Alex Jones / Info Wars

[John Albert]

The plaintiffs did NOT request the entire contents of Infowars’ servers.  They requested only information relevant to the case at hand. It was the responsibility of Info wars and it’s attorneys to determine which items were relevant and turn them over; instead they sent the entire contents as a fuck-you to the plaintiffs, to increase the burden on them.

Kind of like the mythical deadbeat dad who, when forced to pay back child support, delivered it in the form of a trash can full of small change covered in motor oil.

That was not appropriate behavior, though it was not sanctionable.  If they had done as they were supposed to and send only relevant materials, they would themselves have discovered the pornographic images and they could have reported them themselves. As it is, they (unwittingly, I’m sure) retransmitted the images and left the plaintiff’s attorneys no choice but to report the images.  They did everything exactly as they were supposed to do; it’s Infowars and Alex Jones that have been misbehaving throughout.

It's obvious just by listening to Alex Jones' show, that the Infowars corporate culture involves performing the absolute minimum due diligence of any task at hand. Despite Alex Jones' frequent boasting about all the "research" he does, it's clear that he doesn't even bother to read past the headlines of the news items he discusses on air.

[stands2reason]

The thing that confuses me is that the data in question was described as metadata, which I wouldn't expect to contain attachments. Unless, by metadata they mean thumbnails generated by the email server. It sounds like the lawyers explicitly said they received an illegal image, not just going by a filename in the metadata or something.

[John Albert]

When Alex screamed about publishing the "metadata" for armchair investigators to use, I took that to mean the Internet routing data from the email headers.

Based on my understanding of email systems, I assume the contraband images were embedded as attachments and possibly linked in the message body via inline HTML. But because the emails were caught by Infowars' spam servers and never opened by a user, the embedded files never got rendered as visual images or stored in any browser caches.

[The Latinist]

As I understand it, the subpoena asked for metadata but Jones’ lawyers sent raw E-mails to make it harder and more expensive for the plaintiff’s team.

[Jeremy's Sea]

Whomp Whomp
https://www.thedailybeast.com/infowars-former-staffer-we-made-up-shariah-law-threat-stories

Next thing they'll admit is that the government isn't turning frogs gay in an effort to make men more effeminate and easily controlled...

A former staff member at Alex Jones’s far-right conspiracy site Infowars has admitted to making up stories for Jones about the threat of Shariah law within the U.S. Writing for The New York Times, Josh Owens expressed his regret for helping Jones spread Islamophobic misinformation. The former Infowars video editor said that he made up lies about Islamberg, a Muslim community north of New York City, and accused it of harboring terrorists. After being told in interviews that the people of Islamberg were “kind, generous neighbors,” Owens writes that they decided to lie. “The information did not meet our expectations, so we made it up, preying on the vulnerable and feeding the prejudices and fears of Jones’s audience,” he wrote. “We ignored certain facts, fabricated others and took situations out of context to fit our narrative.” The fabrications led to headlines such as “Shariah Law Zones Confirmed in America,” “Report: Obama’s Terror Cells in the U.S.,” and “The Rumors Are True: Shariah Law Is Here!” Owens writes that he quit soon after the Islamberg assignment.