So it appears that Rajat Khare is behind the shady Indian company Appin who appear to offer "hack for hire" services whilst fronting as a cyber security training company and aren't shy about using lawyers to manipulate the public record.
They're good at providing the services they offer insofar as they fulfill the contract, but these sorts of mercenary firms pretty much just phish people. They're quite good at it, but that is pretty much all they do.
I couldn't comprehend the content of the linked article, so I sought out the original piece from Reuters. Here's a concise summary:
- Appin, an Indian firm, is accused by Reuters of functioning as the e-commerce platform for hacking (similar to Amazon but for hacking). Users log in to a covert portal, place orders to hack into target mailboxes, make payments, and receive the delivered data.
- Appin received requests globally, including from RAW, IB, and the Indian military. However, when the Indian government detected financial irregularities, government contracts ceased. In desperation, Appin took on any available work, but it didn't survive.
- Despite Appin's demise, its former employees initiated similar ventures that are still active today.
Considering the involvement of the Indian government, I anticipated Appin and its founders to dispute the allegations, and they did. The article was subsequently removed, raising allegations of censorship.
The linked article discusses the backlash against this alleged censorship.
The timing of this article is intriguing, coinciding with the recent Pannun affair and now presenting another accusation, this time in the cyberspace. Reuters mentions that "The National Security Agency (NSA), which spies on foreigners for the U.S. government, began surveilling the company after watching it hack “high value” Pakistani officials around 2009, one of the sources said. An NSA spokesperson declined to comment." This may lead Indians to question: if the NSA can hack, why can't we?
>This may lead Indians to question: if the NSA can hack, why can't we?
So it's really straightforward, the Indian government can hack within the established global norms for spying, which they do. What isn't allowed to happen is NSA contractors losing their contract and pivoting to corporate espionage. There's no double standard here.
So, if you don't do business in India, why follow the court order?
I understand Reuters taking down the article, but why would Lawfare or other blogs comply? What could an Indian court possibly do to someone entirely outside of their jurisdiction? It seems like the most appropriate response is "no, and we're going to publish the demand letters," which is exactly what techdirt did.
Let Rajat Khare - the guy who is likely behind Appin - file in a US (or EU, or wherever) court. In the US, at least, he'd have to provide some evidence that the article isn't true, which he probably can't.
Fuck Rajat Khare and Appin, the hacking company he almost certainly controls.
> In the US, at least, he'd have to provide some evidence that the article isn't true, which he probably can't.
Realistically, he just has to be able to throw more money and lawyers at the situation than his opponents could. Maybe a bigger journalistic outfit could/would fight it, but the small blogs would probably be easy pickin'.
Reuters has many employees in India, and the Khare legal threats are issued by a US firm, Clare Locke, that describes its attorneys as "media assassins" [1] who have represented Russian oligarchs and people like Matt Lauer.
Well, the courts might not be able to do anything (unless some officer goes to India). But Rajat could direct his cadre of hackers at whoever ignores his demands.
How do you feel about people who don't do business in the US defying US court orders? Ignoring a court order may be something you can do, but it's generally not a good look.
I understand that US courts are not sovereign everywhere in the world, just as North Korea's courts are not sovereign everywhere in the world. So I guess I'd feel indifference.
Maybe, but the USA have more global reach than NK. Depending on how much those courts want to push their requests and where you live or travel to, you might even end up extradated to the USA.
I don't especially care, particularly in a case where someone is suing to hide (ostensibly truthful) reporting on their shady dealings. If a US person were doing this in another country, I'd expect them to be told to fuck right off.
Would you just accede to the dictates of a court in a country to which you have no connection? That a much worse look, imo.
> The judge in the case initially sided with Appin Training Centers, writing that the article could have a “devastating effect on the general students population of India.” He quickly ordered an injunction stating that Appin Training Centers can demand Reuters take down their claims about Appin Technology.
What devastating effects could possibly outweigh reporting on a company that does illegal hacking for hire?
In particular because Appin Training Centers was only incorporated several months after being named the plaintiff in the lawsuit, and appears to exist in order to facilitate these suits.
There are enough scamming companies in India hiring student leaving university with proper training for other jobs. Does it means we shouldn't take down those scamming companies because it hurts India economy?
Real big example of the Streisand Effect in play here. It seems this company got one ruling from one court in India serving as an injunction against one news agency reporting on them, and they then went on to try and leverage that into getting everyone to stop reporting on the entire situation, including the injunction itself.
That's not how injunctions work, that's not how international law works, and it has created a new cycle of news outlets being able to report on the fact that the company tried to gag them.
I'm having trouble figuring out which one of these articles has more information. Since the this one was posted earlier and is currently ranked higher on the frontpage, I guess it can be 'the one' for now. There are a bunch of techdirt-specific comments in the other thread that don't make sense to merge, so readers may want to check both.
Nitpicking, but at least in the US, you dont "own" a fund.
Instead, many limited partners LPs are contributing members and the GP has control of the day to day even though he rarely contributes in any significant %
No one owns that structure. The GP controls it but at the mercy of the LPs for any major decision.
If you truly had an individual owner of a "fund" , this most likely is describing some other structure like a family office, for example.
Thank you for your clarification. I was aware that a VC fund isn't as simple in structure as having an individual 'own' it, but I was using some shorthand. Maybe 'manage' would've been closer to the mark.
The difference between ads and news is that people will pay to publish ads and they will pay to keep news quiet.
It seems that we've built quite a capable ad machine. I wonder what it would look like if we built something for news. Certainly there would be less of this nonsense going on.
Like, kudos to those standing up to Appin, but the fact that facing down a bully is necessary at all is a design failure that I'd like to work to rectify.
Assange may have started out with pure intentions, but as he ran out of money, the only funding became available from the Kremlin. The cover for funding him was his show on RT, the Kremlin-funded English-language television station.
You might recall that Assange bragged about a huge dump of info about Putin and other Russian leaders/oligarchs that was soon to be dropped. It never did. It was either entirely BS from the start to provide cover, or existed but was withheld to keep happy his new sponsors.
You also may recall that the Wikileaks dumps of info stolen by Russian hackers on Hillary Clinton was miraculously released within hours of Trump's "I grabbed her by the pussy" tapes. A classic Russian disinformation move to distract the media, which was quite successful.
That's just glancing at a few highlights. By the time Wikileaks became significant, it was a straight-up Russian operation. It would have been a far better life decision for Assange to simply quit when he ran out of funds, than to sell out. Sad
Hmm, maybe that's actually why I pretty much started ignoring Wikileaks from some point on, to the point I even forgot about all this ?
Wikileaks was perhaps most significant in 2010/2011 (the Manning Iraq / Afghan War leaks)... but you're right, at the very least, looks like he had been a tool (in both senses of the word) of the Kremlin pretty close to that moment already :
The FSB might have had more means to convince Assange, than just money. But from what I remember with a interview with him, he seemed to entrench himself with the narrative that the US as superpower number 1, is the evil empire number 1 ( he has a anarchist, anti state background). So blinded by fanatism would be my assumption. So blinded, that he does not mind the open power abuse by those new allies. It is a phenomen, I often witnessed. More so now, with the various alternative rebells, against globalisation, power abuse etc. - and then finding all sorts of wild justifications for Putins Invasion in Ukraine. Black and white thinking, combined with double think, in all its glory.
I would argue that the capitol raid fanatics are anarchists as well, under the cover of being republican voters. They don't mind the open power abuse by the Kremlin as well.
The core issue I have with the power play on the internet is that it leads to isolationist behaviors on both sides, which in return stalls democratic approaches to finding a compromise in between both opinions.
"The core issue I have with the power play on the internet is that it leads to isolationist behaviors on both sides"
I am not sure if it is the fault of the internet and if this was better before, but the expectation was definitely that it helps bring people more together, not apart. All the various information, one click away. It takes really effort, to ignore all that and entrench in your bubble.
>A classic Russian disinformation move to distract the media, which was quite successful.
It's also basic PR. Hell, watching "The Thick of It" is enough to teach you that when a bad story comes out, try to use a different story as a distraction. That hardly requires Kremlin support.
True, it's just that the Russians have so embraced it as a standard procedure that it's a way of life that they've refined to an art form. And in this case, the release was actually coordinated with the Russians (ref activities of Roger Stone & Paul Manafort, incl public comments).
And yes, their apprentices on both sides of the oceans are learning well.
Just wanted to make sure that was clear.