Everyone’s missing the big picture here which is that this targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented and concerning: https://decode39.com/16319/autistici-inventati-case-sets-a-n...

If a radical group sets up shop on I2P, are I2P users and devs now terrorists? This is a problem.

What about Monero users/devs? Veilid? Tox? Signal?

It is not unprecedented, but a lot of fools lauded moves like this when these kind of instruments were used with barely a legal net around them against islamic terrorism or cybercrime.

I'm not crying for no Al-Qaeda or 8chan, mind you. In this very year UN and ICJ officials have been targeted in a similar fashion though. When the pax americana ends like this, I don't know what else is needed for EU and Asia to raise tougher walls around the woes of any idiot hyped enough to be voted by USA citizens.

8chan's /pol/ wasn't any different than 4chan's. the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't.

> the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't

That's certainly a take.

My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.

Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?

I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.

we've seen several websites that do not break US law get evicted by registrars, ISPs, DDoS protection services, and other Internet landlords. 4chan miraculously survived multiple mass hysteria periods of the past decade without (iirc) any major disruptions. same as Russian 2ch -- miraculously untouched by Russia's rapid North Koreaization even though its /pol/ is overwhelmingly anti-regime.

The pirate bay is still up despite being taken down, is this now also a honeypot?

The Pirate Bay has had legal issues, been raided and taken down in the past. Has 4chan has any issues like this?

The UK fined it £520,000 but has no way to enforce it.

In fairness, this at most tells you the UK court system isn't party to any honeypotting.

Despite the memes, the UK is not the 51st state, which is both why it was able to make the fine (1st Amendment doesn't have jurisdiction over the UK) and why it's not able to enforce it (the UK doesn't have jurisdiction over 4chan).

It got raided once way back.

Is the current pirate bay even still the original, or just a mirror or someone trying to mimic the old one?

it's very much the same and backed a political party at their home turf.

tpb.party

Regarding the honeypot allegations, I'm guessing they're referring to the connections between 4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot", and Jeffrey Epstein:

https://www.ms.now/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-4chan-chris-poole

Michael Tracey, we really need you here...

/pol was made in October 2023 after a meeting between moot and Epstein. 4chan may not have been a honeypot but it’s likely that /pol was influenced heavily by Epstein/Maxwell which indicates a plausible link between/pol and Mossad aligned Intel activities at least.

But /new/ was from before then and was essentially the precursor to /pol/ anyway

Sure. Epstein/Mossad/CIA was not likely involved in the creation of the Chan. But the creation of /pol apparently in response to moot meeting Epstein (and follow-up meetings) as well as Maxwell’s alleged “janitor” status on the board are both deeply suspicious at least.

BTW someone should probably check in on moot once in a while to see if he’s ok lol. Strange bedfellows and all that.

It's was mostly a slightly more edgy 4chan with actually some more varied boards and wider range of political views (/leftypol/) was a thing If I remember. So mostly dumb teens and later the whole Q-Anon mentally ill boomers who took over once the board was brought by one of them much to displeasure of the edge teens. In short if that is a threat to a government and a society it's a weak government and society, comparing it to Al-Qaeda or some kind of comparable threat to anything government or nation is crazy.

Only that 8 was and is just a giant astroturfer for Watkins.

1. It is extremely likely neither 8chan /pol/ nor 4chan /pol/ were or are honeypots.

2. Untrue. I heavily used both (not as a right-winger; just as a decades-long anonymous imageboard user who sometimes finds it fun to rile people up in /pol/ boards). 8chan's was a lot worse and was shut down for a reason.

Yeah That fucking cunt Brenton Tarrant was just ruffling feathers…

I wonder why Epstein was communicating with 4chan's founder in 2011...

There is an endless supply of fools that can be hyped to become the next US president

I think the same people who opposed a/i sanctions (not AI sanctions but they're really missing out by not exploiting that confusion) also opposed sanctions for """islamic terrorism""" and for """cybercrime""".

To some thin extent (opposition to racial profiling and big copyright), mayhaps. People protest against Guantanamo, not for ISIS, and protest against identification, not for looking at pedo porn.

It's the logic of Jack Bauer taken to the end. "Come on, it's obvious who the bad guys are, who needs rules?" until suddenly it's not obvious anymore...

My conspiracy theory is that "24" was funded by the CIA (etc.) to build public support for measures like the Patriot Act. "24" debuted 11 days after the Patriot Act became law, so they were being worked on at the same time.

Don't forget the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. During its pilot episode, first airing March 4th, 2001, members of the U.S. government remotely hijack an airliner and try to crash it into the World Trade Center, blaming anti-American terrorist groups in order to start a new global war on terrorism for the profit of defense industry contractors.

It may also have contributed a bit to the planning - HEAT (the movie) came out before the North Hollywood bank robbery and shootings, but clearly influenced them. I don’t think there is any plausible direct relationship, just zeitgeist/influence.

Yeah; how many times in 24 hours can one vigilante commit acts of thinly-narratively-justified but actually-illegal torture without audiences clueing in?

Same with Homeland. How many times do you see Carrie stymied by the law and cheer when she eventually breaks it?

I was going to say the same about James Bond, but it turns out they literally boast about helping in its production on their website, so it's not really a conspiracy theory https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-cia-and-pop-culture/

Is that even a conspiracy? It's well documented how closely the military works with Hollywood -- of course government apparatuses are interested in funding media that aligns with their goals.

And it was a Fox production. Using the most obvious shill isn't very covert.

The democrats introduced the patriot act...

even if that were true it would be completely irrelevant to the context in which you replied? Check if you have DDS.

except that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

> On October 23, 2001, U.S. representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced House bill H.R. 3162, which incorporated provisions from a previously-sponsored House bill, and a Senate bill introduced earlier in the month.[5] The next day, October 24, the Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66,[6] with Democrats comprising the overwhelming majority of "no"-votes.

> The bill, which removed most of the changes from the Senate version, passed Congress on March 2, 2006, and was signed by President Bush on March 9 and 10 of that year.

Depends what counts as "introduced", the Patriot Act was based on the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act written by Joe Biden.

This is something Biden was proud of, and confirmed in his own words many times

https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-joe-b...

The surveillance state has bipartisan support.

It’s a conspiracy theory in that there’s no evidence of funding, support, or even cooperation in the particular case of “24”.

The 24 pilot was filmed before 9/11. After 9/11, the show had to be modified because reality has become uncomfortably close to it. That included delaying the premiere and removing a scene involving an exploding passenger aircraft.

The Washington Post reported on a trend of shows about counter-terrorism and spies, on August 4 2011: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/08/04/...

That article mentions that some of those shows relied on government consultation, with the CIA and FBI, to help with realism, etc. “24” was not one of them. “24” co-creator Joel Surnow is on record saying there was no government involvement.

Quote from the WP for context:

> Coming this fall [2001]: A new primetime drama series takes a close-up look at an elite federal agency and the dedicated men and women who hunt deadly terrorists and treacherous criminals.

> The new show's on CBS. It's also on NBC. And ABC. And Fox. Some years it's twenty-something sitcoms. Sometimes it's doctors, or vermin-oriented "reality" shows. This fall, the trend is Fed TV: No fewer than five new network series depict the exploits of people with civil-service pay grades, shiny employee ID badges and very large guns.

But it was “24” that did the most to normalize the “torture the bad guys till they reveal the plot” and other such right-wing wet dreams.

How many of those same people are Republicans today, because of various shifts in the political positions the different American political parties take with respect to demographic groups such as men?

More than a few—this was Georgia Tech and these are all southern white guys—but not the majority.

That’s quite the Overton window you’re living with.

> Georgia

Ah yes, I see.

24 was one of the highest rated shows on television, won 20 Emmy awards and was nominated for 68. People just like torturing and killing terrorists. Not just Americans either—it’s a popular Bollywood trope as well.

Show me someone who "likes torturing" and I'll show you someone who's a social media algorithm away from being MAGA or the local equivalent. "Right wing" is the correct term.

Briefly checking your comment history, it's the correct term for you as well, so what's the issue? You don't want to admit it?

I’m happy to admit it. But I think that there’s lots of democrats who are fine with it too—folks who agree on how to handle terrorists, but just want more generous social welfare. I don’t think its a real dividing line in the electorate.

Note that democrats and republicans are both right-wing parties.

Indeed, it's absurd people still have this left/right standoff. Boggled my mind as a kid in history class that the Republicans somehow wanted to free slaves in the past but are all in on bombing the crap out of iraq. Well, guess there's no real code or manifesto to follow. It's almost like they're just saying whatever the heck they have to just to get elected, after that all bets are off.

Highly doubt, perhaps you're just biased due to your own beliefs. Anyway the left/right divide is really silly -- it mixes economic and political orientation. National socialism would be left because socialism and so my god, Mr moustache man really liked beating bad guys. Alright you can argue about this, then what about the bad guys he hated most, most notably the other Mr moustache, Stalin? Communism surely is very left by today's standard, and guess what -- they enjoyed beating bad guys. Both sides of the spectrum literally call for violent revolution all the time.

Who doesn't like beating up bad people? It's in children's fairytale. Getting what you deserve is codified in human moral ideals since like probably cavemen times and movies today still have this theme.

You’re missing something else that happened right before 24 debuted on November 6, 2001.

I’m not missing it, I thought that was obvious. See my other longer comment in this thread.

And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.

The series may have been produced preemptively in case something would happen. In fact several agencies did warn in the summer of 2001 that something was likely to happen but the warnings were shut down.

I'm not a truther, but boy they try hard to make you one ...

>And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.

I looked into this so I could call you out for spreading disinformation.

Except what I found was that this statement is factually accurate as far as I can tell. Each person had their own separate story as to why they didn't go that day.

Huh. Not sure what to make of this.

> Not sure what to make of this.

What was their rate of last minute cancellations? I suspect people in that circle frequently change plans, sometimes at the last minute, so having changed plans on that day would be unremarkable had that day itself been unremarkable.

Not to mention the first plane hit at at 8:46 am. Looking at details, none of these seem remarkable, and wouldn't have been remembered or written about if they happened the day before...

Sarah Ferguson's meeting was scheduled fot 8:45, but she was delayed by traffic after coming from an interview. ... Morning traffic in New York on a business day is not unusual and busy people miss tightly scheduled meetings because of it.

Michael Jackson performed in a concert the day before and was reportedly up late talking on the phone. I didn't see a scheduled time for the meeting, but a missed meeting after a concert doesn't seem surprising to me. Concert started at 7:40 pm according to a ticket stub photo here [1]

Larry Silverstein was reportedly double booked and kept a dermetology appointment his wife had booked after he missed one a month prior. Stuff happens, your wife books medical appointments for you without checking your calendar and you don't miss them twice.

Lutnick took his eldest son to their first day of Kindergarten. Which is something you do if you can. I didn't see any indication that he had a meeting scheduled. I'm guessing there's no consipiracy or even reporting about him going to the first day of Kindergarten for his other three children, but he probably did.

[1] https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/michael-jackson-30t...

If celebrities keep their appointments say 80% of the time, then for every near miss, there should be four who actually died. Are there?

Well Lutnick's brother for one.

But Wikipedia has a list of notable people who died [1]. David Angel, an Emmy winning TV writer and producer. Garnet Bailey, an acomplished hockey player. Carolyn Beug who directed the award winning music video for Van Halen's Right Now. William E. Caswell, a prominent physicist. Charles Edward Jones, an astronaut. Daniel Lewin, co-founder of Akamai. Etc. You can read the list and come to your own conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_September_2001

Also, not everyone who was in the tower died

It would be strange in 2001 for a father to take his kids to their first kindergarden. It would be stranger in a Jewish family.

No it wouldn't. Parents accompanying children to their first day of school is pretty normal and sometimes required, especially for the fancy private schools someone like Lutnick probably sent his kids to.

Perhaps we should compare how many famous people died, and how many near missed. I'm not great at stats but I'm guessing if it was all near misses that would be pretty insane, suggesting somehow they all got the idea to cancel on that day whereas regular Joes didn't get the memo. Whereas if it was like 80% then yea probably attributable to "a busy schedule".

> Not sure what to make of this.

Not much as the sample has (literally) survival bias.

I feel like it's just a statistical fact that many people used to visit and cancel visits there every day, but it's hard to say how unlikely this was without numbers.

Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg were famously supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11, and Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming a movie at the World Trade Center that very morning. I’m sure more near-brushes exist.

Really? What is the actual probability attached to that word "likely", and what is the data is support of a Bayesian calculation to reach that conclusion?

I refer again to rational people. Bush was president of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company and chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, and was meeting with local Texans to build support for his run for the U.S. Senate in 1964. His presence had nothing to do with Kennedy. At the moment of the assassination he was in Tyler, 100 miles away.

Even if, contrary to all reason, Bush was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, there would not have been any reason for him to personally be in Dallas that day.

I'd agree with you that he would not have any reason to be there, but things like this [1] sure look extremely weird.

[1] - https://youtu.be/pukqrmTm65Q?t=81

It doesn’t even need to be secret or underhanded. The government can simply foster the media that drives their strategic goals. Same kind of idea as stochastic terror.

And just like stochaistic terror, it's a label you can apply to basically any media you don't like, that seems to support a political agenda you are opposed to.

Huh? What label? The conversation wasn't about a label.

Except people love torture anyway. Even people who say they're opposed to torture usually do so in terms of "it's bad to torture people, but like, it would totally work". It is a ludicrously common sentiment.

The actual conspiracy was the CIA told the Zero Dark Thirty producers that the Intel to find bin Laden came from torturing a detainee, which was a straight up lie (namely: under standard interrogation he provided the intelligence they needed...then they waterboarded him over 100 more times which provided absolutely nothing).

Why do you need the detour through the CIA? Our de jure Constitutional government is merely part of a much larger de facto government formed by large corporations and the billionaire (oligarch) class. The same group of people who funded the lobbyists that had the "Patriot" Act ready and waiting on September 10th also funded "24", the politicians and think tanks behind the Iraq War, and so on. The main difference is that production of "24" was a direct bona fide business expense for tax purposes.

A conspiracy theory without a shadowy government organization is just a conspiracy.

Fair!

Frankly EU India and China need to take a tougher stand here or see themselves getting harassed in future.

You may be unaware, but the EU, India, and China have also engaged in their own versions of economically-pressured internet presence takedowns of international activists and dissidents they label subversive. The degree differs according to leverage and their constitutional reasoning, but there is no spirit of opposition to this type of policy if that’s what you’re imagining.

Yep. People have had their homes raided in Germany for hosting online content about the Israeli genocide of Palestine. You don't get any warning - the police just show up and take all electronic devices, no exceptions.

People have had their homes raided in Germany and electronics seized for calling politicians dicks on Twitter or Facebook.

That's actually a crime though and everyone knows it's a crime.

Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.

They will only catch the amateurs. But they can pat themselves on the back I guess that did something.

It does more than catch amateurs, it's a heavy blow against the adoption and usefulness

Sounds better and better!

>It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity.

Not really, unless exchanges don't let you withdraw coins into your own wallet? It's trivial for someone to buy another coin like BTC/ETH then use it to purchase Monero via defi.

Poor government has to fight crime the old fashioned way.

Ridiculous.

This isn't comparable to the legality issues in particular countries, a comparatively minor threat for FOSS software projects. If the US declares your organization as terrorist, you'll lose banking access globally by leveraging the SWIFT system. The US influence has always been problematic, but this is now blatantly abused for MAGA populism.

All this means eg. Signal would not be able to escape jurisdictions, because no bank anywhere relevant will endanger their SWIFT access opposing the US. Sanctioned Signal would stop providing services for everyone, since they can't pay for servers, neither being able to receive donations, nor wire any money themselves. It's similar prior situations involving payment processors (e.g. in case of Wikileaks), but has totalitarian reach affecting almost all banking globally.

They can potentially play a cat and mouse game for a while, if none of the transactions actually say "For Signal" on them

It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, we make technology that gets around the laws. Governments must increase their tyranny just to maintain the same level of control they had before. The result is either an uncontrollable population, or a totalitarian state.

I always hoped we'd find some sort of equilibrium. A state where governments learn to tolerate some crime because fully policing them would require crossing serious lines. It's becoming increasingly clear though that governments have no limits. There is no cost they are unwilling to pay in the name of maintaining their own power.

I'd say the more salient dynamic is mass communication increasing the power of propaganda (now individually tailored!) making it so people are increasingly tolerant those lines being crossed. People voted for this, right? There are legitimate understandable gripes underlying Trumpism. Propaganda is able to use that frustration as raw input, and twist it to convince people to support things that directly make their gripes worse! How much did we hear about inflation and the price of eggs, and yet forty trillion dollars more in the hole and now they cheer for it.

Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.

This is hardly unprecedented -- in fact, it looks like the US government has learned a thing or two from the anti-spam community. If you actually want to block e-mail or newsgroup spam at its source, you don't complain to the spammer themselves, but rather to their mail/news provider, and if that doesn't work, you escalate the issue to the upstream provider, the hosting company for the spammer's website, the registrar for the spammer's domain names, and so on. This is time-consuming but is sometimes effective. (Of course, dedicated spammers may then switch providers, or start employing distributed botnets of zombified residential devices, but knocking out their infrastructure at least temporarily does disrupt their operations for a time and drives up their cost of business to the point where they may reduce or even cease their activity.)

The anti-spam community can’t throw you in jail or fine you.

It can ban you from the internet though. The whole internet, all of it, no joke. I've been blocked by Cloudflare and Cloudfront several times today, and it's not because of spam, it's because I'm not identifiable through my IP address and therefore offer no advertising value.

There is a balance that needs to be struck between freedoms and rule of law and it's quite rare to be able to actually have discussions about how to strike that balance because most folks willing to discuss have a simplistic but vaguely absolute position favoring one extreme or another and can never come to the point of deciding of where to draw the lines of enough freedom or enough control.

If you have real operational security concerns, your provider shouldn't know anything about you; should in fact have bilateral shielding between themselves and you to prevent either counterparty from learning stuff. That's how Signal works.

But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).

I don't understand what you mean by all this. Obviously your phone number is tied to your Signal account and Signal knows that linkage at all times - no special action is necessary for them to know it. Signal does not provide anonymity beyond what a phone number provides, and isn't designed to.

Signal's design is "what if WhatsApp wasn't evil" which makes it good for the average user. If you actually want Session or SimpleX, which sacrifice usability for even more privacy, then you know where to find those services.

There's all sorts of things any service provider could do to sleuth out who its users are. The implication of this OFAC determination is that A/I didn't need to sleuth anything out; they are accused of knowingly and deliberately assisting the PKK.

Signal will allow traffic analysis. You send the message to signal, if they wish they can write down to whom they send it on.

It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.

I noticed that more are using Session now and not Signal (no phone number or email required)

https://getsession.org

Ah, blockchain-based. Maybe it's fine. I prefer my idea with dummy messages and no ledgers or anything.

They don't have to do that because accounts are associated one-to-one with phone numbers.

I don't understand your comment.

Again: in every system there's always some kind of sleuthing you could do to attempt to identify a user. That's not the legal standard. The complaint against A/I is that they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK.

No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.

Because you connect to the network, then start sending messages to everybody continuously, a message every second, or every ten seconds, or every 100 seconds, you will, every second, or every ten seconds, or 100 seconds, be able to send a message to whoever you want, and you will not be distinguished in any way from the other network participants, even if an adversary controls all nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.

If they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK in a forbidden way, there would likely have been an Italian prosecution. Since this hasn't happened, it probably isn't true.

The illegality of the PKK in the Europe is also something quite complicated. The commission have declared it a terrorist organization, but here in Sweden such declaration have no judicial meaning and we define terrorism by whether the organization satisfies objective criteria defined in our law, which the courts determine from case to case (which in Sweden means that if you send money the PKK and prosecutor brings the case and argues that they're terrorist organization, and you argue badly, and he wins, then you might be convicted, but when another guy does the same thing, and argues well, he wins); and the situation in Belgium is similarly complicated, with a legal dispute about whether PKK was a terrorist organization, which PKK won, and thus the PKK was, in Belgium, declared by a court to not be a terrorist organization.

A problem with sending dummy messages on something like Signal, is that waking up phones unnecessarily is really bad for battery life. It also doesn't work for the voice/video call feature, since that needs to be realtime.

> No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.

I don't think that's true.

There are two possibilities: If you're proposing that dummy messages are in addition to normal messages, then dummy messages add noise to the signal, but over a long enough time, for known noise distribution, it is possible for the signal to be statistically significant. That depends on there being enough signal, but then things depend on signal traffic patterns, there are no guarantees.

The second possible design is that the node-to-node communication volumes for any pair of nodes is truly independent of the signal - i.e. the statistical model decides how much traffic flows from a node to another node, and that fixed amount of flow is either used for signal or for noise, and if there is more signal, it's dropped or waits. Encryption makes it impossible to distinguish signal from noise without the key known between the pair of nodes. That is secure against a passive adversary who doesn't participate in the network. However, if network users are anonymous and mutually untrusting, then the adversary can use active methods without much risk (i.e. lots of users and nodes can actually be the adversary). Every packet/message delayed or dropped also allows inference about network traffic by other users.

These methods can harden a network and make analysis harder, but they don't guarantee it is not possible.

No, you always send a dummy message the appointed time.

If you have a real message, or a network maintenance message, that substitutes for a dummy message. You never send messages other than at the appointed time.

Delayed or dropped messages won't matter, since you only send a message at the appointed time. So the network is literally indistinguishable from one where you have sent no messages to all participants and to even someone with complete control of the network.

Do messages have a visible receiver address of any kind? In that case, you're out of luck. The only way to do make this statistically sound would involve an insane amount of messages, rendering it impossible.

I don't have an opinion about the PKK. My broad take is: if Europe doesn't care, there's no reason for the US to be leading a sanctions effort. I'm confident like everybody else that this is largely pretextual.

All I care about is the claim that if they can do this to A/I they'll come for Signal next. That doesn't follow.

The issue is complicated.

Many EU governments care, because Turkey cares, but the problem is that Turkey's position that they're terrorists is legally iffy, so a lot of European courts disagree, and this creates a schizophrenic situation where politicians hold that they're terrorist and will claim that it's the government position, while the actual government position in the courts is that they mostly aren't and that it's a case-by-case question.

Impossible for a public thing though, noblogs.org will always be traceable to where noblogs.org is hosted because that's how the packets get there.

You can maintain much better opsec in a two way communication than a broadcast.

Right, I'm only moved to comment by the implications being drawn on this thread that Signal and WhatsApp are next. Different fact patterns and different legal standards.

Signal and WhatsApp don't have the plaintext of your communications to begin with.

Well, a fast broadcast at least. Of you're willing to wait for a pocket switched network to spread the signal, you can hide the source pretty well.

This is about finances. If the US declares you a terrorist organization, you cannot do any banking anymore, even outside the US, since most banks do not want to gamble on SWIFT access.

Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..

Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.

This OFAC action isn't based on "antifa", though the press release predictably takes shots at it. It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.

PKK is the pretext, there is no evidence.

The US does not give a damn about PKK. They used the Kurdish sister organizations in Syria and Iran. They condemn PKK because Erdogan wants it.

The US would have zero issues with a Kurdish state comprising parts of Turkey and Iran that splinters the region even more.

I don't think US cares about the PKK either, but that's not my point.

> It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.

In this context, "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is not an explanation, but a tautology. The matter at hand is how and why something got onto that list.

The antifa remark relates to the Rote Hilfe situation. In my opinion, it's an example of how populist rhetoric became a major overreach with real consequences prior to the incident at hand. Rote Hilfe had a very weak relation to "Antifa Ost" (hardly worth US attention). That's how they got cancelled: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

So the antifa moral panic is indeed very much relevant.

But decide for yourself, if "Antifa Ost" deserves US anti-terrorism attention to the extent of OFAC sanctions, or if it's maaaybe populist action... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_left-wing_extremism_tr...

Incidentally, funny how the NSU isn't on that list, hm?

It's neither an explanation nor a tautology; it's an element of US law.

It was clearly written as an explanation. The alternative is that you didn't intend for the words you wrote to have any meaning, in which case why did you write them?

So if those prior sentences or yours are not related, your argument is part wrong, part irrelevant/nonsensical. Good talk.

The picture everyone is missing is voting in November is how this gets resolved. The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy. Theres no reason to put up with this, the other side of a 70% electorate opposition is prison for the lawless incumbent

A 30% approval rating means ~75-80% of Trump's base is still fully behind him. A two-party system will only very rarely produce figures with over 50% approval, because roughly half of voters disapprove on GP. The apathy of the 40-50% who don't vote is also a product of a system that only allows for two choices and not something to blame the apathetic for. It really makes no difference whether they vote or not, because there are only two choices and neither represents them.

There is no resolving this until at least the maga generation dies off.

> The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy.

And voter suppression, vote manipulation, or simply force.

I agree with you in that barring the above, there is no logical reason a vast majority of all elections should lean away from MAGA/GOP considering the state of the country.

Even if Barack Obama himself was re-elected and the Democrats gained a 102% supermajority, does anybody seriously believe this sanction in particular would be reversed?

If the Dems get the House and Senate, expect a lot of reversals.

I would imagine we might even have some "settlements" with the "DOJ" before the end of Trumps term

a lot of fools beleive that if they facilitate the means somehow they will be free to do so.

Your rights do not matter. Laws do not matter.

If your technology is used by someone for bad, then someone trying to prevent that bad will some day come knocking. Law or not. Rights or not.

The only thing you can thus do is protect yourself. If you get taken out, that is you relying on your Rights and Laws. They dont exist and wont protect you.

It's just incredible how spiteful the federal government is towards its constituency

Not really. It's not like they're going after actual terrorists.

I believe there is a double standard here compared to section 230 of the communications act.

Platforms can't be held liable for speech on their platforms for a reason. For full disclosure: I feel ambivalent about that.

I don't know of an equivalent legal protection for I2P-like infrastructure.

You feel ambivalent about eg. HN not being held liable for some random user signing up and posting, say, a terroristic threat on it? You realise that if platforms/HN were legally punished for that, no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?

> Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision.

To echo what you said to the other poster, that does not follow:

1. Simply repealing Section 230 would not create some kind any novel "know your poster" legal requirement that doesn't previously exist.

2. Most sites would not have any incentive to do it either, since knowing the original author's identity would not shield them from liability. In some cases it would increase their liability instead!

> If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public.

No, for most sites the opposite would occur.

One of the big things Section 230 does is it declares that the act of moderating does not create involvement and liability for the message. It means you can block things without becoming a sorta-co-author of the things that pass the filter.

Repeal that, and sites will be forced into either (A) basically no moderation so no liability or (B) blocking 99% and letting through the safest 1% they're willing to be liable for.

_______________

Useful links:

* "Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?) " https://www.techdirt.com/2021/10/29/everything-you-know-abou...

* "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act " - https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

What doesn't follow? Who said we should repeal section 230? Or to do so without replacing it?

Not me, I said I was ambivalent about it; don't put words in my mouth. My words were: "there would have to be some similar provision [to KYC]". Similar, not the same. Not nothing.

Everything else sounds like you imagining/speculating about what some future provision would look like. And your imagined fears don't play into my ambivalence.

Here's my paraphrased view of the comment chain:

1. stillpointlab: "I'm ambivalent about Section 230. Also [other things not discussed further]."

2. applfanboysbgon: "Hey, you can't be ambivalent about Section 230, removing it would be disastrous, any website like HN would be in shambles."

3. stillpointlab: "Websites would be OK if that happened, there would just have to be some provisions around anonymity."

5. Terr_: "Where did this talk of anonymity come from? That's not what Section 230 does."

6. stillpointlab: "Who said anything about removing Section 230? I didn't say that and I wasn't talking about that happening."

7. [Error: Recursion detected]

In other words, the thread was was steered into "what if Section 230 went away" (at #2) and your reply looks as if you recognized that and proceeded to build on it.

Isn't it just as likely they are using facebook, instagram, and tiktok?

I checked for an official PKK YouTube channel. I found that they don’t have one as they’re a designated foreign terrorist organization* and Google complies with that designation by not allowing them an official presence. Unsure about the others but I doubt any of those companies would allow an official account. Probably individuals that belong to that group have accounts but I don’t know that for sure.

* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.

In a much lighter but similar move, Suno is now associating exporting generated music with the behavior of "bad actors."

Why are you leaving out the important details:

You can't as an ISP prevent malicious actors from using your service, but you do can assist the government - in the case of the recent attacks on Berlins electricity that caused a fatality the German - to hand over the data to help assist law enforcement.

If US state-department's claims [1] are true, did noblogs.org do so – help German authorities track Terrorists or did it cover for them?

Because their statement does say nothing about the claims made by the state department.

[1] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

I2P don't ideologically vet their users nor does Signal. A/I Collective does. That's kind of the pointe of all this.

Have we forgotten Megaupload? Napster? Limewire? BitTorrent?

Anyone setting up infrastructure has to consider, in the very least, how this will be used for CSAM in particular but sure, I guess terrorism too. Years ago we had The Office make a joke about this where the company website for selling paper was overtaken by child predators.

This is one reason why we have centralized infrastructure and not federated infrastructure. All the platforms we have have the capability to report content, automatically scan pictures, images and text and to respond to law enforcement. You need all of those processes.

I'd look at the Prairieland Detention Center Case to understand how broadly and aggressively this government is using "terrorism" to go after political opponents.

Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years in prison for moving a box of magazines related to the protest. He wasn't even at the actual protest.

Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.

It's very much not far fetched that you as an I2P node could get hit with a terrorism charge if some political enemy ends up using your node. That's on the same level of moving pamphlets for a protest.

> Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.

The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.

> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...

Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.

Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.

> and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest."

He did not, he shot at an officer and missed. He was also the only one of the protestors that shot.

You dispute that the officer was shot in the neck?

From supporters of the defendants:

https://prairielanddefendants.com/what-really-happened-at-pr...

I'm not going to just take the word of anybody in the US government without listening to the other side. The description on "Episode 10 Who Attacked" is the other side.

Signal is a honeypot

I think you have to assume any USA/5 eyes based org is compromised.

But only NSA/CIA level access and local law enforcement or politicians. So unless you are a terrorist or high level threat it wouldn't be accessed.

They're not being targeted for terrorist activity per se; they're being targeted for providing material assistance to terrorists.

Per the Treasury Department:

"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.

"Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism." https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/

Per the State Department: "The A/I Collective provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world. Many of these groups have relied on the A/I Collective’s digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiqués by U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure, along with instructions for building improvised explosive and incendiary devices – all routed through a network of foreign servers intended to conceal criminal activity from law enforcement." They then go on to list the specifics. (https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...)

What about software projects (such as anonymous messengers) with political stances, who state the kinds of people their software is intended to help? Is that material assistance?

How is Signal not providing material assistance if someone alerts them that “terrorists” are now using their platform?

Sanctioning providers who host political groups, even if it’s extreme politics, is something new. It’s reminiscent of the Bush admin going after Indymedia, which was a huge violation of free speech and was obviously politically targeted. It’s extra ridiculous because we fund and supply the PKK (via their YPG affiliates), which makes this look like a fig leaf for the real goal of disrupting left politics. I don’t like the radical left, but I don’t think this is constitutionally allowed.

I feel like we need some bold lines drawn around this to make sure this power doesn’t get misused.

It’s all about mens rea. The law distinguishes between people who provide services to anyone, and people who intentionally market their service to criminals, even under coded language. In this case the provider didn’t just allegedly market themselves to them; they also actually excluded others.

Fair, I guess, although again I’m uncomfortable with how the PKK link appears to be used as an excuse for political suppression. I think in cases like this, it would be best to order the provider to discontinue services to the specific entity in question before resorting to sanctions, since they provided services to other political groups that were not listed as “terrorists”. I’m not sure if we have any information about whether this happened or not.