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Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

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Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#21

Post by dfc »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #18
dfc wrote: post #11

I do not understand why a payment processing company would be receiving general cease & desist requests or DMCA takedown requests. What am I missing? EDIT: Tried to clarify that I am not limiting the scope of the question to DMCA takedowns and DMCA cease and desists. Rather DMCA takedowns and general cease and desists.

Companies trying to shut down a website will often go after anything they can connected to that site: the service itself, its hosting service, their upstream bandwidth provider, their payment processor, and anything else they think they can get away with.

It will be interesting to see who sends stripe requests.

This announcement would be so much more interesting if the CE search worked:(

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#22

Post by magicalist »

cwp wrote: post #9
iandanforth wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to know what these means are? For a national security letter my understanding is that the company can't tell anyone and for other lesser gag orders it might be impossible to even contact the EFF for assistance.

In the case of a national security letter, you have to sue the U.S. government. It's rare, but possible. The Internet Archive did it, and won. http://archive.org/post/192021/fbi-gag-order-against-the-int...

that looks like they fought the request and won, but that the gag order was in place until the FBI actually withdrew the national security letter.

Maybe it's what you meant, but it seems that there's no way to get the gag order removed without also getting the letter withdrawn.

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#23

Post by magicalist »

revelation wrote: post #8
jasontraff wrote: post #4

This is fantastic news! For too long have larger companies used the looming threat of legal action to discourage legitimate competition from smaller companies. I'd never heard of Chilling Effects before this, but now I'm tempted to put all of the C&D's we've collected (and will continue to collect) into it.

Google seems to relay the majority of their legal notices there for many years now [1]. That said, the site didn't change at all in those years, either. Just an information trove rotting away. [1] You can try searching for "Amy Weber" on Google (random query I pulled from one of the complaints, semi-nsfw). For me, it shows multiple links to CE with respective DMCA-esque requests made to german governmental bodies. Yo…

The site hasn't changed much (and dear god is it still slow), but it has been pretty fundamental in a number of papers on copyright. The database will hopefully be able to bring actual data to bear on future copyright reforms...if that ever happens.

I'm surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of the site before. If a link has been removed from Google, it will replace it with a notice that a link was removed and and link to the actual takedown request in the Chilling Effects database (which includes the link that was taken down). I believe they started doing this when they were forced to take down the Scientology links years ago.

Since we now know Microsoft is one of the top DMCA notice issuers to google, if you pick a query like

https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+7+torrent

you'll see a bunch of the notices down at the bottom. If you click through to a notice, I don't think you can figure out which link was actually removed for your particular query since the notices can apparently contain hundreds of links, but it is at least a decent measure of transparency for the process.

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#24

Post by geofft »

Titanous wrote: post #19
iandanforth wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to know what these means are? For a national security letter my understanding is that the company can't tell anyone and for other lesser gag orders it might be impossible to even contact the EFF for assistance.

There are two things that should be done to fight national security letters and gag orders: 1) Sue the US government to fight the order. 2) Use technical workarounds to inform your users without breaking the law. For example, rsync.net has a signed notice that they haven't been served a warrant: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

While clever in a hacker sense, I see no reason why the government can't compel rsync.net to continue updating the canary by just yelling "national security" loudly enough.

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#25

Post by cwp »

magicalist wrote: post #22
cwp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a national security letter, you have to sue the U.S. government. It's rare, but possible. The Internet Archive did it, and won. http://archive.org/post/192021/fbi-gag-order-against-the-int...

that looks like they fought the request and won, but that the gag order was in place until the FBI actually withdrew the national security letter. Maybe it's what you meant, but it seems that there's no way to get the gag order removed without also getting the letter withdrawn.

I suppose you could sue for the right to break the gag order, while still supplying the information, but I'm not a legal expert.

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#26

Post by wpietri »

geofft wrote: post #24
Titanous wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two things that should be done to fight national security letters and gag orders: 1) Sue the US government to fight the order. 2) Use technical workarounds to inform your users without breaking the law. For example, rsync.net has a signed notice that they haven't been served a warrant: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

While clever in a hacker sense, I see no reason why the government can't compel rsync.net to continue updating the canary by just yelling "national security" loudly enough.

How do you imagine that working? There's a law that allows them to ban disclosure under penalty of law. Is there some other law that allows them to compel people to lie?

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#27

Post by rsingel »

iandanforth wrote: post #6
ianterrell wrote: post #3

This is great news. > we’re adding a clause that commits us (when possible) to first notify the user if we’re legally compelled by a litigant or government to disclose a user’s private information The only additional thing I would like to see is an additional commitment to use all legal means to fight gag orders when they're present.

Do you happen to know what these means are? For a national security letter my understanding is that the company can't tell anyone and for other lesser gag orders it might be impossible to even contact the EFF for assistance.

Due to an appeals court decision, NSL gag orders have been challengable since 2008 -- and it's very simple to do.

But the thing is, companies rarely care to fight for their users.

In 2010, the FBI admitted that the gag order has been challenged only 4 times, with a 50% success rate.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/nsl-challenges/

So yes, that would be a fine clause for companies to sign onto as well.

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#28

Post by dfc »

magicalist wrote: post #23
revelation wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to relay the majority of their legal notices there for many years now [1]. That said, the site didn't change at all in those years, either. Just an information trove rotting away. [1] You can try searching for "Amy Weber" on Google (random query I pulled from one of the complaints, semi-nsfw). For me, it shows multiple links to CE with respective DMCA-esque requests made to german governmental bodies. Yo…

The site hasn't changed much (and dear god is it still slow), but it has been pretty fundamental in a number of papers on copyright. The database will hopefully be able to bring actual data to bear on future copyright reforms...if that ever happens. I'm surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of the site before. If a link has been removed from Google, it will replace it with a notice that a link was remov…

Which copyright papers has CE played a fundamental role?

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#29

Post by Firehed »

dfc wrote: post #11

I do not understand why a payment processing company would be receiving general cease & desist requests or DMCA takedown requests. What am I missing? EDIT: Tried to clarify that I am not limiting the scope of the question to DMCA takedowns and DMCA cease and desists. Rather DMCA takedowns and general cease and desists.

Courts will subpoena financial records. I don't know the details not being the one that provides the information but I know we have received requests in the past.

I'm going to see if we can set up the same thing. I wasn't aware of this service but definitely support the disclosure when it can be legally provided.

Re: Stripe partners with Chilling Effects

#30

Post by geofft »

wpietri wrote: post #26
geofft wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While clever in a hacker sense, I see no reason why the government can't compel rsync.net to continue updating the canary by just yelling "national security" loudly enough.

How do you imagine that working? There's a law that allows them to ban disclosure under penalty of law. Is there some other law that allows them to compel people to lie?

There's no law or constitutional amendment _preventing_ the government from compelling people to lie, is there?

In the contents of an already-secret national security letter sent to rsync.net, what prevents the government from saying "You may not tell anyone about this letter; this means you must continue updating the canary as if you hadn't received this letter"?

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