Reddit Has Become the Proverbial ‘Gatekeeper’ Like Google, Facebook and Twitter; Reddit Asked to Hand Over Customer Data Under a Secretive Law Enforcement Authority

siouxsie_siouxv2, a moderator at the subreddit, Making a Murderer, wrote on May 24, 2016: "Truth is there was some stuff that happened behind the scenes that makes it hard for us to keep the sub going as it has. I can't get into the details but we had no choice really."

Reddit deletes surveillance 'warrant canary' in transparency report

By Dustin Volz , Reuters

March 31, 2016

Social networking forum Reddit on Thursday removed a section from its site used to tacitly inform users it had never received a certain type of U.S. government surveillance request, suggesting the platform is now being asked to hand over customer data under a secretive law enforcement authority.
 
Reddit deleted a paragraph found in its transparency report known as a “warrant canary” to signal to users that it had not been subject to so-called national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval.

The scrubbing of the "canary", which stated Reddit had never received a national security letter "or any other classified request for user information," comes as several tech companies are pushing the Obama administration to allow for fuller disclosures of the kind and amount of government requests for user information they receive.

National security letters are almost always accompanied by an open-ended gag order barring companies from disclosing the contents of the demand for customer data, making it difficult for firms to openly discuss how they handle the subpoenas. That has led many companies to rely on somewhat vague canary warnings.

"I've been advised not to say anything one way or the other,"  a Reddit administrator named "spez," who made the update, said in a thread discussing the change. “Even with the canaries, we're treading a fine line. The whole thing is icky, which is why we joined Twitter in pushing back.”

Reddit did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2014 Twitter sued the U.S. Justice Department on grounds that the restrictions placed on the social media platform’s ability to reveal information about government surveillance orders violates the First Amendment.

The suit came following an announcement from the Obama administration that it would allow Internet companies to disclose more about the numbers of national security letters they receive. But they can still only provide a range such as between zero and 999 requests, or between 1,000 and 1,999, which Twitter, joined by Reddit and others, has argued is too broad.

National security letters have been available as a law enforcement tool since the 1970s, but their frequency and breadth expanded dramatically under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Several thousand NSLs are now issued by the FBI every year. At one point that number eclipsed 50,000 letters annually.

For your reading pleasure, our 2015 Transparency Report  
Submitted by Moderator spez at Reddit
April 2016

In 2014, we published our first Transparency Report, which can be found here. We made a commitment to you to publish an annual report, detailing government and law enforcement agency requests for private information about our users. In keeping with that promise, we’ve published our 2015 transparency report.

We hope that sharing this information will help you better understand our Privacy Policy and demonstrate our commitment for Reddit to remain a place that actively encourages authentic conversation.

Our goal is to provide information about the number and types of requests for user account information and removal of content that we receive, and how often we are legally required to respond. This isn’t easy as a small company as we don’t always have the tools we need to accurately track the large volume of requests we receive. We will continue, when legally possible, to inform users before sharing user account information in response to these requests.

In 2015, we did not produce records in response to 40% of government requests, and we did not remove content in response to 79% of government requests.

In 2016, we’ve taken further steps to protect the privacy of our users. We joined our industry peers in an amicus brief supporting Twitter, detailing our desire to be honest about the national security requests for removal of content and the disclosure of user account information.

In addition, we joined an amicus brief supporting Apple in their fight against the government's attempt to force a private company to work on behalf of them. While the government asked the court to vacate the court order compelling Apple to assist them, we felt it was important to stand with Apple and speak out against this unprecedented move by the government, which threatens the relationship of trust between a platforms and its users, in addition to jeopardizing your privacy.

We are also excited to announce the launch of our external law enforcement guidelines. Beyond clarifying how Reddit works as a platform and briefly outlining how both federal and state law enforcements can compel Reddit to turn over user information, we believe they make very clear that we adhere to strict standards.

We know the success of Reddit is made possible by your trust. We hope this transparency report strengthens that trust, and is a signal to you that we care deeply about your privacy.

(I'll do my best to answer questions, but as with all legal matters, I can't always be completely candid.)

Announcing new rules and a new subreddit for theories 
Submitted by Moderator NotANestleShill 
May 24, 2016

Hello /r/MakingAMurderer, we mods have been hard at work enforcing the rules and coming up with new ones to improve the sub. Our feedback thread was very helpful, and we got hundreds of comments and suggestions, so thank you!

One big issue we noticed in this subreddit was the staggering amount of theories and rampant speculation. Let's be clear: the people here at this subreddit have little chance of solving this mystery from a computer monitor, compared to professionals with actual access to the evidence and actual investigative skills.

To allow this to go on and to allow people to be called out and harassed because of these armchair detectives is horrible and will be stopped. We've made a new rule, where any posts that would normally be tagged as "Speculation", "theory", or "evidence" will now be removed. We're not going to encourage people to take matters in their own hands here, and that kind of stuff is filling up the subreddit.

You might ask, "Where can I share those kinds of posts then? I still think we can solve the case!". The answer is, you can post those to /r/TheoryOfMaM, where almost all restrictions are lifted and it's supposed to be a theory and investigative based subreddit. It'll be great, since it'll be easier to concentrate everything there and to really go into the details.

You might also wonder what kind of content we'll allow here. We'll allow any content that's about the show itself, as well as news and and posts about the core issues that MaM addresses, such as overzealous prosecutions or wrongful convictions.

Thank you for posting and for your feedback! Hope to see you over at /r/TheoryOfMaM!


Israel jails Palestinian beautician for 45 days over Facebook post

The day is approaching when the headline will be: "National Security Agency Jails American Citizens Over Social Media Posts," claiming they are "lone wolves" inciting terrorism.

By Al Jazeera
May 10, 2016

As uniformed men burst through her front gate last month, Nidal Atwan first thought they had come to her Bethlehem-area home (occupied West Bank) to arrest her 16-year-old son, Mohammed.

"It was two o'clock in the morning. If you saw the number of military jeeps, you'd think Osama bin Laden was in the neighbourhood," recalled Nidal's husband, Yousef.

To their surprise, soldiers pulled Nidal aside and asked after the whereabouts of her 22-year-old daughter, Majd, a makeup artist with a passion for bold hair colours and crystal-enhanced manicures.

In disbelief, Nidal asked the commander to show her the warrant, which stated that Majd was wanted on incitement charges over posts made on social media.

"I was shocked and furious," Nidal told Al Jazeera. "It struck me immediately, once they said they wanted Majd, that it was probably over Facebook," Yousef added.

On Monday, an Israeli military court sentenced Majd to 45 days in prison and a fine of 3,000 shekels ($800) for praising a recent bus bombing in Jerusalem.

Before Majd's arrest, Yousef and Nidal said they were aware of - but not alarmed by - their daughter's online presence. They expressed surprise that her post led to a series of interrogations at Jerusalem's Russian Compound, a police facility whose name evokes fear among many Palestinians.

Did she write stuff online? Yeah, like all other Palestinians. I really don't understand why they chose to arrest her.

"My daughter is not politically active; rather, her involvements are in beauty," Yousef said. "Did she write stuff online? Yeah, like all other Palestinians. I really don't understand why they chose to arrest her."

Since her arrest, Majd has been shepherded to and from court on six occasions as her case has moved through the system. The process has been hard on her, her parents told Al Jazeera, as Majd suffers from a number of health issues, including anaemia.

Majd's lawyer, Tareq Barghouti, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli military had monitored his client for two months before arriving at her house to make the arrest. One year ago, such charges would have been unheard of, he said, but "it has become a common thing these days, and there has been a wave of arrests on these Facebook posts".

Majd is one of nearly 150 Palestinians detained by Israeli forces over Facebook-related "incitement" since a wave of violence erupted in the region last October, according to prisoners' rights group Addameer. The numbers are a sharp increase from the 13 cases they documented in 2014.

Of those jailed in the past year, most were held in administrative detention without charge for three months. The maximum sentence for incitement is 10 years.

A spokesperson for the Israeli army confirmed to Al Jazeera that 59 Palestinians had been found guilty of provocative statements made online since last autumn. Some Palestinian attackers, including Muhannad Halabi, have written threatening statements on social media before launching attacks against Israelis.

The Israeli military is now monitoring Palestinian internet pages, searching for expressions of intent or approval of harming Israelis. "We have been studying very closely those patterns of incitement in Palestinian society," Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon told Al Jazeera.

To those who know Majd, however, she does not fit the profile of someone who would incite others to violence.

"Since she was a baby, she has loved nails," Nidal said, flipping through her smartphone among photographs of Majd in a range of daring styles; in one, she sports blonde hair with purple streaks, while in another, it flows long and red.

After she graduated high school, Majd began working as a stylist while earning two certificates in cosmetology, her parents said. When she is not applying makeup to clients or painting manicures, she spends her time with her mother, who works at a nearby gym. Majd enjoys swimming while her mother is busy with customers.

"We are not just mother and daughter; we are like sisters, like best friends," Nidal said.

The morning before Majd was arrested, mother and daughter perfected their makeup before driving to a grassy field near an Israeli settlement, Nidal said. They spent the afternoon taking pictures of each other enjoying nature, posing next to trees and brush.

George Carlin (2005): It's a Big Club and You Ain't in It!



Tim Hawkins - The Government Can



Reddit’s head of community leaves after nine month
By TechCrunch
May 24, 2016

About nine months after taking on the role of head of community management at Reddit, Kristine Fasnacht (u/krispykrackers) has left the company. In a post titled, “Admin released from captivity, reintroduced to Reddit community,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrote:

I am sad to share that u/krispykrackers is leaving Reddit. Over the past five years, she has done an incredible amount of work for us and the Reddit community. She has been the face of our Community team at Reddit; helped us write many of our policies and was indispensable working through countless tricky situations; and she lead our efforts in support of Extra Life, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. She has been a friend to me and many others here. While we are sad to see her go, we wish her the best going forward.

Actually replacing Kristine is impossible, but next Monday, four (maybe five!) new members of our Community and Trust and Safety teams will be starting, which will give the team even more horsepower.

Reddit has been in turmoil for the last year or so, losing one senior employee after another. Fasnacht came on as head of community in August, following the departure of Jessica Moreno, who left last July. Before taking on that role, she was temporarily managing Reddit’s Ask Me Anything Q&A sessions following the firing of Reddit’s director of talent, Victoria Taylor.

In a meeting with Huffman yesterday, he mentioned that half of the 11-year-old company, which entails about 130 employees, has started in the last six months. About a year ago, Reddit employed somewhere between 70 to 80 people, Huffman said. Within the last year, Reddit has created a Trust & Safety team, an anti-evil team for creating mandates around bullying, spam and account takeovers, and the community team has doubled.

To be clear, my meeting with Huffman was not related to this piece of news. In response to an inquiry about Fasnacht’s departure, Reddit VP of Marketing Celestine Maddy confirmed that Fasnacht left the company about 20 days ago.

“Upon leaving, some members of the community team post to r/modsupport and answer questions in the comments about their departure,” Maddy told TechCrunch via email. “Kristine’s post is here. Her user name is r/krispykrackers so you can identify her communication in the thread.”

I have reached out to Fasnacht and will update this story if I hear back. In response to someone on Reddit, Fasnacht said she has retired her “banhammer.”

[–]wickedren2 at Reddit submitted on May 25, 2016

I did not have the courage to post my suspicion of the appearance of the new mods as a result of a security letter.

I knew the canary was gone from here (last few paragraphs). Of course I went down the reddit hole...impressions to follow.

Preparing for the Chilling Speech in theory post today, I left out the missing canary because /r is huge, and interest of LE on social media should be for other things than LE protecting their reputation. I did not want to dilute my protest post.

But...after some high profile LE incidents this summer, the powers that be let loose the dachshunds of war^tm. BLM, like us, was a target, not because of wrongdoing, but because of the threat to LE reputation.

We'd like to think that MAM was a fluke that is simply the local bad sheriffs, but exoneration by DNA by the Innocence Project in America tell a different story. LE gets it wrong all the time. The appearance of justice is what is important to LE. DNA shines a light on the wrong-doing for over a generation. Out of 2.2 million people in prison...many were sent up on false charges. Look at the stats of the few that were able to gain access to DNA testing after conviction.

Ask any minority in America and you see that the system has different out-comes based on skin, class, and access to lawyers. I was promised my country would be fair to all regardless of position.

....That being said, on /r protect and $erve routinely brigades and protects LE interests. IMO LE interest are the most protected common element of removals across the subs I witness here in /r. LE interests are the most watched social media interactions on the internet. Makes perfect sense, but also the saddest waste of resources in my good country.



Reddit co-founder dies in N.Y. weeks before trial

By The Associated Press

January 14, 2013 

Aaraon Swartz, 26, considered an Internet prodigy for his role in creating RSS and co-founding Reddit, committed suicide only weeks before he was set to go to trial.

 
NEW YORK (AP) — The family of a co-founder of the social news website Reddit who committed suicide weeks before he was to go on trial on federal charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles is blaming prosecutors for his death.

Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday night, his family and authorities said. The 26-year-old had fought to make online content free to the public and as a teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.

In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available.

He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

In a statement released Saturday, Swartz's family in Chicago expressed not only grief over his death but also bitterness toward federal prosecutors pursuing the case in Massachusetts against him.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death," his family said.

Elliot Peters, Swartz's California-based defense attorney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case "was horribly overblown" because Swartz had "the right" to download from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from more than 1,000 academic journals.

Peters said even the company took the stand that the computer crimes section of the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston had overreached in seeking prison time for Swartz and insisting — two days before his suicide — that he plead guilty to all 13 felony counts. Peters said JSTOR's attorney, Mary Jo White — the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — had called Stephen Heymann, the lead Boston prosecutor in the case.

"She asked that they not pursue the case," Peters said.

Reached at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts, Heymann referred all questions to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston, Christina DiIorio-Sterling. She did not immediately respond to an email and phone message from the AP seeking comment.

A zealous advocate of public online access, Swartz was extolled Saturday by those who believed as he did. He was "an extraordinary hacker and activist," the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international nonprofit digital rights group based in California wrote in a tribute on its home page.

"Playing Mozart's 'Requiem' in honor of a brave and brilliant man," tweeted Carl Malamud, an Internet public domain advocate who believes in free access to legally obtained files.

Swartz co-founded Reddit, which was later sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.

He apparently struggled at times with depression, writing in a 2007 blog post: "Surely there have been times when you've been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. … You feel worthless. … depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either."

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, faculty director for the Safra Center for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, wrote: "We need a better sense of justice. … The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a 'felon.'"

Before the Massachusetts' case, Swartz aided Malamud in his effort to post federal court documents for free online, rather than the few cents per page that the government charges through its electronic archive, PACER. Swartz wrote a program in 2008 to legally download the files using free access via public libraries, according to The New York Times. About 20 percent of all the court papers were made available until the government shut down the library access.

The FBI investigated but didn't charge Swartz, he wrote on his website.

Three years later, Swartz was arrested in Boston. The federal government accused Swartz of using MIT's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles from JSTOR.

Prosecutors said Swartz hacked into MIT's system in November 2010 after breaking into a computer wiring closet on campus. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

JSTOR didn't press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz, and some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at the Safra Center, was a guest.

Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.

The prosecution "makes no sense," Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said at the time. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

Swartz faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR announced this week that it would make more than 4.5 million articles publicly available for free.

Swartz's funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Highland Park, Illinois.