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2024-12-24 at 3:30 PM UTCgrabbing whose straws
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2024-12-24 at 7:42 PM UTCapparently I'm grabbing at his crusty old straw
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2024-12-24 at 8:59 PM UTCIn June 2013, it was revealed that Paltalk was targeted by the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program.
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2024-12-24 at 9:51 PM UTC
Originally posted by ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ In June 2013, it was revealed that Paltalk was targeted by the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program.
QFTThis article was published more than 11 years ago
Passport
The question at the center of the NSA’s data-mining program: What the heck is PalTalk?
Reports by the Washington Post and the Guardian on PRISM, a top-secret National Security Agency program that directly mines digital data from the servers of major Internet companies, raises big questions about the proper balance between privacy and national security, the true nature of the terrorist threat facing the United States, the role leaks play …
By Uri Friedman, a former deputy managing editor at Foreign Policy.
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June 7, 2013, 1:30 AM
Reports by the Washington Post and the Guardian on PRISM, a top-secret National Security Agency program that directly mines digital data from the servers of major Internet companies, raises big questions about the proper balance between privacy and national security, the true nature of the terrorist threat facing the United States, the role leaks play in a free press, and the legality of government surveillance. But they also bring an admittedly more minor question to mind: What in the world is PalTalk?
Let me backtrack a bit. Thursday’s reports include a slide from a PowerPoint presentation for senior NSA analysts that charts when the nine tech companies complying with the program signed up. A murderers’ row of Silicon Valley giants appears — with PalTalk sandwiched inexplicably in the middle.
The Washington Post and the Guardian don’t go into detail about why PalTalk is on the list, but the Post does offer this clue:
PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.
So what is PalTalk? Here’s how the (mostly) free instant messaging service, which was founded by Jason Katz in 1998, describes itself on its website:
Paltalk is the world’s largest video chat community, with more than 4 million active members. Paltalk provides video and chat capabilities that can facilitate virtual face-to-face interactions between individuals and between groups. It is the only provider that can support hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously, including thousands of people within a single chat room.
The Washington Post mentions that PalTalk has received substantial traffic during the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, but people have also raised concerns for years now about terrorists using its chat rooms (in 2012, for instance, the British press reported that four men plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange had made contact with each other through the service). In 2009, the year PalTalk reportedly began participating in the NSA’s program, a U.N. report on the “Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes” expressed concern about al Qaeda propaganda spreading in “debate groups such as Yahoo and PalTalk.”
That same year, PCWorld reported that terrorist networks were harnessing PalTalk for recruitment purposes:
Cyberterrorists are using a series of online forums and at least one social-networking site, PalTalk, to recruit people to their cause, Evan Kohlmann, a senior investigator and private consultant for Global Terror Alert, said at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York. Many of these people never actually meet in person, but conspire online to launch both cyberterrorist and physical terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings, he said….
[P]eople have actually used PalTalk, a chat-room hosting site, to host a live question-and-answer with people they alleged to be Al-Qaeda leaders, Kohlmann said. He said that he’s not sure if the company “actually realizes what is going on with their chat rooms,” but that the chat room in question is well known among members of jihadi forums.
“In this case, we are particularly talking about a single chat room, with a slightly-changing-but-mostly-static identifiable name, accessible via the official PalTalk chat room index,” he said via e-mail a day after his presentation in New York. “This chat room has been routinely advertised on jihadi Web forums, and it is used on a day-to-day basis to trade download links for Al Qaeda propaganda videos [and] terrorist instructional manuals … If the company hasn’t gotten a hint of any of this by now, then they really need to start re-considering their security policies.”
At the time, PalTalk responded to the charge that jihadists were exploiting its chat rooms, highlighting its constraints in taking down forums:
When asked if the company is aware of Al-Qaeda chat rooms, Judy Shapiro, vice president of marketing for New York-based PalTalk, said the company is aware that there are many political-discussion forums. However, if the chat occurring within those rooms does not violate the company’s terms of service for troublesome language, freedom of speech applies.
“We absolutely shouldn’t discriminate,” she said. “We can’t constrain people’s ability to say what they want. If someone says, I am the head of Al Qaeda, come talk to me, that’s perfectly legal.”
In its terms of service, PalTalk lists “unacceptable conduct” that would violate those terms as “threatening, harassing, or intimidating another user” or “transmitting any unlawful, threatening, abusive, profane, offensive, defamatory, or hateful text or voice communication or images or other material, or any racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable material, or any material that violates or infringes the intellectual property or privacy or publicity or other rights of any other party,” among other kinds of behavior.
PalTalk will take down a chat room with no warning if users report trouble to its moderators. “If someone said, how do I create a bomb I can [detonate] in Times Square,” that would obviously raise a red flag, Shapiro said.
In cases where “the level of language” would warrant an investigation, PalTalk would take whatever steps necessary to cooperate with law-enforcement officials or take down the site or both if there is good reason, she said.
(For what it’s worth, PalTalk’s terms of service don’t appear to have changed much since the report.)
All of which is to say: the NSA appears to have had its reasons for reaching out to PalTalk.
Update: PalTalk has issued a statement to the Wall Street Journal denying knowledge of the PRISM program — a stance several other tech firms referenced in the NSA slides have also taken. “We have not heard of PRISM,” the company told the paper. “Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users’ data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers.” -
2024-12-24 at 9:56 PM UTCWhen you have an unlimited cash flow, directly from the taxpayers, you can easily buy up any and all threats to the criminal establishment.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-12-24 at 10:13 PM UTCWell, the days of Tinychat are over. But the days of Paltalk have just begun.
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2024-12-24 at 10:19 PM UTCPaltalk has been captured by the deep state ghouls. Everything you say will be recorded for future use.
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2024-12-24 at 10:35 PM UTC
Originally posted by ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Paltalk has been captured by the deep state ghouls. Everything you say will be recorded for future use.
Paltalk was always a piece of shit. banners and shit being ran (to help fund it?)
Stickam was super fun. best and most stable. Justin.TV was also one of the first to stabilize web-casting. but tiny chat always had bandwidth issues. so I was super sad to see Justin.TV go after Stickam went. -
2024-12-24 at 10:38 PM UTCStickam was the first time someone said "Don't go out and drink and drive, Stay inside and have an online bar". this is where Online Bar chat became a thing. When I first joined I made "The Lounge" and then someone who made it before I did contacted Stickam and they took it away from me and I was super pissed because at first they kicked me out but then I became lounge pals with them. shit got weird. we had Titty Night and some cute women would come in and get drunk and shirts were coming off left and right. everyone had to take their shirts off but then some underage came in and or lurked and they shut it down and warned everyone not to do it again.
there was a user name Password who started the "Stanky Leg" (He got from some stupid rap song)
sounds lame sober but was super funny in the day.
I got some old videos of having an interesting chat .. Got to find it and post it -
2024-12-24 at 10:41 PM UTCThe people are always best to go with the little guy, and only up until he becomes the big guy. If it's a little guy, that means the pieces of worthless shit in the government haven't gotten to him... yet.
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2024-12-24 at 10:41 PM UTCMmm There was another incident on Stickam
Johnathan Hock
Dude fondled his girlfriend or had sex with her and streamed it live. thinking it was funny. dude went to prisonJune 3, 2009 — – A Phoenix man was arrested Monday after allegedly using a webcam to live-stream a video of himself raping his girlfriend of two weeks while she lay unconscious in her bed.
Johnathan Hock, 20, of Surprise, Ariz., faces charges of sexual assault, kidnapping and taking a surreptitious photo after the woman he is accused of raping reported the incident to authorities, according to a probable-cause statement filed Monday in Arizona's Maricopa County Superior Court and obtained by ABCNews.com.
The 20-year-old woman, who was not named in the filings, told authorities that she learned of the alleged assault and the video after "receiving numerous text messages from her friends," according to the statement.
After she was told about the video, which was allegedly filmed Feb. 26, the woman told authorities she logged onto the two sites where it had been allegedly posted, Stickam.com and Stickydrama.com, and found photos "of Johnathan Hock lying next to her as she was nude from the waist down," according to the statement.
The woman, who, according to the statement, had passed out for four to five hours as a result of drinking alcohol on the night of the alleged assault, said that she did not give Hock permission to perform the alleged acts. The statement also said that the victim had been dating Hock for two weeks before the assault.
Witnesses who viewed the video reported having seen Hock allegedly perform oral sex on the victim while she was asleep, according to the statement.
The Phoenix Police Department, which received a five-minute video from Stickum.com that they believed was incomplete, said in the statement that Hock allegedly made comments about how the victim was "completely passed out" and how he could "have sex with her without her knowledge."
Detective James Holmes at the Phoenix Police Department said that Hock is being held at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office jail. The lawyer for Hock, who requested an attorney before authorities were able to question him, is not yet known, Holmes said.
"Unfortunately, the way that things are in cyberspace and texting, I really feel that it was inevitable that something like this happened," he said.
Holmes confirmed that the videos have since been removed from the Web site but said that there are still images featuring Hock and a woman who they are not sure is the same woman who is making the allegations.
