
Illegal TV streamers, here's how the feds will hunt you down - chaostheory
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/illegal-tv-streamers-heres-how-the-feds-will-hunt-you-down.ars
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ars
This is what happens when you overfund a department. Especially when you
target the money for a particular purpose.

All this manpower would be more useful for more important crimes, but that's
not how the budget was designed.

And departments ALWAYS use all their money.

It's hard to argue "so defund them", because then you hear of cases that are
being ignored.

I think the best thing to do is merge as many departments as possible, then
fund them in total, and hope that someone local can direct the money where
it's needed - on the fly - rather than some centralized planning budget doing
it.

~~~
uxp
> I think the best thing to do is merge as many departments as possible

Isn't that pretty much what the Department of Homeland Security is? ICE,
Customs, TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA, the SS and a few others under one umbrella?
Doesn't look like it actually made anything better.

~~~
Natsu
All they did was to add another layer of bureaucracy over the top of existing
departments, as I understand it. Ideally, they would eliminate redundancies
post-merger, but this is government we're talking about.

If we coded the way the government governs, we'd never be able to remove bad
code, we'd have to continually add more and more complicated code to fix the
existing bugs and source control would also be an anathema, in particular
because of the 'blame' command.

~~~
wladimir
_If we coded the way the government governs, we'd never be able to remove bad
code, we'd have to continually add more and more complicated code to fix the
existing bugs_

Wow, that sounds a lot like some places I've worked. Nothing was ever removed
out of fear that something somewhere might break. Refactoring, hence, is
forbidden. Just add more code and special cases.

------
aj700
Insane.

1\. The US government now isn't even trying to pretend it doesn't only work
for obsolete corporations. This is all make-work crap. They know the streams
will be published somehow.

1a Until the supremes work out and declare that (soft) money is not protected
speech, America will be an absolute, undemocratic plutocracy.

2\. Why allow someone to register a domain that is obviously to be used for
exactly this purpose in the first place?

3\. The penalty for using frames on a site is now 5 years in prison.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_Until the supremes work out and declare that (soft) money is not protected
speech, America will be an absolute, undemocratic plutocracy._

Sigh.

I can use my money for political speech as I see fit. You and I could pool our
money for political speech as we jointly see fit. At what point do you
advocate that we should lose our right to cooperate, pooling our money to
reach more of the electorate?

Sure, it's a cliche by now, but America isn't designed to be a democracy[1].
It's overarching architecture is that of a constitutional republic, only
granting limited powers to the government. It just uses democracy to fill in
the details.

The problem is that the people have complacently ceded to the government too
much power (and you're advocating that we cede even more![2]). The government
now has the power to determine who is going to succeed, who is going to get
rich, and who is going to be destroyed.

But, as I've said elsewhere, the problem is with public choice economics, and
rationally-irrational voters.

Because we've allowed the government's power to grow so greatly, it now wields
sufficient power that it's (very) cost effective to woo the legislators for
special privileges and rent seeking.

On the other hand, while voters collectively _could_ wield power to counter
this, it's diffuse, and any one particular voter has approximately zero
influence, and thus has little incentive to make the significant investment in
educating himself about what's going on. Thus, the electorate is generally
ignorant (and rationally so), and does not know about (most of) the
shenanigans going on with their government.

[1] There are 3 equal branches to the US federal government. The SCOTUS is
appointed, not democratically elected, so that's 1/3. The President is elected
by the electoral college, not the populace, that's another 1/3. The
legislature is made up of two houses. The Representatives are elected
democratically, but until the 17th Amendment, the Senate was appointed by the
State legislatures -- not democratic. So that's another 1/6.

Thus, 5/6ths of the US government's power was determined non-democratically as
designed at the time the Constitution was ratified. Only 1/6 was democratic.
So it's tough to say that we're supposed to be a democracy.

[2] Indeed, you seem to be trying to give the government more power, not keep
it for the liberty of the people. In (1a) you advocate controlling speech,
which obviously entails having the goverment decide whose speech is legal and
whose isn't. And in (2) you further advocate prior restraint on speech,
deciding in advance that someone seems to have the intent to say something
bad. It looks to me like you're trying to build a "democracy" with absolute
control over us. (I'll leave the ultimate invocation of Godwin to the reader)

~~~
CWuestefeld
Downvotes are fine, but please give me the courtesy of explaining your
disagreement, rather than just whacking me over the head.

~~~
aj700
The system is a two party stable oligarchy anyway.

We more or less publically fund parties in Europe. Why does the private
sector, whether individuals or co-operating individuals have a right to
fund/corrupt officials and influence policy? If hard money is wrong, soft
money should be too. Making it an issue ad is a stupid, inconsistent loophole.
Toby Ziegler's been through all this anyway.

It's simply not normal for corporations to give millions to parties and issue
groups outside America. And the principle may be arguable, but the effects are
clearly appalling.

on point 2, I'm not saying there should be enforced, pre-emptive speech
control. But if the system were human instead of automated, someone could have
pointed out to the domain owner that they'll probably have to seize it anyway
if they use it for that purpose. Of course, I'm expecting far too much
intelligence and concern for the customer from a dumb (ie efficient) system.

~~~
CWuestefeld
A fair reply, thanks. Maybe we're not so different as the initial disagreement
would show.

 _The system is a two party stable oligarchy anyway._

I've been saying this forever. DEM and GOP are just two sides of the same
coin, with barely a hair's breadth of difference between them.

 _If hard money is wrong, soft money should be too._

Logically that makes sense, but I'm arriving at a different solution than you.
I think that the freedom of speech (together with some others, like self-
defense, property rights, and freedom to engage in contracts) are paramount.
Because our system is fundamentally designed to guarantee natural rights, but
only incidentally democratic, when rights and voting are in tension, it should
be the freedom of speech that wins over electoral procedures.

------
Joakal
Gmail. The feds then went to Google, which turned over information on the
Gmail account in question. Chevys@gmail.com was registered to Brian McCarthy
at the same Deer Park address Comcast had revealed.

Gmail has information including his name and address? Really?

Anyhow, another con to using one email account for everything.

~~~
Natsu
It says that they got the name & address from Comcast by looking up the IPs he
used to connect to the other services.

If you have the power to issue subpoenas, you can find out a lot of things
assuming you know which people to ask.

~~~
Joakal
They found that the gmail account had information that matched the name and
address of the information Comcast provided.

"Chevys@gmail.com was registered to Brian McCarthy at the same Deer Park
address Comcast had revealed."

So either the account had information (maybe ip logs but article clearly
states name + home address) or it was in the emails.

~~~
Natsu
Hmm, I had read that assuming they were talking about an IP address, but I may
have misread it. I think you can put your physical address in somewhere in
your Gmail account, but it's not required and I might be misremembering.

------
jrockway
I guess the lesson to criminals is clear: make sure your victim is poor. Beat
some homeless person to death and make a video? Excellent. Re-broadcast free
broadcast TV? Lose all your money and spend the rest of your life in prison.

------
InclinedPlane
I'm quite annoyed that my tax dollars are being used to bring the hammer down
on media "pirates" and PS3 hackers while serious crimes like DDoS for money
(and the related botnets), phishing, malicious systems intrusion, and all
manner of corporate espionage get the cold shoulder.

~~~
iwwr
Or rather, real criminals are hard to catch. Going after them would consume
resources with no payoffs. Easier targets present more opportunities for
publicity.

~~~
cabalamat
And the copyright industry has lots of money with which to bribe politicians.

~~~
dmm
I hear people say things like this all the time. What does it really mean? Do
you believe that politicians are bribed with big cases of money? Or are you
referring to campaign contributions?

I would probably attribute it to agents wanting to further their careers by
catching some people and getting them convicted. All of the agent's office
buddies are going after copyright violators, so they do too.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
Generally what is meant by "bribe politicians" is twofold. The first aspect is
campaign contributions, which help keep the politician in office. But the
second one is post-legislature work. A former Senator just got made MPAA head,
and similar things happen throughout the business sector - get defeated in the
polls (or don't run for reelection) and move over to a cushy job on a
corporate board or as figurehead of an industry group, where you get paid a
6-figure sum for easy and part-time work. Both of these are perfectly legal if
unseemly.

I agree that it may also be about agents who want to further their careers -
because the punishments for copyright violation are so high, it probably looks
just as good on the CV as a successful DDOS or spam case, and it's probably
markedly easier.

------
2arrs2ells
So I just checked out ICE's website
([http://www.ice.gov/about/offices/homeland-security-
investiga...](http://www.ice.gov/about/offices/homeland-security-
investigations/)) and I have absolutely no idea why a domestic copyright
violation case would fall within their jurisdiction. Any ideas how they twist
this to fit in their "mission"?

~~~
T-R
tptacek has made some good comments on this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010226>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1946307>

In short, Customs covers counterfeit, which extends to IP rights. Not saying I
agree with it, but that seems to be the justification.

------
tuhin
Great chain of events and the best part is there was no high tech brain work
involved. I mean the guy could have done so much to at least try to wipe his
trail, but I guess if he were that smart he would be making a positive impact
on the world and not doing this. What got me really thinking is how GMail has
his address? The language is a bit clear if Google had the address or just the
name which was of the same guy who lived at Deer part as revealed by Comcast.
The only possibility otherwise seems to be that this was linked to some
Adsense account which contained the address for a cheque delivery perhaps?

~~~
w1ntermute
<http://vimeo.com/15492594>

It's not that hard for a site to get your location.

~~~
mkjones
That video, while cool, is tremendously misleading. Not only does he make a
lot of unlikely assumptions assumptions (it should not be that easy to get
someone's apache pid), but Facebook doesn't use php's build-in session
management code at all.

------
cletus
I read this and for some reason I read it like an instruction manual on how to
do things right. Given the chain law enforcement followed, the "advice" you
can take away from this is:

\- Always, always, always use a prepaid credit card. You can buy them
everywhere. Pay for them with cash. Don't buy them in a store with good
surveillance;

\- Make sure you register them with out-of-state addresses and fake names (if
you even have to). Use a different card to pay for different things so the
trail covers multiple states. This complicates law enforcement;

\- Use a foreign intermediary. This GREATLY complicates law enforcement;

\- Have that intermediary be an innocent-looking site, like for sending large
files. Use a different set of cards for that site;

\- If you're not interested in real-time as such you could greatly complicate
efforts to obtain a warrant by uploading different pieces of the content to
the intermediary site using a variety of networks.

\- Encrypt the upload. Have individual pieces meaningless without the whole.

\- Upload those pieces via multiple accounts on the fake foreign intermediary.
Maybe even use two or more intermediaries.

Not that I have any interest in such things but the engineer in me sees such a
post and naturally looks for ways to solve the problems.

The piece about encrypting and uploading different pieces as a background task
that simply looks for open networks as you wander around actually sounds like
an interesting technical exercise.

Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing exists already.

~~~
hessenwolf
I read 'lived with his parents' and thought that was good enough information
on the value of this business model.

~~~
ohashi
2 ways to get richer, earn more or spend less.

That said, as you get bigger, you earn more. ad networks pay higher rates as
you get more traffic. So I wouldn't dismiss the business model right away.
Looking at the traffic curve on that site, it was going up a lot at the end. I
bet the bulk was made recently.

------
dekz
Even if the domain is hosted out of US jurisdiction, so many sites are
littered with Facebook 'Like' buttons, couldn't the requests for those assets
then be taken from Facebook? Is it time to start adblocking all these useless
but perhaps identifiable information?

------
cynoclast
This is incredibly alarming!

Censorship and information control of the highest order.

Those things have no purpose but oppression.

------
cookiecaper
1) Host in I2P/Freenet/etc only

2) Use anonymous or throwaway email addresses only; never connect from your
real IP (see i2pmail, hushmail, and good proxying + generic email service)

3) Run your own ad networks, accept payment only in Bitcoins.

4) Encrypt _everything_ vaguely related; all mail to and from your disposable
email address should be encrypted, write a script that downloads and empties
its contents nightly storing encrypted archives on your machine only. All code
and source control and everything else that can be encrypted should be
encrypted. See ecryptfs.

5) Profit!

~~~
Entlin
How about

1) Don't sell ads against stuff you don't own.

?

~~~
cookiecaper
I hope that Google is your first target with this idea.

~~~
Entlin
You might look into robots.txt and then reconsider your point.

~~~
cookiecaper
What does that change? Perhaps these content providers should look into a DMCA
takedown request and reconsider their position. The target of this raid wasn't
hosting any content himself, he was only hosting links that most likely went
out to large video sites, where the copyright holder could request a takedown.
My understanding is they were simply annoyed at this guy's aggregation of the
links and added him to the target list.

~~~
Entlin
Google respects if I don't want my content indexed.

This guy doesn't.

I can't believe we're even discussing this stuff. This guy is clearly in
criminal backwaters fencing illegal stuff. How can you even remotely vindicate
his behavior? "Oh but there is a layer of redirection between him and the
actual source of the content" really doesn't cut it in my book.

~~~
technomancy
> How can you even remotely vindicate his behavior?

Nobody's defending his behaviour; people are pointing out that the way in
which the federal government apprehended him was clearly illegal. There are
legal ways to stop him from infringing; let's see more of that.

------
rorrr
So

1) Use IP instead of a domain or use a bunch of disposable domains registered
outside of US jurisdiction and reach.

2) Don't use US based email.

3) Don't use US based ad systems.

4) Profit.

