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Thomas Moody II of Quantum Metric in Washington D.C.

eXpletiveArchive — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 19:13:35 -08:00

Thomas Moody II sent an email to eXpletiveArchive.com today claiming to have filed a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) after a failed attempted theft of services by means of extortion. Specifically, Moody made implied threats to file police complaints falsely accusing eXpletive Archive of extortion if he were not provided with removal services free of charge. In the state of Oregon, where the message was transmitted to, it is illegal to attempt to compel another to provide someone with a thing of value against their will out of fear that if the thing of value is not provided they will file a complaint with law enforcement. Oregon Revised Statute 164.075 (https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_164.075) governs extortion. The relevant part reads as follows: "A person commits the crime of extortion when the person compels or induces another person to either deliver property or services to the person or to a third person, or refrain from reporting unlawful conduct to a law enforcement agency, by instilling in the other person a fear that, if the property or services are not so delivered or if the unlawful conduct is reported, the actor or a third person will in the future: ... (d) Accuse some person of a crime or cause criminal charges to be instituted against the person." The Maryland extortion statute where Moody lives uses similar language (https://casetext.com/statute/code-of-maryland/article-criminal-law/title-3-other-crimes-against-the-person/subtitle-7-extortion-and-other-threats/section-3-705-extortion-by-verbal-threat). We believe that Mr. Moody violated the Oregon extortion statute by implying that he would accuse us of a crime if we did not provide him with services free of charge. The total dollar amount of the attempted theft is $29.99 which is the amount charged to perform removal services. Although Mr. Moody technically attempted to commit a felony we are not snitches, so we are going to be better men here and not report him to the police. Even if we were snitches we would still have a problem with subjecting someone that appears to be a person of color to the presence of a police officer for such a petty offense. We have a disagreement at the moment, but we don't want anything bad to happen to him. The only plausible defense Mr. Moody could try to raise at a trial would be one of only threatening to report what he believed to be a crime if he were not given something he had a legal claim of right to. For instance, if he were a clerk at a store and threatened to call the cops if a customer did not return a stolen candy bar that is not a crime, but it is a crime to demand that the clerk give you something for free even if you feel entitled to it. You can't drink a beer, tell the bartender it sucked, and threaten to report the place for health code violations if not given a refund. Nobody has the right to have accurate quotations of themselves taken down when used in a context of comment or criticism. If a website has the right not to remove something they also have the right to offer to remove it for a fee. In this case our bot merely detected use of an ethnic slur by a Twitter user and added it to an archive consisting of statements made by social media users containing the ethnic slur in question. The bot usually copies the full statement containing the ethnic slur, takes a screenshot, and includes the author's name with a link to their profile. This was the case with Mr. Moody when he demanded removal of the page. We reviewed the page and determined that it accurately documented him using an ethnic slur as he used it. He seems to think that because of his claimed ethnicity that he should be entitled to free removals whenever he is caught using the particular ethnic slur that he used. Unfortunately for Mr. Moody we lack the resources necessary to manually review about 20,000 pages of people using the ethnic slur that he used just to figure out which ones appear to be of a certain race when it is not necessary to do so in order to document use of an ethnic slur accurately. We are looking for an automated solution that would significantly reduce the number of individuals whose use of ethnic slurs pertaining to ethnic groups they themselves appear to belong to are aggregated by the bot, but that requires that we first locate a tested dataset of keywords capable of identifying the specific ethnic group based on their speech with a high degree of certainty. We think that developing such a solution could have far reaching benefits beyond just our site, but right now we have yet to find a dataset perfected for such purposes and don't have time to do the amount of analysis necessary to create such a dataset in the first place. As an educated man with a business degree, Mr. Moody should know the importance of not making decisions too quickly or doing what seems easiest at the time. He seems to think that the easiest option is to remove the page about him because of the stink he will raise if we don't do what he wants. In such a scenario the only thing making removing a page the easiest option would solely be due to circumstances created by Mr. Moody in an effort to scare us into doing what he wants. We have never done that before and we won't do it now. Mr. Moody should have learned in Business 101 that incurring unnecessary costs in not the right choice for a business. What form those costs manifest themselves as or for what purpose is not relevant. We could be talking about actual monetary expenses necessary to pay someone to respond to complaints like his or the opportunity cost associated with responding ourselves. In either case if doing what he wants is not necessary then doing what he wants in not the right decision. That is not to say that removing stuff is never good for business, but there has to be a reasonably direct relationship between the bottom line and the removal. For instance, in cases of pornography we remove it as soon as we become aware of it because we are not running an adult site and do not wish to be categorized as such by search engines. If it were not for that then it wouldn't make sense to remove porn either unless knowingly hosting it were a crime. Mr. Moody claimed that our site contains revenge porn, but refused to give us a single URL. We asked him to set our differences aside for the benefit of revenge porn victims and send us the URLs so that we could investigate, but he wouldn't do it. He seems to think that we were somehow liable to do a content audit the second he made the revenge porn claim. At one point he said, "That's the thing about aggregators, ya never quite know what's on your site. I'm sure that they will be reaching out about it! Have a wonderful evening!" That statement proves that Mr. Moody knows or at least should know that we are not knowingly hosting revenge porn, so if he did in fact find revenge porn on the site and accuse us of knowingly hosting it he would be making a false report. We are not going to attempt to manually review nearly 300,000 pages because one guy claims to have seen revenge porn on just one of them. If you know of any links on the site with porn please send them to us. We are now writing this article because we are following standard operating procedure for dealing with people that file complaints against us with government agencies. That procedure is to criticize them for their complaints online. We have a First Amendment right to criticize people for working with the government. Finally, Mr. Moody seems to think we are arrogant for thinking that we don't have to comply with his demands or that he can't shut us down if we don't. Mr. Moody was likely unaware that the founder of eXpletive Archive successfully defeated a federal challenge to a similar service on a different website years ago, but was convicted of a lesser offense unrelated to that business model. As such he knows that his business is not illegal because it has survived judicial scrutiny in federal court. In fact, when Mr. Moody's Tweet was picked up by the eXpletive Archive bot the founder of the site was on active federal supervised release, probation received complaints about his business regularly, and the AUSA assigned to the case repeatedly told people like Moody that no crime was committed. If he had committed a crime he would have been charged with violating the condition of supervision which prohibits new criminal conduct. Despite the court's understanding that the business is legal it was still used against him to justify keeping him on supervision longer, but despite that he was still terminated early for good behavior. Nothing about the operation has changed since he got off supervision. Mr. Moody's complaint will likely find itself on the desk of the same AUSA that has been telling people no crime has been committed for the past three years.
Learn more: Thomas Moody II of Quantum Metric in Washington D.C.

Official Notice to Congressman Joseph Crowley

NoLimitList.com — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:07:29 -07:00

In response to a threat created by him against the No Limit List network Representative Joseph Crowley of New York's 7th Congressional District is officially being put on notice that he is at risk of being declared an enemy of the No Limit List Project. If an enemy of the project is a member of the United States House of Representatives named Joseph Crowley then No Limit List may dedicate all resources available to removing that representative from his office before his term is up unless he agrees to leave his office immediately and never set foot in it again. The best way for a member of Congress to avoid being declared an enemy of the project is to optimize his or her behavior so that it does not conflict with the objectives of the project. We were willing to consider a cessation of attacks by Representative Joseph Crowley against Prototype C as optimal behavior by an individual not in need of further optimization until today's incident for which we demand a public apology. In the event that Representative Joseph Crowley engages in further hostilities against the No Limit List network which includes its prototypes Crowley and anyone aiding him in his endeavors may be subject to retaliatory mischief. On May 8, 2012 Crowley launched a noise pollution attack against Prototype C on MSNBC for which Crowley will be the target of minor mischief.
Learn more: Official Notice to Congressman Joseph Crowley

Yes We Can My Ass! Where are the Jobs?

USAPatriot — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:57:20 -07:00

As of August Barack Obama has been in office for over 2 1/2 years without creating a single job with his stimulus bill and other junk that he said would make the economy better. I'm not an economist or an employment expert, but I do know what zero means and when it involves an important campaign promise I don't consider that a kept promise. Maybe if Obama spent less time drinking beer and smoking cigarettes then he might accomplish something. So far "yes we can" sounds more like a half truth version of "yes we can do nothing".
Learn more: Yes We Can My Ass! Where are the Jobs?

Post FTC Complaints Against Unconstitutional Censorship

NoLimitList.com — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:41:55 -07:00

NLL recently found out that the Federal Trade Commission has issued an unconscionable edict against American bloggers in violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The discovery was made while working on an article about the believability or lack thereof when it comes to information you read on the internet at which point we realized that the federal government has attempted to empower an agency called the FTC to issue edicts in violation of the constitution on the grounds that such edicts protect idiots in society from their own stupidity by forcing subject businesses to speaks words that they do not wish to utter. In the good old days online marketers always felt free to do their jobs by assuring web users that they would always be given the best facts about a product carefully selected to fit their needs. If you are a smart consumer then you should already know that despite the quality of the facts presented to you that more investigation is needed to make an educated purchase decision because you should already know that you should never believe anything your read on the internet. If you think otherwise then you are no better than that dumbass uncle in Napoleon Dynamite who bought a time machine online that shocked Napoleon in the crotch instead of back to 1982. If you don’t do your own homework when buying online then you have no one except for yourself to blame for getting burned, unless the creep that burned you actively gave you false information so cleverly presented that it could fool a genius. Consumers owe it to themselves to thoroughly evaluate everything they see online and should accept responsibility for not scrutinizing what they see instead of making the tax payers pick up the slack for their lack of due diligence. Now what exactly is this new "rule" by the FTC? We put "rule" in quotes because due to server location this website falls outside the jurisdiction of the FTC and because they act as if their "rules" are laws even thought technically they are not. The "rule" states that American bloggers cannot share positive opinions about a good or service unless they also include material connections they share with the owner of the good or service. In some cases this may be a good thing to do on your own because it builds trust with readers, but in other cases it subject honest bloggers to unnecessary hassles. Imagine if your friend promised you free beer for a night if you wrote a positive review of their bar containing facts that made you like the place already and found yourself the subject of an investigation for engaging in free speech just because you didn't mention something that the reader didn't need to know. Now in some cases people should know about material connections, but only if people are making claims that they wouldn't other wise make when asked about a good or service. For instance if you hate your friend's bar because it sucks and they give you free beer to write a positive review of the bar anyway then you definitely should be required to disclose the fact that you're only recommending it because you got free beer for doing so. This differs form the previous scenario where material incentive is the incentive that finally motivates the blogger to post true feelings. Unfortunately this new "rule" puts makes it difficult for bloggers to recommend stuff they have used and truly like without ruining the legitimate appearance of their true feelings with some kind of notice that they were paid to review the product. To help bloggers otherwise silenced or ruined by this horrible edict No Limit List extending an invitation for them to use our services because our site disclaimers clearly cover the fact that a conflicting commercial interest should always be assumed wherever one could possibly exist. The added fact that we have sections clearly designated for advertising commercial interests make it easy for people to advertise goods and services in a format where they won't have to worry about disclosing the obvious fact that no reasonable person would post anything in sections labeled jobs, services, or shopping without the intent to profit. Conclusion The FTC is attempting to stop honest bloggers from engaging in free speech and we are here to help. Bloggers who feel like they can no longer speak their minds about a good or service without adding content they don't wish to see on their blog are welcome to use our sections where commercial interests are assumed and clearly disclaimed. If the FTC really wants to protect stupid consumers then they should teach them how to scrutinize information and protect themselves because that would do more sense than going on wild goose chases for bloggers recommending stuff. Take down a blog and idiots won't have a post to read. Teach idiots how to scrutinize and they will read, evaluate, and disregard posts for a lifetime.
Learn more: Post FTC Complaints Against Unconstitutional Censorship