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London Police Ink Shadowy Deal With Industry On Website Takedowns (eff.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the shady-business dept.

AmiMoJo writes: The EFF is warning about unregulated activity against websites by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) of the City of London Police. A program called RogueBlock accepts notifications from IP holders, which the PIPCU then acts on, giving private companies legal jurisdiction over the entire internet, with appeals in the case of malicious reports and mistakes being extremely difficult to make. For example, Spanish sports streaming site Rojadirecta had its domain name seized by the U.S. government for over a year, despite the site being lawful in its native Spain. The EFF terms this kind of activity "Shadow Regulation."

6 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Um, No... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 2

    A program called RogueBlock accepts notifications from IP holders, which the PIPCU then acts on, giving private companies legal jurisdiction over the entire internet

    That's a HUGE jump, from the ability of IP Rights Holders to directly complain to saying they have "legal jurisdiction". Um, no.

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    1. Re:Um, No... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      And don't they? In many countries, a private company is specifically tasked to be the sole entity charged with some specific task that the government would otherwise have to do on its own (here in Europe, it can be, for example, collecting royalty fees for authors under some collective licensing arrangement), but usually in exchange for very close scrutiny by the government. Here you have officials apparently forwarding decision making to non-governmental entities in what appears to be a very similar thing. Under a reasonably broad definition of "jurisdiction" (the always-helpful Google suggests "the territory or sphere of activity over which the legal authority of a court or other institution extends"), this phrasing could be reasonable.

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    2. Re:Um, No... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      Either way, it doesn't seem likely that it would apply to the "entire" internet; that seems like hyperbole to me. It really depends on how the regional governing entity wants to handle requests from other governing entities outside of its jurisdiction.

      In the example of the Spanish sports streaming site, the site owner registered it under a .com and a .org, both of which are in the US's jurisdiction, thus the US government can force its seizure. It doesn't matter if the servers were located elsewhere; they could always have registered it under a .es domain and kept the site up, and the US wouldn't touch it (think ThePirateBay and KickAssTorrents, which the US government surely hates.) To say that a governing entity has jurisdiction over the "entire" internet isn't logical, because after all, the name was domestically registered to the country that took it down.

      Anyways, TFA doesn't state which domains the London police were taking down, but I could see the following happening: Suppose a website registers under a US TLD. Then suppose it hosts content which is illegal in the US, but nobody in the US notices, so it doesn't get taken down. But suppose it does get noticed in the UK by a UK rights holder. UK rights holder asks its government to use diplomatic leverage (treaties, trade agreements, etc) to ask the US to take it down. US might comply in accordance to its own laws (that is, it is against US law, so the US can justify taking it down.)

      And really, this is no different than one country extraditing criminals to another country. And in fact, the US doesn't extradite people for breaking laws in another country if what they are wanted for is an activity that is protected by the US Constitution. So for example, in Germany, spouting racist propaganda is illegal, meanwhile it is protected by the first amendment in the US. Thus, the US won't extradite somebody to Germany simply because they are wanted in Germany for hate speech crimes. Likewise, I'm sure Germany would love to have the website stormfront.org (a neo-nazi website) taken down, but because this site doesn't break any laws in the US, the US isn't going to remove it if Germany asks it to.

    3. Re:Um, No... by Xest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Given that PIPCU is funded by the IPO, and that the City of London police is a defacto private sector police force, I don't think it's really actually much of a jump.

      It's not like this is London's Metropolitan Police or anything we're talking about where public control is retained. The City of London police is directed by the City of London Corporation, and the IP Office is the organisation that represents rights holders with government funding which is past on to fund PIPCU.

      The reality is if rights holders say jump, PIPCU and the City of London police simply ask how high. If they're providing a place where they can submit take down requests make no mistake, the City of London police and PIPCU have shown themselves more than willing to pursue it unquestioningly. This story is basically just about increased automation of how they control their pet police force to do their bidding.

      The problem is that there's really very little residential population in the City of London's square mile, and so the representatives that are elected there are therefore elected on behalf of the corporations rather than average citizens. Hence why it's a different beast to other police forces and is in fact basically a private police force.

      Personally I wouldn't mind if they stuck to their square mile, but unfortunately they attempt to apply extra-territorial jurisdiction to other parts of the country, where our local police forces act and where those police forces priorities are supposed to be decided by those of us who live in these areas by our elected police crime commissioners. As we're seeing here, they also try and apply international jurisdiction by trying to apply the standards of their corporate owned square mile to service providers across the world. The square mile is where all the banking crimes happen in the UK (Libor trading scandal for example), but the City of London police turn a blind eye to it - imagine the uproar about jurisdiction if say South Yorkshire police went down to the square mile and started arresting criminal bankers? Shame the same isn't true when the City of London police go and arrest some minimum wage labourer for selling a Kodi box in South Yorkshire.

      As such, frankly, I believe the City of London police force should be axed as it's way overstepping it's mark, and policing in the square mile should be handed over to the Met, who are at least accountable to the people to at least some degree still. City of London police are an affront to the concept of policing by consent which is precisely what the UK policing system is meant to be based upon.

  2. City of London Police, NOT Metropolitan Police by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    For those not familiar with the language employed, this is the police force of the "City of London" (a.k.a "The Square Mile" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) NOT the London Metropolitan Police, the police force responsible for London itself. The "City of London" has only about 7,000 residents, all of whom are significantly wealthy. Hundreds of thousands of people work there during the day, but only these 7,000 count as resident.

    The "City of London" is run by a corporation which basically operates at the behest of the financial institutions that operate in its borders. It's long been known for rather undemocratic behaviour (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval) and almost universally acts in corporate interest.

  3. Rogue police by Wowsers · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just an FYI, the City Of London police are rogue, they are not real police, they are above any other UK law, they are not regulated by anyone like all other UK police forces are. In short, they do what the hell they like. They should never have been allowed to start, let alone be outside the control of / accountable to the public. They also seem to protect The City's worldwide money laundering.

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