Category: Blogging

Douchebag Lawyer Defends Denial of Service (DDOS) Attacks as ‘Free Speech’

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At what point do those in the legal community who defend criminals — guaranteeing them their due-process rights, giving them “their day in court” — cross a line into advocating, endorsing or excusing the crimes committed by their clients?

Not a moot question, given how Jay Leiderman speaks of the actions of the “Anonymous” hackers he represents:

Take PayPal for example, just like Woolworth’s, people went to PayPal and said, I want to give a donation to WikiLeaks. In Woolworth’s they said, all I want to do is buy lunch, pay for my lunch, and then I’ll leave. People said I want to give a donation to WikiLeaks, I’ll take up my bandwidth to do that, then I’ll leave, you’ll make money, I’ll feel fulfilled, everyone’s fulfilled. PayPal will take donations for the Ku Klux Klan, other racists and questionable organizations, but they won’t process donations for WikiLeaks. All the PayPal protesters did was take up some bandwidth. In that sense, DDoS is absolutely speech, it should absolutely be recognized as such, protected as such, and the law should be changed. . . .
The government and people who write about tech tend to call it a “DDoS attack” but in certain circumstances it’s not a DDoS attack, but a DDoS protest. So the law should be narrowly drawn and what needs to be excised from that are the legitimate protests.

Let’s be clear about this: What “Anonymous” was engaged in was extortion and thuggery, not “protest.”

You can’t just say to a business, “Here, I’m holding up this hoop — jump through it, immediately, or I’ll shut down your business.”

Let’s also be clear about something else: It’s the Left who believes these thug tactics are legitimate, just like when they sent mobs to camp out in the front yards of bank executives, or to harass people attending last year’s AFP summit.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that Jay Leiderman has a highly selective sensibility as regards free speech. Leiderman is defending former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown — asserting, we suppose, Brown’s constitutional right to threaten FBI agents — and also representing Nadia Naffe against Patterico, who evidently doesn’t have a constitutional right to reproduce court documents relating to Naffe’s lawsuit against the Republican Party.

This is a legal manifestation 0f Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” — only the Left has any “rights” worth defending.

UPDATE: Guess this is as good a place as any to quote an article Taylor Amerding wrote about Barrett Brown’s arrest:

Very few in the security community would comment on the arrest for the record, most saying they did not want the headache of becoming a target of Anonymous.
One of the few who did was Robert Stacy McCain, who wrote on his website, The Other McCain, that “a lot of the Anonymous people never trusted Barrett Brown, regarding him as an untrustworthy egomaniacal fame-seeker trying to cash in.”
“He did a TV interview with Michael Isikoff of NBC and announced a book deal with Gregg Housh, and did all of this while promoting himself as the official spokesman for Anonymous, whose members are … well, anonymous, and with good reason, because the cops would very much like to put a lot of them in prison,” McCain wrote.
McCain wrote that after the FBI raided Brown in March, but did not arrest him, other members of Anonymous suspected he might be cooperating with the agency. Of the latest video, he wrote: “Being a paranoid conspiracy theorist is not illegal, and Brown’s tinfoil-hat rantings about (various enemies) were just so much noise. But his threats to ‘destroy’ FBI agent Robert Smith? Yeah, the feds don’t take that kind of talk lightly.”

What stuns me is the timidity of “the security community” Amerding alleges here. Are people really afraid to comment on Brown’s arrest for fear of “becoming a target of Anonymous”?

This assumes that the members of Anonymous are so stupid they can’t see Barrett Brown for the reckless fool he is. Brown’s laughable foolishness is sufficiently self-evident that I have a hard time believing anyone could ever take him seriously, and I’ve never had any fear of reprisal for pointing it out.

Meanwhile, by way of playing catch-up with the Barrett Brown saga, his friends have published Brown’s letter from prison in which he vehemently denies having ever been a “spokesman” or “leader” of Anonymous, while continuing to rant about HB Gary, Aaron Barr, Jennifer Emick, and other such persons whom he accuses of involvement in a sinister conspiracy.

 

What Hath Daily Caller Wrought?

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Slept late today because I figure I’ll be up late writing about tonight’s debate, and I didn’t participate in the Drudge-induced hype over yesterday’s Daily Caller/Sean Hannity release of a 2007 video, e.g., Allahpundit:

It’s the talk of Twitter and of our comment threads, so here’s a dedicated post to let your imaginations run wild.

Really? I was working on other things and didn’t much notice the hype, but Ace got gripped by it, really completely gripped by it — I mean, totally enthralled by it, madly obsessed with it — and so after sleeping late today, maybe I should say something about the EXCLUSIVE VIDEO which apparently was expected to shock the entire English-speaking world yesterday.

Meh.

 

 

A source informs me that some Romney campaign staffers actually got swept up in the speculation that this video was the silver bullet which would magically slay the Obama werewolf. And as usual in such matters, the event didn’t live up to the hype.

Let me here insert a bit of background — historical context, as it were — that might explain why I didn’t get too excited about the revelation of a 2007 video in which Obama gave a shout-out to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and otherwise said controversial things: I remember the 1990s.

During Bill Clinton’s first term, enormous efforts were expended by certain people to dig up The Real Truth about what went down in Arkansas during Clinton’s governorship.

The worst of it was the Mena Airport conspiracy theory: Allegedly, in order to protect a drug-smuggling operation based out of this small airport in rural Arkansas, several people had been murdered and, according to the conspiracy theorists, Clinton and his cronies were up to their necks in this massive corruption and cover-up.

Somebody produced a video about this, and the video became a sort of cult classic, particularly in Christian conservative circles. It appealed to a fairly widespread sentiment that Americans didn’t know everything they needed to know about the Clintons. After the suicide of Vince Foster, especially, there was a sense that all kinds of clandestine shenanigans were being covered up and ignored by the mainstream media. The Internet was still in its infancy back then, but even then there were sites devoted to “exposing” this Mena Airport scandal.

Was there ever anything to it? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not the point.

THIS IS THE POINT: Whatever happened at Mena Airport happened before Clinton was president, you see, and once a guy gets elected president, you’re never going to take him down based on some previously unknown thing that happened before he was president.

Trust me when I say that there are plenty of people out there trying to contact reporters with The Real Truth About Barack Obama. At one point this past summer, I was prepared to fly to Chicago to meet with sources who had something serious that seemed to deserve checking out. Scheduling conflicts and other unexpected hassles prevented that trip from happening, which I sincerely regret — not only did I miss a chance to get paid for a lengthy print article, but I believe the article could have added significantly to public understanding of the corrupt environment in which Obama’s early political career was nutured.

Still, I never believed it was a “silver bullet” story, because you’re just not going to get that kind of story based on stuff that happened before Obama became president. Sean Hannity and others are correct in saying that Obama was never properly “vetted” by the media in 2008, but you cannot defeat Obama for re-election by attempting to “vet” him retroactively.

Public perception of presidents simply doesn’t work that way, and so this 2007 video was never going to be a “silver bullet,” no matter how much promotion Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Matt Drudge put behind it. Tucker went on Fox & Friends today to explain why the video matters:

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson said on Fox and Friends this morning that the “very revealing” clip is an example of Obama using racially-charged rhetoric. . . .
Carlson explained that in his view, “Obama is telling a majority-black audience that the federal government doesn’t like them because they’re black. He is whipping up fear, and paranoia, and hatred.”

Right. Tell us something we didn’t already know. Ed Morrissey:

The larger point here is that the media has a double standard on race, and a double standard for Republicans.

Again: Tell us something we didn’t already know. I’m not discounting either the reality or the importance of this, but I hate seeing people buy into false hope that this EXCLUSIVE VIDEO!! — how do you spell “eleventy”? — or anything else like it could ever be the “silver bullet” that magically defeats Obama.

Here’s a SHOCKING REVELATION for you: The economy sucks.

Let’s see if we can’t win with that simple message, OK?

‘Someone Trying to Breathe Life into a Three-Year Old Dead Horse’

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Thus does John Fund dismiss an attempt by Nadia Naffe to create controversy around James O’Keefe III over a planned “sting” video that never happened, as embarrassing as the details may be.

O’Keefe, as you certainly know, is the young activist who became famous for his collaboration with Hannah Giles in the 2009 undercover videos that destroyed ACORN, and which sparked the successful launch of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. Naffe is a former Republican operative who worked with O’Keefe until, in March of this year, she accused O’Keefe of sexual harassment and worse.

Naffe had been “terminated” by the Florida GOP in 2004, which led to a lawsuit that, if O’Keefe knew about it before he hired her, should have given him pause. Who would knowingly hire anyone whose former employment resulted in litigation? And this is especially true of someone whose work would require a high degree of confidentiality.

So now Naffe has made herself a weapon with which O’Keefe’s enemies seek to destroy him. She has made league with Neal Rauhauser — assisting Rauhauser in an attempt, on behalf of Brett Kimberlin, to get access to e-mails that Naffe wrongfully obtained from O’Keefe — and is now apparently ready to file a lawsuit against Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

Rauhauser has been obsessed with Patterico for more than a year, going back to the 2011 WeinerGate scandal, when Rauhauser (under his “Stranded Wind” alias) published a series of posts at Daily Kos accusing Patterico of all manner of wrongdoing:

It was in the aftermath of the WeinerGate scandal that Rauhauser evidently joined forces with Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c)4 group Velvet Revolution. Kimberlin had his own grievance against Patterico dating back to October 2010, when Kimberlin threatened a lawsuit against Patterico.

Similarly, both Rauhauser and Kimberlin had been striving for some time to destroy Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, which is how Nadia Naffe’s complaints against O’Keefe brought this together with their grievances against Patterico. When Naffe made her accusations against O’Keefe in March, Patterico raised questions about Naffe’s story and subsequently discovered the public-record documents relating to her 2004 lawsuit against the Republican Party.

Patterico’s criticism of Naffe and his publication of those documents is, so far as I can tell, the only grounds for complaint Naffe has against him and I can’t imagine any court finding Patterico guilty of anything, but this lawsuit is just another typical product of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser “accuse the accusers” strategy. Once they target someone, the accusations proliferate endlessly as part of an orchestrated effort to discredit anyone who might accuse them of wrongdoing. (See my June 17 article, “‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions,” for some relevant examples.)

Remember that Rauhauser solicited the same California attorney, Jay Leiderman, in an attempt to get SWATting target Mike Stack to file a nuisance suit against Patterico.

It is most unfortunate that Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed has assisted O’Keefe’s enemies in what is, in fact, nothing more than the latest manifestation of a bizarre personal vendetta. “Dead horse” though the story may be, innocent people still suffer real harm from these deliberate attacks. Assisting sadists in the satisfaction of their depraved appetites is not properly the business of a journalist.

UPDATE: Linked by Jackie Wellfonder and Bill Hoge — thanks! — and thanks likewise to the commenter who points out that Jay Leiderman is also the attorney who represents imprisoned former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown.

Brown’s involvement with Rauhauser became public last month when Barrett threatened me, then published a series of private online chats he had with Patterico, evidently in an effort to defame Patterico as being party to a (wholly imaginary) conspiracy.

Brown’s motives in that incident are impossible to determine, nor do we know what (if anything) connects that failed smear with Barrett’s subsequent public meltdown that led to his arrest. Absent such knowledge we can only observe that, in general, bad things happen to people who actively ally themselves with evil.

 

Federal Law? What Federal Law?

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Ace gave this the Flaming Skull™ and pinned it to the top of his blog: There is a federal law that requires employers to give advance notice of layoffs. Because of Obama’s massive deficits, defense contractors will have to lay off tens of thousands of employees.

Obama convinced Lockheed Martin to delay the layoff notification until after the election. Don’t like it? You’re a racist!

(Trying to get me one of those Elspeth Reeve gigs at the Atlantic.)

Last week, one of my tip-jar hitters informed me that he was one of the 575 people to be laid off when Sikorsky shut down its Black Hawk helicopter plant in New York State. When the Obama deficits start hurting my tip-jar hitters, I get angry.

UPDATE: Gabriel Malor at New York Daily News:

In case you missed it over the weekend, the Obama administration’s Friday afternoon document drop was a memo from the Department of Labor telling defense contractors not to provide legally-required notice to thousands of employees that they are about to be laid off, if automatic spending cuts agreed to by the President and the Congress take effect.
Translation: President Obama wants to prevent thousands of employees, especially in swing-state Virginia, from being told that they are going to be laid off due to Department of Defense funding cuts. Because of the timing of the cuts, those notices would have been sent to employees just prior to the election in November. The man who signed those funding cuts into law would like to avoid that.

It’s worth noting that blog sidekick Smitty works for a defense contractor. Are they going to lay Smitty off? We don’t know.

Because, hey, who cares about a freakin’ federal law, when following it might hurt Obama’s re-election chances?

UPDATE II: Yeah, let’s add this:

Update III (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers! While you’re here, check out Ambassador John Bolton’s recap of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy debacle, recorded Monday, 01 October 2012.

Adding To The Chorus Of Anti-Eric Posner Derision

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by Smitty

. . .Americans need to learn that the rest of the world—and not just Muslims—see no sense in the First Amendment. Even other Western nations take a more circumspect position on freedom of expression than we do, realizing that often free speech must yield to other values and the need for order. Our own history suggests that they might have a point.
Despite its 18th-century constitutional provenance, the First Amendment did not play a significant role in U.S. law until the second half of the 20th century. The First Amendment did not protect anarchists, socialists, Communists, pacifists, and various other dissenters when the U.S. government cracked down on them, as it regularly did during times of war and stress.
The First Amendment earned its sacred status only in the 1960s, and then only among liberals and the left, who cheered when the courts ruled that government could not suppress the speech of dissenters, critics, scandalous artistic types, and even pornographers. Conservatives objected that these rulings helped America’s enemies while undermining public order and morality at home, but their complaints fell on deaf ears.

We can argue over ‘significant’ WRT the Sedition Act, Posner, but let me lay this on you: American Exceptionalism (my definition) is the idea that the individual precedes and is superior to the State. This is in stark contrast to Yglesias:


The rest of the world can be a parade of socialist, green, gay, global warming, theocratic fascists for all I care. The reason that “the rest of the world see no sense in the First Amendment” is that they lack our tradition of self-government. Even the Europeans ate the Treaty of Lisbon. Probably because they are unarmed. Ah, the Second Amendment!

American Exceptionalism is an affront to aristocracy. Or, as we now call it, the Progress. The “Rule of Experts”. Pay no attention to the debt, deficit, lack of a budget, and 2ook pages of U.S. Code. Aristocracy hates liberty, absence of hierarchy in society. So they substitute hedonism for liberty, emotional plays for thought, bullying for leadership, and Socialist Utopia fables for economically sound social systems in a quest to amass, retain, and wield power. But it’s worse. If you review the S.R.C. Hicks series I did a while back, you find gems from the Lefty playbook like:

On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

While I don’t mind tolerating others, after a while, a lack of reciprocity leaves the impression that my good nature is being used against me. And I’m having none of that, not from people overseas, and not from my countrymen who, for all their high position, seem to maintain a low opinion of what this country is about.

This is an Exceptional country, and cleaning up the mess of your ilk may take decades, Posner & Yglesias, but your ideas and cheap ploys are going down. A Philippe Reines sign-off to both of you.

via Twitchy