EDRi on EU public consultations on Internet and Big Brother issues:
Public consultations are an opportunity to influence policy-making at an early stage, and to help to shape a brighter future for your digital rights.
Below you can find the public consultations which EDRi finds relevant in 2017. (…) We will update the list on an ongoing basis, adding our responses to the consultations and other information that can help you get engaged.
Want to see a politician clearly? Remove emotional words from their statements.
"If human rights laws get in the way, we will change them." https://t.co/Ci9yt7I9d6
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 5, 2017
I’m clear: if human rights laws get in the way of tackling extremism and terrorism, we will change those laws to keep British people safe. pic.twitter.com/8EfUJYUDMK
— Theresa May (@theresa_may) 6 juni 2017
It seems as though a Baltimore police officer forgot about one key feature of his bodycam: the fact that it saves the previous 30 seconds of video recorded before the camera is activated. Most bodycams record and dump constantly. The moment it’s activated, the 30 seconds preceding the activation become part of the recording.
What was apparently inadvertently captured by the camera was the officer planting drugs in a can and hiding them in an alley. All three officers then retreat to the sidewalk outside the alley before heading back in to “discover” the drug stash.
Techdirt: Body Cam Footage Of A Cop Planting Evidence Leads To Dozens Of Dismissed Cases »
The Chinese government’s crackdown on the internet continues with the news that Apple has removed all major VPN apps, which help internet users overcome the country’s censorship system, from the App Store in China.
Techcrunch: Apple removes VPN apps from the App Store in China »
Tense nervous headache? Perhaps your name is Tim Cook. For poor Tim has woken up this Sunday morning with a giant headache, and its name is China.
Techcrunch: Apple’s capitulation to China’s VPN crack-down will return to haunt it at home »
It’s going to be much harder to view the full web in Russia before the year is out. President Putin has signed a law that, as of November 1st, bans technology which lets you access banned websites, including virtual private networks and proxies. Internet providers will have to block websites hosting these tools. The measure is ostensibly meant to curb extremist content, but that’s just pretext — this is really about preventing Russians from seeing content that might be critical of Putin, not to mention communicating in secret.
• Engadget: Russian censorship law bans proxies and VPNs »
• TorrentFreak: Russia Bans ‘Uncensored’ VPNs, Proxies and TOR »
The EU Court of Justice ruled this morning that the agreement on the transfer of passenger data (PNR) between the EU and Canada is incompatible with EU law. (…)
Sophie in ‘t Veld MEP, ALDE Group first vice-president, commented today:
“Two and a half years after the European Parliament raised serious concerns, the Court has made it crystal clear that the EU Canada agreement cannot be adopted in its current form. The agreement provides insufficient protection and safeguards for Europeans. The use of personal data is not rejected as such, but sensitive data relating to, for example, religious beliefs, cannot be collected without suspicion. Additionally, the data cannot be accessed without judicial authorisation and has to be deleted after the passenger has left Canadian territory.”
ALDE: EU Court rejects passenger data deal with Canada as it violates EU law »
The law cannot be upheld by breaking the law, said Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights. Reckless data retention and profiling have no place in a democratic, law-based society. Literally every independent body that has spoken out on the subject supports this analysis. The European Commission and EU Member States must now, at long last, take all necessary steps to abandon all illegal data retention laws and practices.
EDRi: EU Court rules that draft EU/Canada air passenger data deal is unacceptable »
On 5 April 2017, the Norwegian government proposed an amendment to the Norwegian code of criminal proceedings to allow the police to compel the use of biometric authentication. After two quick debates, the Norwegian Parliament passed the proposition into law on 21 June. (…)
The lack of specificity of an “electronic system” means this law has an extremely wide scope. We can, for example, envision that access to a personal device such as a mobile phone, which stores the access credentials to several cloud storage services, essentially gives away a more or less complete description of a person’s life. To entrust such decision to a single police officer with no due process means that an act with very far reaching consequences may be performed in a matter of seconds. (…)
There is also no reference to proportionality of the use of force. Although there is no reason to suspect this would be used in a disproportionate way, the lack of such a limitation means that we don’t know how far the use force might be taken.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg today ruled in favour
of the German civil liberties activist and pirate party member Patrick
Breyer (Commission vs. Breyer, C-213/15 P): It ordered the Commission
to give the press and the public access to the pleadings exchanged in
completed court proceedings. In the present case Breyer successfully
demanded the Commission disclose Austrian pleadings concerning the
non-transposition of the controversial EU Data Retention Directive.
However the Court fined Breyer for publishing the written submissions in
his own case on his homepage.
Pirate Times: EU Court rules on transparency of EU justice »
Privacy International is particularly concerned that suspicion of membership of the Gülen movement is based on the use of encryption, specifically a freely available messaging service called Bylock which the government claims is the communication tool of choice for Gülen supporters and was used to organise the coup. There is very little information about Bylock; it is not widely known among security experts or outside of Turkey, it is no longer available from any app store and its origins and developer are something of a mystery.
Privacy International @ Medium » Encryption At The Centre Of Mass Arrests: One Year On From Turkey’s Failed Coup »
On 11 July, two Committees in the European Parliament voted on their Opinions on European Commission’s proposal for a Copyright Directive: the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) and the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE).
CULT decided to abandon all reason and propose measures that contradict existing law on monitoring of online content. They also contradict clear rulings from the highest court in the EU on internet filtering. And for the sake of being consistently bad, the Committee also supported ancillary copyright, a “link tax” that would make linking and quotation almost impossible on social media.
ITRE made a brave effort to fix the unfixable “censorship machine”, the upload filter proposed by the Commission. On the one hand, this demonstrates a willingness in the Parliament to resist the fundamentalism of the Commission’s proposal. On the other, it shows how impossible this task really is. Despite deleting the reference to “content recognition technologies”, ITRE has decided to keep the possibility of measures to prevent the availability of copyrighted works or “other subject matter” which may or may not be understood as supporting preventive filtering.
And there is more bad news in the linked text, below.
EDRi » Latest copyright votes: Filtering, blocking & half-baked compromises »
