Maybe Your Lawyers Shouldn’t Tell Reporters You Did Not Engage In ‘Conspiracy To Or Complicity In Murder’ When No One Was Claiming Otherwise

Sometimes my “I have not participated in any conspiracy to or complicity in murder” t-shirt raises a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

Remember Rajat Khare? He’s the guy associated with Appin Technologies in India, and there’s a pattern of stories mentioning his name suddenly disappearing (or his name disappearing from them) after his various lawyers get involved. Could be a coincidence. Might not be.

We had written about Appin successfully getting an Indian court to order Reuters and Google to remove a story about Appin last year based on a preliminary court ruling. Then we received a bunch of emails from Appin demanding we remove our article. A few weeks ago, we (with help from EFF) told Appin that we were under no obligation to do so.

Reporter Andy Greenberg at Wired wrote about all of this the day we released our response. Now, a couple of weeks later, Wired has updated their story to note that Khare’s lawyers had contacted them two weeks after the story had gone up (despite Greenberg having reached out to Appin and receiving no response) to complain about not having been asked for comment, calling Wired’s story defamatory, and demanding a retraction.

There was something else too:

Neither Appin Training Centers nor Rajat Khare responded to WIRED’s request for comment. However, two weeks after this story was initially published, lawyers from the firm Clare Locke sent a letter to WIRED on Khare’s behalf, calling this story defamatory and demanding a retraction. WIRED stands by its reporting. The letter claimed that WIRED did not reach out to Khare for comment, which is false. It demanded that WIRED include a statement from Khare, which we’ve added as an update below. In addition, it denied that Khare had participated in any “conspiracy to or complicity in murder”—an allegation that was not made in this article.

So, noted.