To hold a citizen incommunicado and indefinitely while awaiting trial for the alleged crime of serving as a journalistic source should outrage us all.
Motherboard » Snowden: Prosecuting NSA Leaker Reality Winner Is a ‘Fundamental Threat to the Free Press’ »
Theresa May has declared she is prepared to rip up human rights laws to impose new restrictions on terror suspects, as she sought to gain control over the security agenda just 36 hours before the polls open.
The Guardian » May: I’ll rip up human rights laws that impede new terror legislation »
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 »
Aaron Swartz once said, “It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.”
BoingBoing: Theresa May wants to ban crypto: here’s what that would cost, and here’s why it won’t work anyway »
This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:
• All Britons’ communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to interceptAny firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software
• All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked
• Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software
• Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease — security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one’s findings, such as industry R&D and the security services
• All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped
• Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software
• Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave
• Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons
• Free/open source operating systems — that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors — must be banned outright
Further, there is something disturbing in this apparent ubiquitous acceptance of profiling by political parties. After all, did you ever consent for the content you post online, the words you type in your messages, the “likes” you post, the website you browse, the places you go, the things you buy, and the other “data points” that companies have on you to be used to profile you for political purposes? And are you confortable for this vast array of data (often seemingly irrelevant crumbs of our personalities) to be used to pigeonhole (and predict) your political leanings?
Privacy International: Hiding in plain sight — political profiling of voters »
A particularly interesting discussion has been unfolding over the past months in the Romanian Parliament, where, on 15 March, the IT&C Committee of the Chamber of Deputies organised a debate on the proposed Directive, in order to collect the views of different stakeholders. After the event, the Committee produced an opinion addressed to the European Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, which is the group responsible for drafting the final report of the Parliament on the package proposal. The members of the IT&C Committee unanimously voted against the European Commission’s Copyright proposal and advised to withdraw it in its entirety.
EDRi » Romanian Parliament: EU Copyright reform does more harm than good »
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 »
“The U.S. is buttressing its paperwork walls with new requirements for social media disclosures as part of revised visa applications.” (…)
“The new questionnaire will ask for social media handles dating back over the last five years and biographical information dating back 15 years.” (…)
“Quoting an unnamed State Department official, Reuters reported that the additional information would only be requested when the department determines that ‘such information is required to confirm identity or conduct more rigorous national security vetting’.”
Techcrunch: US approves social media background checks for visa applicants »
Reuters: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media checks »
The European Commission, Parliament and Council (representing member states) agreed on Monday to a €120-million plan to install free wi-fi services in 6,000 to 8,000 municipalities across the EU by 2020. The scheme had been proposed by EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker last September. How the system will be funded will have to be discussed and agreed before local authorities can start applying to it.
How kind. I guess a lot of people will be happy. But there might be unintended and unwanted consequences.
First of all, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In the end, this is €129M that somehow, forcefully will be taken from taxpayers.
Second, there must be much merriment within various mass surveillance organizations. This will make controlling the people that much easier.
And if you read the parliaments statement, there is mention of a »single authentication system valid throughout the EU«. This will have huge privacy implications. Can we please have a discussion about this first?
Third, it usually doesn’t end well when politicians start to meddle with what is supposed to be a free market. Is this at all fair competition? What will the consequences be when it comes to developing better and quicker commercial connections?
Finally, communal WiFi run by your local bureaucracy. What can possibly go wrong? Will it even work? How will surplus metadata that you generate be used? By whom? Wich web pages will be blocked?
/ HAX
Next Thursday, June 8, the European Parliaments Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) will have its main vote on the EU Copyright Package.
Here a proposal will be hammered out for the parliament’s final plenary vote later this summer. So it’s a very important event. And there are dark clouds on the horizon.
Key points are the EU Censorship Machine (forcing internet platforms to control and, in relevant cases, censor content uploaded by its users) and the Link-tax (a license fee for linking to media news articles).
This is the best – and maybe last – opportunity to stop this from becoming EU law.
Take action, spread the word and please contact your elected members of the parliament.
Julia Reda (German Pirate MEP): Just 9 days left to reject the worst version of EU copyright expansion plans yet »
BoingBoing: ACT NOW! In 9 days, the European Parliament could pass a truly terrible copyright expansion »
