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In Turkey, using encryption gets you arrested

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 »

EU Child Protection Online – another fine mess…

The EU is in the process of implementing new regulations aimed for Child Protection online.

To nobody’s surprise, this is a can of worms – where seemingly conflicting principles are at stake. There is a strong possibility that it will all end up restricting the Internets free flow of information, without doing any good to actually protect any children.

Read more at EDRi: Commission Report on child protection online lacks facts and evidence »

European Parliament making a pig’s breakfast of new Copyright regulation package

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 »

PI to court over »Five Eyes« transparency

Privacy International has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to compel disclosure of records relating to a 1946 surveillance agreement between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, known as the “Five Eyes alliance”.* We are represented by Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic (MFIA). The most recent publicly available version of the Five Eyes surveillance agreement dates from 1955. Our complaint was filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

PI: Privacy International Files Lawsuit To Compel Disclosure Of Secretive 1946 Surveillance Agreement »

The police will always know who you are

Police already have access to visors with built-in face recognition and fugitive spotting. The technology was in prototype stage a few years ago, and was successfully tested when police officers walked into dark cinemas full of people and got so-called People of Interest highlighted directly onto their field of vision. The future is approaching fast, and it’s not all shiny happy rainbow unicorns.

Falkvinge: There are already police visors with built-in face recognition and fugitive spotting »

Digital border searches, now also in New Zeeland

New Zealand airport customs agents force thousands of travelers every year to hand over the passwords for their devices, in some cases inspecting files and even copying the data for the government.

Softpedia: NZ Airport Travelers Forced to Surrender Device Passwords, Data Copied by Govt »

Meanwhile, in Mexico…

A team of international investigators brought to Mexico to unravel one of the nation’s gravest human rights atrocities was targeted with sophisticated surveillance technology sold to the Mexican government to spy on criminals and terrorists.

NYT: Spyware Sold to Mexican Government Targeted International Officials »

Consequences of Germanys social media censorship

Even accepting that free speech ends where criminal law begins, that doesn’t justify fining the platforms. If people are posting “illegal” content, go after them for breaking the law. Don’t go after the tools they use. By putting massive liability risks on platforms, those platforms will almost certainly overcompensate and over censor to avoid any risk of liability. That means a tremendous amount of what should be protected speech gets silence, just because these companies don’t want to get fined. Even worse, the big platforms can maybe hire people to handle this. The littler platforms? They basically can’t risk operating in Germany any more. Berlin is a hotbed of startups, but this is going to seriously harm many of them.

Techdirt » Germany Officially Gives Up On Free Speech: Will Fine Internet Companies That Don’t Delete ‘Bad’ Speech »

Autonomous surveillance vehicles now to be deployed

Last month, Privacy News Online wrote about the first arrest by UK police using an automatic facial recognition system mounted on a vehicle to scan people in a crowd. But things move quickly in the world of surveillance technologies: the police in Dubai have announced that they will be deploying facial recognition systems mounted on autonomous vehicles by the end of 2017.

Glyn Moody @ PNO » Our surveillance future: pervasive, continuous facial recognition from wandering robo-cars and hovering drones »