synonymous

Last updated on 15 June 2023 @ 11:07AM

Links in

azarias's comment are my own, to provide some context.

Relevant updates or contextualization, if provided and within a reasonable timeframe of this comment, will be added in this post rather than a new one.

(link)

azarias:

So, first off, I've heard that Heidi logged in to the Board Slack channel shortly before the statement accusing me of a thousand exciting felonies was posted! This is not a channel Heidi normally inhabits. All evidence points to Legal's statement being a genuine Heidipology!

My household observed Shut The Fuck Up Friday while I found a lawyer who's competent in internet drama, because unlike the OTW, I do realize that CSEM is an extremely serious matter and wanted to make sure my bases were covered. I do NOT recommend cold-calling old guys off Martindale.com and trying to explain this situation to them. I DO recommend asking furries. Anyhow, I'm good. There's fuck all the Org can do to me except try to smear my reputation, which sucks, to be clear, but is an Org problem and not a me problem. I sent the Board a demand that they retract Legal's false and malicious statements. I pointed out that Board are the officers of the corporation and are therefore ultimately responsible for official announcements from the OTW (I figured they could use the reminder), and that Legal's statement contradicts Board's own statement earlier that day. Board said it was all an accidental miscommunication and they'd be sending me an apology, Legal said actually I'm an international sex criminal. Oops.

Few questions I saw come up:

I got kicked out of my systems on the night of May 6, Heidi said May 7. I think this is just a time zone thing.

I'm just gonna go ahead and copy in the email I sent about reinstatement in a spooooooooky coincidence, and Betsy's response.

Jul 4, 2022, 5:48 PM

Hi Betsy,

Is there an update available on my account status? We're coming up on the two months mark, which seems to be a long time for securing some logins, so I don't know if I've just been overlooked or if something else came up.

Thanks,

[My wallet name]

Jul 6, 2022, 2:30 AM

A well-timed question! We asked Volcom to reinstate your Slack access today, and you should have an invite soon, if you don’t already. It goes without saying, but in an abundance of caution: Please make sure that the password you choose for Slack is different from any password(s) you have used before, and we recommend activating 2-factor authentication. If you encounter anything suspicious happening with any of your accounts, please let us know immediately.

Best –

Betsy

TBH, I thought the bit about "A well-timed question!" was Betsy ass-covering because they'd forgotten about me. It actually wouldn't have been a big deal if they did, since they had a lot going on and a single volunteer's status could easily slip through the cracks, except evidently I was the prime suspect??? Anyhow for the record I asked because it had been two months and humans like round numbers, Heidi you fucking walnut. Also it was the 4th of July and I was probably a little drunk.

I did mess up in an earlier anon comment and say this happened July 22. Sorry for the confusion.

As far as other coincidences, IDK. The emails that I saw from the attacker all used info that was available to every single volunteer. They contact info we had in our Slack profiles and the personal information we had shared in casual Slack chats. They formatted their subject lines to look like official org emails that everyone got. One of the most frightening things was when they started quoting what was being said in the emotional support channel that had been started for us all to deal with the attacks, proving they had access to Slack - but there were over 500 people in that channel and you didn't even have to join the channel to see it. I think one of those emails went out shortly after I joined the channel, but I joined when everyone was joining AFAIK.

I have no idea why the attacks stopped. I didn't know they HAD stopped until I got unsuspended, because nobody told me, so that was a fun couple of months checking that email account. When I rejoined Slack, I was told that Legal negotiated some sort of halt with the attacker, but I don't remember who told me that and I didn't ask questions. It might have just been a rumor. I have to assume the attacker made a list of volunteer email addresses before sending the emails, so I don't know how simply cutting off access to Slack would have stopped that.

It's worth pointing out that a few weeks before the attacks happened, I gave Board my actual real life resume. They have my IRL name, address, contact info, and current workplace. I would not! Actually! Do that as a prelude to making myself an international criminal!

Anyhow it was nice of Heidi to corroborate every detail of my story, including some parts I was guessing it. I can't overstate how much it bothers me that the Org evidently thinks CSEM is a minor issue that can be slung around to win a fandom feud. I'll be pleasantly surprised if the Board sees reason and issues that retraction I've demanded.

azarias talks specifically about the problems with PAC policies: (link)

explicit discussion of CSAM material here

Fuck it, sure. This is from an email I wrote up for someone several weeks ago about problems with PAC policies. I didn't wind up sending because it was TMI, but that's why I appear to be addressing someone in particular, and why the tone is somewhat distressed. I've since vented some of the emotions I was feeling as I wrote this and feel steadier. Honestly, at the time I didn't expect anyone to care? It's nice that people do.

Some of this I've mentioned elsewhere, other bits I have not.

1. I handled a case where user who very clearly did have pedophilic disorder linked to some exploitative videos from South Africa. These videos were freely available for purchase and are not illegal in the US or South Africa -- I checked. There have been some legal suits about these videos specifically. Strictly speaking, the children in them, who generally seem to be between the ages of 7 and 12, are not engaging in sexual activity. They are fully clothed. They are advertised as "wrestling" and "martial arts training." But what they are doing is rope bondage, dominance/submission, and sadomasochism that is indistinguishable from adult fetish videos.

I wrote up the case and my chairs sent it to Legal. PAC isn't allowed to speak to Legal directly; as with so much else in the org, it has to go through chairs. Legal answered that, legally, these videos were fine. Whether or not there's anything sexual in the videos is a matter of the viewer's intentions, not the content of the videos. My recounting of this makes Betsy sound callous, but in reality it was just a very lawyerly answer. She was called on to comment on the legality of something, and she did. The Org WANTS to be able to take the legal answer as the only relevant one, but you can't actually run a website that way.

In this case, I took the links down and permabanned the user. I also deleted everything that told people how to contact him off-site. I was not at all on good TOS footing, however PAC chairs agreed this was fucked up and were happy to look the other way. Because there is not a written policy about this issue and because my actions were somewhat contrary to the TOS, I can't be sure similar situations will be handled as harshly in the future. That's another reason not to talk about this particular instance in public, because I don't want the org to decide to review my decisions. [Edit: lol guess they're reviewing now.]

Creepshots of underage celebrities are a related issue, and thankfully also rare, but not something I was always able to take down. Gore photos, other photos people don't want sprung on them without warning, same problem.

There were several other cases where I had to carefully comb through the works and comments of a user after banning them for attempting to distribute CSEM, looking for other attempts that hadn't been reported. I had to read some disturbing stuff - usually fictional underage stuff does nothing more than normally squick me, but when I KNOW the writer was trying to pass around real CSEM? It's worse. A better policy would be to just nuke the entire account, which is what most sites do when you're caught with your hand in the CP jar, but "maximum inclusiveness of content" means the violations have to be carefully peeled away from the rest of the content. God forbid we delete one fic we could save.

2. RPF art that consists of a real life minor's head badly photoshopped onto the body of a porn actor. This is allowed on AO3, or it was as of the last time I handled a ticket about it, which was over 2 years ago. There's absolutely no way to mistake those for actually being images of the minor really engaging in sex, and the letter of the law in the US has to do with photorealism. Allowing them is really playing with fire, however, and leaves the Archive little margin for error. From a volunteer safety standpoint, handling those tickets involved looking at images closely and trying to decide whether they were CSEM or not, which was stressful.

Oh, damn, I just thought about the fact that there probably is AI-generated fanart of underage celebrities circulating around AO3 now, and PAC is probably having to come up with policies while there aren't even courtroom precedents yet. I hope the team's okay.

3. Gifs from real-life porn embedded in Underage works, to illustrate something that an Underage character is doing/experiencing. This is allowed on AO3, as long as the porn actors are themselves of legal age. The problem is that it's hard to know whether the actors are legal or not. Nobody making these fanworks cites their sources, and there is SO MUCH porn on the internet, oh my god. I can't swear that some actress I thought was an 18 or 19 year old from a "barely legal" title wasn't actually 17. Some of them look even younger! Is that the vagina of a small woman who's shaved, or is that the 10 year old this fic's about raping? I'm 40, they all look like children to me. I tried to get RL porn gifs banned from AO3 for this reason, but Content/Legal wouldn't go for it and I couldn't really drag it into the pan-org areas to try to get support. [Edit: this policy has been reversed in the wake of the CSEM spam attacks.]

4. What am I allowed to say when I report stuff to law enforcement? We say we won't give out user data without a subpoena, which is reasonable, but what do we define as user data? I have to report CSEM I just saw, am I allowed to say who did it? If I took the user's IP and email address from server records, is that okay to put in the report? I'm decent at webstalking people and I've figured out where this person lives and that they have a seven year old child in their house, using a combination of private AO3 data and the user's sloppy opsec. Am I supposed to call the local sherif?

I once got in trouble with Legal, Board, and chairs because I called in a welfare check on a deeply disturbed user who declared in an email to PAC and in a public post on Facebook that she was going to commit suicide immediately. I had her home address from her website. Welfare checks in her county turned out to be handled by the sheriff's office and she was understandably angry that police showed up at her house. I would rather not expose someone to police attention, but I was trying to send an ambulance; I can't control how emergencies are managed in her area. Afterwards she threatened to sue AO3 over it, and Legal told me I had violated our privacy policy by sharing user data. I actually was careful to use no userdata from AO3 and instead used her personal website and Facebook. I would rather risk breaking policy than twiddle my thumbs as someone experiencing a crisis dies, and I would err the same way when it comes to reporting actual CSEM, but I would like to have known what the rules were so that I could decide whether or not to break them.

5. Written, non-fictional approval of activities that would be crimes against children if done IRL. It's unclear what is and isn't allowed on AO3. Saying "be gay, do crimes" is clearly not against TOS. "It's moral to shoplift from Wal-Mart" is allowed. "Here is a step-by-step guide to shoplifting from Wal-Mart" is not allowed. "Here is how to find CSEM and not get caught" is not allowed. "I should be able to fuck an 8 year old." Allowed? Not allowed? Does it matter if it's a specific 8 year old or the general concept of 8 year olds? What if the author doesn't strictly speaking say that, but rather, the work is a long monologue delivered by characters from Popular Children's Cartoon arguing that the author should be allowed to fuck 8 year olds, and the author is a member of a Discord server I recognize because some people I banned for real CSEM distribution were also members?

Conversely, saying "All pedophiles should be murdered" is maybe allowed? Is that more akin to "Kill all men" or more to "Kill all turtlecest shippers"? Fucking Franzeska helped write the TOS and specifically wrote in that "X is a bad actor and should die!" as an example of what is allowed, so we can't have a blanket no death threats/death wishes policy, and of course updating the TOS to something we can actually enforce is a non-starter. [Edit: the org says it's making updates, but not who or how or what. I've run out of the ability to assume good will.]

(the following comments are in this thread, but are not distinctive if they are made by azarias)

Anon 0: ...Like most volunteers, Board members sincerely believe that Legal is vital to the running of the org, is fandom's sole legal defense against IP holders trying to take down fanworks, are the only lawyers who would help the org and are furthermore the only ones the org can afford (as their time is pro bono) and is made up of legal experts in all relevant fields.

I don't know to what extent Legal has deliberately cultivated this mythology, vs how much it's just arisen naturally. I know that many people in power in the org sincerely believe that the org would crumble and AO3 would shut down if we did not have Legal. And I've gotten much more skeptical over the past few weeks of Legal's unwillingness to refer the org to outside counsel for areas outside their expertise, and to present their opinions as law.

Anon 0: AFAIK, they're all IP lawyers. Most are in academia, though Heidi Tandy actually practices law https://www.bergersingerman.com/team/heidi-howard-tandy

Becca's a pretty famous academic and says she's an expert on copyright law and engagement ring law? I can't tell if that last bit is a joke. https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/rebecca-tushnet/

I don't know of any criminal law experts on the committee. It's my understanding that the Legal members would ask their friends and colleagues in other specialties for advice as needed, but that was an ad hoc and extremely slow process that added yet another round of "playing telephone" to getting an answer from Legal.

Anon 1: In a truly shocking twist, all Heidi's declamations about her expertise there are thoroughly belied and undermined by her actions here. Look, I'm sorry, that is blatantly not a group of people who have the background or experience to properly do the job of a corporate in-house counsel.

This leads of course to the conclusion that the in-house avdvice area of the committee's work needs to be separated from the IP advice responsibilities and given to someone with relevant experience who will report to the Board directly, ASAP. (Especially considering that the Legal committee in its czrrent state is, blatantly, one of the biggest liabilities the org has.)

Anon 0(?): Having an external counsel on retainer would also (at least possibly) allow advice to come from someone who is disinterested in the internal workings of the org and fandom.

Part of Becca's problem is that she has particular idealogical ideas about what the org should do and how AO3 should operate, because she is an active part of fandom and a founding member of the OTW. Hence when asked if we could take down porn gifs in underage fics, she said no, because as a participant in the Archive she thinks we shouldn't do that. The question we actually needed her to answer was does it violate the Terms of Service if we do that. Eventually it turned out that no, it doesn't violate the TOS and never did, PAC could have been taking them down all along, Becca just thought we shouldn't.

A disinterested third party attorney would be able to answer the "can we" and leave out the "should we." At least in theory.

Anon 1: I competely agree, and in spite of previous threads pointing out (valid!) concerns with hiring someone, I continue to believe that some professional and paid for form of expertise which as you say is disinterested in fandom is required. In principle the "should we" question is for the Board to answer, never legal - it's a question about the fundamental principles of the org which the executive body (and/or the membership, depending on applicable US laws) should answer, not an advisory committee.

Anon 0(?): In principle the "should we" question is for the Board to answer

In this particular case, I would say it's for the trust and safety department or head to answer. In the OTW, Board has on paper delegated those decisions to PAC. But PAC does not actually have the authority to make those decisions and is subordinate to Legal and other committees, to the extent of PAC chairs feeling that they must consult with Legal on even fairly ordinary business, whereas PAC volunteers may not consult directly with Legal at all.

azarias's partner talks specifically about their feelings and experiences with the situation here.