Fraudulent DMCA Takedown Submitted to Hide Details of Felony Domestic Violence Arrest of Premise CEO Delwin Maury Blackman
A pseudonymous account claiming to represent Premise CEO Delwin Maury Blackman submitted a fraudulent DMCA Takedown request in an attempt to hide details of Mr. Blackman's felony arrest.
On the afternoon of Friday, October 6th, a pseudonymous online account began sending emails demanding takedowns of the author’s previous reporting on the felony domestic violence arrest of Delwin Maury Blackman, the CEO of the covert gig-work surveillance firm Premise Data. Using purposefully sloppy English and a pseudonym of “Christian Ericsen” — along with a differently spelled email address of “ericssenchristian@gmail.com” — the account asserted its connection to Mr. Blackman by stating that “I’m representative Mr.Blackman on the online community”.
By Thursday, October 12th, the nominal representative of Mr. Blackman escalated to attempting to bribe the author to take down the reporting critical of Mr. Blackman, asking “How much you want for removing?” The same day, ‘Mr. Ericsen’ began submitting fraudulent abuse reports to Digital Ocean, a cloud service provider which was being used to host an external copy of Mr. Blackman’s felony arrest. Initially claiming that the file was abusive as a result of the alleged domestic violence it described, Mr. Blackman’s apparent representative further escalated to committing perjury by filing a fraudulent takedown request through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Although, this time, he would spell his last name as “Ericssen” and, bizarrely, falsely digitally sign the DMCA takedown using the name of the author of this article, Jack Poulson. (The phone number associated with the takedown request, 812-651-1989, is non-functional, and the address fragment, “3832 Heliport Loop”, appears to be similarly made up.)
Despite the clearly fraudulent and malformed nature of the DMCA takedown request allegedly submitted on behalf of Mr. Blackman — whom has held a security clearance as a result of his company’s covert surveillance work with U.S. Special Operations Forces — Digital Ocean nevertheless complied with the fraudulent request to minimize its own legal liability. Even a cursory inspection reveals that the document in question for the copyright claim was created by the San Francisco Police Department, and is therefore a public record, and that the document was signed using a fraudulent digital signature: that of the author being harassed by the fraudulent DMCA request. Despite these glaring details, Digital Ocean was unresponsive to a request for comment on whether it protects journalists from harassment through fake DMCA takedown requests. (To prevent any censorship of the document, it has been directly embedded in this article as well.)
The public affairs office of U.S. Special Operations Command — which Mr. Blackman’s company frequently contracts with — did not respond to a request for comment on whether felony domestic violence arrests or the targeted harassment of journalists through fraudulent DCMA takedown requests violates any Department of Defense policies for holding a security clearance.
Appendix
A complete copy of the original DMCA takedown request notification submitted by the pseudonymous representative of Premise CEO Delwin Maury Blackman, ‘Christian Ericssen’ / ‘Christian Ericsen’, follows:
Hello,
This notice is to inform you that material posted on one or more of your Droplet(s), was the subject of a notification of claimed copyright infringement pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). A copy of that notice is included below.
As you know, DigitalOcean provides hosting service to your Droplet, but is not responsible for the content hosted on it. Copyright infringement is expressly forbidden by our terms of service. DigitalOcean takes seriously the DMCA notices it receives and expects its customers to do the same.
Accordingly, no later than 3 days from today, you must certify in writing that you have removed or disabled access to the material identified in the attached DMCA notice. If we do not hear from you within 3 days, we may disable access to the Droplet without further notice.
Please let us know if you have questions about this issue or would like additional information.
Regards.
Security Operations Center
DigitalOcean
-----------------------nixos-web-server
138.197.60.145
Type of Abuse: dmca
Copyright Owner's Full Name: Jack Poulson
Reporter Full Name: Christian Ericssen
Address: 3832 Heliport Loop
Phone Number: +1 812-651-1989
Email Address: ericssenchristian@gmail.com
URL(s) of the infringing content: https://techinquiry.org/docs/BlackmanPoliceReport.pdf
Police report not for publication
URL(s) and/or a description of the original content: https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/the-covert-gig-work-surveillance
Original article about this incident
By checking this box, you attest, under penalty of perjury, that (1) you have a good faith belief that use of the material in this report is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; (2) you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner; and (3) you understand, under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), that you may be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys fees, if you knowingly materially misrepresent that the material you are reporting is infringing: true
Digital Signature: Jack Poulson
ref:!00Df2018t5m.!5004P02KJv7Z:ref
Out of curiosity, can an average citizen get the unredacted police report or does one need to be a reporter? This is a fascinating story that is only getting more interesting.