Wow, the website of his hosting company[1] is, eh, extremly honest:
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
Not necessarily. Making that statement, setting up in a country that has enough issues to make it plausible, and then not paying the bribe would also make a lot of sense. See also: no log VPNs that actually were logging.
Worst case scenario they shut down, collaborate fully with the police and keep all the profits up til then. Better case scenario they make a deal with the police and keep operating and making profits while covertly providing assistance. Best case scenario the issue never comes up and they make all the profits without having to spend those expenses.
My impression is that in this kind of shady web hosting the companies never last that long so you wouldn't want to invest a lot in bribes and multiple data centers and so on when you could lie and make short term profit.
Note also that corruption isn't a boolean flag. First off the cop make take the exact same strategy: take your money, do nothing else, and hope their boss never gets interested in you while planning not to protect you if anything comes up. Furthermore there are all sorts of anticorruption efforts in that area linked to US aid. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption, it does mean that if a major US corp works with the FBI in a major investigation the local police may rather piss you off than lose critical aid funding.
Which vpn was no-log-but-logging? I was shopping around for an alternative after mullvad blocked port forwarding, but it seems like no one else is as trustworthy. Not that I need it for my “attempt to port forward smash ultimate from within crummy hospital internet” purposes, but hey, principle of the thing and all that.
I am all-but-certain that NordVPN doesn't. I am in possession of records from a recent police investigation in which law enforcement subpoenaed NordVPN and the company replied, essentially, that they had no information connecting a particular IP address, at a specific date and time, to any specific user.
(I am a reporter who covers law enforcement and crime.)
Exact examples are hard to find in the press. One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
This article (edited multiple times!) is not evidence of anything, let alone Nord co-operating with law enforcement to log customer data.
> Exact examples are hard to find in the press.
You said there are countless examples of Nord logging user data, why are you backtracking now?
> One that comes to mind is from a Belgian Telco company that was internally hacked by an employee hiding behind NordVPN. Nord when approached by the telco responded with the usual no logs, but after the telco involved the Interpol, logs were given and the attacker doxxed.
>This article (edited multiple times!) is not evidence of anything, let alone Nord co-operating with law enforcement to log customer data.
Not sure what is not clear from this:
“We will comply with lawful requests as long as they are delivered according to all the laws and regulations," NordVPN says. "We are a company that protects the security and privacy of our customers, but we operate according to laws and regulations.”
Why you don't find articles googling is that Nord puts a lot of effort in removing or burring it (google their dispute with TorGuard). Same what they tried to do with the breach in 2018, they half-ass disclosed at least 6 months later after being known to them. (at a point in time the breach already leaked)
Example I gave was a talk in a hacker conference, with no recording (common request for hacker conference talks).
> Not sure what is not clear from this: “We will comply with lawful requests as long as they are delivered according to all the laws and regulations," NordVPN says. "We are a company that protects the security and privacy of our customers, but we operate according to laws and regulations.”
This is obviously true for every VPN company that intends to keep operating. And in itself is not evidence of anything.
If all the links were taken down, how come no one saved a copy on wayback machine because the burden of proof is on you to provide these backups every time you make such allegations. Otherwise I'll just assume you are just being disingenuous.
Then that is a service then which might be safe for people who's opponents are the police. But some people also worry about threats from the obscenely rich, from their own intelligence agencies, from foreign intelligence agencies, from organized crime, and/or from popular mob outrage.
Your experience doesn't indicate the safety of the service against those other threats, and not only may they not be correlated but they may be anti-correlated. E.g. I bet both CIA and mob run VPN services are really good at saying no to the police.
The fundamental thought that drives my opinion on this subject is this:
We already know for a fact that some state actors do broad scale full take surveillance of the internet. VPN services are even more attractive to monitor because the users are somewhat self-selecting as people who have something to hide, more intel bang per megabit monitored. Without surveilling VPNs these entities would have a blindspot in their expensive internet monitoring machine, so its important just for completeness sake. The VPN provider game is also a much lower barrier to entry, smaller players that don't have the power to push around AT&T can get in on it. Russia, for example, isn't in that much of a position to engage in world wide telecom monitoring (except perhaps that one fiber that goes through sibera and has really low latency between europe and china)-- but they sure can stand up some VPNs and get the worlds traffic to come to them.
Plus, if you run a VPN service people will pay you to run their secret data through you. It's a profit center even before you get to the potential revenue streams from abusing your position. Perhaps it becomes so profitable that you'd prefer to protect it and so you minimize your abuse, but the optimal amount of abuse will pretty much never be zero.
So, If you're the head of a clandestine service or serious organized crime group and you haven't launched at least one VPN service you should be immediately fired for grave incompetence.
The best reason to not run one would just be that you've already infiltrated many existing ones through operatives and backdoored hardware.
And also the heat you take running these services is much easier to deal with if you have 'connections' either of the run-by-a-TLA sort or the we-have-blackmail-material-and-can-break-your-fingers sort. And corrupt VPNs have a whole extra potential revenue/benefit source so they can afford to under-price any honest competition.
Given that, we should expect that many VPNs are honeypots. Probably not all of them, but by their very nature it should be hard to impossible to tell which.
This sounds somewhat hard to believe. If the description of events is accurate, this would be superb marketing for the VPN provider. Why would they not talk about it publicly?
It's obviously an unsubstantiated statement, but given all the concrete information on the MOs of alphabet agencies, it seems like a reasonable bet. If they haven't done one of those things, they probably just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom
Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before
SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as
the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room.
The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 14.6 m) and contains several
racks of equipment [...].
The oddly detailed description along with the badly lit photo makes this read like an SCP entry.
Is it that wild? There are a few questions we have to ask
1. Do these agencies have the motivation to do the above? I think the answer here is an obvious yes to everyone
2. Do these agencies have the technical ability to hack the VPNs, the finances to pay them for access, or some other reasonable measure to coerce compliance?
If 1 and 2 are both true, then the OP claim is also certainly true.
Given that 1 is true, I don’t think it’s “wild” to claim that these agencies cannot satisfy 2. In fact I’d say given the historical record, the more wild claim is that the CIA/NSA etc is incapable of satisfying #2.
It's a crime. Maintaining continual access to every major vpn provider increases the probability of getting caught breaking the law towards one while continually risking the methods required to acquire such access each time your implant is discovered.
If you are using unknown exploits not passed on to relevant software projects each discovery further risks said exploit being discovered then used against us individuals and enterprise.
It is a potentially very high cost for mediocre gain as criminals can turn to more secure methods leaving you with a lot of data on whose hiding piracy from their ISP but little of actual value.
Meanwhile you can direct attack targets any other ways when they are likely to have actual intelligence instead of hoping they log into nord VPN.
In brief speculation is incredibly likely to be based on bad logic and should probably attend more to actual know.
Eg most people aren't important enough to directly target. Uncle Sam probably knows the entire contents of your Gmail but not what you do via nord VPN. At such time as you become an international drug lord your privacy is likely to fall apart when Sam starts serving providers who do business with you.
The Interpol literally took over a darknet market (Dream) using stolen admin credentials and continued to run the site for months to gather intelligence on vendors and buyers. Not the same thing but if LE is willing to operate a major illegal drug trafficking operation then surely hacking a few VPN companies doesn't seem impossible.
Great example however unlike constantly hacking all VPN providers this is potentially deemed legal kind of like under cover cops doing controlled buys to trace drug networks. Also unlike hacking all the VPNS. It's also pretty high benefit for a very finite and controllable risk.
What crime is it for the NSA/CIA, who are explicitly tasked by the government with gathering intelligence on foreign agencies, to hack say Mullwad, a Swedish entity? That’s like saying it’s a murder for the police to shoot someone who has hostages. I mean yes it’s the same action, but when it’s been deemed justified by the government, it’s not really a crime in the same way.
A crime in Sweden perhaps. Who will Sweden charge? Do they even have names for individual employees?
It’s also a “crime” to sell false and compromised products to customers yet CryptoAG existed for decades.
> At such time as you become an international drug lord your privacy is likely to fall apart when Sam starts serving providers who do business with you.
Then you’re simply agreeing under point 2, I.e they have they ability to coerce cooperation when desired
This is really the unfortunate truth. >90% of global ISP's not only collect but also sell netflow metadata commercially. Nanosecond timestamps, packet sizes, source IPs, destination IP's. Doesn't matter what VPN provider you use, whether you're using Tor, how many residential proxies you're routing through via a complex proxychains config... commercial entities can correlate virtually all of it.
Team Cymru is one such buyer of bulk netflow metadata from ISP's (and their upstream providers) around the globe, who do all of the correlation work on their side, and then sell it, under product names like Pure Signal Recon (formerly Augury)... including to law enforcement agencies and the US military...
There are also no laws dictating that ISP's must disclose whether or not they are selling that information, and they have no commercial incentive to choose to honestly disclose that they do.
If your adversary is NSA/FBI/US Army, or any other deep-pocketed nation-state-level adversaries who Team Cymru is willing to sell to, the safest assumption is that there is absolutely nothing you can do to obscure the origin of your traffic with 100% certainty.
Let's say you are using an ISP to connect to a VPN provider.
That VPN provider does what most of them do and SNATs multiple customers connections to a single exit public IP.
How can they correlate the encrypted wireguard data from my ISP connection to the VPN provider and then from the VPN provider to the final endpoint (say, ProtonMail)?
There is a known traffic pattern for a GET request to Protonmail - size of the initial request, # of subsequent requests (for subresources, like CSS, JS, images, etc), and size of those requests, as well as size of those responses.
There is a known overhead for encapsulating these requests in an OpenVPN or WireGuard tunnel.
So even without looking at the contents of the traffic at all, the metadata your ISP collects can easily reveal that you sent outbound traffic and received inbound traffic that had a high statistical correlation with the expected traffic flow of a request to Protonmail encapsulated within a Wireguard tunnel, to a known VPN node, and then a (known) number of milliseconds before that VPN's upstream provider also made a request that perfectly matched the expected packet flow of Protonmail. If you have visibility into the traffic netflow of both your ISP and the VPN's upstream provider, consider yourself confidently unmasked.
The initial fingerprinting laid firm groundwork for your adversary to suspect you went to protonmail, and then the network behavior of the first destination machine you connected to simply offered confirmation of that.
Hell. Is that amount of global correlation even possible? What if I route through 7 countries? Surely the data of every single ISP on earth cannot be collected in the hands of a single entity?
Btw I2P provides imho decent amount of protection for timing and packet sniffing attacks.
You are correct that not every single ISP sells this data, but for reference, back when Team Cymru's 'Pure Signal Recon' product was advertised under the name 'Augury', Team Cymru claimed that data sources included "90% of global ISPs". They currently claim to be ingesting and processing neflow metadata from over 200 billion (with a b) connections per DAY.
So in theory, yes, route through enough ISP's, and you may eventually hit one along the way who isn't selling that data.
That said, to my knowledge, no ISPs are required to disclose whether or not they sell metadata, and as profit-oriented corporations, have no incentive to be honest about that if asked.
So it's something of a gamble to assume you can definitely find a path through n ISPs where at least one of them does not sell netflow metadata.
Which VPNs do you find effective for the second purpose? My small experience of using VPNs is that you just end up suffering from the poor reputation of your exit IPs, which rarely stay secret for long. So you end up blocked or at least frequently CAPTCHA'd on sites that wouldn't have blocked your own IP, and I imagine those that are doing geoblocking have a big blacklist of VPN IPs (I know BBC iPlayer does)
I rarely have the need, I use mullvad, and it works for those occasions. But I don’t need to circumvent any serious blocks, most of the time it’s just something being US-only or "not EU", and neither of those sites care much if you circumvent it.
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution.
What happens if someone else is willing to pay a higher bribe than you are...?
Competent corrupt officials can do the math, and understand ongoing 1X bribes are far better than poisoning their money tree by stupidly accepting a one-time 10X bribe.
“There's probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn't stay bribed; not for any sum.”
-Discussion of a rather sinister court official in Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation And Empire'
I’ve seen it in the business world, but trust is everything and if you break it once even accidentally good luck. When crime enters the picture you probably won’t ever get more than a single chance, or worse, be in physical danger if you do.
I dunno. The one thing I took away from reading both memoirs of people involved in crime (yes it exists) and reports about their court cases is that there is no honor among chiefs.
And there is very little trust too. They lie and defraud each other constantly. They do kill each other too, but most often because someone knows too much or has something want.
Sure, but if there's enforcement officials that will take a periodic 1X bribe to protect illegal activity, there's likely someone else in society (possibly, other enforcement officials taking a bribe, or possibly other groups that have simply bribed the right people to protect their own activities) that will take a 10X payment to suppress that activity from some party with conflicting interests, perhaps by means such as putting a gun to the head of the official taking the periodic 1X stream and giving them a choice of betraying the payer or having their office redecorated with the contents of their skull.
Corrupt systems rather notoriously do not tend to feature unity of action or interest throughout what is notionally the government, or even what are nominally single agencies within the government.
Also, a 10X carrot directly to the bribed official receiving the periodic 1X stream can also be combined with a stick.
You don't think the plata o plomo choice only applies to actors not already on someone else’s corrupt (beside the official government’s overt) payroll, do you?
In countries with systemic corruption, those people collecting periodic 1X bribes share a significant part of them with their superiors, who share it with their superiors etc all the way to the top. There may not be unity of government or any formal organization, but the cliques are very strong, and they do form along institutional lines. This isn't to say that there is no bribe large enough to break the system, but 10x is way too low for most bureaucrats to risk their neck trying to do so.
It's more complicated than that. After all, these bribes aren't exactly public and transparent. A competent corrupt official can always pocket the 10x and pretend that the 1x target didn't pay in time, or that some other official did it, or some other excuse.
In a volatile place covering for illegal thing that can bite you in the ass - you'll take the payout, gain political points by cooperating with some agency and spin yourself as a hero in the case.
Also, just because you are offering a simple cash bribe doesn’t mean the party trying to subvert the person you are bribing is doing that and not, e.g., putting a gun to their head as a stick while also offering a cash bribe as a carrot.
Or just bribing someone else in a position to withdraw the authority that the person you bribed is using to protect you.
Wouldn't full disclosure make them, in some sense, honest?
Also, you have just condemned entire nations of people, like those who lived under Soviet domination, where bribery became custom, because if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to bribe the people involved. Just got married and want an apartment for your new family? You could submit a housing application, but it might bubble up to the top of the queue by the time you hit retirement. A bribe given to the woman in the office handling the paperwork can help grease the track. Have a totally curable disease that, without intervention, can kill you? Well, you could have your name added to a long wait list and have your treatment started next year, or you could "gift" your state-pensioned doctor a cognac, some luxury chocolates, and an envelop containing a "tip" to shorten the wait time. Need to travel abroad? Well, guess what. The passport stays with the government for "safe keeping". They might not be in a hurry to let you leave, just yet. However, with a few enticing arrangements and exchanges, you'll be on the next plane headed over the Iron Curtain.
In other words, I'm not convinced bribes are a categorically wrong thing for someone to offer. To receive, on the other hand...
The soviet system sounds pointlessly overloaded with middle men. Why not abandon the "official system with middle men bribes" and descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?
No matter the empathy I have for the suffering. What is the point of offering a bribe, to bully the system, in the same way the receiver intends to break the rules?
Just tell the truth and say the system sucks. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours done en masse, hardens society for everyone and then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.
> What is the point of offering a bribe, to bully the system
Imagine your grandma needs urgent surgery and it is customary to give the doctor some money to 'ensure best results'. Will you refuse?
> descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?
You mean like some monopolized industries in the US have done?
> then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.
Why Soviets, Bribing is the default way of society - Imperial Russia has no concept of bribery, if you wanted a government official to do their job, you had to pay them, and they set the price, thats just how the system worked.
Victorian britain was insanely corrupt too. Absence of corruption is unusual.
It is not a binary choice. My grandma can get the care via a bribe and the next day I can go join the local mafia.
Not like a US corporation, the machine of machines, systems of systems. An actual mafia that breaks down the government and replaces official services with a protection racket around people's families and uses physical violence to enforce arbitrary mafia business norms.
The real criminal mafia does not answer to a doctor who takes the wrong bribes and that doctor may go home that evening to find his house/family/prized thing to be in jeopardy. The mafia built on family and religious connections that can't be bought out, and will balance out a non-working government when it fails.
The Soviet system props up the normal structure just enough to leech off it. That is a luxury of Russian culture that doesn't survive elsewhere, for very good reason.
Suffering isn't an excuse for corruption that hurts basic services for the middle/lower class.
Lie, bribe, cheat and steal for all the yacht money and control over steel mills, between upper class toffs, I don't care.
When your corruption stops society from working for the majority, or oppresses the majority, then you have become the problem.
> The soviet system sounds pointlessly overloaded with middle men
I find this conclusion hilarious (if not untrue) - you can say absolutely the same for the USA system. So many things require a useless middleman that only takes their cut and adds friction - car dealerships, "value added" resellers, health insurance, etc.
> I like living in countries where corruption is accessible for everybody.
The emphasis here was on everybody because this followed a rant about how Western societies are corrupt where the rich gets to ignore the laws and he wanted to do the same. He said this in 2022 so whether he really did move in 2017 for this reason is impossible to say.
Tate is also arrested currently, so looks like this kind of "honesty" has a price. And in general I'm pretty sure that bribery even when done abroad would get you in trouble in your own country, so I'm quite surprised by such statements put like that in the open.
> The supposed human trafficking charges against him appear to be completely bogus and Kafka-esque, and therefore violate his rights against arbitrary arrest and detention.
I don't know enough details on the 'kafka-esque' nature of the charges, so I won't comment on them, but he has more than one credible rape accusations him against in his home country, and he talks openly about using women as sex workers and taking their income from it.
According to NYT (https://archive.md/4tSmc) prosecutors haven't made the key details of the charges public, and the media reports sharply contradict Tate's own characterization of the charges in recent interviews. This is roughly the premise of Kafka's "The Trial".
It's hard to judge what is true or not, especially if it's about a public figure and especially when said public figure seems to be making the most idiotic choices ever.
There are plenty of women pretending to be cool, even doing rape role play and then using recorder material to blackmail men.
He was obviously into BDSM stuff (he was being grilled for a video in which he was hitting a woman with a belt - the woman went on video to record it was consensual), so it would be incredibly easy to trap and blackmail.
Similar situation with human trafficking: the girls were always free to leave but they were getting paid for sex work. He was for sure a digital pimp (not sure if that's a crime).
Overall, I don't think Tate is an actual abuser: it would be incredibly stupid to go public with such a past; I'd bet he is just a self centered narcissist who likes to get into risky and dumb situations and thinks nothing bad will happen to him because he's God.
These two things are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one would think that a narcissist who has gotten away with it all his life would think he was invulnerable. It certainly tracks that he would be open about it.
And really, if it walks like a rapist, and it talks like a rapist, and it acts like a rapist... it is probably a rapist.
I don't think anyone is saying he should be in jail because he's saying misogynistic stuff. The context of his bragging about corrupt officials was on why his illegal casinos and sex trafficking operations didn't have any problems (while he himself never directly admitted to it, some of his associates tweeted about beating a "girlfriend" who wanted to stop doing webcame shows, and he heavily implies it at time when talking about how he "keeps women under control").
That's why he deserves a fair trial, and as a result, probably jail time. It's possible he didn't actually do anything wrong, but that's very improbable.
> I don't think anyone is saying he should be in jail because he's saying misogynistic stuff.
For what it's worth, I do. The shit he and others of his ilk teach to young, vulnerable men is inspiring a lot of real-world violations of women, some even get drawn to outright terrorism and murder.
In Germany, we call such persons "geistige Brandstifter" for a reason. They may not light a fire on their own - in general they keep their hands very clean and shiny to be able to spread their message far and wide - but they sure as hell have no issues when others do the dirty work for them. And of course when someone follows the stochastic terrorism strategy, the preachers disavow them.
> In Germany, we call such persons "geistige Brandstifter" for a reason.
The "there's a world for that in German" thing is probably a good (but obviously imperfect) inoculation against extremist propaganda.
I'm often frustrated that we don't have pithy little phrases specific to all kinds of bad behavior in English. It is easier to talk about things if they're given specific names.
Yes, which we've done, but if I go around talking to people in Seattle about "Geistige Brandstifter" I have exactly one friend who is going to know what I'm talking about because they're German.
Language doesn't really work unless there's broad social buy-in, otherwise you're just talking to yourself.
It's nice to have specific terms for special generic concepts. However, use of the German language doesn't stop there, and creates an association between some terms and use in a specific political context, removing these expressions from politically correct usability even outside of the political context that claimed them. And those are a lot more subtle and difficult to identify than e.g., allow/deny-lists.
That is how fascism started, increasing the verbal threat, a string of political assassinations and subsequently not giving a f* because your hands are clean, but shouldn't ideas be challenged not suppressed?
If people cannot be trusted and should rather be cocooned from the true range of human thought, doesn't this go against every assumption we use to justify our freedoms?
> If people cannot be trusted and should rather be cocooned from the true range of human thought, doesn't this go against every assumption we use to justify our freedoms?
Well, we've seen in 1933-1945 where that sort of orthodox interpretations of "free speech" leads. And we've seen in the Covid era that some people are able to politicize wearing masks... or to put it differently: the intersection between the dumbest humans and the smartest bears and crows is so large that we cannot design actually bear/crow proof trash cans because enough people wouldn't be able to open them.
With politics it is just the same: there are more than enough dumb fucks on this planet that someone like Donald Trump was able to lead them to storm Congress, leading to multiple people getting killed, and more severely injured. Society needs some sort of defense mechanism against those ruthless enough to use moronically dumb people as a weapon and, like Trump did, discard them aside when they outlived their usefulness. People got sentenced to many years worth of prison time for following Trump's suggestion - and yet, to my knowledge, he didn't pay a single one's legal bills, assist their families or grant a pardon. Even the goddamn mafia takes better care for those actually risking prison time and their families!
I know this unpopular and naive but I wish political self segregation was an option.
I want to live somewhere with liberal values, universal suffrage, same sex marriage, the right to change your gender, tax-funded healthcare and capitalist neo-liberal means of production but I cannot deny someone else's dream of a white nationalist state or socialist dictatorship or black ethnostate or Shariah theocracy.
I'd hope if people actually lived in a society that had those values and endured all the limitations it brings they'd change their minds about the rules they want to structure society, given the only rule would be for everyone to be free to choose where they want to live.
Yes I do think people should be free to ruin their own lives as much as possible if it doesn't infringe on others.
Tate is an incel? "a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually"
I think Tate is going to be super surprised to learn that. Dude is many things, an incel is not one of them.
Perhaps you have been caught up in the hysteria and are attributing things to him that he is not responsible for? I'm not a Tate fan and think he is probably not a good person but there has very much been a witch hunt / circus atmosphere around those who are anti him. Dude advocates for traditional male roles in relationships and for people to think for themselves and try to be the best version of themselves. Alot of it is very much a money making scheme. He is no worse than a lot of other people and far better than others. He has his good and bad aspects like everyone else. If its found he is guilty of the crimes he was charged with then I hope he goes to prison. If not then he has a right to speak.
He's not an incel, but he specifically targets incels and the incel movement. Men who don't have any problems finding women they want to date aren't a suitable target for this kind of rhetoric.
Does he encourage them to remain incels or to better themselves and become something else? Seens like incels are pretty bad and we should encourage them to not be incels anymore.
I do realize he doesn't do this out of the kindness of his heart and there is a monetary aspect.
As far as people that are not incels not being a target for his rhetoric, I somewhat disagree. He preaches a lot about discipline, and personal responsibility. Something I can relate to. I am not an incel, I am happily married with kids, financially successful, and decent looking. I say this not to brag, there are many people on this site multiples more successful than I am but just to illustrate that very few people are 100% bad and worthy of silencing. There can be good in most messaging. The OP I replied to advocated for silencing Tate, I personally don't think anyone should be silenced, we are all responsible for our own actions and reactions to stimuli.
The few truly evil people on this earth live on in history books, everyone else is shades of grey.
Oh he's not an Incel by any means, but he's regarded as the ultimate role model, the person to become, by a hell of a lot of them. And that is the true danger behind Tate: there are a lot of people able and willing to commit an awful lot of criminal or offensive things just to get to the point he is.
Would you not prefer that incels, including the list of those you provided that committed violent crimes instead change who they are, gain confidence in themselves, establish a relationship and live a normal life? The list you provided was a group of people that committed "an awful lot of criminal or offensive things" without him. Seems like them gaining some self confidence and accepting responsibility for their own place in the world would be a good thing. Something he advocates for
The only incel forum I've seen is incels.is and searching for Andrew Tate I see just as much if not more negative opinion of him as there is positive. Even the positive ones are "yeah he's a grifter, but he annoys people I don't like" which is hardly thinking of him as a role model.
As a commenter just proved, "nobody is saying" is always false. It may only be a few nutters, but often it's lots and lots of nutters (even prominent members of government).
Despite the name, most folks in Western Liberal Democracies who call themselves "liberal" or similar aren't actually interested in liberalism and only want democracy when they win (so they can oppress those who disagree with them).
If I understood you correctly, it would be something like (as rhetorical example) liberals wanting the government to take action in ensuring same sex marriage even if that goes against the cultural beliefs of the majority?
My rebuttal ,if I understood you, would be to point at the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship of the masses.
You hopefully can't legalize lynching in a liberal democracy even going by their original intent, which includes human rights and civil liberties.
According to NYT (https://archive.md/4tSmc) the key details of the charges are kept confidential by the prosecutors. Media has implied that Tate running a webcam business is ipso-facto illegal, but it is not--roughly 400,000 women and 5,000 companies do webcams in Romania.
In various recent interviews (Tucker Carlson, Patrick Bet David, both on YouTube), Tate has claimed he is not charged with any sex/violent crimes including rape (contrary to NYT and other reports) nor is he charged with anything in connection to his webcam studio. Tate claims the only charges against him are seducing women (so-called "Loverboy method" of trafficking) to make Tiktok videos for which he did not receive financial compensation. If this is true, I would file it under the "bogus"/"arbitrary" category. (And without victim blaming, I would also observe that any woman who believes Tate's promise of a serious relationship has clearly not done her research.)
Again because the full details of the charges are kept confidential ("Kafka-esque") none of us know, but I would think that Tate (with nudging from his lawyers) would be smart enough not to misrepresent the charges against him in interviews. He will have his day in court, and we will see then.
Not to hijack his comment but I am open to betting my HN account that those charges on him will be cleared. There is no evidence on what he is accused of, and he has since appeared in podcasts with people who have done a lot of great interviews in the past.
You’d have to be a complete idiot to associate with a trafficker unless your gut made it clear as day that there isn’t much meat to these potatoes.
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Oh no… the “i downvote but don’t comment” brigade has arrived.
This is a good point. An entirely unrelated person was accused of a completely different crime in a different country once. This is proof that human trafficking doesn’t exist.
Even if you believe that, Andrew Tate isn't a dissident, nor does he have any claims to journalistic protections. At best he's a deep-fried Tom Leykis and at worst he's a human trafficker.
I don't find that comment objectionable because it is in favour of freedom of speech, I find it objectionable because it pretends someone with multiple credible allegations of rape and associates who admit to using violence to incite women into sex crimes, who admitted to running illegal casinos and who says he moved to Romania because he doesn't have to follow the law is only in legal trouble because people disagree with his ideas and has done nothing illegal that would warrant charges.
That could not be further from the truth. There’s plenty of offensive speech that isn’t suppressed (personal insults, porn/other things that used to be considered “obscene”) and there’s plenty of inoffensive speech that is (spam, sometimes defamation).
No speech is suppressed where free speech is valued as a right, probably your case.
You would find that porn and personal insults are not legal in many parts of the world. The Chinese government has adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward so-called sexual content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_China
You can defame a corporation, in which case there’s no one to take offense. As for spam: look up the long list of rules in the CAN-SPAM act, for example.
How am I missing the point? There is no point. We can choose as humans how we deal with speech we find offensive.
Free speech as a right was thought of by people that deemed offensive speech to have inherent protection. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There being no immediate repercussions doesn't mean there aren't going to be any long term when you basically give governments a loaded gun aimed at your own head. Eventually someone might decide to use it even if the reason for it has nothing to do with the gun.
This is a person who, by their own statement, had out of context IRC logs used by the government to convict him of a different crime.
Romania has high levels of corruption, but when we entered the EU we had high levels of overt corruption.
I'll never forget during the presidential elections of early 2010s (or around that time) (we joined EU in 2007) when a member of the loosing party (which would then become our prime minister), Victor Ponta, stated frankly, in an interview, that they lost because his party stole fewer votes (bribing the poor with meager amounts of household products to vote for them, which is a favorite campaign activity around here).
However to combat this prolific corruption (in part because of EU mandate), around the same time, our winning president instated the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA in Romanian) which is a "taskforce" of judges and lawyers investigating these highly profilic cases.
It became moderately successful (there's always room for improvement). The EU took note, and brought in members of the directorate to instate a similar structure centrally as an EU institution (for cross border corruption cases), and afaik the process has been set in motion to instate the same directorare in Bulgaria (under the guide of a certain prosecution attorney that lead this directorare in Romania, Laura Codruta Kovesi).
Whenever foreigners bring corruption in Romania, I try to emphasize that while it exists, it is no longer very visible unless you are in fairly high-level business and politics. There was a time when everyone on the bus had to contribute 5€ when crossing the border, so that the customs officials wouldn’t go through everyone’s luggage. A time when you couldn’t register a sole proprietorship without at least offering the clerk some chocolate or whatever as a token bribe. But that all disappeared about 2006 and life in Romania is little different from Western EU states.
Corruption is also common practice within the EU (see: Eva Kaili), most of the upper EU just hides it better while pointing fingers at "unaligned" states, inside and outside of the EU.
If Von der Leyen wasn’t corrupt, I’m sure she wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts.
> wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts
This is the same non-reason as is being brought up with cameras filming you 24/7 etc.
'You dont have to worry if you have nothing to hide' ... It's an invasion of privacy, and it is worth fighting against that.
> It's an invasion of privacy, and it is worth fighting against that
VdL should have a private phone and a work phone, just like everyone else.
If these work messages are from her work phone, she should hand them over. If they are work messages on her private phone, she should also hand them over. She simply cannot claim to have been having non-work conversations with anyone at Pfizer.
I have non-work conversations with staff and coworkers at work all the time, and also work related conversations on private channels from time to time. The world is not as black-and-white as you think it is.
Was she acting as a private individual or as a government official?
Government has ZERO right to privacy; government agents in their capacity have ZERO right to privacy.
If a government agent uses a private account to do government business, then a) they should be fired/ removed and charged for trying to hide that business and b) those accounts should be turned over to the government, redacted of anything not related to the government business, and everything else made public.
A private individual has a right to privacy. Government, including anyone acting as its agent, do not.
> If Von der Leyen wasn’t corrupt, I’m sure she wouldn’t have any problem handing over her texts.
Haven’t found much on this. Frankly there is no need to allege corruption against this particular EU politician when there are better examples like those involved with the Qatar scandal.
I don’t know the specifics of his case but it is my understanding that EU isn’t as easily bought as South America or Southeast Asia for example.
The latter has a system that doesn’t “include” foreigners, whereas someplace like Romania is a lot more Westernized and offering a bribe carries a lot more risk.
Well, money will only buy you freedom in such places until you annoy someone with deeper pockets than you have sufficiently so that they want you to wind up behind bars.
Sure, but that’s in extreme cases. For small stuff like papers, permits and such - talking to the right people will get you anywhere you want to go.
I still remember handing over my passport to a guy on a sports bike in Singapore to get an extended stamp for Indonesia, and only a few years later did it occur to me how sketchy the whole situation was.
Seems this hosting company is a scam. Kosovo might be corrupted but it is the country with the highest approval of U.S. government. The FBI can investigate and arrest you in Kosovo just as easily as they can arrest you in Maine. Probably even easier because in Kosovo you don't have same judicial guarantees as in the U.S.A.
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
[1] https://basehost.eu/