Longtime Slashdot reader v3rgEz shared this report from MuckRock.
Founded in 2003, Appin is described as a cybersecurity company and education consulting company. Appin also ran a prolific “hacking hack” service, stealing information from politicians, the military, businesses and even unfaithful spouses, according to a Reuters report and extensive marketing materials.
Legal documents sent to newsrooms and organizations around the world attempt to remove their stories from the internet, often successfully.
The Reuters investigation, published in November, was based in part on corroborated marketing materials detailing various “hack-for-hack” services offered by Appin. After publication, Reuters became the target of a legal campaign to shut down critical reporting, an effort that expanded to news organizations around the world, including MuckRock. In partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MuckRock is now sharing details about this effort while continuing to host the material that the Appin Training Center Association has gone to great lengths to remove from the web.
The original story by Reuters staff writers Rafael Sutter, Zeba Siddiqui and Chris Bing is no longer available on the Reuters website. Following the court's preliminary ruling in New Delhi, the article was replaced with an editor's note saying Reuters “stands by its reporting and plans to appeal the ruling.” The article has since been reposted on his Distributed Denial of Secrets, and the primary source material used by Reuters reporters and editors in their reporting is available on his MuckRock's DocumentCloud service.
Representatives for the company's founder denied the allegations in the Reuters article, claiming instead that the wrongdoers were “misusing the Appin name.”
TechDirt titled the article, “Mr. Appin, we will not delete articles about your attempts to silence reporters.”
And on Thursday, the EFF called it a “campaign of bullying and censorship to dispel stories about the little-known company Appin Technologies in general, and its co-founder Rajat Khare's mercenary hacking campaign in particular.” I wrote my own opinion about it. . ”
These efforts follow a common pattern. The idea is to obtain a court order in a friendly international jurisdiction, misrepresent the validity and content of that order, and bully publishers around the world into removing articles. We are helping to thwart its efforts to turn India's very limited and interim court ruling into a global takedown order. We represent Techdirt and MuckRock Foundation, two of the news organizations seeking to have Appin-related content removed from their sites, after an Indian court found the Reuters report to be inaccurate. , or disputed the claim that the order was found to be inaccurate. Demand that organizations other than Reuters and Google do something. We have requested a response but have not received anything so far…
As of this writing, more than 20 of these articles have been removed by their respective publications, many at the request of a group called the Association of Appin Training Centers (AOATC). …it's not clear who is being removed. The organization behind the Appin Training Center Association did not exist until a lawsuit was filed against Reuters in an Indian court, according to documents released by Reuters.
If relatively unknown companies like AOATC and oligarchs like Rajat Khare can successfully hide their names from public discourse through strategic litigation, other large companies like Dark This is a dangerous precedent for companies with strong financial resources and high profile. Issues or NSO groups do something similar. This would be a disaster for civil society, a disaster for security studies, and a disaster for freedom of expression.
