This encourages self-censorship, or what's called "anticipatory obedience".
YouTube has become much worse about censorship. Pepe's Towing, LA's main towing company for major truck accidents, complains that YouTube took down some of their videos. Their videos are simply detailed coverage of the complex but effective process by which large vehicles that had accidents are lifted, rotated upright, placed on their wheels or on a large dolly as necessary, and towed away.
Their people wear body cams, like cops, their cranes have cameras, and sometimes they use a DJI drone. (They bring out the drone when someone drives off an embankment and they need to plan a difficult lift.) The main purpose of all the video is to settle arguments with insurance companies over the cost of recovery.
But they started a YouTube channel for PR purposes.
Almost all this video is taken on public property on LA county roads and freeways, with the cooperation of the cops, CALTRANS, local fire departments, and other organizations that clean up other people's messes. These are very public activities, with traffic streaming by and sometimes news helicopters hovering overhead.
Totally First Amendment protected. Not a violation of YouTube's stated policies.
So what's the YouTube censorship about? Preventing corporate embarrassment. Their older videos have clear pictures of truck doors with ownership info. Container markings. License plates. Pictures of damaged goods. Now. out of fear of being cancelled by YouTube, they're blurring everything identifiable. Recently someone rolled over a semitrailer full of melons, and they blurred out not just the trucking company info, but the labels on the melons. Which the people from Pepe's say is silly, but they don't want to fight with YouTube.
During the George Floyd death, the only place I could find the entire unedited footage was on liveleak, including when Floyd got into and subsequently out of the police cruiser. Nowhere else could I find that, and wondered why such an important event, triggering such outrage - didn’t have all the video available for everyone to view. A cynical person would suggest that the entire unedited footage conflicted with whatever narrative the media was pushing at the time.
Talk about anticipatory obedience, read the rest of this thread. oof.
This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply. There are no financial damages. The video is not classified. It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment). At best this is an internal policy violation that might possibly result in a termination for cause (although government employees tend to have more protections).
And yet people are still falling over themselves to reason that going against the desires of your employer must of course be illegal somehow. Not just written up per employer's policies, not just fired, not a civil suit if you've caused actual damage - but an escalation to criminal charges with the possibility of jail time, merely for not following an employer's whims. The degree to which we've already allowed top-down authoritarianism to infest our thinking is sickening.
And I think overbroad laws like the murderous CFAA have a lot to do with this. Rather than defining narrowly-scoped trespasses and a clear boundary where the rights of an individual end, they've entrenched draconian legal regimes that arbitrarily create harsh penalties. So the only way to avoid running afoul of them is to avoid upsetting anybody who might have the power to use them on you. Society has generalized this as top-down authoritarianism that flows along economic power relations, and it's sad.
> This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply.
That is incorrect. Copyright generally does not attach to works created by federal government agencies. The same is not true for works created by state and other sub-national government entities.
Harvard has an online resource center where you can learn more about this.
I do think it’s true that this particular footage is in the public domain.
>It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment).
FOIA does not apply to MWAA records. MWAA has its own access to public records policy that applies to its records. I have the unfortunate privilege of being a quasi-expert at dealing with MWAA and its records. I am one of three people to have ever appealed a MWAA Freedom of Information Policy all the way to arbitration.
(Bizarrely, binding arbitration is a requester’s final recourse. Unlike every other government entity that I know of, litigation is not an option if you think MWAA has not followed their Freedom of Information Policy.)
It is, in its most true form, a modern-day sefdom, bound by soft power, hopelessness, and above all else an unquenchable aversion to risk. The risk part predicated upon the delusion that we are in end times and things couldn't be better, so don't rock that boat. It appropriately fills the void that religion used to.
Right. A business is using the logos of other businesses to advertise their business…those vehicles are directly the subject of the video. That’s not allowed; it doesn’t make it not the case simply by the location filmed. Put it this way, I make a video and say my restaurant is great because restaurant B gets low health scores, then I plaster restaurant B’s logo all over my video to advertise my own business. Why would the fact that I stood on a public sidewalk make a difference?
(Note: I’m only talking about your described example.)
They are not using logos to advertise their business. They are using footage of their business operations to promote their business. This footage happens to contain logos of other businesses, because those other businesses put their logos places where they might be incidentally filmed. Trademark law does not give one the right to police any time your logo appears, nor does it protect one from criticism.
Your analogy misses the mark. A more appropriate analogy would be someone taking a promotional selfie while walking down the street, which includes businesses' signs in the background.
If the intention of the videos is to cover the process of towing the cars in general, then there is no need to include specific personally identifiable information, so removing those details seems quite reasonable to me.
Regardless of Youtube's rules, this just seems like good practice. Surveys and opinion polls in newspapers and scientific research normally redact that sort of information, for example.
Trading one "private sector" state surveillance and narrative control platform for another isn't much of an improvement.
That said, I hate to break it to you, but there is no real question of 'when', or even 'if'. The general public simply does not care, no matter how much abuse they are subjected to by mainstream platform operators.
There will always be a minority who care enough to embrace decentralization, open source, good e2ee, but they are the exception to the vast majority, at least inside the US, who simply do not care enough to change their behavior.
What percentage of Americans do you think would voluntarily, permanently relinquish their own fourth amendment rights for $5000? Scary thought experiment when you recall studies that have found only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech.
Here in Spain we use telegram a lot. I've heard in the US it's used only for piracy and drugs but we use it for everything. There's groups letting people know of Nvidia card availability. Groups for every community I'm part of (WhatsApp sucks at group chats), from makerspaces, lgbt events to tattoo artists, gigs etc. There's also a group exposing the faces of metro pickpockets because the police doesn't care. Stuff like that.
The good thing is that Telegram is not American so you don't get this prude censorship BS that you get on American apps (show half a nipple and get banned). Especially in the LGBT groups this can be a problem but also in the makerspace one (one of our members really loves making certain toys lol). Of course actual porn is not ok but that's fine, we don't use it for that.
I also like that their premium subscription is super affordable, only 2€ per month (it's cheaper if you don't pay through the Apple/Google ripoff stores) and it offers a lot of cool and useful features like automatic translation and transcription (which actually works unlike WhatsApp's)
I'm really quite happy with it and on top of everything bots are a fully supported first class citizen there so you don't have to screw around with hacky code like with WhatsApp. I have several bots for myself. So if there's a feature I want that it doesn't have I can simply add it!
Note that CNN isn’t in trouble for reporting this, the person who exfiltrated the footage is.
Stealing security camera footage and giving (or possibly selling) it is a problem. This article tries to make a case that the law applied wasn’t correct on somewhat pedantic terms, but I don’t know enough about the law to know if they have a point or not.
I do know, however, that if you take private data from your employer and leak it (or sell it) you’re not going to be on the right side of the law. I have a hard time buying this article’s point that it was just “violating company policy”
if you wrong your employer, for example by failing to do your job well, you are not a criminal to be prosecuted by the state. you may well deserve to lose that job though.
here, wronging your employer is considered a criminal act.
> if you wrong your employer, for example by failing to do your job well, you are not a criminal to be prosecuted by the state
This is going out of one’s way to abuse the employer’s trust. Moreover, it’s stealing their stuff. If I take cash out of a till, my employer should have the option of pressing charges.
Where I agree with you is that this isn’t computer fraud and abuse. It’s closer to theft. The law used to prosecute should be more banal.
> I do know, however, that if you take private data from your employer and leak it (or sell it) you’re not going to be on the right side of the law. I have a hard time buying this article’s point that it was just “violating company policy”
If I were to copy the files on my work device and distribute them, I would be in violation of NDAs which could be pursued as civil offenses. If I didn’t have those NDAs, my employer could try and pursue something in court, along with firing me, but it wouldn’t be a straightforward suit.
None of these are (or at least, should be) criminal situations.
> thanks in part to CNN’s initial failure to redact some CCTV text that described the location of the camera
This is the most important bit. That journalist had one fucking job. Technically, their job was handed to them in a platter. Now their incompetence is going to cost someone else's livelihood and possibly, life. What a sad state of affairs.
I'd say leaking an employer's internal data when not whistleblowing is definitely cause for termination, in the "no future employer should trust you" way, but yeah, calling this a CFAA case is a stretch.
Many states have super vague computer abuse statutes. Illinois' law specifically states it is a crime to violate the ToS of a network (e.g. a web site).
Also, if the defendant here is literally innocent (i.e. the statutory wording does not apply to his actions) and his lawyer still advised him to plead no contest, then he might have grounds for the conviction to be overturned. I remember that Subway Jared had some of his charges reversed because he was technically innocent of them, but his lawyer stated that he didn't check any of the evidence before recommending a guilty plea.
And, in a further ridiculous twist of justice, if the defendant pleads to something that isn't even a crime (e.g. the state simply made the statute up, or adjusted the wording so it wasn't what the law said), then you can't get that reversed if you knowingly plead to it. I remember cases where defendants pled guilty to non-crimes, but you're cooked at that point because you agreed to it.
Why is leaking the video the right thing? There were multiple videos of the incident including footage from a EarthCam live camera. And the NTSB released multiple videos as part of their investigation. The video wasn't leaked in order to stop a coverup.
The person who leaked the video worked in a police dispatch center. Those personnel aren't supposed to leak information. Would it be ok for an EMS tech to leak videos? How about a surgeon? The incident occurred in public view with many existing videos and eyewitnesses and other telemetry information. It wasn't like this guy was swinging for the fences to get the Zapruder tape to us.
This encourages self-censorship, or what's called "anticipatory obedience".
YouTube has become much worse about censorship. Pepe's Towing, LA's main towing company for major truck accidents, complains that YouTube took down some of their videos. Their videos are simply detailed coverage of the complex but effective process by which large vehicles that had accidents are lifted, rotated upright, placed on their wheels or on a large dolly as necessary, and towed away. Their people wear body cams, like cops, their cranes have cameras, and sometimes they use a DJI drone. (They bring out the drone when someone drives off an embankment and they need to plan a difficult lift.) The main purpose of all the video is to settle arguments with insurance companies over the cost of recovery. But they started a YouTube channel for PR purposes.
Almost all this video is taken on public property on LA county roads and freeways, with the cooperation of the cops, CALTRANS, local fire departments, and other organizations that clean up other people's messes. These are very public activities, with traffic streaming by and sometimes news helicopters hovering overhead. Totally First Amendment protected. Not a violation of YouTube's stated policies.
So what's the YouTube censorship about? Preventing corporate embarrassment. Their older videos have clear pictures of truck doors with ownership info. Container markings. License plates. Pictures of damaged goods. Now. out of fear of being cancelled by YouTube, they're blurring everything identifiable. Recently someone rolled over a semitrailer full of melons, and they blurred out not just the trucking company info, but the labels on the melons. Which the people from Pepe's say is silly, but they don't want to fight with YouTube.
During the George Floyd death, the only place I could find the entire unedited footage was on liveleak, including when Floyd got into and subsequently out of the police cruiser. Nowhere else could I find that, and wondered why such an important event, triggering such outrage - didn’t have all the video available for everyone to view. A cynical person would suggest that the entire unedited footage conflicted with whatever narrative the media was pushing at the time.
I watched the unedited video too. That's exactly what happened.
Talk about anticipatory obedience, read the rest of this thread. oof.
This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply. There are no financial damages. The video is not classified. It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment). At best this is an internal policy violation that might possibly result in a termination for cause (although government employees tend to have more protections).
And yet people are still falling over themselves to reason that going against the desires of your employer must of course be illegal somehow. Not just written up per employer's policies, not just fired, not a civil suit if you've caused actual damage - but an escalation to criminal charges with the possibility of jail time, merely for not following an employer's whims. The degree to which we've already allowed top-down authoritarianism to infest our thinking is sickening.
And I think overbroad laws like the murderous CFAA have a lot to do with this. Rather than defining narrowly-scoped trespasses and a clear boundary where the rights of an individual end, they've entrenched draconian legal regimes that arbitrarily create harsh penalties. So the only way to avoid running afoul of them is to avoid upsetting anybody who might have the power to use them on you. Society has generalized this as top-down authoritarianism that flows along economic power relations, and it's sad.
> This is about a government created footage from a surveillance camera. Copyright, or any other notion of imaginary property, most certainly does not apply.
That is incorrect. Copyright generally does not attach to works created by federal government agencies. The same is not true for works created by state and other sub-national government entities.
Harvard has an online resource center where you can learn more about this.
See https://copyright.lib.harvard.edu/states/
I do think it’s true that this particular footage is in the public domain.
>It's essentially a public record, and FOIA likely does apply (as noted by one tiny comment).
FOIA does not apply to MWAA records. MWAA has its own access to public records policy that applies to its records. I have the unfortunate privilege of being a quasi-expert at dealing with MWAA and its records. I am one of three people to have ever appealed a MWAA Freedom of Information Policy all the way to arbitration.
(Bizarrely, binding arbitration is a requester’s final recourse. Unlike every other government entity that I know of, litigation is not an option if you think MWAA has not followed their Freedom of Information Policy.)
See https://www.mwaa.com/sites/mwaa.com/files/legacyfiles/freedo...
It is, in its most true form, a modern-day sefdom, bound by soft power, hopelessness, and above all else an unquenchable aversion to risk. The risk part predicated upon the delusion that we are in end times and things couldn't be better, so don't rock that boat. It appropriately fills the void that religion used to.
Right. A business is using the logos of other businesses to advertise their business…those vehicles are directly the subject of the video. That’s not allowed; it doesn’t make it not the case simply by the location filmed. Put it this way, I make a video and say my restaurant is great because restaurant B gets low health scores, then I plaster restaurant B’s logo all over my video to advertise my own business. Why would the fact that I stood on a public sidewalk make a difference?
(Note: I’m only talking about your described example.)
They are not using logos to advertise their business. They are using footage of their business operations to promote their business. This footage happens to contain logos of other businesses, because those other businesses put their logos places where they might be incidentally filmed. Trademark law does not give one the right to police any time your logo appears, nor does it protect one from criticism.
Your analogy misses the mark. A more appropriate analogy would be someone taking a promotional selfie while walking down the street, which includes businesses' signs in the background.
2 replies →
If the intention of the videos is to cover the process of towing the cars in general, then there is no need to include specific personally identifiable information, so removing those details seems quite reasonable to me.
Regardless of Youtube's rules, this just seems like good practice. Surveys and opinion polls in newspapers and scientific research normally redact that sort of information, for example.
I wonder when people in the west will start flocking to Telegram groups (or equivalent) to get the real information the way they do elsewhere.
Trading one "private sector" state surveillance and narrative control platform for another isn't much of an improvement.
That said, I hate to break it to you, but there is no real question of 'when', or even 'if'. The general public simply does not care, no matter how much abuse they are subjected to by mainstream platform operators.
There will always be a minority who care enough to embrace decentralization, open source, good e2ee, but they are the exception to the vast majority, at least inside the US, who simply do not care enough to change their behavior.
What percentage of Americans do you think would voluntarily, permanently relinquish their own fourth amendment rights for $5000? Scary thought experiment when you recall studies that have found only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech.
https://studyfinds.org/constitution-americans-rights/
3 replies →
In almost every context when someone says something like "real information" it almost always means "information I like or agree with".
2 replies →
Outside the US, WhatsApp already fills that role, but like Telegram, "real information" is an optimistic descriptor.
Here in Spain we use telegram a lot. I've heard in the US it's used only for piracy and drugs but we use it for everything. There's groups letting people know of Nvidia card availability. Groups for every community I'm part of (WhatsApp sucks at group chats), from makerspaces, lgbt events to tattoo artists, gigs etc. There's also a group exposing the faces of metro pickpockets because the police doesn't care. Stuff like that.
The good thing is that Telegram is not American so you don't get this prude censorship BS that you get on American apps (show half a nipple and get banned). Especially in the LGBT groups this can be a problem but also in the makerspace one (one of our members really loves making certain toys lol). Of course actual porn is not ok but that's fine, we don't use it for that.
I also like that their premium subscription is super affordable, only 2€ per month (it's cheaper if you don't pay through the Apple/Google ripoff stores) and it offers a lot of cool and useful features like automatic translation and transcription (which actually works unlike WhatsApp's)
I'm really quite happy with it and on top of everything bots are a fully supported first class citizen there so you don't have to screw around with hacky code like with WhatsApp. I have several bots for myself. So if there's a feature I want that it doesn't have I can simply add it!
Note that CNN isn’t in trouble for reporting this, the person who exfiltrated the footage is.
Stealing security camera footage and giving (or possibly selling) it is a problem. This article tries to make a case that the law applied wasn’t correct on somewhat pedantic terms, but I don’t know enough about the law to know if they have a point or not.
I do know, however, that if you take private data from your employer and leak it (or sell it) you’re not going to be on the right side of the law. I have a hard time buying this article’s point that it was just “violating company policy”
"the law" is the fulcrum this turns on.
if you wrong your employer, for example by failing to do your job well, you are not a criminal to be prosecuted by the state. you may well deserve to lose that job though.
here, wronging your employer is considered a criminal act.
> if you wrong your employer, for example by failing to do your job well, you are not a criminal to be prosecuted by the state
This is going out of one’s way to abuse the employer’s trust. Moreover, it’s stealing their stuff. If I take cash out of a till, my employer should have the option of pressing charges.
Where I agree with you is that this isn’t computer fraud and abuse. It’s closer to theft. The law used to prosecute should be more banal.
30 replies →
And it seems like that law requires malicious intent. I wonder how that would be proven here?
2 replies →
[flagged]
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I do know, however, that if you take private data from your employer and leak it (or sell it) you’re not going to be on the right side of the law. I have a hard time buying this article’s point that it was just “violating company policy”
If I were to copy the files on my work device and distribute them, I would be in violation of NDAs which could be pursued as civil offenses. If I didn’t have those NDAs, my employer could try and pursue something in court, along with firing me, but it wouldn’t be a straightforward suit.
None of these are (or at least, should be) criminal situations.
As a DLP professional: please don’t tell people this. You can absolutely be arrested and prosecuted for this.
10 replies →
I mean in the first case you're literally stealing from your employer. If that doesn't make you a criminal for theft I don't know what does
6 replies →
> thanks in part to CNN’s initial failure to redact some CCTV text that described the location of the camera
This is the most important bit. That journalist had one fucking job. Technically, their job was handed to them in a platter. Now their incompetence is going to cost someone else's livelihood and possibly, life. What a sad state of affairs.
Ehhh. It was from a fixed position CCTV camera. It was going to be found
I'd say leaking an employer's internal data when not whistleblowing is definitely cause for termination, in the "no future employer should trust you" way, but yeah, calling this a CFAA case is a stretch.
Agreed, he could be fired and even sued by his former employer for damages.
But calling using your cell phone to video record a security monitor "computer fraud" and "trespass" is clearly ridiculous.
Many states have super vague computer abuse statutes. Illinois' law specifically states it is a crime to violate the ToS of a network (e.g. a web site).
Also, if the defendant here is literally innocent (i.e. the statutory wording does not apply to his actions) and his lawyer still advised him to plead no contest, then he might have grounds for the conviction to be overturned. I remember that Subway Jared had some of his charges reversed because he was technically innocent of them, but his lawyer stated that he didn't check any of the evidence before recommending a guilty plea.
And, in a further ridiculous twist of justice, if the defendant pleads to something that isn't even a crime (e.g. the state simply made the statute up, or adjusted the wording so it wasn't what the law said), then you can't get that reversed if you knowingly plead to it. I remember cases where defendants pled guilty to non-crimes, but you're cooked at that point because you agreed to it.
Has anyone involved been within 10 feet of a computer in the last 15 years?
The CFAA applies!
It’s like postal or wire fraud. You’re going to do it somehow in just about any possible crime. They’ll get you.
It wasn’t/shouldn’t have been a crime? They’ll get you anyway, if they want.
Did you read the actual statute? It hardly applies.
That didn’t stop them from charging them, did it?
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1 reply →
[flagged]
Why is leaking the video the right thing? There were multiple videos of the incident including footage from a EarthCam live camera. And the NTSB released multiple videos as part of their investigation. The video wasn't leaked in order to stop a coverup.
>Why is leaking the video the right thing?
Because it's in the public interest. The law doesn't state what's right only what's permitted.
Isn't that an even stronger argument that the leak shouldn't be criminal?
13 replies →
Leaking crash footage to CNN isn't clearly "the right thing". Except for CNN I guess, who probably got a lot of views and clicks from the footage.
A lot of views from general population rather than being buried.
Are you suggesting such incidents should not be reported on or captured?
7 replies →
Overreach for sure, but I don't buy at all that rubbernecking is "obviously of public interest"; hardly the Pentagon Papers we're looking at here.
The person who leaked the video worked in a police dispatch center. Those personnel aren't supposed to leak information. Would it be ok for an EMS tech to leak videos? How about a surgeon? The incident occurred in public view with many existing videos and eyewitnesses and other telemetry information. It wasn't like this guy was swinging for the fences to get the Zapruder tape to us.
> The incident occurred in public view…
So what was the harm in releasing a video of said public view, that almost certainly would've been subject to FOIA anyways?
Was the information proprietary or classified?