The Empire's Underlings Frown On (Their Own) Accountability

Who knew...?

I received the following email from YouTube on 11/24/2010.

Dear bikerbillnh,

This is to notify you that we have received a privacy complaint from an individual regarding your content:

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Video URLs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPIgDVLpzKU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9QvKwfRg_I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPIgDVLpzKU
The information reported as violating privacy is at 0:23

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We would like to give you an opportunity to remove or edit your video so that it no longer potentially [emphasis mine] violates the privacy of the individuals involved. You can edit your video by removing names and other personal information from the video's title, metadata or tags. Annotations or marking the video as private are not acceptable forms of editing and your video will still be at risk of removal. Please edit or remove the material reported by the individual within 48 hours from today's date. If no action is taken, the video will then come in for review by the YouTube staff and be prohibited from being uploaded again.

If the potential privacy violation is contained within the metadata or title of the video, you should be able to edit this content without video removal. If the potential privacy violation is within the video content, the video may have to be removed completely.

Protecting a person's privacy is protecting their personal safety. When uploading videos in the future, please remember not to post someone else's image or personal information without their consent. Personal information includes things like names, phone numbers, and email addresses. For more information, please review our Community Guidelines at
http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines and our Safety Center at
http://www.youtube.com/t/safety

Regards,
The YouTube Team

Interesting that there seems to be no opportunity for rebuttal offered: "There's been a complaint. Must be valid. Take it down or edit it, or we will. As to the specific complaint and its source (which might help identify the "offense"), you're required to guess. Tick, tick, tick..."

"[T]he video will then come in for review ... and be prohibited from being uploaded again."
-YouTube-

"We're gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first class hangin'."
-Sheriff Cobb-

So what is the complaint, exactly? Is the alleged start point really identical for both? This we don't know.

They're my 2 videos from the 11/13 "Tilting at Windmills" protest at the Concord Fed building, and :23 appears to be the approximate start of footage in each, or the entrance, stage right, of "Our Heroes." My best guess is that the taxfeeding public employee who nominally "engaged" us in "Silent Propaganda Minister" complained to YouTube that somebody'd posted his name (and contract employer -- like, you know, they'd do, and more, in an MSM news report to one of their "suspects") in the video comments (hey! the Feds are watching my videos! and reading the comments!).

'Course, pulling the video wouldn't remedy that issue, now would it? And I'd just put it back up at blip.tv, with a link from YouTube, and a new blog post. In the mean time, I used YouTube's functionality to add a text box over my simple inquiry into his identity at the end:

Turns out self-important police state taxfeeders apparently don't like it so much when THEIR EMPLOYERS ask such questions ABOUT THEM. Welcome to OUR world...

Now, why the other video is included in the complaint is even less clear, as the previously referenced thug doesn't say anything in it, and he's not ID'd in any way, even in the comments (although I'd have to assume that complaint's also his). And the other taxfeeder, the disingenuously gregarious one, claims to love the attention. Surely he wouldn't lie to us...

Oh, and YouTube? Images are protected -- in other words, you don't need to worry about government ordering them taken down. If you really don't support the 1st Amendment rights to speech and press, perhaps you should just come out and say so...

EDIT: One more point: I find it telling that the authoritarian's very first, knee-jerk resort for redress (even, presumably, if it had merit, in this case) is always to "call the authorities." He needs "Big Brother" just to manage to live his life.