Weekly Updates

Section 230 lives to fight another day

From Fast Company:

"In an unsigned opinion on Thursday, the Supreme Court declined to reinterpret a law that protects social media companies from being held responsible for their users’ posts, effectively dealing a victory for the tech platforms. (…)

The opinion referenced a separate similar case against Twitter, known as Twitter v. Taamneh, in which the Supreme Court voted unanimously to side with the tech platform in a dispute brought by the family of a victim in the Istanbul 2017 nightclub terrorist attack. That ruling was also decided on Thursday.”

The decision to not decide on the Google case may sound a bit confusing for the unfamiliar ears, so let's sum it up. The US Supreme Court decided the Twitter case first and then returned the Google case to the lower courts to avoid analyzing two identical cases. It's not that the Supreme Court had second thoughts and decided to avoid the cases altogether. It's just that the juicy policy issues were discussed in the Twitter case, rendering the Google case redundant.

Funny enough, the most important case in the history of Section 230 doesn't mention Section 230 at all. The way the logic of the arguments works, Section 230 comes to play to shield intermediaries (content platforms) from a liability claim. The Supreme Court focused on the squashing of the liability claim itself, which meant Section 230 didn't have to be applied at all.

Of course, SCOTUS could have confirmed Section 230's application and rendered the liability claim moot, though. As a consequence, in the following weeks, we'll likely see way more discussion about what the court did not say than what it did say. For now, we’re just glad Section 230 lived to fight another day.

Efficacy of technology bans

Technology bans are used worldwide by nations in attempts to enforce laws or react to national security threats. Brazil has repeatedly banned communications apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp for failure to comply with police forces. Pirate Bay is banned in multiple countries for copyright infringement claims. And, more recently, India has banned 14 different communication apps due to risk to national security.

From The Register:

India's government has reportedly banned 14 messaging apps on national security grounds, including some open source services.

News of the move appeared in local media last week, citing government sources for news that apps including Element, Wickrme, Mediafire, Briar, BChat, Nandbox, Conion, IMO and Zangi were banned on the recommendation of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The Ministry cited risk of terrorism in the region of Jammu and Kashmir – a majority Muslim territory administered by India but also claimed by Pakistan.

These measures achieve their goal in the short term by disrupting the service. But they have more unintended consequences in the long term. In Brazil, people learned to use VPN to bypass app bans. Pirate Bay and bit torrent technology evolved into one of the most resistant against law enforcement, so raids or IP blocking have little effect.

India's ban may also stop working soon. From the same article at The Register:

As timing would have it, the Briar project's blog last week detailed the project's efforts to build mesh networks out of Android devices during internet outages – so that messages can continue to flow even if the internet is down.

Other applications will follow the Briar project's path of switching their infrastructure to more state-control resistant technologies, such as mesh networks or DHTs (the technology that powers the bit torrent infrastructure).

Apart from achieving the short-term goal of disrupting the service, these technology bans also trigger the popularisation of technologies designed to resist unilateral bans, making future bans harder or impossible. Banning technologies is never a solution because it won't solve the underlying problem these technologies are manifesting. While the underlying problem exists, people will adapt the technology to solve it.

Internet Crime Report 2022

In March, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) published a report on the complaints they received over 2022. They received more than 700 thousand complaints, with a declared loss of almost 11 billion USD.

Phishing was the most reported crime, responsible for more than 40% of the complaints, while investment-related crimes accounted for the most losses (around 30% of total losses or 3.3 billion USD). Interestingly, Data Breach was the crime with the highest average losses: almost 165 thousand USD per complaint. The report does not make it clear whether the Data Breach losses include fines from regulators.

In terms of how the criminals profited, which is called crime facilitation in the report, cryptocurrency facilitated 35% of the losses (3.8 billion USD). The report does not make it clear if we can attribute the facilitation of the rest of the 65% of losses to traditional payment rails.

This report can be a helpful tool to improve a security strategy, but the data is quite contextual. The report only covers the US and only covers victims that voluntarily reported the crime. This needs to be kept in mind when establishing assumptions for a security strategy.

Section 230, Technology bans and Internet Crime Report