HAX

Category: Democracy

  • Russia to make TOR and VPN illegal

    Yesterday, Friday, the Russian Duma held its first (of three) readings to adopt a law making use of TOR and VPN illegal.

    The plan is to make access to sites blocked by net censor authority Roskomnadzor illegal. And there are plenty of them.

  • The rise of crypto-anarchism

    At some point, and probably sooner than we think, the current left and right offerings of the major parties, including (perhaps especially) the populist, will start to appear ludicrous and unworkable. New political movements and ideas will arrive before long for this industrial revolution, especially once the majority of the population will soon have grown up online. It will be a politics that offers solutions to the challenges society will face, and be bold enough to steer technology rather than be led by it, to harness it rather than dismiss it, to see it as a motor of social change, not just a job maker.

    The Guardian: Forget far-right populism – crypto-anarchists are the new masters »

  • Theresa May should blame herself, not the Internet

    To nobody’s surprise also the London Bridge assassins were known to the authorities. One of them has been in a tv-documentary about jihadism. And he was reported trying to convert children he met in a park to Islam. According to himself, he would be prepared to kill his own mother in the name of Allah.

    Responsible for the authorities that are supposed to handle things like this was – between 2010 and 2016 – now Prime Minister Theresa May.

    Today her only comment is that she would like to censor the Internet.

    Censoring information and maximizing surveillance of the people is not the way to defend democracy. That would rather be to support the terrorists strive to destroy our open and free society. And it would do very little to stop religious radicalization.

    To Theresa Mays defense, it should be said that it is not all that easy to know what to do. You can hardly lock people up who have not (yet) committed any crime. You cannot jail people because of their skin color, their cultural background, their faith or their political beliefs. And you should not punish entire ethnic groups because of the deeds of a few.

    There must be better ways to defeat terrorism.

    / HAX

    A few links:

    London Bridge terrorist ‘was in Channel 4 documentary about British jihadis’ »

    Theresa May Blames The Internet For London Bridge Attack; Repeats Demands To Censor It »

    ‘Blame the internet’ is just not a good enough response, Theresa May »

    Tim Farron warns of win for terrorists if web is made surveillance tool »

  • G7 Group unite to limit free speech

    Dear all,

    Please take notice that the G7 meeting just decided to beef up censorship and control of the Internet.

    If you make censorship possible at all – sooner or later it will be used by sinister minds.

    Please – do not limit the freedom of speech. We cannot silence or put people in prison, simply because we do not agree with whatever they are saying. (Unless they are a direct threat to other people’s immediate security. And if so, only after a fair trial respecting fundamental human rights.)

    Giving Big Government and Big Data control over the freedom of the word – that must not happen.

    / HAX

  • Open letter to the EU on German »NetzDG «

    This bill asks social media companies to take down content, including perfectly legal material, that social media companies like Facebook can arbitrarily label as “hate speech”, “fake news”, “pornographic content”, among other categories. In addition, the draft law de facto imposes filtering of content, despite the fact that such technology cannot understand context and will, therefore, inevitably lead to still more legal content being deleted. The basic aim of the bill is, of course, well-intentioned. However, the way this bill is drafted appoints social media companies as arbiters of legality and “the truth”. Furthermore, this bill breaches EU law, which establishes that all restrictions to fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, must be provided for by law, necessary and proportionate (Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). In addition, EU law also prohibits imposing general monitoring obligations on companies. If adopted, this unprecedented law would serve as a bad example for other states, including countries with serious democratic deficits.

    EDRi » EU action needed: German NetzDG draft threatens freedom of expression »

  • The future of profiling

    Even worse, profiling and similar techniques are increasingly used not just to classify and understand people, but also to make decisions that have far-reaching consequences, from credit to housing, welfare and employment. Intelligent CCTV software automatically flags “suspicious behaviour”, intelligence agencies predict internet users’ citizenship to decide they are foreign (fair game) or domestic (usually not fair game), and the judicial system claims to be able to predicts future criminals.

    As someone once said: it’s Orwell when it’s accurate and Kafka when it’s not.

    Privacy International » Cambridge Analytica Explained: Data and Elections »

  • The Internet after UK elections?

    UK Prime Minister and noted authoritarian Theresa May has promised that if she wins the upcoming general election, her party will abolish internet access in the UK, replacing it with a government-monitored internet where privacy tools are banned and online services will be required to vet all user-supplied content for compliance with rules about pornography, political speech, copyright compliance and so on — and search engines will have to employ special British rules to exclude banned material from their search results.

    BoingBoing: Theresa May promises a British version of Iran’s Halal Internet »

  • EU Commission failing its oath

    The President of the European Commission said in 2010: “The oath of independence and respect for the EU Treaties is more than a symbolic act”. As it turned out, it was not even a symbolic act.

    Joe McNamee, EDRi: Commissioners’ oath – a broken promise on fundamental rights »

  • Sweden, an Orwellian state

    Something remarkable happened in Sweden this week: a list of 15,000 people with the wrong political opinions was used to block those people from the @Sweden account, and thereby preventing these people from communicating over Twitter with that part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The government tried defending the block as only concerning neo-nazi right-wing extremists, which was a narrative that held water in legacy media until somebody pointed out that the Ambassador of Israel (!) was among the blocked.

    Falkvinge: What do you do when you realize your government has blocked you for Wrongthink? »

  • Big Brother is not amused

    The annual German Big Brother Awards were bestowed by EDRi member Digitalcourage on 5 May 2017 in Bielefeld, Germany. The event drew much media attention, as one of the awardees threatened the organiser with legal action. (…)

    The awardee in the “Politics” category was the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB). Imams at DİTİB – with ties to the Turkish government and its secret service MİT – are said to have conducted political espionage on DİTİB members and visitors, exposing them to persecution by the Turkish state.

    EDRi » BBA Germany 2017: Espionage, threats, tracking, provoking cyber wars »