STRIKETHROUGH '07 - This? Is terrifying.

[kiaxet]

I have no idea if this is  true or not, but if it is, it scares the bloody hell out of me.

Take a look.

Here's the letter - one of them - that was sent to Six Apart about the "problem." The problem for me, personally, is that I can understand where she's coming from in not wanting pedophiles on the internet where kids could potentially be; however, 1) she forgets about LJ's "only with parental permission are people under 13 here" policy, 2) she assumes there are "thousands" of pedophile sites on LJ, and 3) the banners at the bottom worry me. Man is judged by the company he keeps, after all, and this lady's part of the Redneck Army, the new confederacy, and all sorts of stuff I don't even want to think about. Is this really the kind of person we'd want behind any kind of campaign whatsoever?

...not really.

Thoughts?

Comments

[sbcpanuru.livejournal.com]

Scuttlebutt on Boing Boing is that Warriors for Ignorance Innocence is a Dominionist front; dominionists are a collection of interrelated groups based largely on the writings and philosophy of R.J. Rushdoony in the 50s and 60s, who advocated a "return to" a government based on "Biblical" principles, which should read instead the creation of a government based on authoritarian Protestant fundamentalist dogma. Under these ideals, pagans, homosexuals, Catholics, atheists, etc. all convert to the state church or are executed. This is nothing that dozens of groups of crazies don't already think (just change the name of the One True Pure Inner Circle); what sets dominionists apart is their strategies and organization. Orcinus has written quite a bit in the past about dominionists, as well as other hate groups.

The guideline I use to decide whether a crusade is probably well-intentioned (if not necessarily wise, though sometimes they are) is that things like Megan's Law, taking a specific case and trying to find a general solution to problems like it, are actually concerned with the issues; whereas WforI's appeal to broad, unspecific, emotionally-charged buzzwords (OMG think of the children! without giving a single example of someone who has been harmed by LJ writings) are usually manipulative acts geared toward social control.

[ninxninxnin.livejournal.com]

(Too lazy to log out of RP journal. ^^;)

If you can back up that scuttlebutt with any evidence, I'll use it and love you forever. There's no way any of this should have happened, especially if it's engineered by somebody with those sorts of beliefs and goals. (Oh, no, I'm Catholic! I must be the spawn of Satan in their eyes. Oh, dang. -_-)

We're actually doing a counter-crusade: there's a seven-day rebellion going on, people with plus accounts are switching to basic so LJ doesn't get the ad money, things like that. Would you define our crusade as well-intentioned?

[sbcpanuru.livejournal.com]

There's rarely any kind of evidence; you kind of have to read between the lines of the rhetoric. Here's the original Boing Boing post covering it.

Par for the course for these kind of sites is to put up something that looks basically innocent (besides being really freaking weird), that nobody can directly connect to any kind of political agenda, and seems to be advocating something that nobody in their right mind would oppose. Keeping kids safe on the internet? Why, you'd have to be some kind of pervert to not like that! Problem is, with most anti-pedophile sites, you can kind of tell why the folks are doing it--sometimes they've been molested themselves, or had a sibling or a friend or a child molested, but regardless, you can tell when they, personally, are very angry. WfI, by contrast, only plagiarizes news reports to talk about specific sex offenders, without so much as a "this f**ker got what he deserved". There's something deeply wrong when discussions of abstract principles are filled with rage, but everything is completely calm when they give real-life examples. (It's a classic propaganda technique going back decades.) With legit sites, it's the other way around. WfI gives the impression of being run by people who think they're living in a fantasy novel as they slip into the role of Heroic Protector--or expects that their audience is.

Another thing to look out for is who has heard of them, who links to them approvingly, who picks up their torch and carries it, who argues that everyone ought to be supporting them. Is it evenly spread between random people who just happened across the site, or is it concentrated primarily among self-described patriots, America-lovers, flag-wavers, citizens with a preoccupation with national, religious and/or racial purity? WfI fails the smell test; it seems like too many national-purity folks have heard of it in such a short amount of time for it to be just one random group's personal crusade. It usually takes months or longer to get hard evidence, though, and that's almost always done by people more persistent than me.

Anyway, pretty sure Six Apart wouldn't care even if WfI were run by Daleks. I see the biggest problem here not with WfI or whoever the hell is making these demands, as it is with Six Apart who, in their idiocy, decides to roll over for some random, previously unheard of group, over against their paying customers who aren't even given a chance to defend themselves and their work. Hopefully they'll come around. I don't know what's likely to help that, but I think working toward making sure people have a voice who might not otherwise have one--as opposed to WfI, which apparently hopes to shadow all LJ's discourse under a cloud of fear of being silenced--is a noble cause, regardless of the intentions behind it. Maybe even better than a nice MLT.

[kiaxet]

Hmmmmm. Wow. So basically, the knowledge against WFI is common sense and a little bit of knowledge about these groups, but it's nothing admissible in court. I have a day off tomorrow - I'm going to have to do my homework and see if I can't find something absolutely concrete - a member list, perhaps?

But wow, your analysis was...amazing. Just wow. We have a reaction going here that requires a few good writers - d'you want to take a look at it? I really think you'd be able to help. (I mean, you've certainly wowed me. :D)

This would probably make a lot more sense if WFI were run by Daleks. -_- And I agree - there's no way Six Apart should have succumbed to the pressure from some unverified outside group with unsupported claims (I highly doubt there were "thousands" of pedophelia sites on LJ).

Whould you like to help? :D

[sbcpanuru.livejournal.com]

You know, I think I'm wrong--their motives may be financial rather than ideological.

Here's the thing. Warriorsforinnocence.org is registered through a kind of domain anonymizer, so you can't tell who owns it. But what's really odd is that WfI.org was registered in October '06, the very same month that their anonymizer's patent was issued. Awfully fishy. What's fishier is that their address and phone/fax lines are the same as the old Coastal Management Group that was implicated in an identity theft phishing scam in August '05.

Everyone complains that the WfI site is spyware intensive. My guess is they make up a site that pushes a big old emotional button to get tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people visiting them, and harvest names, addresses, social security and credit card numbers from those few hundred people who have preexisting datamining spyware and older versions of Internet Explorer, and with that information they do--

--what exactly? I don't know; it was never really clear what Coastal Marketing was doing with their harvested information. Still, identity theft seems a likely enough motive, and with everyone's attention now focused on Six Apart and the ethics of using incest and molestation in fiction, they have a pretty good chance of slipping under the radar and doing something like this again. It's brilliant in its own way--pretending to be an unbelievable idiot and having people be so busy looking for the larger con that they don't notice their pockets being picked. Then again, I don't know enough to say that this is the whole story.

LJ is apologizing, so it looks like all this outcry is doing some good. I'll see how things develop in the next couple of days before I commit to anything in particular. I'd almost rather do a little digging on this Coastal Marketing group to see what else they've been doing.

[sbcpanuru.livejournal.com]

Yep, just fraud. Guy who started Coastal Management has prior convictions for fraud and child abuse. Alec Defrawy is actually pretty famous in scammer circles.

[sbcpanuru.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's annoying...asked the hivemind at Boing Boing and it turns out they only share the address because they're using Domains By Proxy, which has given the same contact information for all its clients since September 2002. Back to square one...