SUMMARY: President Trump's travel ban got its first federal appeals court review today, marking the biggest test yet for the revised executive order to suspend travel to the U.S. for people from six majority-Muslim countries. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins William Brangham to review the arguments.
Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, speaking publicly for the first time about concerns she brought to the Trump White House on Russia, told Congress on Monday she warned that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “essentially could be blackmailed” because he apparently had lied to his bosses about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
The statements from Yates, an Obama administration holdover, offered by far the most detailed account of the chain of events that led to Flynn's ouster from government in the first weeks of the Trump administration.
Yates, appearing before a Senate panel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, described discussions with Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn in late January in which she warned that Flynn apparently had misled the administration about his communications with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
White House officials had insisted that Flynn had not discussed U.S.-imposed sanctions with Kislyak during the presidential transition period, but asked Flynn to resign after news reports indicated he had misled them about the nature of the calls.
“We felt like it was critical that we get this information to the White House, in part because the Vice President was making false statements to the public and because we believed that Gen. Flynn was possibly compromised,” Yates said.
“We knew that was not a good situation, which is why we wanted to let the White House know about it.”
The highly anticipated hearing — it is Yates's first appearance on Capitol Hill since her firing in January — filled in details in the chain of events that led to the ouster of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's first National Security Adviser, in the early weeks of the administration.
The Jan. 26 conversation took place two days after the FBI interviewed Flynn about those contacts. McGahn asked Yates how Flynn did in the interview, but Yates said she could not answer.
She was fired four days later by the Trump administration. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama, testified as well. He retired when Trump took office.
The hearing came hours after former Obama administration officials revealed that Obama had warned Trump against hiring Flynn as National Security Adviser during an Oval Office meeting after the 2016 election.
The highly anticipated hearing — it was Yates' first appearance on Capitol Hill since her firing — before a Senate panel investigating Russian interference in the presidential election was expected to fill in basic details in the chain of events that led to Flynn's ouster. Word that Obama directly warned Trump suggests that concern over Flynn's possible appointment spread to the highest level of government months before Flynn's departure.
The Obama-Trump discussion was first reported Monday by NBC-TV.
Flynn's forced February resignation followed media reports that he had discussed U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia with Ambassador Kislyak, which was contrary to the public representations of the Trump White House.
Earlier Monday, former officials said Obama had raised general concerns about Flynn with Trump and told the incoming president there were better people for the national security post. Trump's White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in response Monday that if Obama “was seriously concerned” about Flynn's connections to Russia or other foreign countries, he should have withheld Flynn's security clearance. Flynn served under Obama as defense intelligence chief before Obama dismissed him from that post.
Trump moved to distance himself from his former adviser's troubles Monday, tweeting that it was the Obama administration that gave Flynn “the highest security clearance” when he worked at the Pentagon. Trump made no mention of the fact that Flynn had been fired by the Obama administration in 2014.
In a second tweet, Trump said Yates should be asked under oath “if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers” soon after she raised concerns about Flynn with McGahn.
She said Monday she did not — and that she had revealed no classified information herself.
Trump has said he has no ties to Russia and isn't aware of any involvement by his aides in Moscow's interference in the election. He's dismissed FBI and congressional investigations into his campaign's possible ties to the election meddling as a “hoax” driven by Democrats bitter over losing the White House.
The Associated Press meanwhile reported last week that one sign taken as a warning by Obama administration officials about Flynn's contacts with Kislyak was a request by a member of Trump's own transition team made to national security officials in the Obama White House for the classified CIA profile of Kislyak. The revelation came after interviews with a host of former U.S. officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive national security information.
Marshall Billingslea, a former Pentagon and NATO official, wanted the information for Flynn, his boss. Billingslea knew Flynn would be speaking to Kislyak, according to two former Obama administration officials, and seemed concerned Flynn did not fully understand he was dealing with a man rumored to have ties to Russian intelligence agencies. When reached by the AP last week, Billingslea refused to comment. Last month, Trump announced his intention to nominate Billingslea to serve as Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing at the Treasury Department.
Yates' warning about Flynn in January capped weeks of building concern among top Obama officials, former officials told the AP. President Obama himself that month told one of his closest advisers that the FBI, which by then had been investigating Trump associates' possible ties to Russia for about six months, seemed particularly focused on Flynn.
Yates, a longtime federal prosecutor and Obama administration holdover, was fired Jan. 30 by Trump after refusing to defend the administration's travel ban. She had been scheduled to appear in March before the House Intelligence Committee, but that hearing was canceled.
The subcommittee meeting Monday is one of three congressional probes into the Russia interference, along with House and Senate intelligence panels. All the committees are led by Republicans.
White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.
SUMMARY: Two high-profile witnesses -- former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates -- addressed a Senate hearing Monday on the investigation into the Trump administration's relationship with Russia, and the warnings the White House received about Gen. Michael Flynn. Judy Woodruff speaks with Lisa Desjardins and Julie Pace of Associated Press.
SUMMARY: Former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin joins Judy Woodruff to discuss congressional testimonies by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and the ongoing investigation into Russia's interference in November's presidential election.
This story was co-published with IRE Journal.
It's a great time to be an investigative journalist. Sure, no President has done more to demonize media than President Trump. But nor has anybody done more to boost our standing than Trump.
Millions of Americans have put their faith in us. A few weeks after the election, a friend of mine, pondering the reality of one-party government in Washington, looked at me soberly and summed up her sentiment: “You are our Congress now.”
What she meant, of course, was that we need to keep doing our job, to ferret out facts and expose wrongdoing. It seemed straightforward enough.
But as my friend was talking, one thought kept running over and over in my mind: How the hell are we going to do this?
At ProPublica, our stories often take months, and occasionally longer than that. How could we cover something as fast moving as a new administration? We also tend to stay away from areas other reporters are already covering. If lots of reporters are already digging into something, why would we want to as well? One of our advantages is that we don't have to be comprehensive. We can and should skip stories where we're unlikely to distinguish ourselves.
We could have made the decision to stick with those inclinations — to veer away from the pack and focus on areas where others were now even less likely to be.
But we didn't do that.
Instead, on Inauguration Day, we announced what we would be covering — many, many areas related to the new administration. The same day, we reported Trump hadn't fulfilled his promise to hand over control of his businesses. Two weeks later, we reported that Trump's daughter Ivanka had failed to do the same.
And our stories kept coming: about how Trump was hiring lobbyists to work at agencies they once lobbied, about the hundreds of officials Trump had quietly installed across the government, and about a Trump trust document that states the president can pull money from his businesses any time he wants. (It's that last story that got the White House riled up and led Sean Spicer, to blessedly, label us a “left-wing blog.”)
We're still in flux. We definitely don't have all the answers. Like many newsrooms, we're still grappling with how to handle coverage of the new administration. But we have found a few principles to be helpful.
Worry Less About Zigging When Others Zag
Rather than tacking away from important topics that already have the country's attention, sometimes it makes sense to look for opportunities within them.
Take the work last year of the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, who, of course, could serve as an example in any number of these tips. Countless journalists were covering Trump's campaign. The size of the scrum covering his candidacy probably set a record. But how many reporters were really digging into Trump's charity? It turned out none, until Fahrenthold.
That's obviously not an easy example to replicate. In fact, Fahrenthold has written about how he didn't know what he was launching himself into.
That doesn't mean you should chase the week's news, or worry about matching what other outlets are doing. What it means is deciding you're going to go after the most important and vital topics, and then giving yourself the task of producing revelatory coverage within them.
A hypothetical I've occasionally invoked: Imagine you had been a reporter during the civil rights era and were looking back at your career decades later. What would you have hoped to cover? (I've heard BuzzFeed's Ben Smith tell his staff something quite similar: Write now what you think you'll be proud of at the end of your career.)
Stop Hoarding and Start Sharing
ProPublica has been collaborating with other newsrooms since we started nine years ago. But over the past few months, we've landed on new ways of working with others.
On a Friday night in late March, the White House announced it was making many staffers' financial disclosure forms “available.” But it didn't post them online or even disclose which staffers had filed the forms.
To get the documents, reporters first had to guess who had filed the disclosures. Then, they had to fill out a form on the White House's website for each person. It was like dealing with the world's worst customer service department — only we were trying to wrangle purportedly public information.
Then, one of our editors, Tracy Weber, had an idea: Why not call our friends at other outlets and coordinate. Within minutes, The New York Times and Associated Press had agreed to work with us and post all the documents we gathered.
In another instance, we talked with the Times' Eric Lipton about our joint interest in documenting the legion of lobbyists joining the administration. The chat led to a very simple and quick collaboration: We shared data on administration hires with the Times, which used it to publish a hard-hitting story that cited our contribution.
It was just one example of many where even the simple act of comparing notes has paid off. That's clearly not the proper approach all the time. But it can be plenty of the time.
Do It Out In the Open
For years, we've reached out to readers to fuel our journalism. But we've been much more aggressive about it recently.
One thing has been to simply say what we're working on — even if it's just broadly. On Inauguration Day, we not only laid out our areas of coverage, but we also gave contact information for each of our reporters. And at the bottom of many of our stories now is a reporter's contact info, and, crucially, an explanation of what information they're seeking.
Do you have information about the Trump administration's beachhead teams and their role at federal agencies? Contact Justin at justin@ProPublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240. Here is a guide for how to leak to ProPublica.
It's not fancy, but it's effective.
Sometimes readers don't have insider tips, but they can still contribute. In February, a reader wrote us about a letter she received from Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt criticizing Obamacare. The letter was filled with misleading formation. We wondered if that was true of other congressional letters, so Charles Ornstein and Terry Parris Jr. asked readers to share any similar letters they'd gotten. Again, we coordinated to get the word out with other outlets: Vox, Kaiser Health News and STAT News. Readers sent in hundreds of letters. The result: We were able to lay out how legislators were sending their constituents correspondence “full of lies and misinformation.”
Others are also embracing the approach, and getting results: Last month, the Trump administration disclosed donors who funded the president's $100 million inauguration committee. The administration posted them as super-unhelpful, non-searchable PDFs. So reporters got together to fix that, turning the documents into data. Then, the Huffington Post's Christina Wilkie invited readers to dig in and background the donors. It turns out, some of the names were straight-up fake.
You Won't Be Able to Neatly Plan and Package Your Stories — and That's Okay
Just about the only certainty with this administration is that nobody knows what will happen. That means if you're going to cover one of the most consequential stories of our time, you're probably not going to be able to, say, carefully plot out a year's worth of stories in advance.
But that doesn't mean just writing what's in front of you, either. In fact, it's more crucial than ever to think carefully about which waters to swim in. You just may need to be at peace with the uncertainty about where exactly your coverage is heading. You may even have some false starts. And there's no guarantee it will work at all.
Success will require the typical alchemy needed for great journalism — doggedness, imagination, and luck. It will also require a leap of faith. Making that leap seems only fair given the faith that readers have put in us.
SUMMARY: Syndicated Columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the week's news, including the House of Representatives' passage of a GOP health care bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, and the coming political consequences and an executive order by President Trump easing political restrictions on religious groups.
SUMMARY: French voters head to the polls Sunday in the second-round runoff between centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Macron has been buoyed this week by an endorsement by former President Obama and a solid debate performance. But Le Pen's anti-immigrant party continues to press its case. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.
SUMMARY: Two candidates facing off this weekend in the French presidential election runoff offer starkly different visions for the country. Centrist Emmanuel Macron supports immigration and the European Union, while the far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen wants to curb immigration and pull France out of the EU. Special Correspondent Christopher Livesay reports from France.
SUMMARY: One of the most divisive political campaigns in French history that had much of Europe on edge came to an end during Sunday's runoff election. Centrist Emmanuel Macron defeated his controversial opponent, the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Malcolm Brabant joins Hari Sreenivasan from Macron's campaign headquarters in Paris.
SUMMARY: Once a proud industrial town, Janesville, Wisconsin, was knocked for a loop in 2008 when General Motors idled its assembly plant, the area's long-time largest employer. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to Amy Goldstein, author of "Janesville: An American Story," about the complicated picture of how the town and its people have tried to recover and adapt.
SUMMARY: The summer movie season is about to kick into high gear, even though it's barely May. This year will see at least 15 blockbuster sequels, reboots or spin-offs, like “Guardians of the Galaxy” and from older franchises like "Spiderman," "Planet of the Apes," and "Pirates of the Caribbean." Jeffrey Brown talks to Alonso Duralde of TheWrap and Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post.
SUMMARY: Journalists around the world sometimes risk death or imprisonment to inform the public. In Mexico, dozens have been killed by drug cartels, the Turkish government has been cracking down by closing newspapers and locking up reporters, and U.S. reporters are enduring accusations of “fake news.” Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists joins William Brangham to discuss attacks on freedom.
SUMMARY: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that the company will add 3,000 more workers to monitor live video after problems with hate speech and violence, including murder and suicide. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times about the ever-growing scope of the social media network and the company's responsibility.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now questions about the ever-growing scope of Facebook's empire and social network, and whether the company is embracing enough responsibility for its reach.
Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they will add 3,000 more people to monitor live video, after problems with violence and hate speech.
Hari Sreenivasan takes it from there.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The decision comes after a series of cases where people shared live video of murder and suicide, recent examples, a murder in Cleveland last month that was posted live on Facebook, and a man in Thailand posted video of him murdering his 11-month-old daughter. It wasn't removed for 24 hours.
Once Facebook makes these announced hires, there will be 7,500 employees to monitor thousands of hours of videos uploaded constantly.
Farhad Manjoo is a tech columnist for The New York Times who has been closely covering Facebook. He joins me now to talk about this issue and other questions facing the company.
Farhad, so let's first — today's news, how significant is this?
FARHAD MANJOO, The New York Times: I think it's significant.
I mean, it's a significant sort of step up in their ability to monitor these videos, and it should help. The way it works is, there's lots of videos going on, on Facebook all the time. If somebody sees something that looks bad, that looks like it may be criminal or some other, you know, terrible thing, they flag it, and the flagged videos go to these reviewers.
And just having more of these reviewers should make the whole process faster. So, it should help. I mean, I think the question is why it took them a year to do this.
SUMMARY: President Trump has given a flurry of interviews in the past week and made a dizzying amount of news, offering controversial and sometimes contradictory comments on topics ranging from North Korea to the Civil War. Judy Woodruff tries parsing the President’s words with Lisa Desjardins, Yeganeh Torbati of Reuters, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times.
SUMMARY: In what ways is Richard Nixon still with us in our political culture? John Farrell, author of "Richard Nixon: The Life," joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss Nixon’s Dickensian childhood and how it influenced his polarized politics, his mix of idealism and inclination toward dark intrigue, as well as the revelation that Nixon helped sabotage the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War.
SUMMARY: Congress' first bipartisan deal of the Trump era is a massive spending deal that keeps government running through the fall and boosts funding for the Pentagon and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But to get needed Democratic votes on board, a number of President Trump's top priorities were cast aside. Lisa Desjardins joins William Brangham for a closer look.
SUMMARY: Congress was able to agree on a compromise deal to avert a government shutdown, but a bigger fight may come in the fall when the current spending bill runs out. Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Tamara Keith of NPR join William Brangham to discuss the spending deal, plus the current state of Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare and President Trump’s 100-day rally.
SUMMARY: South Sudan was founded in 2011, and now it's on the edge of collapse. Forces allied to the president and vice president have been fighting along tribal lines. Murderous raids on civilian communities are a favored tactic, and UN peacekeepers have been criticized for not doing more to stop them. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: Countless numbers of people in South Sudan are on the run from government troops, targeted because of their tribe amid a brutal civil war. Communities hide in the wilderness to avoid violence, but there is nothing to eat, fueling a man-made famine as aid agencies struggle to reach people. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
SUMMARY: Rape has become a tool of war in South Sudan, wielded against women of rival tribes. In partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports from a camp for people fleeing ethnic violence where most women are rape survivors and they don’t dare leave because they fear they will be violently assaulted.
SUMMARY: A startup no longer, Instagram boasts 700 million monthly active users and counting. As it grows, the free, photo-sharing mobile app is grappling with how to innovate and stay relevant, as well as how to foster a safe community. But with 95 million uploads a day, monitoring is a tall order. Judy Woodruff reports from California.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): The rapid rise of one of the world's biggest social media networks, Instagram.
It's building up steam, with 700 million people now using it each month, and it just took four months to pick up its latest 100 million new accounts.
But along the way, the company has faced concerns over how it can be used, and even some criticism for the way it essentially copied ideas from its rival, Snapchat.
Judy Woodruff recently got an inside look during her trip to Silicon Valley.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): One of the first things that greets you inside Instagram is, no surprise, a place to take pictures. The free photo-sharing mobile app was born in 2010 with its first post, a foot in a flip-flop alongside a stray dog.
Turns out it was taken in Mexico by co-founder Kevin Systrom.
KEVIN SYSTROM, CEO and Co-Founder, Instagram: It's a mixture of teams. So, we have got design teams, we have got partnership teams, we have got a community team, and then a bunch of engineers. We don't really have an organization.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Systrom showed us around Instagram's new offices in Menlo Park, California, designed to accommodate an ever-expanding staff.
You moved here six months ago; is that right?
KEVIN SYSTROM: Yes, six months ago, we moved from the original campus. And we designed this entire experience inside here to be cleaner, and a little bit more Instagrammy. So we have got the hip wood walls, and the polished concrete floors. It's very start-uppy, but it's in an Instagram way.
JUDY WOODRUFF: A start-up no longer, Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for a cool billion dollars. Then, the company had 13 employees. Now it has more than 600 to keep up with a rapidly growing user base, 700 million monthly active users and counting, 80 percent of them outside the United States.
How do you explain the phenomenal, rapid growth of this?
KEVIN SYSTROM: On Instagram, very early on, you would post an image, and anyone anywhere in the world could see that image, and understand what you were trying to say without speaking your language.
So, we like to say that Instagram was one of the first truly international networks in the world. And I think that's what's allowed it to scale to the hundreds of millions of people that use it every day today.
Since its launch in 2013, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet. Women are whores, blacks are inferior and a shadowy Jewish cabal is organizing a genocide against white people. The site can count among its readers Dylann Roof, the white teenager who slaughtered nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, and James Jackson, who fatally stabbed an elderly black man with a sword in the streets of New York earlier this year.
Traffic is up lately, too, at white supremacist sites like The Right Stuff, Iron March, American Renaissance and Stormfront, one of the oldest white nationalist sites on the internet.
The operations of such extreme sites are made possible, in part, by an otherwise very mainstream internet company — Cloudflare. Based in San Francisco, Cloudflare operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network, and the company’s mainstream clients range from the FBI to the dating site OKCupid.
The widespread use of Cloudflare’s services by racist groups is not an accident. Cloudflare has said it is not in the business of censoring websites and will not deny its services to even the most offensive purveyors of hate.
“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”
Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining.
This has led to campaigns of harassment against those writing in to protest the offensive material. People have been threatened and harassed.
ProPublica reached out to a handful of people targeted by The Daily Stormer after they or someone close to them complained to Cloudflare about the site’s content. All but three declined to talk on the record, citing fear of further harassment or a desire to not relive it. Most said they had no idea their report would be passed on, though Cloudflare does state on the reporting form that they “will notify the site owner.”
“I wasn’t aware that my information would be sent on. I suppose I, naively, had an expectation of privacy,” said Jennifer Dalton, who had complained that The Daily Stormer was asking its readers to harass Twitter users after the election.
Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content.
“We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”
ProPublica asked Cloudflare’s top lawyer about its policy of sharing information on those who complain about racist sites. The lawyer, Doug Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, defended the company’s policies by saying it is “base constitutional law that people can face their accusers.” Kramer suggested that some of the people attacking Cloudflare’s customers had their own questionable motives.
Hate sites such as The Daily Stormer have become a focus of intense interest since the racially divisive 2016 election — how popular they are, who supports them, how they are financed. Most of their operators supported Donald Trump and helped spread a variety of conspiracy theories aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton. But they clearly have also become a renewed source of concern for law enforcement.
In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chief Will D. Johnson, chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Human and Civil Rights Committee, highlighted the reach and threat of hate on the Internet.
“The internet provides extremists with an unprecedented ability to spread hate and recruit followers,” he said. “Individual racists and organized hate groups now have the power to reach a global audience of millions and to communicate among like-minded individuals easily, inexpensively, and anonymously.
“Although hate speech is offensive and hurtful, the First Amendment usually protects such expression,” Johnson said. “However, there is a growing trend to use the Internet to intimidate and harass individuals on the basis of their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, disability, or national origin.”
A look at Cloudflare’s policies and operations sheds some light on how sites promoting incendiary speech and even violent behavior can exist and even thrive.
Jacob Sommer, a lawyer with extensive experience in internet privacy and security issues, said there is no legal requirement for a company like Cloudflare to regulate the sites on their service, though many internet service providers choose to. It comes down to a company’s sense of corporate responsibility, he said.
For the most part, Sommers said, a lot of companies don’t want “this stuff” on their networks. He said those companies resist having their networks become “a hive of hate speech.”
Jonathan Vick, associate director for investigative technology and cyberhate response at the Anti-Defamation League, agrees. He said that many of the hosts they talk to want to get hate sites off their networks.
“Even the most intransigent of them, when they’re given evidence of something really problematic, they do respond,” he said.
Cloudflare has raised at least $180 million in venture capital since its inception in 2009, much of it from some of the most prominent venture capital firms and tech companies in the country. The service is what’s known as a content delivery network, and offers protection from several cyber threats including “denial of service” attacks, where hundreds of computers make requests to a website at once, overwhelming it and bringing it down.
Company officials have said Cloudflare’s core belief is in the free and open nature of the internet. But given its outsize role in protecting a range of websites, Cloudflare has found itself the target of critics.
In 2015, the company came under fire from the hacker collective Anonymous for reportedly allowing ISIS propaganda sites on its network. At the time, Prince, the company’s CEO, dismissed the claim as “armchair analysis by kids,” and told Fox Business that the company would not knowingly accept money from a terrorist organization.
Kramer, in an interview with ProPublica, reiterated that the company would not accept money from ISIS. But he said that was not for moral or ethical reasons. Rather, he said, Cloudflare did not have dealings with terrorists groups such as ISIS because there are significant and specific laws restricting them from doing so.
In the end, Kramer said, seedy and objectionable sites made up a tiny fraction of the company’s clients.
“We’ve got 6 million customers,” he told ProPublica. “It’s easy to find these edge cases.”
One of the people ProPublica spoke with whose information had been shared with The Daily Stormer’s operators said his complaint had been posted on the site, but that he was “not interested in talking about my experience as it’s not something I want to revisit.” Someone else whose information was posted on the site said that while she did get a few odd emails, she wasn’t aware her information had been made public. She followed up to say she was going to abandon her email account now that she knew.
“The entire situation makes me feel uneasy,” she said.
Scott Ernest had complained about The Daily Stormer’s conduct after Anglin, its owner, had used the site to allegedly harass a woman in the town of Whitefish, Montana. After his complaint, Ernest wound up on the receiving end of about two dozen harassing emails or phone calls.
“Fuck off and die,” read one email. “Go away and die,” read another. Those commenting on the site speculated on everything from Ernest’s hygiene to asking, suggestively, why it appeared in a Facebook post that Ernest had a child at his house.
Ernest said the emails and phone calls he received were not traumatizing, but they were worrying.
“His threats of harassment can turn into violence,” he said of Anglin.
Anglin appears quite comfortable with his arrangement with Cloudflare. It doesn’t cost him much either — just $200 a month, according to public posts on the site.
“[A]ny complaints filed against the site go to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare then sends me an email telling me someone said I was doing something bad and that it is my responsibility to figure out if I am doing that,” he wrote in a 2015 post on his site. “Cloudflare does not regulate content, so it is meaningless.”
Representatives from Rackspace and GoDaddy, two popular web hosts, said they try to regulate the kinds of sites on their services. For Rackspace, that means drawing the line at hosting white supremacist content or hate speech. For GoDaddy, that means not hosting the sort of abusive publication of personal information that Anglin frequently engages in.
“There is certainly content that, while we respect freedom of speech, we don’t want to be associated with it,” said Arleen Hess, senior manager of GoDaddy’s digital crimes unit.
Both companies also said they would not pass along contact information for people who complain about offensive content to the groups generating it.
Amazon Web Services, one of the most popular web hosts and content delivery networks, would not say how they handle abuse complaints beyond pointing to an “acceptable use” policy that restricts objectionable, abusive and harmful content. They also pointed to their abuse form, which says the company will keep your contact information private.
According to Vick at the ADL, the fact that Cloudflare takes money from Anglin is different from if he’d just used their free service.
“That’s a direct relationship,” he said. “That raises questions in my mind.”
Some companies offering other services vital to success on the web have chosen not to do business with Anglin’s The Daily Stormer. Google, PayPal and Coinbase, for instance, have chosen to cut off his accounts rather than support his activities. Getting booted around from service to service can make it hard to run a hate site, but Cloudflare gives the sites a solid footing.
And, by The Daily Stormer’s account, advice and assurances. In a post, the site’s architect, Andrew Auernheimer, said he had personal relationships with people at Cloudflare, and they had assured him the company would work to protect the site in a variety of ways — including by not turning over data to European courts. Cloudflare has data centers in European countries such as Germany, which have strict hate speech and privacy laws.
Company officials offered differing responses when asked about Auernheimer’s post. Kramer, Cloudflare’s general counsel, said he had no knowledge of employee conversations with Auernheimer. Later, in an email, the company said Auernheimer was a well-known hacker, and that as a result at least one senior company official “has chatted with him on occasion and has spoken to him about Cloudflare’s position on not censoring the internet.”
A former Cloudflare employee, Ryan Lackey, said in an interview that while he doesn’t condone a lot of what Auernheimer does, he did on occasion give technical advice as a friend and helped some of the Stormer’s issues get resolved.
“I am hardcore libertarian/classical liberal about free speech — something like Daily Stormer has every right to publish, and it is better for everyone if all ideas are out on the internet to do battle in that sphere,” he said.
Vick at the ADL agrees that Anglin has a right to publish, but said people have the right to hold to task the Internet companies that enable him.
“Andrew Anglin has the right to be out there and say what he wants to say. But the people who object to what he has to say have a right to object as well,” he said. “You should be able to respond to everybody in the chain.”
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's news, including an evaluation of President Trump's first 100 days in office, a lack of legislative traction in the Republican-led Congress, and public perception that Democrats are out of touch with Americans' problems.
