How the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation laundering firm
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
I asked if they had contracts with any of the social media companies, to which the salescritter responded that they had an excellent track record. I asked why the social media companies would pay more attention to their requests and take-down notices than they would to mine, and got no particular reassurances.
I suggested that if they could come back to me with proof that they had contracts with three social media companies, then I would consider them. I don't think I'll be hearing back.
Anyone with a full Bitcoin node is in theory in significant violation of US law; child porn is a strict liability scenario, where intent doesn't matter.
People have been criminalized for bittorrent, music sharing services, etc. Uninformed people I know hesitate to use Tor clients due to its reputation; well-informed people hesitate to run Tor exit nodes. Why would blockchain get special status?
For example, imagine a blockchain explicitly intended for use by drug dealers to exchange money or CSAM users to exchange materials (maybe they read on HN that it's anonymous, impossible to censor, etc.): Could the government shut that down? Would they? Would you dare allow any such thing on your computer (ignoring that you probably have no interest in either service).
Blockchains allow structure and incentive beyond the data in itself. If someone published all the leaked pii of us citizens from the last decade to the bitcoin blockchain (which would probably exceed high 6 figures in fees,) the financial incentive would effectively permanently protect it. It's about as far from ephemeral as data can get. Governments could hamper the use of bitcoin, shut down exchanges for fiat, but it's effectively impossible to get rid of the data once it's published to the blockchain.
Non blockchain distributed data systems can theoretically be censored, but in the same sense that tor users can be tracked - the resources needed aren't trivial.
Building in a consensus based way of eliminating garbage from non-functional blockchain data might prove legally necessary, as bitcoin nodes are effectively hosting all sorts of nasty and illegal data even now.
Transaction size limits and fees prevent meaningful abuse or use of bitcoin as a data sharing platform, but there are solid cryptocurrencies designed for arbitrary public distributed data. I'd love to see a scihub blockchain, or a better steemit type system.
It'll be interesting to see how cryptocurrencies evolve, and how long it takes governments and cultures to adapt.
What financial incentive? How would that work?
I'd avoided looking into NFT's because the concept strikes me as being just, well, cringe, but I'd assumed at least that the chains stored the hash of a jpeg or something.
You're telling me that they're not even immutable? They really just store urls with _no checksum of what's on the other end of the url_!?
> protocol matches people who have hard drive space to spare
If people were pumping and dumping physical goods, using shill bidding and other tactics blatantly on display in NFTs, they'd go to prison.
The hammer is gonna fall hard on lots of shady characters in the nft space, and a whole bunch of famous people will get spanked or look really stupid when law enforcement catches up.
I always thought the same about those companies who pose themselves as some "domain registration office" and tell me that they have a customers request to register $firstname$lastname.$tld but that they found out about me and would like to offer me the domain, because I'm $firstname $lastname obviously. What would keep me from registering a TLD by myself and then order them to do so?
On the other hand: I already bought too many domains while being drunk, so I won't get deeper in to that.
Nothing's stopping that; you're just not the mark they're looking for.
They're looking for people with little experience with domains who'll be told because of the other person's interest it's gonna cost $500 and you should act quick or forever lose it.
In my experience, the vast majority of salescritters making cold calls don't know much about the product that they are selling. They have about three paragraphs of information at their fingertips, and that's it. They often don't know whether it runs as a service or as delivered software, what operating systems it uses or can support, and in many cases they don't understand what it does or why someone would want to buy it.
Why would they be "really good" at "filtering out the second", as opposed to them just being a minimum viable outsourced sales department?
it wouldn't be hard to go on LinkedIn and find some of Twitter's content managers and bribe them by paying them on the side to prioritize certain requests. Amazon had an issue with this related to their product ratings
https://www.techspot.com/news/76465-amazon-employees-alleged...
It’s not really that expensive either. You can go with a reputation management company or just use your own legal team once you’re large enough.
The more-annoying part is that it is getting harder to see who and what has been taken down so it’s harder to track the information that’s being targeted and the people behind it. Google has been providing less information in the DMCA notices (they used to basically be a complete list of the offending content) - I think now they just list paths or domains but not the complete URL.
I spent quite a bunch of time in Europe last year and would see quite a few search results noting something being removed under EU right to be forgotten legislation. Often I wondered wtf could have been removed. The law is probably abused for PR reasons, but like dmca, would cost a lot to fight and better to hope it stays under the radar and unpopular.
Also saw lots of blurred out stuff on google maps, but yandex is rather willing to share the sat views of prisons and other facilities ;)
A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand. Sure you can do opposition research to dig up things, but why go through that effort when you can simply wait passively and harvest later?
These companies do exist; I tried to google but came up empty, but I've heard that there are companies that keep collections of dirt on people like politicians, that can be released at strategic times (e.g. before elections). It's likely the various 'secret' services around the world have similar caches, like this rumour that the Kremlin had 'kompromat' on Trump (camera footage of prostitutes pissing on him or something), threatening to release it if he didn't do as they told him. I mean nothing came of that, as far as we know, so it might've just been propaganda, but it sounds plausible enough - both that Trump would be doing that, and that the KGB or whatever it is these days would have cameras in dignitaries' hotel rooms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels–Donald_Trump_sc...
[0] sex worker in this case being porn actress not AFAIK a prostitute; I don’t know which of “porn star” or “prostitute” would’ve been more damaging in the view of Trump’s advisers with regard to his expected electoral result at the time, as American cultural attitudes to sexuality are basically alien to me.
Maybe his core would say “that’s fake, but even if it’s real, then hey, what he’s into, he’s into - people can do weird stuff”. But actually seeing the video of someone peeing on the president of the United States is humiliating for the party and the country, and would (maybe?) be enough to have him sidelined.
They could argue “respect the office, not the person”, but the counter would quickly be “if a person doesn’t have enough respect to not be peed on by another human being, then maybe they shouldn’t hold the office”.
I mean - it would just be replayed over and over and the Streisand effect would take hold. Any pro-trump person would probably have to wade through replies with links of him being urinated on. Quickly jokes would come up about him taking crap, it’d be thrown into debates. Chants would be made… the little decal of the guy peeing on stuff would quickly be put over trump name or campaign stickers.
He's paid off & NDA'ed a few known people, it's possible that not everyone he's done that with bothered to come forward once he was president. He may appear indiscreet merely because his efforts failed in two cases but not in others. Those two failures show that he was making significant efforts to keep this sort of thing discreet.
This is by no means intended as an argument that additional incidents like this took place, only the observation that claiming something that already has precedent didn't happen again because "evidence would have shown up" is flawed justification.
The genius of Trump is that he’s able to normalize it. He had scandals every week that would take down most people.
Although the phrase “fake news” itself is a used as a magic wand to dismiss uncomfortable facts, this can and does happen.
While I was developing my @sfships Twitter bot, I needed to look up a ton of locodes, 5-character codes for "economically significant" places. The agency in charge of them releases it as CSV and Microsoft Access files, so it's a pain to quickly access the data. I said, "fuck this" and turned it into a website. E.g.:
On a lark, I put some Google Ads on it; a few times a year Google sends me $100. More than enough to pay for the site itself. Given that I haven't touched it in a few years that's good enough for me.
Sounds like you've come up with a business plan even more harmful than Facebook.
When I did some volunteer work with a Progressive organization I found out that there's an underground of people who do exactly this work. Their archives are private, though, and I can't speak to their vetting process. When I learned about it the only thing I could say was, "This sounds like professionalized character assassination."
Even more concerning, is the blind application of these DMCA requests for takedown by the registrars. We are heading down a very concerning path here.
I once got offered money to include the given name of a well known crypto startup founder in an existing positive article about him. Because if you searched for his given name back then, it brought you to his previous career photographing underage swimsuit models.
This is what the redacted email said:
>>
My name is Kyle Kilgore and I am with Sharp SEO Services. A client of mine has contracted me out to work on a reputation management campaign for First Last.
To verify what I am doing for First name please contact Mr.Last name and tell him I am working on behalf of Joseph Chinnock for making sure the changes on Google search engine's first page listing are the same for the keyword "Given name Last name” and "First name Last name”
There are just two changes I need done and will be more than happy to pay for you time to do it. The article page below is the reference content where I need changes about First Last:
[link redacted]
The changes desired are highlighted in BOLD text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (1.)
The title (H1 headers) needs to be changed from:
First Last Talks Newest Company Name Innovation: ***
To read as follows:
Given name Last name Talks Newest Company name Innovation: *** ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (2.)
As well as the first sentence in the first paragraph needs to be changed from:
company name’s co-founder First Last is no stranger to innovation.
To read as follows:
company name’s co-founder First Given Last is no stranger to innovation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If there is a fee for having you change this please let me know how you accept payments for doing this. Also, if possible, I need to know if this name change gets approved or disapproved as soon as possible.
I appreciate all your help and look forward to your response.
Best regards, Kyle Kilgore
Integrity as a journalist necessitates that one cannot accept payment from a person mentioned in a news article, and cannot agree to the attempt to compromise on journalistic independence. The cost to one's reputation as a journalist far outweighs the payment offered by the cold emailer from a reputation firm.
For any commenters without experience in the news industry, this request is disrespectful to the recipient as it assumes that the owner of the news site can be bought for or influenced with pay.
I am a big believer in the power and value of journalism, but in your experience, how far down do the ethics go?
Journalism work is low-paying and scarce today, relative to how it has been in the past. If a a person just wants to make money, they could move into marketing (especially copywriting), public relations, market research, or change fields entirely. So, a person who chooses to be a journalist is likely doing so for non-financial reasons. These might be a want to serve their community; a wish to become famous for good work; or just because they like the day-to-day work. Accepting payment for article influence runs counter to a journalist's motivations for staying in the low-paying line of work (they aren't serving the community; it's bad for personal reputation; and it makes it harder to keep doing journalism work, if the word gets out).
It makes sense for ethics to go far down, out of pragmatism more than idealism (though I also recognize that a person having a bad day/week might impulsively compromise on their integrity, or may not have thought about the consequences in advance).
I couldn't find it on Google, and was surprised that either nobody on the internet had talked about it, or Google had just become so bad for deep searches that it could only give me results about shoes and people named Sarah.
Maybe this had to do with why... And if so, I guess I have to just get used to not being able to satisfy my curiosity.
"He who controls the past controls the future."
She came from a prominent family, and the family hired one of these firms to “clean up” the images.
It did not seem to work. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect (see “Streisand Effect”). Trolls tend to take this kind of thing as a challenge.
Some jurisdictions have the concept of a "right to your own image" if you are relatively unknown or if the image does not have sufficient content to suggest public interest, but afair, the US does not.
Also, she (of course) did not take the picture, nor did anyone in her family. I suspect the FR that took the picture was fired with extreme prejudice. It may have even been illegal to take them. It was certainly a fairly abhorrent thing to do.
But it wasn't a copyright violation.
Why is it unrelated to free speech? It seems like it would be a free speech issue if pre-accident images weren't allowed to be published, e.g., in a news article about the accident. I don't see a material difference that would take accident photos out of the domain of free speech.
For my part, as a parent, I would never want to look at such photos. I would however be alright with their use, for example in safe driving campaigns in drivers ed courses. I believe some driving courses (specifically against drunk driving) have done exactly that. I'm sure other families would feel differently, but I don't think there's a prima facie case to be made that no family ever would be okay with this and that it would always increase the emotional toll, or never have any benefit.
I certainly don't like them being published merely to satisfy the morbid curiosity of random internet folks, but I also don't see how you ban that without potentially running afoul of (US) free speech rights that have strict limits on speech restraints. Obscenity is one of those limits, but the law has continually struggle to find a bright line rule by which to measure such things. At a minimum, that lack of clarity still places this sort of image within the domain of free speech issues.
If that was a genuine effort to bury news articles it seems to have backfired. Search results are full of information on actual whistleblowers and news articles returned that were written about the whistle seem to have no issue bringing up the actual whistleblowering
When people go digging around other peoples old social media posts, nothing good has ever come from it. If your 5+ year old tweets or instagram photos have actual value to you, curate them to a blog you control and delete from the platforms.
Anyone can do this, and have done this.
What these companies offer is the legwork, the right contacts at sites, and potential templates that make communication sound like it comes from solicitors/lawyers.
Reputation management has been around for thousands of years.
This should be a human right.
For thousands of years people have forgotten, it's how we need to function as human beings.
This has been taken away. This is not a good thing. The internet should not be a giant dox machine.
The digital present is more complex, but it too should not be a free for all in any moral and well functioning society. This is all going to get a lot worse.