Earth Station 5 (ES5) was a peer-to-peer network active between 2003 and 2005, operated by a company of the same name. The user client application also shared this name. Earth Station 5 was notable for its strong, if overstated, emphasis on user anonymity, and for its bold advocacy of piracy and copyright infringement. ES5's highly antagonistic position toward copyright advocacy and enforcement organizations garnered the group significant attention and peaked with an ES5 press release announcing a "declaration of war" against the Motion Picture Association of America. ES5 claimed to operate out of the Jenin in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank, a region where they argued that copyright laws were unenforceable. Investigative journalism<!--who?--> cast serious doubts on the company's Palestinian origin as well as many of its other claims. To this day, much about the company and its leadership remains uncertain or unknown.
Peer-to-peer services
Earth Station 5 was based around a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service and a standalone Earth Station 5 file-sharing client. Initial versions of the software could only share or download files by using the ES5 network.
ES5's P2P network and client were announced on June 9, 2003. People associated with ES5 claimed in media reports that the network had more than 16,000,000 participants at its peak, but these numbers were unsupported and viewed very skeptically. The actual number of participants was probably several orders of magnitude smaller. and "a busy affair" for its plethora of features.
The second version of the client, released a year later, garnered better reviews. However, users still felt overwhelmed by the "bundled" features that included a dating service and audio-visual chat. ES5 claimed it planned to capitalize on these features in order to become profitable. ES5 president Ras Kabir claimed that on ES5, "users no longer have to be concerned about what they are sharing, or with whom they are sharing because there is complete anonymity."
ES5's claims to anonymity were based on its use of several security technologies. The first version of the software used Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, encrypted searches over UDP, and integration with PGPDisk. most P2P networks were careful to adopt a strategy of "turning a blind eye" to copyright infringement on their network in order to escape or minimize liability. ES5 distinguished itself by openly supporting its users' copyright infringement over its network and by actively participating in sharing movies with its users.
Some within the file-sharing community speculated that ES5 shared media in order to "seed" the network with media — a step necessary because ES5's user base was very small compared to other networks and it did not require quotas. ES5 shared media by downloading content from other networks (e.g., Kazaa and Gnutella), vetting these for quality, and then connecting a version of their client to their network from one of their servers. This step was important in assuring that ES5's network could offer a sufficient amount of content to users.
In the early stages of the network, ES5 tried to attract users by streaming movies in addition to in-network sharing. To do this, ES5 created a website at es5.org which provided links to dozens of Hollywood films immediately available for streaming.
Antagonistic relationship to media industry
While few P2P networks enjoy friendly relationships with the media and content industries, ES5 displayed a famously antagonistic relationship to them—most notably the US-based Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America. This position culminated in a famous press release where ES5 formally declared war on the MPAA:
:In response to the email received today from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to Earthstation 5 for copyright violations for streaming FIRST RUN movies over the internet for FREE, this is our official response!
:Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys [sic] have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE.
In the same release, ES5 claimed that, "unlike Kazaa and other P2P programs who subsequently deny building their P2P program for illegal file-sharing, ES5 is the only P2P application and portal to actually join its users in doing P2P."
Ras Kabir
Most ES5 press releases quoted company president Ras Kabir who, like most of the company, was nominally based in Jenin in the West Bank.
Stephen M. Cohen
While his involvement in the project was publicly hidden early on, Stephen Michael Cohen was closely involved in all stages of ES5 and, in most opinions, was the founder, primary architect, and primary participant in most of its actions. Cohen is best known as the person involved in fraudulently obtaining control of the sex.com domain name.
ES5's business registrations papers, filed with the Palestinian Authority, listed Cohen as the "sole director" of ES5. Both in the forum and through their spokesperson, ES5 officials claimed that Cohen played the role of a consultant. By sending a specially-formed request, a remote user could use a facility of the ES5 client in order to delete arbitrary files on the computer of anybody running the ES5 client. Garriok concluded that "the people behind ES5 have intentionally added malicious code to ES5" and speculated that:
:They could be working for the RIAA, MPAA, or a similar organization. Once they have enough users on their ES5 network, they would start deleting all copyrighted files they own which their users are sharing. The users wouldn't know what hit them. and patched it through a software update soon after Garriok's revelation. While there no public evidence of collusion between ES5 and the MPAA or RIAA, speculation about it dogged ES5, sowing seeds of distrust.
Untrue claims exposed
The anonymous authors claimed they were based in a refugee camp in Jenin, though some investigative attempts to locate their headquarters in Jenin were fruitless.
Many of the claims behind ES5 were unsubstantiated and untrue. With increased media analysis, especially from The Washington Post, it became clear that ES5 was not what it claimed to be. ES5 was not based in Jenin or even elsewhere in Palestine. Most of the people claimed to be behind ES5 were found to be fabricated, and many of ES5's technical claims were debunked; also, ES5 was not nearly as large as it claimed at several points.
ES5 had claimed that the encryption around its system made identifying and blocking traffic from the site impossible. A P2P Watch Dog post demonstrated a method by which packets from ES5 could be identified and blocked. This was quickly put into action in several anti-P2P systems on the market at the time.
Other contributing factors
There were several other reasons that many in the P2P and file-sharing community distrusted ES5. Many speculated that the project was engaging in practices such as seeding and streaming of films from ES5 servers and proxying that would not scale.
But as the apparently secretive and untruthful acts of ES5 came to light, the core fan base began to rebel in the main ES5 forum, leading to many users being banned and topics being deleted. Eventually, the forum collapsed and a new forum was started by the admin "SharePro." The new forum never gained the popularity that the old one had.
Closing
In February 2005, ES5 quietly closed its doors.