Turn over user info, FreeDominion.ca ordered
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “Today Connie and I received the ruling on Richard Warman’s motion that we be ordered to turn over the IP addresses and email addresses of the Free Dominion 8 John Does who he has named as co-defendants in one of his SLAPP suits against us.
“The full ruling can be read here.”
Those are the first two sentences of a post by Mark Fournier on FreeDominion.ca, and it goes on:
“The judge has ruled in favour of Richard Warman and ordered that we release this confidential information to Warman and that we pay him over $5,000 in costs.”
What it boils down to, blogs Michael Geist, is: an Ontario court has ordered the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to reveal personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site.
“The required information includes email and IP addresses,” he says, going on »»»
The case arises from a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman, the anti-hate fighter, against the site and the posters. The court focused heavily on the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, which contain a strong duty of disclosure on litigants.
The discussion includes a review of many key Internet privacy cases, including the CRIA file sharing litigation (which the court distinguishes on the basis of different court rules) and the Irwin Toy case (which emphasized the importance of protecting anonymity, but which the court tries to distinguish on the basis of the newness of the issue at the time).
The court also looks at the string of recent cases involving child pornography cases and ISP disclosure of customer information, concluding that “the court’s most recent pronouncement on this is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.”
According to the defendants in the case, they are unsure if they have the resources to appeal. This particular decision feels like a judge anxious to order to disclosure, despite the weight of authority that provides some measure of privacy protection for anonymous posters.
Indeed, the public policy issue is characterized as “we are dealing with an anti-hate speech advocate and Defendants whose website is so controversial that it is blocked to employees of the Ontario Public Service.”
Leaving aside the fact that sites blocked to employees of the Ontario Public Service is not much of a threshold (Facebook is blocked to the OPS), the public policy issue is not the merits of the particular website. Rather, it is the privacy and free speech rights of the posters to that site.
Protection for anonymous postings is certainly not an absolute, but a high threshold that requires prima facie evidence supporting the plaintiff’s claim is critical to ensuring that a proper balance is struck between the rights of a plaintiff (whether in a defamation or copyright case) and the privacy and free speech rights of the poster.
I cannot comment on the postings themselves (and I recognize that Warman has been a frequent target online) but I fear that the high threshold seems to have been abandoned here, with the court all-too-eager to dismiss the privacy considerations associated with mandated disclosure by not engaging in an analysis as to whether the evidentiary standard was met.
Stay tuned.
FreeDominion.ca - Forum operators ordered to turn over IPs, March 23, 2009
Michael Geist – Ontario Court Orders Website To Disclose Identity of Anonymous Posters, March 25, 2009
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March 25th, 2009 at 11:31 am
“..with the court all-too-eager to dismiss the privacy considerations associated with mandated disclosure by not engaging in an analysis as to whether the evidentiary standard was met.”
Too many judges are demonstrating this kind of thinking lately, as they help move us closer and closer to a police state.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
The most important quote from the original site is:
”
This ruling means a number of things. Most importantly it means that anyone can gain access to a Canadian forum owner’s confidential records on its members simply by filing a lawsuit (that could later be dropped) against the forum operator. No forum operater in Canada, and no Canadian blogger who allows the public to post on his blog, can now safely keep any information at all about a website’s members. We highly recommend that Canadian forum operators and bloggers expunge all such records from their files and stop collecting any information that could endanger the anonymity of their posters.
”
In short, sites MAY NOT KEEP records if they TRULY WANT to protect the anonymity of their posters. Anything else is asking for a subpoena to come.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
As for the USERS, here are some tips for you
* Read EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense site https://ssd.eff.org/ (USA, but many things relevant to Canada and other countries)
* Evaluate your risk
* Use Tor with Privoxy so that the DNS lookups are done through Tor too
* Prefer the forums that do not require registration / do not collect data
* If a forum does require registration, do not give your e-mail. Instead, give them a disposable e-mail address from a service that does not require you to provide your e-mail address (e.g. mailinator, spam dot la)
* And treat governments for what they really are: are skilled and well funded adversaries who tap their resources from you in form of taxes and other shit so that they can screw you as many times as they want. C-61, IPRED, Section 92A and Internet censorship initiative in Australia are the most recent examples.
“Don’t believe them. Don’t fear them. Don’t ask anything of them.” — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
March 25th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
If you are posting links to web forums or blog comments, consider posting the HTTPS versions instead of HTTP version so that the ISPs can’t sniff which page was visited by those who clicked on the link and systems that censor users from visiting specific URLs cannot censor yours. For example,
https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Police_raid_home_of_Wikileaks.de_domain_owner_over_censorship_lists
Another benefit is that the target site does not get to know where the visitor came from. If instead of Google result page you post Scroogle HTTPS results page and the users click links on that result page, the target sites don’t know that the visitor came from Scroogle or Google and don’t know what they were looking for.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Many sites are using “secure login”, for example your webmail provider or your social networking site. However, there is a catch. Your username and password is submitted securely over HTTPS, but the form was loaded with a regular insecure HTTP. This gives an opportunity to man in the middle attacks where the attacker ALTERS the form before sending it to your browser. For example, the attacker may cause the form to send the password to the attacker’s site, or to send it insecurely over HTTP to the original site. In both cases, the information you submit will be intercepted by the attacker.
The only way to counter this attack is NOT TO USE forms that arrived over insecure HTTP. You have to TYPE the HTTPS site instead of the HTTP site so that the form gets loaded over HTTPS.
For example, go to https://www.facebook.com/ to log in to Facebook.
After you log in, it will revert to the unencrypted HTTP, but at least you know that the login form that came from Facebook was not altered in any way and your password was not sent to
Gmail supports it too (also change it in the Gmail Account Settings once you are logged in).
Not all sites allow to load the login form over HTTPS, and this is very unfortunate. For example, there is a bank that does not provide a dedicated secure URL and redirects you to HTTP site after you type the HTTPS version of bank’s home page.
March 27th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
It is still up to the courts or the Human Rights commissions firstly to confirm, to define what is actually libelous, slanderous, a hate email message..
and someone’s else’s statement and opinions on the subject does not count. But to be on the safe side if you want to avoid court costs, ligation,
if you are unsure if what you write is libel, slanderous, prosecutable better not post it on the net. Wrongfully accusing someone of posting a hate message
or accuisng them of being a racist clearly can be challenged in courts as a hate message itself and prosecutable.
March 29th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I guess it’s too much to hope people would risk jail time, but it would be nice if in such cases people handed over the hard drive to the judge after it had been slagged with a welding torch. “Here ya go, Judge”!!
April 9th, 2009 at 10:26 am
If you ever want to read a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed parts. Thank you, anyway!