Today, Pornhub took down all videos from unverified accounts after a @nytimes report documented instances of nonconsensual pornography can child sexual abuse material on the service.

1/
But the Times editorial isn't what spurred the shutdown: rather, it was the decision by Visa and Mastercard to withdrawn Pornhub's payment processing that prompted Pornhub to take action.

2/
You may count that as a win. No one with any kind of moral center endorses nonconsensual pornography, especially when it involves children, and the less there is out there, the better the world is. I agree.

3/
But we should also be worried about the growing monopolization of payment processing, and the role that payment processors are coming to play as gatekeepers for all kinds of activities.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

4/
Mastercard and Visa are not qualified to make those calls. More importantly, no one elected them to make those calls. No law requires them to make those calls, and any law that tried would likely be unconstitutional.

5/
If you want a sex industry based on consent and dignity, this should doubly worry you. After all, the first group of people shut down by payment processors' arbitrary judgements about what speech should and should exist were independent sex-workers.

newrepublic.com/article/160488…

6/
It took years for the payment processors to work their way up to the monopolistic, sprawling porn empire behind Pornhub - a Canadian company called Mindgeek that maintains the pretense that it is headquartered in Lichtenstein,a notorious tax-evasion jurisdiction.

7/
There's an old saw that the sex industry are early tech adopters. That's not quite true - rather, people with disfavored views are the first people for whom it's worth figuring out new technologies, since the old ones are unavailable to them.

8/
Porn got into home films because most big cinemas wouldn't screen pornography. They got into VHS because it was easier to duplicate than film. They got into the net because it offered access without social costs of being seen in the adult section of the video rental place.

9/
But while pornographers aren't early adopters, they ARE leading indicators. Pornographers' fights with novel censorship tactics are also trial-runs for using those tactics against OTHER people - and payment processors have already been pressed into service.

10/
Visa and Mastercard threats have been used to block or shut down journalism, self-published books, dating services.

Mindgeek and Pornhub don't need our sympathy, but hard cases make bad law.

11/
With only a few payment processors online, our ability to engage in legal conduct will always be at the mercy of Visa, Mastercard and a handful of others.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

16 Dec
1998's Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended US copyrights by 20 years to life-plus-70 for human authors and 95 years total for corporate authors. The extension was retrospective, so works in the public domain went back into copyright.

1/ Image
This was a wanton act of violence that doomed much of our culture to disappear entirely before its copyright expired, allowing it to be used and revitalized, rewoven into our cultural fabric.

2/
It was undertaken to extract extra revenues for the minuscule fraction of works by long-dead authors that were still generating revenues. It also froze the US public domain for two decades, with no work re-entering our public domain until Jan 1 2018.

3/
Read 12 tweets
16 Dec
Cities - and even states - across the USA have passed laws banning the use of facial recognition technology by governments; the most-often cited concern is surveillance and its ability to chill lawful conduct like protests.

1/ Image
But as my @EFF colleague @mguariglia writes for @FutureTenseNow, the risks run deeper than that, as historic debates have shown us. The early 20th century saw debates over "rogues galleries" (police files of photos of criminals and suspects).

slate.com/technology/202…

2/
As Guariglia writes, "Suspicion is a circular process." In theory you got put into a Rogues Gallery because you were suspicious. In practice, being in a Rogues Gallery MADE YOU suspicious. A single photo taken after a single police encounter turned into an eternal accusation.

3/
Read 9 tweets
16 Dec
The Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, Swissleaks, Lichtenstein Leaks, the Fincen Files - the past decade has been filled with financial secrecy scandals wherein we learned how the world's worst people hide the world's dirtiest money.

1/
Governments have fallen as a result of these leaks. Journalists have been murdered for reporting them, whistleblowers have been imprisoned for telling the truth. These are a high-stakes window on the corruption, self-dealing and viciousness of the 1% and their criminal pals.

2/
One critical revelation is the role that "onshort-offshore" plays in money-laundering: rich countries with a reputation for a strong rule of law and good governance are the lynchpin of global financial secrecy, thanks to lax corporate enforcement.

3/
Read 10 tweets
16 Dec
I'm about to go offline until 2021 and I had planned to do ABSOLUTELY NO WORK OF ANY SORT while on break, but I made an exception, for an exceptional opportunity: the 32nd Chaos Communications Congress, which is remote this year.

rc3.world

1/ Image
CCC is - notoriously - held during Christmas week, which means that the attendees are limited to people who either care about tech policy and security more than their families, or people who can talk their families into coming along.

2/
It's one of the best events I've ever attended (I brought my family along). My talk at that event, "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing," has had a long afterlife, in large part because of the kind and thoughtful reactions of the attendees.



3/
Read 6 tweets
16 Dec
It's been a decade since @apophenia introduced me to the idea of "email sabbaticals." That's when you go away and turn off your email.

zephoria.org/thoughts/archi…

1/ Image
Not just setting an out-of-office message, but rather deleting all inbound mail and asking correspondents to try again after the break. In her message, boyd explains to those correspondents who know how to reach her mother that this is the only way to reach her.

2/
Here's the rationale: if you allow email to pile up while you're trying to unwind, it'll take months to catch up on when you get back, and you'll immediately burn out, incinerating all the value you got out of your break.

3/
Read 26 tweets

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