Category Archives: social media

Sweden’s troll hunters

Adrian Chen reports: We’ve come up with the menacing term “troll” for someone who spreads hate and does other horrible things anonymously on the Internet. Internet trolls are unsettling not just because of the things they say but for the mystery they represent: what kind of person could be so vile? One afternoon this fall, the Swedish journalist Robert Aschberg sat on a patio outside a drab apartment building in a suburb of Stockholm, face to face with an Internet troll, trying to answer this question. The troll turned out to be a quiet, skinny man in his 30s, wearing a hoodie and a dirty baseball cap — a sorry foil to Aschberg’s smart suit jacket, gleaming bald head, and TV-trained baritone. Aschberg’s research team had linked the man to a months-long campaign of harassment against a teenage girl born with a shrunken hand. After meeting her online, the troll tormented her obsessively, leaving insulting comments about her hand on her Instagram page, barraging her with Facebook messages, even sending her taunts through the mail.

Aschberg had come to the man’s home with a television crew to confront him, but now he denied everything. “Have you regretted what you’ve done?” Aschberg asked, handing the man a page of Facebook messages the victim had received from an account linked to him. The man shook his head. “I haven’t written anything,” he said. “I didn’t have a profile then. It was hacked.”

This was the first time Aschberg had encountered an outright denial since he had started exposing Internet trolls on his television show Trolljägarna (Troll Hunter). Usually he just shoots them his signature glare — honed over decades as a muckraking TV journalist and famous for its ability to bore right through sex creeps, stalkers, and corrupt politicians—and they spill their guts. But the glare had met its match. After 10 minutes of fruitless back and forth on the patio, Aschberg ended the interview. “Some advice from someone who’s been around for a while,” he said wearily. “Lay low on the Internet with this sort of stuff.” The man still shook his head: “But I haven’t done any of that.”

“He’s a pathological liar,” Aschberg grumbled in the car afterward. But he wasn’t particularly concerned. The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been coined to encompass all these forms of online nastiness: näthat (“Net hate”). Troll Hunter, which has become a minor hit for its brash tackling of näthat, is currently filming its second season.

It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it. The anonymity provided by the Internet fosters communities where people can feed on each other’s hate without consequence. They can easily form into mobs and terrify victims. Individual trolls can hide behind dozens of screen names to multiply their effect. And attempts to curb online hate must always contend with the long-standing ideals that imagine the Internet’s main purpose as offering unfettered space for free speech and marginalized ideas. The struggle against hate online is so urgent and difficult that the law professor Danielle Citron, in her new book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, calls the Internet “the next battleground for civil rights.” [Continue reading…]

ISIS supporter @ShamiWitness arrested in Bangalore while his defenders threaten to decapitate more journalists

IBT reports: Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who was arrested Saturday in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, was only a sympathizer of the Islamic State group, and was not directly involved in recruiting for the militant outfit, M.N. Reddi, chief of Bangalore police, announced at a press conference. Biswas will be produced before a judge within 24 hours.

Biswas was detained by local police earlier in the day after a search was triggered following a report from UK-based Channel 4, which revealed that he was managing a popular Twitter account sympathetic to ISIS. Biswas, “who was never directly recruited” or left the country, will now be charged under Section 125 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, authorities told the media in Bangalore on Saturday. He will also be charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

“Mehdi Masroor Biswas has confessed to the fact that he was operating @ShamiWitness Twitter account for the last many years,” according to a press release from the Office of the Commissioner of Police in Bangalore, which added that “he was particularly close to the english speaking terrorists of ISIS & became a source of incitement and information for the new recruits trying to join ISIS/ISIL.”

The 24-year-old man, who reportedly worked for a local office of ITC, a multinational conglomerate, was “only active in the virtual world,” Reddi said, at the press conference, adding that most of his 17,000 followers were from the UK. Indian authorities will also investigate Biswas’ online followers. [Continue reading…]

A #FreeShamiWitness campaign has already been launched on Twitter. Here’s one tweet which threatens kafir (“infidel”) journalists with decapitation:

All kaffir journalists take note: 1. Muslims do not forget 2. Jihadi John's knife is very sharp. #FreeShamiWitness

— M-Shami-K (@y_dohak) December 14, 2014

But as @ShamiWitness and ISIS supporters speak out on Twitter, they highlight not only the extent to which their cause has been advanced by social media but also the fact that their favorite tool for propaganda is also indispensable for gathering intelligence.

Since some of these #FreeShamiWitness #daeshbags are too stupid to get off the Internet and destroy their hard drives, I expect more arrests

— WTF-Ette (@flr666) December 13, 2014

UK inquiry criticizes U.S. tech companies for failing to engage in counter-terrorism surveilance

Wired reports: GCHQ has direct access to “major internet cables” and has systems to monitor communications as they “traverse the internet” an official government report has revealed. The spy agency, which has been heavily criticised in the wake of the Snowden leaks, also admits that it has more data than it can handle. Despite these capabilities the government is being urged to massively expand its surveillance powers.

The details come from the Intelligence Security Committee’s inquiry (PDF) into the murder of the fusilier Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in Woolwich, London in 2013. While crucial details have been redacted for security reasons, the report still reveals the scale of the surveillance powers at GCHQ’s disposal.

Detailing GCHQ’s capabilities it notes that the spy agency has access to around “*** percent of global internet traffic and approximately *** percent of internet traffic entering or leaving the UK”. Despite the redactions the report does reveal that GCHQ is currently overwhelmed by the amount of data it has to process:

“The resources required to process the vast quantity of data involved mean that, at any one time, GCHQ can only process approximately *** of what they can access.”

The inquiry, which was set up to investigate what could have prevented Rigby’s murder, clears both M15 and M16 of any fault. It reveals that both Adebolajo and Adebowale were known to British security agencies, but that no action was taken. As both men were seen as low priority targets they were not subject to any specialist surveillance by GCHQ or any other agency.

The committee was far more damning in its assessment of an as-yet-unnamed US internet company. In December 2012 an exchange between Adebowale and an individual overseas revealed his intention to murder a soldier. The exchange was not seen by UK security services until after the attack. The report intimates that all overseas internet companies risk becoming a “safe haven for terrorists”.

“This company does not appear to regard itself as under any obligation to ensure that its systems identify such exchanges, or to take action or notify the authorities when its communications services appear to be used by terrorists.”

The Guardian identifies this company as Facebook.

The Wired report continues: “When the intelligence services are gathering data about everyone of us but failing to act on intelligence about individuals, they need to get back to basics, and look at the way they conduct targeted investigations,” said Jim Killock, executive director of online privacy advocates the Open Rights Group.

“The committee is particularly misleading when it implies that US companies do not cooperate, and it is quite extraordinary to demand that companies pro-actively monitor email content for suspicious material. Internet companies cannot and must not become an arm of the surveillance state.”

The unsafety net: How social media turned against women

Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly write: In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called “Men are better than women.” One image she found there, Thorlaug wrote to us this summer in an email, “was of a young woman naked chained to pipes or an oven in what looked like a concrete basement, all bruised and bloody. She looked with a horrible broken look at whoever was taking the pic of her curled up naked.” Thorlaug wrote an outraged post about it on her own Facebook page.

Before long, a user at “Men are better than women” posted an image of Thorlaug’s face, altered to appear bloody and bruised. Under the image, someone commented, “Women are like grass, they need to be beaten/cut regularly.” Another wrote: “You just need to be raped.” Thorlaug reported the image and comments to Facebook and requested that the site remove them.

“We reviewed the photo you reported,” came Facebook’s auto reply, “but found it does not violate Facebook’s Community Standards on hate speech, which includes posts or photos that attack a person based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or medical condition.”

Instead, the Facebook screeners labeled the content “Controversial Humor.” Thorlaug saw nothing funny about it. She worried the threats were real.

Some 50 other users sent their own requests on her behalf. All received the same reply. Eventually, on New Year’s Eve, Thorlaug called the local press, and the story spread from there. Only then was the image removed.

In January 2013, Wired published a critical account of Facebook’s response to these complaints. A company spokesman contacted the publication immediately to explain that Facebook screeners had mishandled the case, conceding that Thorlaug’s photo “should have been taken down when it was reported to us.” According to the spokesman, the company tries to address complaints about images on a case-by-case basis within 72 hours, but with millions of reports to review every day, “it’s not easy to keep up with requests.” The spokesman, anonymous to Wired readers, added, “We apologize for the mistake.”

If, as the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, television brought the brutality of war into people’s living rooms, the Internet today is bringing violence against women out of it. Once largely hidden from view, this brutality is now being exposed in unprecedented ways. In the words of Anne Collier, co-director of ConnectSafely.org and co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety and Technology Working Group, “We are in the middle of a global free speech experiment.” On the one hand, these online images and words are bringing awareness to a longstanding problem. On the other hand, the amplification of these ideas over social media networks is validating and spreading pathology. [Continue reading…]

A spy’s deceptive complaints

Who is more delusional: the spies, for saying Silicon Valley is in bed with ISIS, or Silicon Valley, for denying it's in bed with the spies?

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) November 4, 2014

In an editorial, the New York Times says: Robert Hannigan, the new director of Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, threw down quite a gauntlet with an op-ed article in The Financial Times arguing that the ever more secure communications services provided by the American technology companies that dominate the web have become the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.” He is not the first spy to complain that post-Snowden concerns over privacy, including increased encryption on the web, have put serious constraints on fighting terrorism, though his phrasing is the toughest yet.

Mr. Hannigan primarily makes two points. One, quite familiar, is that the Islamic State has been spectacularly successful in using the web to promote itself, intimidate enemies and radicalize recruits. The other is that tougher privacy controls have enabled the terrorists to conceal their operations, while impeding “lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies.” But the crocodile tears of the intelligence chiefs overlook the fact that before those barriers were put in place, the United States National Security Agency and Mr. Hannigan’s GCHQ misused their powers for an illegal dragnet surveillance operation. The technology companies are doing their job in protecting people’s private data precisely because the intelligence agencies saw fit to rummage through that data.

Mr. Hannigan’s argument overlooks the many legal avenues intelligence agencies have to seek data. Demanding that the technology companies leave “back doors” open to their software or hardware also potentially assists Chinese, Russian and other hackers in accessing reams of data.

Still, there is a terrorist threat; it is dispersed around the world and it does have a global tool on the web and in social networks. At the same time, there are powerful reasons for technology companies to protect the economic interests, personal privacy and civil liberties of their clients.

The ways to solve potential conflicts include requiring court orders for data mining, restrictions on specific practices such as exploiting the back doors, and far stronger oversight of the intelligence community. They do not include blaming technology companies for doing their job.