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Good evening.
Welcome, everybody.
Sorry, I don't know if anybody caught it, but we played the recordings in reverse order.
That's a mistake.
We don't usually do that.
I also want to remind people, please support this radio station because this radio station brings you such fantastic programming.
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It is really, really important in the world of free speech, which we are going to be delving into with a passion today.
I'm going to start by reading a bit of a little story.
Let's sit close by the radio because this is going to be rather interesting.
It's a story that ran in a news organization known as Reuters back in November.
You might have read it.
It's called How an Indian Startup Hacked the World.
We can't read the whole thing.
It's 21 pages long, but we're going to read a little bit of it.
All right.
It's, again, called How an Indian Startup Hacked the World.
Came out in November.
Chuck Randall was on the verge of unveiling an ambitious real estate deal he hoped would give his small Native American tribe a bigger cut of a potentially lucrative casino project.
A well-timed leak derailed it all.
In July of 2012, printed excerpts from Randall's private emails were hand-distributed across the Shinnecock Nation's Square Mile Reservation, a wooded peninsula hanging off the South Fork of Long Island.
The five-page pamphlets detailed secret negotiations between Randall, his tribal government allies, and outside investors to wrest some of the profits from the tribe's then-partner in the gambling deal.
They sparked an uproar.
The pamphlets claimed Randall's plan would sell out the tribe's lands, resources, and future revenues.
Within days, four of Randall's allies were voted out of tribal government.
Randall, who held no formal position with the tribe, was ordered to cease acting on his behalf.
Amid the upheaval, the Shinnecocks Casino hopes faded.
We lost the biggest economic opportunity that has come to the tribe in forever, Randall told Reuters.
My emails were weaponized.
The scandal that roiled the Shinnecocks barely registered beyond the reservation,
but it was part of a phenomenon that has drawn interest from law enforcement and intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Randall's inbox was breached by a New Delhi-based information technology firm named Appen,
whose sudden interference in the matters of a faraway tribe was part of a sprawling cyber-mercenary operation that extended across the world, a Reuters investigation found.
The Indian company hacked on an industrial scale, stealing data from political leaders, international executives, prominent attorneys, and more.
By the time of the Shinnecock scandal, Appen was a premier provider of cyber espionage services for private investigators working on behalf of big business, law firms, and wealthy clients.
Unauthorized access to computer systems is a crime worldwide, including in India.
Yet, at least 17 pitch documents prepared for prospective business partners and reviewed by Reuters advertised Appens Pares in activities such as cyber spying, email monitoring, cyber warfare, and social engineering.
Security lingo for manipulating people into revealing sensitive information.
In one 2010 presentation, the company explicitly bragged about hacking businessmen on behalf of corporate clients.
Reuters previously named Appen in a story about Indian cyber-mercenaries published last year.
Other media outlets, including The New Yorker, Paris-based Intelligence Online, Swiss investigative program Runschau, and tech companies such as Alphabet on Google, have also reported on the firm's activities.
This report paints the clearest picture yet of how Appen operated, detailing the world-spanning extent of its business and international law enforcement's abortive efforts to get a handle on it.
Run by a pair of brothers, Rajat and Anuj Kar, the company began as a small Indian educational startup.
It went on to train a generation of spies for hire that are still in business today.
Several cyber-defense training organizations in India carry the Appen name, the legacy of an old franchise model, but there's no suggestion that those firms are involved in hacking.
Rajat Kar's U.S. representative, the law firm Claire Locke, rejected any association between its client and the cyber-mercenary business.
It said Kar had never operated or supported and certainly did not create any illegal hack-for-hire industry in India or anywhere else.
In a series of letters sent to Reuters over the past year, Claire Locke said that Mr. Kerr has dedicated much of his career to the fields of information technology security, that is, cyber-defense and the prevention of illicit hacking.
Claire Locke said that under Kerr's tenure, Appen specialized in training thousands of students in cybersecurity, robotics, and artificial intelligence, never in illicit hacking.
The lawyers said Kerr left Appen in part because rogue actors were operating under the company's brand and he wanted to avoid the appearance of associations with people who are misusing the Appen name.
The lawyers described media articles tying Kerr to hacking as false or fundamentally flawed.
As for the 2010 Appen presentation boasting of hacking services, they said Kerr had never seen it before.
The document is a forgery or was doctored, they said.
Claire Locke added that Kerr could not be held responsible for Appen employees who went on to work as mercenary hackers, saying that doing so would be akin to holding Harvard University responsible for the terrorist bombings carried out by his former student Ted Kaczynski, referring to the former math prodigy known as the Unabomber.
A lawyer acting for Rajat's brother, Anuj, said his client's position was the same as the one laid out by Claire Locke.
This report on Appen draws on thousands of company emails, as well as financial records, presentations, photos, and instant messages from the firm.
Reporters also reviewed case files from American, Norwegian, Dominican, and Swiss law enforcement, and interviewed dozens of former Appen employees and hundreds of victims of India-based hackers.
Writers gathered the information, or gathered the material rather, which spans 2005 until earlier in 2023, from ex-employees, clients, and security professionals who have studied the company.
Writers verified the authenticity of the Appen communications with 15 people, including private investigators who commissioned hacks and ex-Appen hackers themselves.
The news agency also asked U.S. cybersecurity firm Sentinel-1 to review the material for signs that it had been digitally altered.
The firm said it found none.
We assessed the emails to be accurately represented and verifiably associated with the Appen organization, Sentinel-1 researcher Tom Hagel said.
Though CARES lawyers say Appen focused on teaching cybersecurity and cyber defense, company communications seen by Reuters detailed the creation of an arsenal of hacking tools, including malicious code and websites.
Hegel and two other U.S.-based researchers, one from cybersecurity firm Mandiant, the other from Symantec, all worked independently, were able, all working independently, rather, were able to match that infrastructure to publicly known cyber espionage campaigns.
It all lines up perfectly, Hegel said.
Over the past decade, Google saw hackers linked to Appen target tens of thousands of email accounts on its service alone.
That's according to Shane Huntley, who leads the California company's cyber threat intelligence team.
These groups worked very high volumes to the point that we actually had to expand our systems and procedures to work out how to track them, Huntley said.
The original Appen has now largely disappeared from public view, but its impact is still felt today.
Copycat firms led by Appen alumni continue to target thousands, according to court records and cybersecurity industry reporting.
Well, that's about as far as I want to get.
But as I said, it's 21 pages long.
We got into four pages of it.
It's a fascinating story.
It's a story that I imagine people really are interested in finding out more about.
Here's the problem, though.
You won't find this story on the Internet, at least not on the Reuters site.
Why?
Because it's been taken down because of threats from courts in India, from all kinds of legal firms.
And not only has this story disappeared, but many stories that talk about the story disappearing have also disappeared.
It's actually more interesting than what Appen is being accused of here, which we can also discuss.
But I think really what people in the hacking community, people in the freedom of speech community, are most fascinated by is when powerful firms are able to silence critics or investigators and just shut down the conversation.
We've seen many stories disappear.
We've even seen podcasts discussing this disappear.
Joining us for this discussion tonight from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we have Senior Public Interest Technologist Cooper Quinton, and we have Civil Liberties Director and Senior Staff Attorney David Green.
Gentlemen, thank you and welcome to Off the Hook.
Hi, Michael.
Happy to be here.
Happy to join you.
So this is an incredible story, is it not?
I mean, seeing how this has disappeared, how this original writer's story, which was very thoroughly researched, 21 pages long, and a lot of people were part of the investigation.
What does it tell you?
What is going on here?
How does a court in India have the power to shut this down globally?
So the court in India issued a judgment, an issued order that ordered Reuters to take the story down.
It actually also indicated that it had reached agreement with Google to de-index the story.
So actually, Reuters, and that's disturbing, we don't like foreign courts telling, you know, make it difficult for us not in that country to read stuff.
But Reuters does have to comply with the Indian court order, for better or for worse.
What I think is really shocking and really disturbing is how others are using that Indian court order to make it seem like everybody has to take down everything they've written and said about the story,
even though the Indian court order doesn't say that in any way at all.
It's only limited.
It only says Reuters has to take it down and whatever Google is going to do.
So I think we could be – I don't know if there are other ways Reuters could have complied with the order.
It doesn't seem so from the language of the order, but that case is still ongoing.
And so hopefully at some point, you know, they'll be able to republish the story.
So who is it who is going beyond what the Indian court initially was ordering?
Yeah, so there's an entity called the Association of Appen Training Centers that is apparently a group of people who are associated with Appen,
who use the Appen techniques and who continue to train people.
And again, the sort of – the corporate structure of this whole thing is really confusing because there's –
it's unclear whether what – who uses the Appen name, who's authorized to use it,
if there's a former Appen entity that doesn't exist anymore.
But there's this group called the Association of Appen Trading Centers in India that says that they still, you know,
use the Appen name for trading purposes and that – and their director is the one who brought this action in Indian courts,
in the Delhi – in the New Delhi court against first Reuters.
They've also since brought one against the New Yorker as well.
And so they're – and what they've done since they got this Indian court judgment is they've gone around –
they've been sending emails to lots of people who have, you know, written about this or either republished the Reuters article
or digested it or talked about it and say – and, you know, first, you're asking them to help remove this information.
But then they also, to some people, you know, represent that the Indian court order found that the article was defamatory, which it didn't.
It represent that they'd be in contempt of court if they did not remove the article, their articles.
And again, that's – that's not true.
But it was effective because apparently a lot of people were intimidated or a lot of organizations were intimidated by that language.
Yeah, you know, it's not unusual when – if you're just a publisher and you get something from someone telling you
there's an Indian court order saying you have to take something down, you know, your choices are to spend a lot of time
and a lot of money looking into it and seeing if that's actually the case or just to take it down.
And it's obviously much easier just to do the latter.
Cooper, your thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, it has been really effective.
Unfortunately, over 20 stories have been taken down as of this time.
And, you know, it's – it shows just how, you know, how sort of easy it is to intimidate people by just, you know,
even the presence of a lawyer, for better or for worse.
Well, we've got a bunch of them on the show right now, so I'm not sure.
We're going to be intimidated by this.
And, of course, reading the story, I guess, is kind of similar to publishing the story,
although I couldn't read all 21 pages on the air.
But this is – we've seen many instances in the past where people have taken offense
or companies have taken offense at the way they've been portrayed in a story.
And the normal reaction is to counter with facts, with evidence, and in extreme cases,
bring some kind of a lawsuit against the reporting entity if you feel that they have gotten key facts wrong
or they're defaming.
What do you suppose it is about this that made this case evolve differently?
Yeah, I mean, well, they did sue Reuters, right?
So they went that far.
And it's going to be a lot of trouble for them to try and sue other people.
So they sue Reuters, and I think they're just trying to get as much out of the interim court judgment
in that case as they possibly can before they have to go through the time and expense of filing another lawsuit.
They did sue the New Yorker.
Unlike Reuters, the New Yorker doesn't do business in India,
and the court there said that it could not order the New Yorker
because it didn't have the ability to order a non-Indian entity to depublish.
It said that it could not order the New Yorker to take down its article.
So that might have indicated then the limit of who they can try and drag into Indian courts.
But, you know, it's a fairly effective technique.
I mean, we don't just see this in this case.
It's actually not that uncommon for people to get judgments in foreign courts
and then to wave those around and say, look, there's a court telling you
you have to depublish what you wrote.
Now, go ahead.
And the sort of exploit, and David can speak more to this,
but the sort of exploit that they've used in this case
is that the Indian courts apparently in libel cases tend to order the content taken down right away
until the lawsuit is settled.
And so, you know, by suing an Indian court,
they're able to instantly take down the content, which achieves their goals, right?
And they're able to tie this up for years, you know,
until everybody's sort of forgotten about the story and moved on, right?
So it's really sort of, you know, they're taking advantage of an exploit
in the Indian legal system, which, you know, happens to be where they're located,
but it makes it far more advantageous for them.
And they have the ability to make that a global action?
So, I'm not a lawyer.
David is the lawyer, but no, we argue that no, in fact, that they do not.
Okay.
Yeah, it's not a global takedown.
What they said in some of their emails was they tried to represent it as such.
And again, someone getting that email is, you know,
they could try and hire a lawyer in India if they really wanted to look into it
or they can take the story down.
So it's been fairly effective.
I mean, not everyone has taken things down,
but certainly lots of the reporting has been passed.
So if Reuters had kept the story up,
even if it was only directed at an audience in the United States,
they would still be held liable?
Reuters is a global news company.
It does business all over the world.
So Reuters is subject to Indian court's jurisdiction.
So whether the Indian court could have decided instead of what it did,
to only limit their publication in India or in .in domains or Reuters.in,
or it could have, the Indian court might have been able to do that,
but it didn't.
That's not what it did.
And that's, I think, is a question that would require, you know,
someone with expertise in how Indian courts work to answer.
But that's not, that's not what the court did.
They ordered them to take it, to take it down.
And because Reuters is subject to Indian court jurisdiction, it has to comply.
So Alex is our lawyer here on Off the Hook.
I know you have some input for this.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's great to have you back, David.
And great to be in touch, Cooper.
Cooper, by the way, just so you know,
this is Alex that also sends the EFF, the DNS data, every day.
Oh.
Yeah.
Alex, good to hear from you again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alex, I think you hit a button because now you're not making any noise.
Ah, I did hit a button.
You're right.
Look at that.
Yeah.
What a small world indeed.
But great to have you both back.
And to talk about such an interesting topic here, too, is I think, you know,
David's expertise on this being a really preeminent First Amendment scholar,
I think, is so important to how we interpret this.
But I also think it's just important to remember what Appen did here through their lawyers
is essentially a social engineering attack.
They took something, they misinterpreted it,
and they are using psychological pressure points in other legal departments around the world
essentially to force these companies into compliance.
Because legal departments around the world, as David noted, you know, look,
we are very risk-averse as a profession.
If we see something come in and it looks like a valid court order,
we're going to try to comply to the lowest common denominator,
and we don't want to get the company in trouble.
So our recommendation generally is going to be to comply with whatever the court's order is.
And in my experience, and I think Cooper may have insinuated this, too,
but in India, things can be pretty extreme.
And in my experience, especially with intellectual property matters
and trademark filings in India, you really have to watch what goes into the pleadings
because sometimes Indian counsel will put in some really inflammatory
or highly hyperbolic language, and then, you know, the input essentially becomes the output.
And so you could come out, you know, with a judgment from an Indian court
that sounds quite far-reaching but really isn't.
And I think that media organizations need to stop the default posture of being comply
with whatever the court order is for this very example
because other companies are going to weaponize that automatic default knee-jerk reaction
of complying with whatever the court order is.
I think that we need to make much more noise about this particular story
because it is so incredibly important.
And if I recall correctly, the reporter who originally broke this story was Raphael Satter
at Reuters, and he's been on this show numerous times as well.
I did not know that.
What a small world this is.
That is incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the other thing that's really a very small world here,
and I'll mention this to you guys, and we can talk about it more offline.
But this is such an important story, I think, for the EFF as well
because if you look at the history of the Appen Technology Center
and what it was before that, it was Beltrox before that.
And Beltrox was this essentially hacker-for-hire outfit that was running roughshod
all throughout, I think, from about 2015 onwards.
But you can connect the dots.
Beltrox actually comes after Appen, is my understanding.
They were Appen alumni.
Oh, you know, that might be right.
Yeah, it might be right.
And then I think you have this Appen Technology Center that's trying to, you know,
enforce this judgment around the world, so maybe it's kind of going full circle.
But the-
The Appen name has been passed around a lot, for sure.
And, Cooper, you may know more about this,
but if you go back and you look at the Beltrox data,
and I have a lot of data that is a separate branch of this,
a separate branch of what I believe are Beltrox-related attacks,
but they all relate to a threat.
Well, not all of them, but a good number of those earlier attacks
relate to a threat actor that was associated with the name Amanda Lovers.
And Amanda Lovers was also associated with attacks on the EFF quite a few years ago.
Yeah, we actually wrote a story about this.
The Fish for the Future story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it really is a much smaller world.
It goes really kind of full circle here because, you know,
if we can't get the word out about this type of threat intelligence and this type of data,
then, you know, it's harming, I think, worldwide and global cybersecurity efforts as well.
Not just, it's not just about reporting.
It's about security.
And on that note, we're talking about something that came out of a court in, I believe, New Delhi in India.
What if the court was in Moscow?
What if the court was in Beijing?
What if the court was in one of the so-called adversaries of the United States?
And there was a story reporting on hacking attempts or something else coming from one of those nations.
And they took exception to it and said, no, we're going to file suit against you.
Would we find ourselves shutting it down because of what they say?
Or is there something different about an Indian court?
So this phenomenon where people get foreign court judgments and then wave them around and say that everyone in the world has to take things down actually happens far too frequently.
I mean, there's even – in the libel area, there's a term for it, which is libel tourism, which means you file your lawsuit in the most libel-friendly jurisdiction in the world, which probably right now is probably Australia.
And you get a judgment there.
And some courts will even do things like order people who they have no jurisdiction over to –
The takedowns are rare, but they might have monetary judgments against people.
And then your choice is to defend a lawsuit in – if you're the one sued to go – whether you want to defend a lawsuit in Australia or take a default judgment.
You just ignore it and the court answer a default.
The U.S. actually passed a law specifically to address this called the Speech Act.
And what that law says is that if someone obtains a foreign court judgment in a defamation case, that judgment is not enforceable in U.S. courts if they would not have won the case under U.S. law.
So if someone has First Amendment defenses or statutory defenses or even state constitutional defenses that would have immunized them, then the foreign judgment cannot be enforced against them in U.S. courts.
Now, it means that person can't go to the foreign country because then he might be able to be enforced against them.
But it was such a big phenomenon that Congress actually passed a law to address it.
So that doesn't apply in this case?
Well, it doesn't – well, it does apply.
That law is really designed for monetary judgments because the court systems that will issue – sort of take order things to be depublished like here, that's actually quite unusual.
Although, for what I've heard from talking to lawyers in India, it's routine in India.
But that's actually quite unusual, especially for a country that has its legal system founded on English commonwealth law, as India does.
So – and the speech act is really more designed for monetary judgments.
That being said, if they really tried to enforce the speech act against someone – if I tried to enforce it in U.S. courts, I don't – I'm sorry.
If they tried to enforce the Indian court order in U.S. courts, I do believe the speech act would be one of the many defenses that someone would have.
So – well, you know, it's – go ahead.
I wanted to put myself in the chair for a minute too.
Like I think that their concern is probably that if they try any sort of legal cuteness, right, by leaving it up in the U.S. or leaving it up in other countries, that they expose their employees in India to risk, right?
So I can understand why they're taking sort of the most broad stance because they have a lot of employees in India that they don't want to put at risk.
And in fact, Raphael Satter, who we mentioned earlier, one of the authors of the original story, he had Indian citizenship by marriage.
And he has – since this story came out, he's had that Indian citizenship revoked by the Indian court pretty clearly because of this story.
So the sort of – the effects, right, aren't without – you know, the concerns aren't without merit, right?
There's definitely already some blowback against the journalists who have reported this.
Well, you know, that's kind of disturbing to hear because my understanding is there's a criminal complaint in India's Central Bureau of Investigation against CARE, the guy from Appen Technology.
That is publicly available, it can be seen, and despite that, the story was ordered to be taken down.
But it's still under investigation.
How does the Indian court justify taking away someone's citizenship when they're complying with the court order in the first place?
So my understanding, and David can probably correct me on this, but is that the Indian court decided that he – I think that somebody filed that he had – you know, basically, since he is – basically, he has the equivalent of, like, an Indian green card.
And that he was besmirching the good name of India by writing these stories.
And so that was grounds to revoke his citizenship.
I don't know if David can correct that.
Yeah, I don't know anything about this.
India has this special citizenship for people who don't reside in India.
And I don't know anything about what qualifies or how you get it, where it gets revoked.
But I do know that in the Appen Online – Association of Appen Training Center's complaint against Reuters,
what are the claims they make is that this story, even though it defames Appen,
is actually does damage to the whole – all the people of India because Appen has trained so many people in India that its harm is so widespread.
So they are really casting this as about, you know, harming, you know, the whole populace and not just this company.
So in their eyes, Appen is beyond any kind of critique or investigation.
Anyone who does that is an enemy of the state of India.
India is a democracy, so it's really – or at least they were last time I checked.
This is incredible that we're seeing this kind of action taken against someone trying to get to the truth.
Yeah, it is.
And I do think, you know, the Indian court order is an interim order.
And so by its terms, it's saying that we are not making a finding.
All we are making – all we have found is that they have – is that the plaintiffs, this guy Pandey,
who represents Association of Appen Training Centers, all I say is that he has stated claims that if he can prove are true,
that that could be a successful lawsuit.
That's all – and that's enough under Indian law to get an interim takedown order.
So the court says that, you know, we're – this is not a final order.
We are – you know, Reuters has not submitted its evidence yet.
And so we're – this is no final decision about whether the article is actually defamatory,
but it's just what they call a prima facie – it's just an order that they've made a prima facie case.
That's enough to move forward and get this temporary takedown order.
Now, one of the reasons we're citing that Reuters is complying is because they do business in India.
Now, let's say this was a situation where it was an organization that did not do business in India.
They solely did business here in the United States.
They were a small publisher.
And they printed a story like this.
And they put it online.
But they put it online in the cloud.
And they used Amazon.
And while they don't do business in India, Amazon does do business in India.
Would Amazon then be compelled to take down the story?
And the publisher that was a small publisher in the United States would be playing by Amazon's rules then?
Yeah, I don't want to give them any ideas.
It certainly is – I don't know how – we don't know everything they've done and what they've pursued.
Also, I don't want to be too critical of people who've decided to take this down rather than incur the expense of trying a lawyer or whatever to try and figure it out.
Everyone makes their own risk assessment.
But I offer thanks to those who have decided to keep it up and who are brave enough into weather legal risks.
But it's a tough thing to get someone just asserting these things.
And one of the reasons that we – I guess we can get into this, what we've done in terms of responding to these emails on behalf of two publications was really to help try to embolden others who may have received the same emails if they wanted to make the decision to not take their reporting down.
I guess we should also discuss to a degree what's known as SLAP lawsuits, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, which basically is using an expensive legal claim against someone who, as you say, does not want to spend enormous amounts of time and money on a lawsuit.
There are some states here in this country who have laws against SLAP lawsuits.
Can you tell us something about that?
Sure, yeah.
So SLAP, it's an acronym, Strategic Illigation Against Public Participation.
And these are typically meritless lawsuits.
So the idea about SLAP is you have a lawsuit, it's not going to win, but merely by filing against somebody and burdening them with the expense, the time and the money of having to defend it, you could get what you want, which is typically that they'll shut up.
They'll either depublish what they publish.
They'll agree not to speak anymore.
They will, you know, and again, it's not just about writing, it could be about, you know, I've seen the file against people who are protesting.
It's really just to get them, get people to stop exercising their First Amendment rights, whether by speaking or writing or protesting.
And this is taking advantage of the fact that even if you have really worthy defenses in the U.S. legal system, it can still be really difficult to assert them.
And so what anti-SLAP laws do is try to create a procedure to try and get rid of these lawsuits really quickly and then also create some disincentives for those who file them.
They do this in two ways, so these laws vary by state, but most of them have some procedure where the court will very early on look at the merits of the case and decide whether this is a case that has even minimal merit.
And then if it doesn't, they can dismiss the case, and typically they also have some provisions for reversing attorney's fees.
So if you're – so that if you successfully get a SLAP lawsuit dismissed, then the other side, those who filed the lawsuit, would have to pay your lawyer's fees.
And so that's, again, to both, you know, disincentivize filing them as well as make it easier for people who get sued to get lawyers.
But this is not the case in all states, correct?
It's not the case in all states, and it's not the case in all countries, so there's not one of these in – there's not one of these in India.
And we do see SLAPs as it's not just a U.S. phenomenon.
It happens all over.
There was sort of a famous one in Malta not too long ago.
They're happy – Greenpeace has been slapped, I think, in, you know, 12 different countries around the world.
Well, it's – we do see these – you know, we do see the – it's unfortunately a very common phenomenon.
And again, yeah, you're right.
Not every state has this protection.
If you are sued in U.S. courts in some states, you won't – I think maybe 38 states do.
I'm not – not completely –
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned Greenpeace.
Jason Kelly, who is a fellow EFF employee and also writes for 2600, mentioned the Greenpeace lawsuit in Next Issues column.
Basically, they were being sued by a company called Resolute Forest Products simply because they had blog posts saying such things as logging.
Their logging was bad news for the climate, and these SLAP lawsuits can be ways of really quelling speech and making it so it's almost impossible to criticize or say anything that could be seen as negative about a powerful entity.
Yeah, that's a really common – that's a really common application of SLAPs, where there's someone who's very powerful.
They get publicly criticized.
Sometimes it's even people making comments in public meetings and things like that, and so they sue them to get them to shut up.
And fortunately, I mean, Greenpeace ended up winning, getting that case dismissed, and there was a very large attorney's fees award, so it ended up coming out okay for them.
I think if you'd ask Greenpeace, they would rather have not have had to go through the whole thing to begin with.
And as you might imagine, it's a lot more – for a big organization like Greenpeace, they have a lot more funds.
They have a lot more lawyers.
They have a lot more appetite to fight this sort of thing.
But for a small environmental group or really a grassroots organization, they might not have the legal backing or funding to really even fight something like this.
So it's a lot more effective against smaller organizations, against grassroots organizations.
And I want to really quickly shout out the work of another nonprofit, the Civil Liberties Defense Center up in the Pacific Northwest.
They've been working for years helping small organizations, environmental organizations, fight these sort of SLAP lawsuits.
They're a great resource for this sort of thing.
Go ahead, Kyle.
Yeah, I just – I would emphasize that not only in the case that someone would be able to – were they a small entity to fight it, but thereafter, the lasting effects of the overall intimidation of what might be around the next corner constantly
and how that affects their operations after the positive outcome or the ability that if they're able to get past it, it just hangs over smaller organizations in ways that a really large entity might even just have institutional memory loss over it.
But it could really harm something that's really on a shoestring or otherwise would cave to the kind of pressure that they'd have to face changing their habits or otherwise their overall mission.
Well, any other comment from people out in Skyplan?
Rob, Gila, Alex?
Yeah, sure.
I'll jump in and say, you know, I think we should talk a little bit about, you know, the blowback here in the Appen case and what people like, you know, Distributed Denial of Secrets and others are doing in order to fight this type of activity.
You know, in law, we have something called the Streisand effect, right, which was, you know, filing a lawsuit essentially to stop attention from going to one person.
You know, you know, a particular object, but then you wind up filing this lawsuit that gets a lot of attention and, you know, the whole thing blows up in your face.
And I think that the actions of a few media outlets that have not taken this down, and I think David alluded to those brave outlets earlier, but I think it's really admirable.
And I think that, you know, what we're doing here and talking about this tonight is really important, too, because the more we bring attention to this type of activity, the less likely it's going to be successful again in the future.
And I really think that, you know, we need to be able to, I think, number one, train lawyers and legal departments to not necessarily kowtow to, you know, the whims of all of these courts, some of whose public policies may not comport at all with our traditional notions of fairness and due process.
I think we should view with skepticism these types of judgments, and I think that, you know, when it comes to news organizations as well, I think we're right to expect that they should fight for our First Amendment freedoms because it, you know, their bottom line depends on it, number one.
And, you know, the other aspect of this is, you know, this affects all of us, right?
I mean, we're talking about First Amendment freedoms on the same day that Julian Assange had his last high court appearance trying to contest extradition to the United States, and I think we are seeing the press being attacked on many, many different fronts right now.
And this one that involves a, I think, coordinated misinterpretation and manipulation of the legal system is particularly dangerous as well.
Speaking of small worlds, so the term stridesand effects was actually coined by Mike Masnick, who's the publisher of TechDirt, which is one of the two organizations that EFF is supporting.
And we've written, them and MuckRock are two of the organizations that have received the letters from the Association of App and Training Centers asking them to take down their content.
And EFF is representing both of those organizations in responding to those letters and asserting that there is no legal basis for this takedown.
But the stridesand effect is absolutely right.
It's an interesting nexus there, too.
But I think that with this sort of tactic that's being taken in the courts by the Association of App and Training Centers, the stridesand effect is exactly our best tactic here, right?
The more that, because they want to silence this story, right?
They want this story to go away.
They want the reputation of App and Carey to be spotless, right?
And the more that we can talk about this story, the more that we can talk about the really visceral reaction to this story by these organizations, right?
The more that this spreads, the less effective their tactics are, even if the Reuters story, you know, officially stays down, right?
You can still read it on distributed denial of secrets, right?
And shout out to them for their amazing work, right?
And you can still read about it on places like MuckRock and TechDirt and the EFF website.
And here, you know, you can hear about it here on the radio.
And it's interesting.
Yeah, the stridesand effect is a fantastic pushback to this.
Absolutely.
And, Cooper, it's interesting because just as you were saying that, I was pulling up the story on TechDirt, and I really recommend people read this.
And it's entitled, Sorry, Appen, We're Not Taking Down Our Article About Your Attempts to Silence Reporters.
And I just think that's brilliant.
We need more of that.
And, of course, your folks at EFF are a major part of that.
I don't know what we would do without you.
We're in the closing minute, but is there something that people can do to get more information, stay involved, or help out?
Well, keep on reading the stories.
I think if you want more information, there are, I mean, so Mike Mazik at TechDirt has written about it a few times.
MuckRock, which was actually, you know, they got the nasty email from Association of App and Training Centers because of their document cloud service, which Reuters used to actually host some of the documents.
But they've also written about it.
And so and and even Wired magazine had had a story recently.
They've actually just gotten a letter, a takedown demand from Kare's U.S. lawyers threatening to sue them in U.S. courts.
So it'll be interesting to see how how that plays out.
Well, I just wonder what we're going to get because we read part of the story and we talked about this for an hour.
And we're going to continue talking about this on Overtime, which starts at 8 o'clock on YouTube.
Just go to the link on 2600.com on the main page or simply go to channel 2600 on YouTube.
In the few seconds we have left, what do you anticipate happening next in what is the next step in all of this?
Well, in our letter, in our email back to App and Training Centers, we said, here's why we think you're misleading people, that the Indian court judgment, it's not a judgment, didn't make any final determination that was defamatory, that it only apply, even if it did, it only applies to Reuters and Google and no one else.
And even if it did apply to them, it's not enforceable to U.S. courts.
And we said, you know, if you disagree with any of this, please let us know.
And we haven't heard back from them.
I don't expect to ever hear back from them, but if we do, we'll let you all know.
But it will be interesting to see whether Kare's U.S. lawyers actually file any actions in U.S. courts on his behalf.
We've been talking with David Green, Civil Liberties Director and Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as Cooper Quinton, Senior Public Interest Technologist at EFF.
And hopefully the both of you can join us on overtime at 8 o'clock.
As promised, I will be asking people again at WBAI to support WBAI by calling 212-209-2950 or going to give to WBAI.org.
We have defended freedom of speech from our beginning back in 1960, and we always will.
I don't think there's a single radio station anywhere in New York City on any of the frequencies, AM or FM, that would dare to have an hour-long conversation about this kind of thing, where anyone who talks about it is targeted by powerful entities.
That is our promise to you, our listeners, that we will always be here to do this, to stand up for your freedom of speech, for freedom of speech globally, and that we will continue to inform and speak out when necessary.
All right, we are off next week, but you can write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
And again, we will be on overtime at 8 o'clock on YouTube, and we'll see you again on WBAI in two weeks.
Good night.