Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
It's unfortunate, as I'd consider myself "leftist".
The democrats are a center-right party while the actual left is effectively frozen out of the political system and is currently focused on building alternate power structures for when the US government inevitably collapses. There’s not a lot of electoral participation on the left because when the choice is fascism or diet fascism, there’s not much point to an actual socialist.
Your average leftist is simply disillusioned with electoral politics writ large; they’re tired of voting for guys like Obama who promise change but then still spend a trillion dollars turning brown children into skeletons. But there’s absolutely a feeling that we’re running out of time and more drastic solutions are on the horizon.
Some join something like DSA which still nominally participates in the electoral system and others build mutual aid networks to circumvent capitalist control.
The news media doesn't generalise and it doesn't lie, you are a 'far-right troll' that 'trusted Epik' - silly you!
Seriously though, whatever your political stance, I am sorry you had your details leaked. What you do or don't do privately is entirely your business, and is certainly not of the place of some news media to go sharing about.
> After Alayon’s name appeared in the breached data, his brokerage, Travers Miran Realty, dropped him as an agent, as first reported by the real estate news site Inman.
Perhaps, we should consider that despite many right-wing persons using this domain service, that doesn't mean they _all_ are - and that headlines like this are actually insanely irresponsible.
> Asked why his name, email address and other personal information were listed in company invoices for the “racisminc” and Holocaust-denial domains, Alayon said the data was “easily falsifiable,” that he was the possible victim of extortion and that The Post was “fake news.”
Maybe he was more extreme in his views in the past, and later changed his mind and became less radical. Do these people not believe in reform? If they don't, then surely the only purpose of this article is the sadistic destruction of this man's life without a fair court?
Perhaps he believes in these things in his private life, but exercises separation between his private life and work. I hate to remind people of this, but there's a very good chance that you do not agree with _everything_ your colleagues, family, friends, etc, do. Differences are okay, they are even quite healthy.
> The spokesperson said the company “offers its services to everyone” and that “domains affiliated with right-wing politics comprise less than 1 percent of users.” Epik said it is not aware of its users’ intents and “does not consider its role to be censors of free citizens.”
I'm not sure I want my domain registrar to be political either, even if it means an extremist gets a domain. I fully respect Epik's stance on this. Forcing companies to become political is incredibly dangerous.
Sure you do.
So let me just check here: Political purity as an employment requirement... Firing people for this is fine, right?
What happens when the popular politics change?
The "Moral Majority" folks were accused of wanting to be everything the Left has become.
They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
> creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions
The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.
I disagree with this. I think they did have a reasonable expectation of anonymity, they just didn't do a great job at protecting it. Per the article it seems like Epik accept fake names and cryptocurrency; they could have done that and avoided this mess.
I'd expect my registrar to protect my personal address, for example, despite the website being my full name. And for my other domains I absolutely would expect them to protect my identity because I paid for WHOIS protection. And none of them are even remotely controversial.
> The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.
Also disagree. It's an opinion, but a wrong one that they should face social opprobrium for.
I have personally known people who honestly believed the Holocaust had been exaggerated in scope. They were wrong, but telling them "shut up!" wasn't going to help educate them. Showing them some of the stuff linked from here [1] did.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/combating-...
That’s why they were asking, not stating a fact. You also dodged the question.
>If someone says something you don't like or something you think is inaccurate, reply to it, inform people of what's wrong and convince them of why you believe you are right
President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, wrote: "A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on."
Fighting misinformation is way harder than spreading it. Because misinformation spreads virally because it's clickbait and interesting, while fact checks are boring.
Agitating contrary to the majority sociopolitical opinion should not make one unemployable; Firing people for inappropriate or immoral political opinion is not new, USA has already been there with e.g. Hoover's Red scare and the 1980s "Moral majority", but in hindsight it seems quite clear that this approach was wrong at least back in those years when it was targeted by the right wing towards the [USA-]left.
No one's firing him for saying that taxes are at the wrong level.
Crimes, harassment and libel are another issue, but for that we generally want a legal process to determine the guilt and appropriate punishment; simply firing accused suspects is not a proper response because it's not sufficient if he's guilty and far too much if he's not.
Sane public health policy: X is more dangerous that Y.
Insane publish health policy: secret government fake pandemic
The problem with being fired isn't because of views then, you'd think people with views that would get them fired would be working to get those laws changed.
I.e. I'm think that making someone unemployable or outcast as a harsh (and perhaps even "cruel and unusual") punishment which should happen only for things the society has explicitly forbidden, and after we have properly established that the accused is actually guilty. Obviously, it's not the situation right now in USA (at least not in the at-will states), where employers have a wide (IMHO too wide) discretion of what they will tolerate for non-job-related acts of employees after work; some will fire antivaxxers, some will fire pro-vaxxers; some will fire holocaust deniers; some will fire people for having an OnlyFans account; etc. (and, crucially, they'll fire them for assuming they are like this, which won't always be true).
IMHO this discretion needs to stop, as it the case in some countries with different employment laws. And if we do want to have a harsher treatment for some of those things (e.g. holocaust denial is a good example) than for others, then that distinction should be decided in laws by the whole society, not unilaterally by company owners.
The flaw is not the lack of laws about what's punishable, it's the lack of a law to require a standard before firing someone.
What if we ask all the other people who work with that people, if they're fine working with a racist, or a plague spreader?
Really?
AFAICT, the people who have been combing through that database and releasing details on people on the net, in a readable format have been selective about who they look for and release details about. So the answer (still AFAICT) is yes, if by release you mean in a human-friendly and/or googleable manner.
If, on the other hand, you consider the dump itself to be releasing details, no matter how difficult it is to read, then the answer is no. But that seems a rather pedantic, otherworldly no.
Sometimes governments or other organisations that are required to publish things choose to publish bad news late on Friday before a three-day weekend, or on another day when most people won't notice and the publication will be ineffectual.
In my heart I don't consider that publication. It is the minimum required by law, but in my heart I don't see it as real. I suspect that most people feel as I do.
Because of that, I also don't see publishing Epik's customer list as a 150GB database dump as real publication. Having to downloading 150GB, loading it into the right DBMS and figuring out the schema is enough to keep the data away from the general public. De jure it's public but de facto it's buried.
The ones who had their details released by the newspaper are the trolls
You think people somehow inherently differ because of their political beliefs? We're all human and both sides will act roughly the same but for different stated reasons. Then denounce the other side for it before doing it themselves.
Maybe people consider death as the ultimate freedom, freedom from interference of society.
At least in my country that is the case, not sure how the US handles it.
Certainly there are people who prefer to not be forcibly intubated. Or consider other cases where life supporting machines are even more gruesome.
The constitutional right to Freedom of Speech means, at the least, Freedom from legal Consequences. If it does not mean that, then it does not mean anything. The same argument then extends to the informal meaning of free speech.
The issue is that you’re implicitly trying to find a way to say that these people’s speech should be protected, while the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be. There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
I think Popehat says this best.
> Private consequences are something else. Speech is designed to invoke private and social consequences, whether the speech is "venti mocha no whip, please," or "I love you," or "fuck off."1 The private and social consequences of your speech — whether they come from a barista, or your spouse, or people online, or people at whom you shout on the street — represent the free speech and freedom of association of others.
> But speech has private social consequences, and it's ridiculous to expect otherwise. Whether sincere or motivated by poseur edginess, controversial words have social consequences. Those social consequences are inseparable from the free speech and free association rights of the people imposing them. It is flatly irrational to suggest that I should be able to act like a dick without being treated like a dick by my fellow citizens
> Finally, I should note that one social consequence is employment-related. In many American jurisdictions, employment is "at will" unless the parties have a contract that says otherwise; an employer can fire an employee for any reason not prohibited by law. Private employers can generally fire private employees based on their extra-curricular speech. That's private action, not government action; it's an exercise of such free association and free speech by private entities as the law allows. Employers may face social consequences — particularly in a social media age — for exercising that right in a way that angers the public, which is in turn the public's free speech right.
Yes, that is what I am saying - I personally value right to choice of business association lower than right to speech.
> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
You can call for anyone's firing. That too is protected speech. Of course, firing is not speech.
Re Popehat, there is a difference between legal obligation and moral obligation.
I'm not sure "free association" applies to employment. If someone chooses not to have any friends that aren't the same race as themselves, racist as that might be, it's not illegal.
But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.
> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.
> But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.
This is not an argument that businesses don’t have free association rights; this is an argument that they have limits that the state has a compelling interest in.
This argument is like saying that we don’t have free speech rights because there are laws against incitement. It’s obviously silly; “free” never meant “without any limits whatsoever” in either case.
Furthermore, while I agree it wouldn’t be legal to make employment decisions based on protected characteristics, forcing businesses to keep nazis on the payroll against their will strikes me as both absurd and a socially undesirable outcome.
> I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.
Given the nature of at will employment, this actually weakens your argument.
I’d also consider terminating someone for their behavior to be a matter of free association, not free speech. I thought I’d made that clear.
You don't FA with coworkers because you don't (generally) get to decide who to work with, except in the sense of quitting.
Either you're happy with them, or go to war. This isn't really a new problem.
That being said, the examples given in the article aren't very sympathetic. Back in 2013, Donglegate[0] was absolutely baffling for me, because I wasn't aware anyone could get fired for an overheard dick joke. Getting fired for running an actual Holocaust denial site seems fine.
The right wing of this country has really confused freedom of speech with freedom from consequence. In addition to freedom of speech, the constitution provides for freedom of association, i.e. the right to associate or disassociate with groups or people.
The problem is that 15 years ago, most companies and people didn't pay as much attention to social media as they do today.
I mean, I'm not sure what your point is. This is absolutely a key problem that newspapers have; on the one hand, no-one wants a news environment where newspapers just publish press releases, but on the other hand most people don't want a repeat of the News of the World scandal either. Newspapers have to tread a fine ethical line on just how involuntarily disclosed information can or should be used.
Clearly, an environment where newspapers _never_ reported on leaks or hacks would be a problem; realistically they'd just be press release services at that point. On the other hand, an environment where newspapers uncritically published every leak and hack would _also_ be a problem; this would cause a lot of problems and would, frankly, be such a huge volume of information that it would be useless. They _have_ to editorialise.
Seems like there's a solid industry around mapping "hate" groups and studying them.(and potentially doxxing their members by the sounds of it)
That's one of the least subtle things I've ever seen and I've been following some of this for a while.
- The Epik leak contains 15 million records [1], including scraped data of people who have never had any relation to Epik whatsoever.
- Epik has operated as a seemingly ordinary domain registrar since 2009, and controls over half a million domains [2]. Their rise to infamy over far right wing hosting did not occur until around 2018 [3]. Despite this, the leak contains their entire historical user database.
This is a case of doxxing millions of innocent people to expose a couple of assholes. The way I see it, if you celebrate this hack, you truly are a scumbag no better than any of the people behind "theholocaustisfake.com".
[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#Epik
[2] https://www.domainstate.com/top-registrars.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)#Hosting_of_far-...
Doxxing people is never cool. It’s a great responsibility no one should have, especially when innocent people can get hurt in the process. Mistakes in correlating the data have already been made.
salaried individuals sifting through data dumps to compile identifying lists of people to publish to their millions of readers in temporal perpetuity.
Njalla is a registrar that allows purchase of domain names with Monero and other cryptocurrencies. So this will never happen to any domain squatters and enterprisers here, as there would be no identifying information such as the kind needed to process credit card transactions :) and Monero distinctly does not have further tracing to prior fund ownership.
Just write whatever you want in the WHOIS information of course, and then still keep the free WHOIS privacy on. You can put contact information in the DNS information if you are just trying to sell the site.
File this under yet another case of SHUM
Should Have Used Monero
it is only happenstance that online purchases require name and address, as this is required to process over credit card networks at lower transaction fees (due to slightly lessened ability for payment fraud - which could be reversed - from the payment processor's perspective). As crypto currencies do not have reversal without nearly complete network consensus, such information is not applicable.
so let me help you: crypto is a better solution for e-commerce and people won't be able to get doxxed when employing the best practices. the best practices will become more convenient.
You don't want your car to be covered in heavy armour. That gains you nothing and costs you a lot. But the military does want that, a lot.
Heavy armour gets you protection from firearms and some explosives. I wouldn't call that nothing.
*I know high value individuals that drive armored vehicles in the US.
But that's really secondary to the point, if something has proven itself in the most strenuous conditions you can feel confident that it will meet your needs. Assuming your needs are in line with the aforementioned conditions, ex. yes, a "military grade" laptop will be bulky, and grandma will not care about that feature, but someone in an auto-shop who needs a laptop to withstand all sorts of punishment might feel the extra bucks are worth the confidence.
My assumption here is you and those with similar views do not view privacy as a requirement for grandma, and I think that is the crux of the argument. Privacy can be its own reward and everyone will determine their own value for it. If grandma's circumstances are that she needs/wants that privacy, then having a battle tested solution that can be counted on is an easy decision to make.
its funny to me because you don't even realize thats your argument, since you are focused on the specific use case of far-right subscribers not being able to get doxxed when actual criminals actually hack a website
And you can make up things you think I am arguing and feel smug about it all day, but that is not going to gain you any insight into anything.
But if you value secure data, communications, and interactions, there's little better test than that those you'd least want to support would be able to use a tool without risk of being exposed by its use.
Because if they're able to, anyone with good intentions but who is at risk whether from establishment, corporate, criminal, or violent radical/reactionary actors, will be able to do so as well. Which I see as a societal good.
I'd like to see a world which does a better job of balancing legitimate common weal interests in accessing such information, whilst affording strong protections against general surveillance and fishing expeditions. I think we're terrifyingly far to the latter extreme, and that law-enforcement agency alarmism over "dark threats" is a case of crocodile tears.
The guilt by association here is transparent, as is the implication that it's okay because it's hitting the "right" people, i.e. the right. Who are then immediately labeled far-right by fiat.
Far left extremists are far too high on their own supply, and are torching the principles of free society left and right. And they still somehow think they wouldn't have been the baddies 80 years ago.
Rather than cause a complete exposure of everyone’s sensitive data, just report whatever illegal content you find to the authorities to force Epik to take it down.
One day Anonymous is on your side and in the next day they are not. They can try to do this to anyone they don’t like, even if innocent users are involved.
That is not something to celebrate or cheer about, is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
Remember, too, that the Hunter Biden emails involved the future president of the USA and his family whereas this involves random obscure anonymous internet users that none of the Seattle Times' readers would even have heard of had prior to the press deciding to go after them. It takes an extremely partisan notion of newsworthiness to consider the latter worthy of reporting but not the former.
And the 5 years of reporting that Trump was a compromised Russian asset since the 80s are just as much bullshit as all the Fox News reporting that Obama was a secret Muslim and not a real American citizen, yes? And you would also support suppressing those bogus claims about Trump just as much as you would support suppressing those claims about Obama.
Just to make sure we're all being impartial about reality here, and not treating one set of claims preferentially because of who they're about or where they come from.
You seem to want to blame the people on the right for this situation, but they are the symptom, not the cause. If you're interested in fixing this, then stop compounding the problem, like suppressing stories that make your favoured side look bad.
If you can't quote that or anything even remotely like it, then this counts as exactly the kind of misinformation that I'm talking about.
Also: https://www.justsecurity.org/63660/is-trump-a-russian-agent-...
That article has some pretty mixed signals, both in the "intelligence" section and the one about Murdoch sources.
In any case, the WSJ has since published:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-real...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vindication-over-hunter-biden-e...
WP describes WSJ: "Most editors consider The Washington Post generally reliable."
But also, these articles are critical of the majority of media outlets overage. So, what are we to conclude?
Or are you going to continue to deny that the article didn’t mention this?
Despite "domains affiliated with right-wing politics comprise less than 1 percent of [Epik's] users", the focus was emphatically on Epik's "right-wing" and "racist" users. There was zero reporting on the consequences to non-affiliated and left-wing users.
Admittedly, the featured victims of the breech are unsympathetic characters, so it's hard to really be upset. Which is upstream's point: the article invites us as readers to indulge in schadenfreude which, let's be honest, is a kind of cheering.
The downside of such articles for people of all political stripes is that it seems to imply that online anonymity, such as that supplied by Epik, benefits only reprehensible people peddling reprehensible views.
It's easier to call for legislation that limits online anonymity if it is generally perceived to help only those who everyone can agree are awful.
Throughout history, good people have needed anonymity from the government and even from popular consensus. The Underground Railroad, homosexuals, Jews, civil rights activists, anti-war demonstrators, to name just a few prominent examples.
In the witch hunt they use illegally obtained information. How do we know that the data sets are even correct? Can one use information from a hack? Will these journalists be prosecuted like Assange for using such information?
I don't like the websites that the witch hunt target participated in, but public shaming like this (of non-politicians) is worse.
How do we know that this is correct? We can download the data via torrent and see that his name actually does appear, we have to trust that what he told the journalists is correctly quoted, and that he was fired? I've no idea, I suppose neither the employer nor the employee will be eager to talk about that, many people aren't.
The journalists may be prosecuted, but for what? If that already was widely enough known that his employer fired him, what is the significant change of this article? And what else might they be prosecuted for?