The New York Times - 06.08.2019

B4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSTUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019

MASS SHOOTINGS: TECHNOLOGY

for critics of 8chan and other vile
parts of the internet. Cloudflare’s
service protects a large chunk of
the internet, and for years, the
decade-old company avoided
making decisions about which
sites deserved protection and
which did not.
That changed in 2017, after
white nationalists held a violent
rally in Charlottesville, Va. After
the rally, Mr. Prince was pres-
sured to remove The Daily
Stormer, a neo-Nazi hate site,
from Cloudflare’s service. He
eventually agreed to do so. It
was a break from the company’s
content-neutral stance, and Mr.
Prince expressed reservations
about his choice.
“I woke up in a bad mood and
decided someone shouldn’t be
allowed on the internet,” he said
at the time. “No one should have
that power.”
But as one of several internet
executives with control over the
web’s most basic infrastructure,
Mr. Prince does have that power.
And in the wake of the El Paso

shooting, the calls for him to

exercise it by revoking 8chan’s

security protections grew louder.

I wanted to talk to him about

how he thought through the

decision, and about how he even-

tually chose to effectively kick

8chan off the internet, if only

temporarily.

In two interviews on Sunday,

Mr. Prince expressed a range of

views about Cloudflare’s respon-

sibility with regard to 8chan.

In a phone conversation in the

early afternoon, Mr. Prince

sounded torn: On one hand,

8chan was clearly reprehensible,

and depriving it of the protection

Cloudflare provides would rid

him of a troublesome customer

and a huge headache. On the

other hand, banning 8chan could

set a bad precedent, and it could

make it harder for law enforce-

ment authorities to monitor

violent extremists. Cloudflare,

like other tech companies with a

window onto dark internet activi-

ty, can share information about

crimes with investigators.

Banning 8chan “would make

our lives a lot easier,” Mr. Prince

said, “but it would make the job

of law enforcement and control-

ling hate groups online harder.”

Among Cloudflare employees,

there was disagreement. Some

thought that banning 8chan was

a clear-cut moral imperative;

others thought it could create a

slippery slope to censorship.

Douglas Kramer, Cloudflare’s

general counsel, spent much of

Sunday afternoon telling news

outlets that Cloudflare would not

ban 8chan because of its content,

saying, “We’re largely a neutral

utility service.”

Hours later, Mr. Prince called

me back. He had decided to cut

off 8chan. He characterized the

site as a “lawless” platform that

had willfully ignored warnings

about violent extremism. Its

tolerance for hate, he said, made

8chan different from other sites

where extremists gather, like

Facebook or Twitter.

“They’ve been not only ac-

tively ignoring complaints they

receive, but sometimes weap-

onizing those complaints against

people who are complaining

about them,” Mr. Prince said.

“That lawlessness feels like a

real distinction from the Face-

books of the world.”

Removing 8chan was not a

straightforward decision, Mr.

Prince said, in part because

Cloudflare does not host or pro-

mote any of the site’s content.

Most people would agree, he

said, that a newspaper publisher

should be responsible for the

stories in the paper. But what

about the person who operates

the printing press, or the ink

supplier? Should that person be

responsible, too?

“It’s dangerous for infrastruc-

ture companies to be making

what are editorial decisions,” he

said. “The deeper you get into

the technology stack, the harder

it becomes to make those deci-

sions.”

Ultimately, Mr. Prince said, he

decided that 8chan was too cen-

trally organized around hate, and

more willing to ignore laws

against violent incitement in

order to avoid moderating its

platform. The realization, along

with the multiple mass murders

that the authorities have con-

nected to 8chan, tipped the scale

in favor of a ban.

“If we see a bad thing in the

world and we can help get in

front of it, we have some obliga-

tion to do that,” he said.

Mr. Prince, who announced the

removal of 8chan from Cloudflare

in a 1,300-word blog post on

Sunday night, still worries about

setting a bad precedent. He

theorized that a repressive Mid-

dle Eastern government could

cite the 8chan example when

asking Cloudflare to remove

security protections for an

L.G.B.T. group inside its borders,

since it might technically be

“lawless” to promote homosex-

uality in that country.

“We have to make sure we’re

setting policies where we can

push back on those things,” he

said.

He added that even if a hacker

took advantage of 8chan’s lack of

defenses, he did not expect the

site to stay offline for long. Many

companies now offer security

services similar to Cloudflare’s,

and it might be possible for

8chan to find another provider in

short order. (8chan was down for

hours on Monday morning, al-

though its administrator said on

Twitter that the site would soon

be back up after moving to an-

other security provider, BitMiti-

gate.)

It is undeniably true that the

underlying problem of online

hate is bigger than one website,

and that taking 8chan offline,

even permanently, would not

stop violent hatred from leaping

off the internet and onto Ameri-

ca’s streets. There will always be

another message board, another

hosting provider, another securi-

ty service willing to give harbor

to extremists.

But as he prepared to serve

8chan with an eviction notice,

Mr. Prince sounded sure of his

choice.

“We’ll see how this turns out,”

he said. “I don’t think I’m going

to regret this for a second.”

Decision to Pull Plug on Extremist Website Wasn’t So Simple

Matthew Prince, head of Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company.

JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Banning a message

board could hamper

efforts to monitor

violent groups.

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

also protect it from cyberattacks,
an 8chan administrator said in a
tweet.
After 8chan migrated to Epik
and BitMitigate, the site flickered
back online in some regions. But
its return was brief. Voxility, a
company that provides comput-
ing services to Epik, was criti-
cized by internet executives for
indirectly helping to keep 8chan
on the web. In response, Voxility
severed its relationship with Epik,
taking BitMitigate offline in the
process — and making 8chan go
down again.
The behind-the-scenes digital
domino effect illustrates how web-
sites like 8chan rely on a complex
network of internet infrastructure
companies that are unseen by
most people but are crucial to
keeping these sites around. Doz-
ens of these companies, which are
often small and privately owned,
provide web addresses, cloud
computing power and other basic
mechanisms that websites need
to exist. Without the backing of
these companies, 8chan has lim-
ited options for survival.

“Some of the biggest service

providers of the internet on the

planet are generally completely

unknown to the average user,”

said Tarah Wheeler, a cybersecur-

ity policy fellow at New America,

a public policy think tank. She said

the infrastructure companies en-

abled sites of all kinds to be

quickly and easily accessible at a

low cost.

A version of 8chan was still

available on Monday afternoon on

the so-called dark web, the home

of many illegal websites.

Bad actors have thrived on the

dark web because the technology

allows website owners and vis-

itors to obscure their location and

internet address, making it harder

for law enforcement to find them.

The dark web version of 8chan,

which was surfaced by the intelli-

gence firm Terbium Labs has the

site’s familiar battle cry across the

top: “Embrace infamy.” The top

headlines on Monday afternoon

were all about the weekend shoot-

ings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio.

But even on the dark web, com-

panies need service providers to

keep their sites up reliably. And

the 8chan site was only intermit-

tently available and slow to load,

making it nearly impossible to

click on the site’s links.

Ronald Watkins, an administra-

tor for 8chan, said on Twitter on

Monday afternoon that he would

wait to see if BitMitigate would be

able to restore its services. If not,

8chan would try to get online

again anyway, he wrote. Mr.

Watkins is the son of Jim Watkins,

the owner of 8chan. As of 6 p.m.,

the message board remained off-

line.

Rob Monster, the chief execu-

tive of Epik, said in an email that

he had not solicited 8chan’s busi-

ness and had not decided whether

to keep the site as a customer.

“Our services fill the ever grow-

ing need for a neutral service

provider that will not arbitrarily

terminate accounts based on so-

cial or political pressure,” he said.

“Our philosophy is, if the

customer is not breaking the law,

providers of technology should

apply discernment in determining

whether or not to service.”

At Voxility, Maria Sirbu, the

vice president of business devel-

opment, said it would not work

with Epik or BitMitigate again

even if those companies ended

their relationships with 8chan.

“We’re totally against hate

speech,” she said. “We are free to

terminate the service as we like.”

The internet infrastructure

companies have distanced them-

selves from toxic websites before.

In 2017, The Daily Stormer, a neo-

Nazi forum, was booted off Cloud-

flare after the site mocked

Heather Heyer, a woman who was

killed during a white nationalist

rally in Charlottesville, Va.

The Daily Stormer initially

struggled to find companies that

would provide the infrastructure

it needed to remain online. BitMit-

igate, which says its services

come with “a proven commitment

to liberty,” and Epik eventually

stepped in to protect it. The Daily

Stormer now uses dark web serv-

ices and overseas hosting

providers to stay afloat. But it

went offline on Monday after Vox-

ility terminated its business with

Epik.

8chan is in an even more deli-

cate position than The Daily

Stormer because it appears to

help mass killers by providing

them with a place to air and

spread their violent and often rac-

ist messages. Other recent shoot-

ings — including at mosques in

Christchurch, New Zealand, and

at a synagogue in Poway, Calif. —

were all announced on 8chan be-

fore they began. Over the week-

end, even one of 8chan’s own

founders, Fredrick Brennan, disa-

vowed the online message board,

saying, “Shut the site down.”

Nick Lim, the founder of BitMit-

igate, who left the company in

May, said he expected 8chan to

emerge elsewhere on the internet.

The message board could tap

other infrastructure and hosting

providers for services, experts

have said.

“I don’t think cutting off BitMiti-

gate and Epik is something that

will remove hate from the inter-

net, rather I think it will only push

it elsewhere,” Mr. Lim said in a

text message.

But Alex Stamos, a former

Facebook executive who is now

the director of the Stanford Inter-

net Observatory, which re-

searches abuses of information

technology, said 8chan could ulti-

mately be marginalized, even

when it returns online.

“We started down the path

where 8chan is going to end up in

the same place that spammers

end up,” said Mr. Stamos. “What

you are seeing here is infrastruc-

ture companies treating the

worst, most vile hate speech like

they treat spammers.”

Infrastructure companies have

long banned spam, malware and

other malicious content, and

providers of this content have

been pushed to overseas hosts,

primarily in Russia and Ukraine,

or to the dark web, he said. 8chan

could follow the same route.

“It will be much slower and less

reliable, but they’ll still exist,” Mr.

Stamos said.

Flowers lain near the Walmart entrance in El Paso after Saturday’s mass shooting there that has killed 22 people. 8chan, an online message board, had hosted the anti-immigrant manifesto of the man accused in the massacre.

ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

8chan, an Infamous Message Board, Scrambles for Its Life

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

A platform that hosted

a hateful screed comes

under fire.

MILITARY POLICE OF THE STATE OF SÃO PAULO - BRAZIL

CENTER OF MILITARY EQUIPMENT – (CMB)

The Center of Military Equipment (Centro de Material Bélico - CMB)

of Military Police of the State of São Paulo, Brazil announces

international public tender for the acquisition of firearms, to be

used by the military police, according to the following provision:

Case no. CMB-2019340007: public offer of: 10 (ten) Light Machine

guns, caliber 7,62x51mm, with accessories and spare parts.

The process will be carried out at CMB facility, located at Rua

Alfredo Maia, 106 - Luz -São Paulo/SP - Brazil. Zip Code 01106-

010, on September 19th 2019 at 9:30 am (local time).

This proposal is formally known as a presential international

bidding. The winner will be chosen based on the lowest price.

The proponent interested can take knowledge and obtain

the documentation by website http://www.imprensaoficial.com.br,

through the link Negócios Públicos. Any questions or requests

for information should be requested by e-mail at cmbtecnica@

policiamilitar.sp.gov.br or by telephone at + 55-11-3228-6055.