
Homeland Security Issuing Its Own DMCA Takedowns On YouTube To Stifle Speech - tomse
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120720/02530219774/homeland-security-issuing-its-own-dmca-takedowns-youtube-to-stifle-speech.shtml
======
Hoff
If you call the US "IP cops" for a perceived violation of IP or copyright,
then the response will probably involve DHS.

The Department Of Homeland Security (DHS) is the home of the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), and ICE has had responsibility for the
enforcement of copyrights, intellectual property and related. ICE has had that
role for a while now, too.

Which means you see DHS listed on various postings.

Here is one of many previous OMG-DHS-WTF kerfuffles:

[http://www.quora.com/U-S-Department-of-Homeland-
Security/Whe...](http://www.quora.com/U-S-Department-of-Homeland-
Security/When-did-the-DHS-start-to-become-involved-in-copyright-enforcement)

Waving the latest round of DHS enforcement in front of nerds is probably great
for the clicks, but not really all that newsworthy.

~~~
_delirium
The U.S. has somehow historically been really bad at producing this kind of
paranoia over computer-related stuff through strange assignments of
responsibility. The fact that '80s hax0r kids were raided by the _United
States Secret Service_ , rather than by some normal-sounding police agency,
added a whole layer of mythos to that historical episode.

~~~
tptacek
They were raided by the _US Secret Service_ because the Secret Service is/was
actually the Treasury Police (the Protective Service assignment to the Secret
Service is an accident of fate).

In other words, it is/was weirder that the Secret Service protects the
President than it was that they were involved in Sun Devil.

And, as someone who came up close enough to Sun Devil to know a couple things
(I graduated high school in '94 and went almost directly to working in
vulnerability research): many of the people who got caught up in Sun Devil
were ultimately good people playing MIT-style pranks that just got out of
hand... but don't valorize it. For a good long chunk of time, people were
routinely _hacking phone switches and rerouting calls_. Almost the whole phone
infrastructure --- and _EVERY_ Internet-connected Unix system --- was owned
up. It was NUTS.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of that history. But naming a government agency
"secret service" is just a mythology-building choice in any circumstances,
regardless of having a good explanation. Though the later association with
guys wearing earpieces and black sunglasses taking a bullet for the President
didn't help, either.

I don't _valorize_ the '80s BBS scene per se, I just think the response was a
bit over the top. Instead of fixing their shit, they tried to paint a bunch of
teenage pranksters as some kind of apocalypse, as if these were uniquely evil
geniuses, and raiding some BBSs and board game companies to incapacitate them
was the real fix to the problem. If you're so wide-open that critical
infrastructure is being owned by teenage kids of the level of technical
sophistication that you find in '80s _Phrack_ issues, there might be a bigger
problem. If anything, the companies were lucky it was teenage kids and not, at
that time, anyone more nefarious.

As far as the "mythos" part, the writings are what's appealing to me, mainly;
there's a certain breathless, naive technical wonder of discovery that runs
throughout the '80s textfiles on the subject, which is somehow endearing.

~~~
tptacek
Ok, you just heard me explaining why I think the situation _was_ apocalyptic,
right? You could not have had a successful commercial Internet built on
infrastructure as thoroughly owned up as the early '90s telco networks were.

I am also not talking about "the BBS scene" (which I was very much a part of).
The BBS scene didn't own up switches. The BBS scene didn't have lists of X.25
outdials. The BBS scene couldn't rig you up a conference bridge. Lots of
people posted comments on BBSs. Very few of them would know what to do with a
DMS-100.

I am not saying the people to whom I am alluding were evil. They were not. I'm
saying they were much smarter than "the BBS scene" as a whole, and that the
pranks they were playing got _way_ out of hand.

Also: I don't know why you're talking down early Phrack issues. Say what you
will about today's Phrack, but in the early '90s, those were teenagers talking
about how to reconfigure telco switches. The telco switches they had broken
into and owned up.

Also, "Secret Service" originally referred to "The Secret Service Division of
the Treasury", which was the anticounterfeiting task force of the US Treasury.
It is less ominous in context. I do agree, though, that the name is ominous
when you strip away the context.

~~~
_delirium
Well sure, but that's an argument for fixing the infrastructure!

I'm thinking mostly of '80s Phrack issues; I haven't read too much of the '90s
stuff. The '80s issues don't read to me like particularly high-level technical
genius. They feel more like kids just learning relatively basic things about
how different machines and networks work, sharing newbie advice (some of it
cargo-cult), and then, somehow, also getting accounts on big telco systems at
the same time. It's mostly the proximity that's striking, that you have kids
clearly not up to the level of a Bell Labs engineer or anything, still trying
to learn stuff, who are simultaneously breaking into everything using even
their quite-in-progress knowledge.

~~~
sp332
_Well sure, but that's an argument for fixing the infrastructure!_

I'm not so sure... Most things in the world don't require as much security as
information infrastructure. For some reason there is a cultural understanding
that attacking it is OK.

------
vehe
Stupid headline nitpick: the DHS's goal in this case is not "Hey guys, let's
stifle free speech", so it is dishonest to word it as "DHS <doing something>
to stifle free speech". It is true that free speech in this case is stifled,
so it would be less deceitful to say, "DHS stifles free speech by <doing
something>" or "DHS <does something>, which stifles free speech".

~~~
jcoder
Really??? None of us know their motives _for sure_ , but I think it's more
than plausible that they did this TO stifle speech.

~~~
gph
It's plausible though doubtful that this was done to stifle free-speech.

That said it appears DHS were given ample time to give a comment and decided
not to. That was their choice and it left their motives open for speculation,
which the article writer took full advantage of when selecting a title. It's
probably a bit of yellow journalism, but DHS could have squashed it with a
comment saying they simply didn't want their copyrighted material to be
associated with such views.

~~~
wtracy
In the article, the author tries and fails to come up with some other reasons
to explain this action.

So, if the takedown was not done with the intent of silencing someone, why was
it issued?

~~~
ceol
Because the uploader did not own the rights to parts of his video?

~~~
wtracy
Why would the DHS be issuing takedown requests on someone else's behalf, then?
I believe that it's been established that isn't even legal.

~~~
ceol
Because it's possible for the DHS to _hold_ copyrights if someone else
transfers it to them.

------
DamnYuppie
Once again the HSA shows why they should not exist. I am not saying it is a
conspiracy per-se. You give a group of people great power over others with
limited oversight or accountability and soon they will be running over
everything in their path. This isn't a conspiracy theory this is simple human
behavior, one that has been proven time and time again through out history.

------
smlacy
Here's Google's Transparency Report for the United States:

[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/US/?p=2011-12)

Looks like ~1700 videos have been taken down.

------
jimrandomh
This is very likely a hoax; someone typed "Department of Homeland Security"
into a form, and YouTube didn't do anything to verify it. Quite likely the
same person who made the video in the first place, actually. The Streisand
Effect is well-enough known that people have started to use _pretending to be
censored_ as a strategy.

------
eloisius
Perhaps a FOIA for all DHS DMCA take town activity is appropriate.
<https://www.muckrock.com>

------
mtgx
Why does Homeland Security exist again? Even the name doesn't suggest it's
coming from a "free" country.

~~~
ChuckMcM
There is a comedian one liner that goes Q: "Why do we have the Department of
Homeland Security?" A: "Because the Russians own the trademark on KGB."

Its one of those painful chuckles.

That said, take down notices from law enforcement or intelligence agencies
would generally cite either an investigation in progress or a confidential
information. I saw a takedown which related to the a video that included
extensive footage of the federal building in San Jose. The amateur music video
was using the concrete pillars for some coreographic moves but the Feds
complained it contained too much 'site intelligence' with respect to the
building. Which you really couldn't argue with, watching it you could see
where all the fire exits were, office partitions, etc etc.

~~~
goodcanadian
But why, in a free country, is that sensitive information?

