free,” “premium,” etc.), indicating for each any payments required and the main benefits users receive. Are paying users entitled to enhanced benefits related to downloading or otherwise accessing files uploaded by other users, such as faster access speeds, higher allowances for total amount of data accessed, or the reduction/elimination of wait times, captchas or advertising? If so, please describe the related terms.
Forum Codes. Do you offer “forum codes,” “URL codes,” “HTML codes” or other features that facilitate the incorporation of links to uploaded files on third-party websites? If so, please describe such features.
Link Checker. Do you offer users a link checker or other functionality that helps users determine whether links to uploaded files have been disabled. If so, please describe such functionality.
File Deletion. Please describe any practices you employ related to the expiration, purging or other automated deletion of uploaded files. Is the timing of a file’s deletion influenced by the frequency with which it is downloaded or otherwise accessed? If so, please explain.
Information Collection. Do you collect information about the uploaders of files? If so, please describe your related practices, including whether you collect any of the following: name, postal address, email address and IP address.
Repeat Infringement. Please describe any practices you employ to prevent users of your system from uploading copyright infringing files on multiple occasions. Please include information about any technological methods you use to identify repeat infringers, such as methods involving the IP addresses of computers used to upload files. If a policy or other information related to repeat infringement is available on your website, please provide a link.
Copyright Infringement Reports. Please describe your practices related to soliciting, receiving and responding to reports from third parties about copyright-infringing files accessible through your service. If a policy, reporting instructions or other information related to such practices (e.g., a DMCA policy) is available on your website, please provide a link.
Illegal File Reports. Please describe your practices related to soliciting, receiving and responding to reports from third parties about illegal files accessible through your service (other than reports of copyright infringement covered by Item 10 above). If a policy, reporting instructions or other information related to such practices is available on your website, please provide a link.
Monitoring. Do you employ any practices involving the monitoring of uploaded files to identify and remove copyright infringing files or other illegal files? If so, please describe those practices, including any manual review or automated scanning of files performed by your staff or by any third-party firms. Please indicate the names and website URLs of any such third-party firms.
Law Enforcement Cooperation. Please describe your practices with respect to responding to requests or orders from law enforcement, courts or other government bodies, such as information requests, discovery orders, search warrants and subpoenas.
Child Exploitation. Please describe any actions you take if you become aware that a file uploaded to your system involves child exploitation or any sexually-oriented depiction of a minor.
Other Controls. If you employ any processes or controls not otherwise covered in your responses to this questionnaire that are aimed at preventing or otherwise addressing any actual or potential use of your system for the storage or transfer of illegal files or for other illegal activities, please describe them.
Point of Contact. Please identify and provide contact information (including phone number and email address) for a person who will serve as PayPal’s point of contact with respect to our review of your business and any future inquiries or concerns we may have.

The cost of censorship in libraries

Libraries across the country are routinely overblocking content, censoring far more than is necessary under the law. This means library patrons are cut off from whole swaths of the World Wide Web, hampering their access to knowledge.

A version of this was originally published on EFF Deeplinks.

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the enforcement of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which brought new levels of Internet censorship to libraries across the country. CIPA was signed into law in 2000 and found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003. The law is supposed to encourage public libraries and schools to filter child pornography and obscene or “harmful to minors” images from the library’s Internet connection in exchange for continued federal funding. Unfortunately, as Deborah Caldwell-Stone explains in Filtering and the First Amendment, aggressive interpretations of this law have resulted in extensive and unnecessary censorship in libraries, often because libraries go beyond the legal requirements of CIPA when implementing content filters. As a result, students and library patrons across the country are routinely and unnecessarily blocked from accessing constitutionally protected websites.

First, libraries don’t actually have to comply with CIPA, which only applies to libraries that accept e-rate discounts or Library Services and Technology Act grants for Internet access; libraries that turn down this funding need not comply with the law. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in San Jose has successfully fought initiatives to install Internet filters, even at the cost of certain federal funds.

For institutions it does cover, CIPA has three requirements: that schools and public libraries adopt a written policy that includes an Internet filter, that they hold a public meeting before the policy is enacted, and that the Internet filtering is enforced when the computers are used. As Caldwell-Stone explains, the Internet policy must include a few things, specifically:

Schools and libraries subject to CIPA must certify that the institution has adopted an internet safety policy that includes use of a “technology protection measure”—filtering or blocking software—to keep adults from accessing images online that are obscene or child pornography. The filtering software must also block minors’ access to images that are “harmful to minors,” that is, sexually explicit images that adults have a legal right to access but lacking any serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

According to CIPA, libraries must place filters on all the computers owned by the library, though the filter can be turned off upon request. Schools that are covered by CIPA have some additional requirements (see text of CIPA).

What should not be censored under CIPA? Even a casual reading of the law makes it clear that only images, not text or entire websites, are legally required to be blocked. Libraries are not required to filter content simply because it is sexual in nature (sexual content isn’t necessarily obscene; it may have serious literary, educational, or artistic value, for example). Libraries aren’t required to block social networking sites, political sites, sites advocating for LGBTQ issues, or sites that explore controversial issues like genocide or gun laws or WikiLeaks.

But unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening on the ground. Libraries across the country are routinely overblocking content, censoring far more than is necessary under the law. This means library patrons are cut off from whole swaths of the World Wide Web, hampering their access to knowledge.

Problems with CIPA

After 10 years of CIPA, we now know that the law is widely misunderstood and used as an excuse for censorship. Here are a few of the main problems:

Library filters block constitutionally protected content. Library filters often block many sites that aren’t pornographic or obscene in nature. This may happen because the filters aren’t very accurate at detecting certain types of content or it may happen because the libraries set the filters to block content that should be accessible (filters typically have a range of options that can be manually adjusted during setup). As a result, filters have been known to block LGBTQ-themed sites, websites for art museums, information on teen smoking, Second Amendment advocacy sites, and sites about role playing games.

Filters don’t actually effectively block obscene content. CIPA’s objective is to prevent certain harmful and obscene material from being accessed from libraries and schools. But filters aren’t perfect. In addition to blocking legitimate content, filters can fail to block certain content that is obscene. Testing and analysis (PDF) of several available filtering technologies conducted by the San Jose public library in 2008 found that filters don’t work:

In all four filters tested, image filtering had a low rate of accuracy. Many images of an adult sexual nature were displayed on web pages accessed by the testers, and additionally the image search results pages and most of those images’ full-size versions and/or parent sites could be accessed as well. Because of the ability of image search engines (like Google Images and Yahoo Image Search) to display thumbnails which often aren’t treated as “real” images by the filtering programs, image filtering is a problem for the filtering software’s AI. Images of an adult sexual nature from image search engines, pages with images of an adult sexual nature but “fake” innocent text, or images of an adult sexual nature posted to social sites like Craigslist were consistently displayed in all four filter tests.

The deficiency of filters was emphasized by the very public failure of Homesafe, a network-level filter that was offered by one of Britain’s largest Internet providers. The filter was designed to block adult content on the network level, but in late 2011 it was revealed that the filter failed to block Pornhub, which offers thousands of free explicit videos and is ranked as the third largest pornography provider on the web.

Kids are under-prepared for the open web. One of the harmful side effects of CIPA is that many kids who rely on schools and libraries for Internet access are prevented from experiencing the unfiltered web. While in the short -term this supposedly protects children from accessing harmful content, it also robs kids of the chance to learn skills necessary to navigate the web as a whole. When websites such as social networking sites, political advocacy sites, and LGBTQ-themed sites are censored from the Internet experience of young adults, we are failing to empower our children with the skills they need to use good judgment, common sense, and basic precautions when browsing the web. Rather than employing overly stringent filters to censor the Web, libraries and schools should educate students to protect themselves online.

We don’t know exactly what’s being blocked. Among the many problematic issues with Internet filters in libraries is the lack of transparency around what’s filtered. There’s no solid documentation of which libraries are filtering what specific websites. Part of this stems from libraries not being transparent about their decision to voluntarily block more content than required by law. Additionally, most filtering technology companies closely guard their algorithms for blocking sites, claiming trade secrecy. Because we don’t have a comprehensive list of what’s getting blocked, it’s difficult to judge whether some filters are more speech-friendly than others or whether some libraries have set their filters to censor more content than they should.

Content blocking goes against the ethical obligations of librarians. Librarians play an important role is preserving free speech online — a role we recognized with our 2000 Pioneer Award honoring librarians everywhere. The American Library Association has codified the ethical obligations involved in its code of ethics: “We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.”

What can be done: fighting back against censorship in libraries

If you are concerned about the harmful ramifications of Internet censorship in libraries, you can help fight back:

Speak to your library. Find out if your library has a policy regarding censorship and ask to see it. Voice your concerns about the harmful ramifications of filters in libraries, and explain that filters are never 100% accurate.

Attend the public event. Every library that is seeking to institute a new censorship policy under CIPA is required to have an open meeting to solicit public feedback. Attend the meeting and let the library know that you think your community will benefit from an uncensored Internet.

Ask to have the filter removed. As a library patron, you may find online content blocked that obviously should not be – such as anatomy sites necessary for research. If this happens to you, don’t ignore it and try to find an alternate source. Tell the librarians on staff what happened and ask to have the filter removed so you can access the legitimate content. Every time you speak out for your rights to access content, you’re making the librarian aware that the filters are blocking too much. This not only helps prompt libraries to revisit filtering policies, it helps ensure libraries are familiar with the process of removing filters upon request.

Celebrate 404 Day with EFF. Next April 4, EFF will join several partners around the country to raise awareness of library Internet censorship. Mark your calendar now and stay turned for more information. Want to host an anti-censorship event in your school or community on that day? Email parker@eff.org and we can help.

Ethiopian blogger will face 18 years in prison

This was originally published on EFF Deeplinks.

Ethiopian Constitution

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression without any interference. This right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of his choice.”

Yesterday, the Ethiopian Supreme Court upheld the conviction and extreme sentence of award-winning online journalist Eskinder Nega, who now faces 18 years in prison. Nega was arrested in September 2011 and charged with “terrorism” under a vague law in Ethiopia that has been used to target online journalists and political dissenters. His trial and appeal faced repeated delays, while international human rights and free expression groups continued to criticize his imprisonment and punishment. EFF, PEN America, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and others campaigned for his release, and a United Nations panel found his conviction to be in violation of international law.

Ethiopian Constitution

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression without any interference. This right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of his choice.”

Mohamed Keita of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling “The persecution of Eskinder and other journalists is the hallmark of a regime fearful of the opinions of its citizens.”

Eskinder Nega came to the United States for college, studying at American University before returning to Ethiopia to become a journalist. He founded four newspapers—all of which were shut down by the Ethiopian government—and has been jailed repeatedly for his outspoken articles. His journalism license revoked, Nega moved to the digital world, becoming a blogger and using online platforms to discuss the political situation on the ground in Ethiopia. While many journalists in Ethiopia have been silenced or fled the country to protect their lives and the lives of their family members, Eskinder Nega refused to leave or stop writing. His courage and dedication as a journalist have made him an international symbol of press freedom and the power of the Internet to maintain free speech in repressive conditions.

Eskinder Nega wrote passionately about the opportunity for Ethiopia to embrace human rights and free expression. In one blog post, he wrote:

Tyranny is in retreat everywhere. It has lost one of its two last great bastions, the Arab world. The momentum is now on the side freedom. Freedom is partial to no race. Freedom has no religion. Freedom favors no ethnicity. Freedom discriminates not between rich and poor countries. Inevitably, freedom will overwhelm Ethiopia.

Eskinder Nega’s writings have provided a window into the realities of life on the ground in Ethiopia and served as inspiration for people in Ethiopia and around the world. His continued imprisonment denies the world of a unique and powerful journalistic voice from an area of the world that is hungry for accurate, fair, and multifaceted reporting.

It is time for Washington to speak up. The U.S. government has cultivated tight political ties with Ethiopia, and continues to nurture that intimate relationship, even as Ethiopia shuts down Internet freedom and intimidates its own online citizens. It can and should use its political influence with Ethiopia to champion the cause of bloggers wrongfully imprisoned. Nega’s case is emblematic of a larger problem: Ethiopia’s ongoing pattern of prosecuting journalists and political dissenters, imprisoning those who challenge the status quo, and using threats and technology to restrict its citizens’ liberty and free expression in the process. The United States’ ongoing silence in the face of such human rights abuses by a close ally is damning and shameful.