Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

While I like the efforts you've gone to in order to hide what is inside the service, I hope that you also appreciate the level of force arrayed against you.

It seems that one of the challenges of these services is that in order to avoid the copyright goons everyone you know, even those folks you only know by some IRC handle, have to be willing to go to jail for you. Because otherwise one of them will get turned, they will then be pressured to get you to indict yourself. This is how it worked against Anonymous, and how it works on most disobedience rings (civil or otherwise). One of your friends will share with you a folder that has copyrighted material in it, once they are sure you have accessed it they will re-iterate that some (or all) of the material there is copyrighted. At this point the most common thing that happens is that thinking they are 'safe', someone will say something stupid like 'don't worry, its our secret' or something like that.

And almost simultaneously the door will explode open as the SWAT guys come in and put them in cuffs and read you your rights. All because someone you thought you knew, was unwilling to spend time in jail rather than help the FBI with their investigation.

Law enforcement has a number of tools (many dubious like the CFAA) which they can employ against you, and they will.

The best you can hope to achieve is to keep a solid (and I mean solid, no slip ups anywhere) public front of respecting the copyright holders rights and your willingness to protect them. Otherwise you will be served papers to decrypt other buckets and you will be sent to jail for contempt if you do not facilitate rooting out copyright infringement on your service. Not even keeping your servers and company in a foreign country will help unless it is a country which doesn't care about its relationship with the US.

To be fair, Anonymous' trouble with the law has nothing to do with copyright, and people are not generally assaulted by SWAT teams for having folders containing copyright material shared with them. Even in the Megaupload case, the indictment included a long history of incriminating emails, not a single setup by an informant or slip-up.

But yes, if you want to run a file sharing site whose main purpose is uploading copyrighted material, you had better avoid leaving a paper trail containing anything damaging.

I have to ask: why not just email someone a copyrighted file? Once the file is downloaded to their email client, they are in the same position as they would be in if you shared it via Turtl.

As a Turtl user, you'd have to be careful about who you share with (or accept shares from). We even outline this on our security page (https://turtl.it/docs/security#when-is-turtl-not-secure).

It seems at some point the app you're using becomes irrelevant and what you actually do with it becomes much more relevant (such as a bittorrent client).

   > why not just email someone a copyrighted file? Once the 
   > file is downloaded to their email client, they are in 
   > the same position as they would be in if you shared it 
   > via Turtl.

Not exactly, there have been a couple of ultimately unsuccessful cases which are similar (but not exact) with people getting mailed kiddie porn and the federal agents tried to arrest them when the mailman handed over the letter/package.

The successful prosecutions I've read about involved three things, 1) an opportunity, 2) an awareness of the legality, and 3) the follow through even when there is no reasonable doubt.

Bittorrent is a good example here, and cassette tapes are as well. All of the outward facing material from these folks are focused on legitimate uses of the service, it doesn't keep people like cassette makers from being sued, but it gives them a pretty credible defense. In the linked article you mentioned using Turtl specifically to avoid copyright enforcement, a judge or jury reading that could be persuaded that you intended to facilitate copyright infringement and that intent would make you liable for any copyright infringement that occurred by anyone using the Turtl service. The point I was trying to make is that you are doing the prosecution's job for them when you write

"So how does Turtl deal with copyrighted material?

We don’t. We don’t know what you’re storing. Neither do copyright holders. Neither does the government.

That’s how we like it =]"

It will not be difficult for a prosecutor to use your words to a Jury and show that you like that people can violate copyright with your service and that you made the service so that they could.

And once the prosecution has made the jury understand that, you will be convicted of abetting copyright infringement and either broke for the rest of your life paying off an infringement judgement from hell, or serving time in prison.

All for stuff other people did using your service, because you made it so they could. See how that works?

I find your point (2) very weird.

Child porn is strict liability (meaning, there's no requirement to show you did anything on purpose). The law generally doesn't require that you be aware of the legality of what you're doing ("ignorance of the law is no excuse").

Now, it's easy for me to believe that if you can show affirmatively that you received child porn by accident, for example through the unknown-to-you malicious actions of others, the judge might let you off, but that's not actually encoded in the law; the federal agents you mention have an accurate view of things.

Can you point out a case where someone knew they were in possession of or receiving child porn, but got off because they were under the impression it was legal?

Sounds like you can get people easily arrested by mailing them child porn without a return address and anonymously tiping off police.

Kind of like destroying someone's reputation via sybil attacks, on an app like lulu or yelp or whatever. The NSA had slides on how fake victims could write blogs about being raped or mistreated or whatever.

It's an issue, but hopefully a fairly minor one.

The classic Japanese serial novel Musashi ( http://www.amazon.com/Musashi-Epic-Novel-Samurai-Era-ebook/d... ) includes a fairly disturbing subplot about the protagonist's reputation being trashed by a little old lady of no significance who follows him around insulting him to anyone who will listen. Despite the fact that no one knows her, and many significant and influential people know (and like) him, this prevents him from landing a respectable job.

Yes, that's actually happened before. It's never turned out well for the actual perpetrator.

The mail service has a remarkable ability to track mail packages, even those not sent by certified or registered mail. Additionally, police stations log all calls received--there's no such thing as an anonymous call. The use of a pay phone, prepaid cell phone, or online burner number is a huge red flag--it supports the recipient's defense that someone is attempting to ruin their reputation. Plus, almost all child pornography cases are coordinated with a special DOJ task force, due to the international scope of this offense.

Once it's been established that the recipient is being framed, the police--and the FBI--turn their attention to finding the actual perpetrator. The use of the postal service makes the frame-up a federal crime.

This is actually how the FBI actually cracked one of the more infamous child porn rings a few years ago--some idiot tried to frame his neighbor over some stupid dispute and they traced it back to him quite easily.

This was the case I was thinking of when I wrote that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._United_States

The wikipedia write-up suggests other grounds. From the majority opinion (via wikipedia):

> The evidence that petitioner was ready and willing to commit the offense came only after the Government had devoted 2½ years to convincing him that he had or should have the right to engage in the very behavior proscribed by law.

Jacobson was let off on grounds of entrapment; the reasoning was that the government specifically persuaded him to do what he otherwise wouldn't have done (or at least, what it could not be reasonably shown that he otherwise would have done). It's not obvious that that has much to do with whether he was or wasn't aware that child porn was illegal; the fact that the entrapment campaign included political literature protesting government intrusion tends (IMO) to suggest that he was.

Legality does get coverage as an issue, but it seems to be mostly (again, all I did was read the wiki article) as a way to show that Jacobson wasn't a suitable target for the entrapment campaign in the first place; the argument went that buying legal child porn doesn't demonstrate that he's likely to buy the same child porn after it becomes illegal.

Possession of child porn is not a strict liability offense. You still need to have the intent to possess whatever media is at issue and you must know what the media contains.

Now, it's easy for me to believe that if you can show affirmatively that you received child porn by accident, for example through the unknown-to-you malicious actions of others, the judge might let you off, but that's not actually encoded in the law; the federal agents you mention have an accurate view of things.

If you can show affirmatively that you received child porn by accident, the judge will let you off, because there wasn't any intent to possess child porn. Moreover, the prosecution will go after the person who sent the porn to you, and will likely recommend a good civil attorney for your lawsuit against that person.

You appear to be correct. Do you know of something discussing this directly?

Yeah I gotta say, this blog post is a really terrible idea. A "reasonable person", if this came up in a court of law, would probably conclude that despite your disclaimers to the contrary, you know or should've known that this blog post serves as a recommendation or even incitement to share copyrighted materials over your service.

As in all hack attempts, while the security may be rock solid, it is still susceptible to the "guy gets locked in a room with Bubba who loves breaking kneecaps with his bat"

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