The Justice Department on Friday petitioned the US Supreme Court to step into an international legal thicket, one that asks whether US search warrants extend to data stored on foreign servers. The US government says it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world’s servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.
Ars Technica: Does US have right to data on overseas servers? We’re about to find out »
The British Internet provider O2 disputed the previous story that they don’t permit people to access tools that give them anonymity protection, like this VPN service. “You only need to show photo ID in one of our stores”, they said, via a link provided. So in order to be an anonymous and protected press source, you need to show a photo ID. You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
Falkvinge @ PNO » British ISP: Of course you can be a protected anonymous press source, you just need to show us photo ID first »
1. Digital access and net neutrality needed
2. Censorship and surveillance: No excuse for states and private actors to breach human rights
3. Freedom of expression must be preserved by states and private sector
EDRi: UN Rapporteur demands respect for freedom of expression online »
In a similar way that the police cannot enter your home without a court warrant, they are not supposed to look into your private communications without permission, right? Not really.
The EU is working towards easing the access to e-evidence for law enforcement authorities. The plan of the European Commission is to propose new rules on sharing evidence and the possibility for the authorities to request e-evidence directly from technology companies. One of the proposed options is that police would be able to access data directly from the cloud-based services.
EDRi » Access to e-evidence: Inevitable sacrifice of our right to privacy? »
At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we’ve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can’t fix it — we can only make it slightly less awful.
That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay’s co-founder, Peter Sunde‘s talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest.
TNW » Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now »
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.
Today the European Parliaments committee for the internal market (IMCO) has voted on the new EU copyright package.
The »censorship machine« (demanding that net platforms and ISP:s should filter all user uploaded content) fell. This is a victory for a free and open Internet.
(But still, the proposal is not quite dead. It can be re-tabled for the main vote in plenary.)
However, the »link tax« (license fees for linking to mainstream media content) still stands.
This terrible idea must be stopped in plenary!
It ain’t over ’till the fat lady sings.
Update » A more detailed report » IMCO Vote on Copyright in the DSM: crying tears of…? »
Update 2 » Pirate MEP Julia Reda » 5 takeaways from the first important copyright reform vote in the European Parliament »
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 »
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 »
People inside the NSA are quick to discount these studies, saying that the data don’t reflect their reality. They claim that there are entire classes of vulnerabilities the NSA uses that are not known in the research world, making rediscovery less likely. This may be true, but the evidence we have from the Shadow Brokers is that the vulnerabilities that the NSA keeps secret aren’t consistently different from those that researchers discover. And given the alarming ease with which both the NSA and CIA are having their attack tools stolen, rediscovery isn’t limited to independent security research.
Bruce Schneier in Foreign Affairs: Why the NSA Makes Us More Vulnerable to Cyberattacks »
