Google Turns Over Identities of Bloggers on Benfica
Google Turns Over Identities of Bloggers on Benfica
Benfica’s enormous popularity in Portugal has taken a hit
the past year as blogs released damaging confidential information about the
club.
By Tariq Panja Oct. 23, 2018
Google Inc. and other internet service providers have
turned over confidential user information to a Portuguese soccer team that may
help it identify anonymous bloggers who have written about allegations of
wrongdoing against the serial national champion Benfica.
The information was turned over as part of a lawsuit
Lisbon-based Benfica filed earlier this year in United States District Court in
California as part of an effort to stop the bloggers.
Benfica has been battling a tide of leaked information
for much of the past year that has cast a negative shadow over Portugal’s
biggest club. The leaks have been drip-fed onto a specially created website
since December 2017, producing sensational headlines and leading to a crisis
within a club that counts some of the country’s most important politicians and
business figures as members.
However, Benfica was unable to stop the leaks through
Portugal’s legal system. So the club, a two-time European champion, turned in
April to California’s courts. It issued subpoenas to Google and a handful of
other companies that own the platforms used by the bloggers.
The efforts have paid off. “We only confirm that we made
agreements with those digital platforms,” said a spokesman for Benfica. He
declined to provide further details of the information the team received.
In a statement, Google said it complied with the legal
process. “Google gave notice to impacted users who then had an opportunity to
challenge the legal process in a U.S. court,” said a spokeswoman for the company.
The owner of the popular Artista do Dia blog is among
those whose user identity has very likely been passed on to Benfica by Google.
He received an email from Google in September telling him he could try to quash
Benfica’s demand through a legal challenge.
Faced with thousands of dollars of legal fees, the
author, whose identity The New York Times has confirmed, was able to only reply
with an impassioned email, in which he outlined that he had not been
responsible for the leak, and like many others, had written about a subject of
enormous public interest.
“I thought Google and billions of users of Google
services were protected by a company with principles and, above all, respect
for users who trust their platforms,” said the writer, a professional services
worker with two children. “I think it opens a very serious precedent that will
only allow those with financial possibilities to remain anonymous.”
Benfica’s status within Portugal is immense. The team
counts at least half of the country’s 10 million citizens as fans, the weight
of which gives it a greater cultural and social significance than most ordinary
sports teams. Even in good times, details of exploits inside its Estadio da Luz
home dominate local media.
The leaks, which began last year, have purported to show
influence peddling schemes that targeted top soccer officials and, perhaps most
worryingly for the club, efforts to influence the refereeing system. Benfica
denies wrongdoing. It has separately been charged with illegally obtaining
confidential information from a mole working inside the justice ministry.
The bloggers’ cases are not without precedent. They are
similar to a years long legal battle between Chevron and internet providers
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in which the company sought identity information
belonging to activists, attorneys, journalists and others who have spoken out
against the company.
Albert Gidari, consulting director of privacy at the
Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said under current regulations Google
had little option but to comply with Benfica’s subpoena. Internet companies get
hundreds of thousands of similar requests, said Gidari, who spent 20 years
representing some of the world’s biggest technology companies including Google.
“It isn’t scalable to know what’s behind each case,” he said.
Google already goes “one step beyond” what it is required
to do by giving notice of the subpoena to users, he added.
Benfica’s search for the bloggers and web users has
dominated the headlines since The New York Times first reported on the issue
earlier this month. Benfica fans have also tried to unmask the identity of
those behind the blogs. In at least one case, the name and photograph of a man
suspected of being one of the bloggers was widely circulated on the internet
but turned out to be wrong.
Fans of Benfica’s rivals, Sporting Clube de Portugal and
F.C. Porto, are behind most of the blogs the team is targeting for legal
action. Benfica alleges the two other teams are part of a conspiracy to
discredit it, a claim that is typical in soccer in Portugal, where club
executives frequently launch allegations against one another. The leaks first
appeared on a weekly television show on Porto’s channel, before a website
called O Mercado de Benfica appeared in December 2017.
Porto’s communications director Francisco Marques said he
received the data anonymously from an individual purporting to be a fan of the
club. Marques said he passed all the files he received to the police. He
suspects the website publishing the leaked information is run by the same
person.
In its lawsuit in California, Benfica claimed the details
published online were “trade secrets” that buttressed its success in winning
championships and cultivated an academy system that generated “more than any
other club in the world” in player sales this decade. The claim did not mention
police raids on Benfica’s offices or ongoing investigations into alleged
results manipulation and corruption it faces.
“Despite commencing numerous actions, both civil and
criminal, in Portugal, Benfica has thus far been unable to stem the tide of
stolen information or identify the thieves. It is clear to Benfica that only
with the cooperation of the hosting organizations will Benfica be able to stop
the campaign to discredit it,” its U.S. lawyers wrote.
Gidari, the former privacy lawyer, said the suit seemed
similar to others brought by other large organizations confronting the public
disclosure of damaging information.
He added that though in some cases there may be valid
reasons behind subpoenas, they are often “strategic lawsuits brought to silence
critics.”
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