Get in touch with the national lawyers guild. They have people with a history of protecting left wing protestors.
Don't worry Beat. None of us are going to tell the feds you run chapo.chat on an old Commodore 64 in your basement.
Lol bunkerchan. That takes me back. I think they've split more times than us jajaja.
Lol the same bunkers where Albanians go for a quiet hump? :trot-shining:
That guy with the website ran on a Raspberry Pi in the closet:
:side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:Nothing but a Raspberry Pi and the neighbour's wifi.
:fidel-cool:
Hey Bill! Good weekend? Oh, that comcast still acting up? Yeah same here, bunch of bastards those guys.
Not sure about Lefty bonifides but Electronic Frontier Foundation might do some consulting, (possibly pro bono.)
Another page about EFF's legal assistance including contact information: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
Not a lawyer (yeah yeah I know) but am an accountant with plenty of education & experience in business law, taxes, and business formation (incl nonprofits). So I can't really give formal legal advice but research and filling out paperwork is literally my specialty.
I will say that "formally structuring" this website as literally anything besides a website sure does complicate things in a big way, idk how much the donations are bringing in but it's a whole thing. The first thing anyone says about forming a "business" (including a nonprofit) is you need a lawyer and an accountant so I'm just throwing that out there
the guys who host the ALAB podcast might be able to help, they're on Twitter probably
On Twitter there's a few leftist lawyers OTOH, @RespectableLaw, @bethbourdon, @The_Law_Boy. Maybe they'd know some lawyer comrades that could be able to help.
Not a lawyer
The ACLU and wikipedia have pretty good resources on the limits of protected speech in the US based on case law precedent and supreme court decisions. Lawyers will almost always err on the side of more caution than less as less risk and potential exposure for clients are good and their job is to protect their clients first and foremost which is why many large companies with certain legal risks have legal teams and go back and forth with the lawyers on risk to find an acceptable middle ground.
Mainly the problem would be real threats. For example if I say I am going to assassinate the Prime Minister of Kerplekistan (fictional nation btw) on his visit to the UN building Next Friday that could be taken as a "real threat". If I say that and name the street I claim I'll do it on and the approximate time his car will be passing that makes it a very serious and thought out threat. Same thing with more obscure threats towards the president. Saying I hope the Prime Minister of Kerplekistan drops dead or is hit by a bus or dies from the 'rona or is convicted at home and hung are all generally going to be protected speech. The last one is tricky when dealing with internal US matters as there is such a thing as incitement so saying you hope a mob lynches the US president is ehhh territory. Saying that plus naming a time and place makes it much more credible as incitement or a real threat as opposed to just being a hothead for which you can still be visited by the secret service over (provided the platform you do it on cooperates with authorities and isn't say based in Russia or Senegal and ignores the feds when they send a legal email) but may not be able to be prosecuted for successfully.
Anyways your concerns are two-fold. One your own exposure and that of the legal structure of the site, the second is the legal exposure of users of your site for their speech. In the case of the secret service investigating a threat to the president they would immediately care only for the user information so they could visit them. If you didn't hand that over they may drop the matter or they may try and start some legal trouble for you. So mods need to remove anything as serious at that immediately and ban the person for their own protection. Obviously the users here would prefer you could avoid handing over our information to the feds or anyone else for that matter.
As someone who has been watching internet crime, international crime, privacy, developments for some years the most important thing is not crossing bright red lines and making yourself a big fish threat.
If you make it reasonably difficult by structuring yourself legally outside their jurisdiction and hosting outside their jurisdiction they are going to shrug and give up trying to shut you down unless you are a real thorn in their side and/or cross bright red lines. They might still monitor you, they might send demanding emails but if they can't get to the company because of international boundaries and cannot find the person in the US or the person isn't in the US then they'll give up 9/10. The other 1/10 is probably asking friendly nations to take action against you but if you haven't broken local law and aren't a problem domestically they may or may not even bother looking into it. The exception is crossing bright red lines. Are you hosting terrorists, actual terrorists or violent separatists who have taken violent actions? Then they'll put in the extra effort. If you're just being edgy (upping the RA for instance which isn't even a threat actor in the US or one that has historically engaged against the US) they probably don't care. So in my inexpert (but somewhat more knowledgeable than most, again not a lawyer) opinion if we avoid hosting a blackbloc organizing /c/ community, ban people who make specific threats (wishing for death is not a threat), and don't become a dumping ground for new releases of classified leaked US material we should be fine.
That is assuming of course there are no new draconian laws that further criminalize speech under Biden, which who knows, but there still is the fact these places, DOJ, DHS, etc have limited resources, the standard is to ask for co-operation and if it isn't given they may have to move on to the next matter, if it's more serious they may try legal action which is why you ideally want to place yourself outside the legal clutches of the US so that once they send you legal notices you can ignore them and then they will mostly drop it there. And the question is whether we'll bend over for such infringements. It is possible for example they could try and designate antifa a terrorist group and lump us all in with them on the virtue of ideology. I'll understand if the current site-runners would fold at that point for their own safety but it's something to consider during planning of your legal strategy and attempts to protect yourself maximally not just from what the law is today but what it might be in a year, 3 years.
All this deplatforming happening to the reactionary Trump base is 99% NOT happening based on the fact they could successfully prosecute these people (for the speech, I'm not talking about the separate actions on the capital), it's based on the unwillingness of private companies to have violent content on their platforms which may lead to violent acts which reflects badly on them. There may be also problems on national security grounds for them as they're large American companies and the feds could try and pursue and give them trouble and expensive with national security charges or investigations, etc (these people are actively calling for the overthrow of government, the execution of specific government individuals, and have shown themselves to be not just a bunch of online talkers as they walked into the capital). Businesses have interests. One is not looking too badly to keep current and get future customers. Another is keeping the government off their back. Which is why hosting offshore and registering offshore are both good ideas because a business in Russia has less to care about the US government being angry about something and more to care about the Russian government being angry at them. This is why torrent sites host in far flung nations who don't give a fuck about a bunch of westerners paying one of their companies to allow them to pirate western media.
One last thing. National Security Letters. They include gag clauses which force cooperation and silence talking about it and allow them to force you at the threat of a lengthy jail term to implant spy software in your website to do what they want. These letters can also be sent to anyone, they do not have to be sent to the registered owner of a legal structure so if your lawyer in China holds title for this site but you in the US administer it they can send the letter to you in your role as having back-end access. Short of all personnel with such access living outside the US the best solution is a warrant canary. Trying to insulate yourself from easy legal discovery is still good though as I believe it is typically delivered via post or person so I don't believe they email them.
Dont talk about torrents, dont talk about marxism, dont talk about police violence, military imperialism, christian extremists, the violence of capitalism, ecology, antifa and you are good to go!
In many places you need to formally engage a lawyer for your conversations to be subject to attorney-client privilege.
If you think you might say something spicy, for example "I run a website and am concerned that someone on it might do a terorrism" then its absolutely worthwhile getting formal legal advice.
What would a lawyer even be able to do if every single major tech company were to persona non grata your website or service
I figured as much, I was just ruminating about the current state of the Internet out loud.
Nothing, but it would prevent actual legal action taken against the site owners and admins.
