Saturday, August 19, 2017

Purge Begins: Cloudflare Terminates Service to Cody Wilson’s GhostGunner Website



A day after Cloudflare removed service to the Daily Stormer, it has now terminated service to Cody Wilson’s website GhostGunner.net, Wilson announced on Twitter:






Yesterday the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that this behavior to remove offensive speech is a dangerous path for technology companies to go down.


EFF lawyers wrote:



In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.”


We agree. Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with.




It appears that Wilson, the inventor of the first successful 3D-printed gun, is ready for a fight. He goes directly after Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince on Twitter.






Never one to back down from a challenge, when PayPal and others dropped service to his Defense Distributed project, Wilson turned to bitcoin to fund his operation. Because of that, Wilson worked to develop an anonymous wallet for the cryptocurrency called Dark Wallet. Wilson is also in a legal battle against the State Department over whether CAD files for printable gun designs fall under gun manufacturing laws.


Wilson continued to savage Cloudfare’s Prince on Twitter:










Wilson also recently launched Hatreon, a tongue-in-cheek competitor to Patreon which recently banned “hate speech” from its platform.


Newsweek wrote this about Hatreon:



Finding funding on the internet is hard—especially if your ideas are despised by almost everyone. Just ask members of the so-called alt-right, the pro-Donald Trump white nationalist movement that received considerable attention during the 2016 presidential election. These guys often get barred from online funding platforms like Patreon, GoFundMe and PayPal.


Enter Hatreon, a new crowdfunding service. Like Patreon, Hatreon allows users to donate money to their favorite internet personalities, while the website takes a small cut. But Hatreon doesn’t have any “hate speech” restrictions. Which is perhaps why it’s attracted controversial figures such as alt-right leader Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin, founder of neo-Nazi news site The Daily Stormer.


In 2014, PayPal cut off Anglin from its service for promoting “hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime,” according to an email from the company that Anglin published on his site. The Daily Stormer is looking for new funding because it is being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for organizing a harassment campaign against a Jewish woman in Montana. (In an email, Anglin took issue with the argument that his First Amendment speech could be limited because private businesses are free to deny someone service.)



As an activist entrepreneur, whenever Wilson gets annoyed by petty power, he seems to build a new business to help others expand personal liberty. We look forward to what he builds out of this challenge.


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