When Parler, which made the news a lot prior to the presidential election last November,
was kicked off of its hosting provider for violating its rules, it, and other far right
Internet sites and apps turned to Washington-based hosting provider Epik.
According to news reports and Wikipedia, Epik was hacked in February of this year, following
the seige at the capitol on January 6th. The group apparently came away with tons and tons of
data which was not encrypted at rest.
The hacktivists exposed tons of account infomation, including financial records.
Government authorities were quick to request preservation of the data for use in investigating
the events of the capitol seige. In my estimation, the data's publication to the public domain
represents the exposure of the clockwork of myriad right-wing organizations. This should be worth
more than gold to the FBI in particular.
"The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive," said
Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism.
"Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to
accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm"
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
Epik's CEO — a man whose surname actually is Monster —
says he's interested in Net Neutrality. I am, too.
But I guess if Net Neutrality is what I really
want, then there must be room for Epiks in our world.
Besides, Epik should remind us that we're supposed to be living in a free country. People are free
to choose hosting providers, and hosting providers are free to impose whatever rules they want to
impose in their license agreements. It's a shame they got hacked — it's a bigger shame they didn't
protect their information better (Ashley Madison, anyone?) — which is something the FTC could
investigate.
I guess my point is, choice is choice and crime is crime. Epik represents freedom of choice here.
I vote that should be preserved, good, bad, or otherwise. People will choose to use Epik's services
like people will choose to become students of philosophies we don't agree with. Studying them is choice,
not crime; hurting others is crime. There's a certain logic to the argument that stopping the spread
of the philosophy will stop the crimes, but it also impinges on choice — and choice is what we're
supposed to be about here.