Blogging for the 5th of July Foundation on Security, Privacy and Liberty
Three years after the 9/11 attacks, a frustrated NSA employee complained that Osama bin Laden was alive and well, and yet the surveillance agency still had no automated way to search the Arabic language PDFs it had intercepted.
The Intercept: Why Soviet weather was secret, a critical gap in Korea, and other NSA newsletter tales »
US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN.
The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning.
Prosecutors have struggled with whether the First Amendment precluded the prosecution of Assange, but now believe they have found a way to move forward.
CNN » Sources: US prepares charges to seek arrest of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange »
The current proposal, which proposes even more obligations on video-sharing platforms, is horribly contradictory and unclear. It does contain, however, a reasonable amount of comedy, which is an innovation for the EU institutions. For example, this legislation on “audiovisual” content covers, on the basis of Parliament compromise amendments, “a set of moving images”, which would cover, for example, an animated GIF. (…)
On a more serious note, the proposal requires badly defined video-sharing platforms to take measures to protect children from content that would harm their “physical, mental or moral development” (“moral” added by the Parliament to various new parts of the Directive). This involves measures to restrict (undefined) legal content.
EDRi on the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD): AVMS Directive – censorship by coercive comedy confusion »
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies today, CIA Director Mike Pompeo went off on WikiLeaks. Pompeo is pretty mad about that whole Vault 7 hacking tools data dump, it looks like. “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” he declared Thursday. I think he means that it’s a hostile intelligence service!
Techcrunch: The CIA is really, really mad at WikiLeaks »
Germany has approved a draft law that will enable businesses to run open WiFi hotspots without being held liable for the copyright infringements of their customers. Copyright holders will still have the ability to request that certain sites are blocked to prevent repeat infringement.
Torrentfreak: Germany Approves Draft Law to Protect WiFi Operators From Piracy Liability »
A database set up jointly by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube aims to identify “terrorist and radicalising” content automatically and to remove it from these platforms. (…)
It appears that no research whatsoever has been done on the likely impact of this initiative, including no review mechanisms on its impact and no way of establishing whether the initiative has counter-productive effects. (…)
The role of judicial and law enforcement authorities in this process has, unsurprisingly, not been mentioned.
EDRi: Social media companies launch upload filter to combat “terrorism and extremism” »
On the better web Berners-Lee envisions, users control where their data is stored and how it’s accessed. For example, social networks would still run in the cloud. But you could store your data locally. Alternately, you could choose a different cloud server run by a company or community you trust. You might have different servers for different types of information—for health and fitness data, says—that is completely separate from the one you use for financial records.
Wired: Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web, Plots a Radical Overhaul of His Creation »
The security of the facial recognition feature on Samsung’s new Galaxy S8 smartphone has come into question, after a video was shared online that appears to show one of the handsets being unlocked by waving a photo of the user’s face in front of the camera.
MacRumors: Facial Recognition Feature on Galaxy S8 Bypassed Using Just a Photo »
A Spanish court on Wednesday sentenced a young woman to jail for posting jokes on Twitter about the 1973 assassination of a senior figure in the Franco dictatorship.
Even the granddaughter of Carrero Blanco attacked the move by public prosecutors to charge Vera and put her on trial, saying in a letter sent to daily El Pais in January that while the jokes were in poor taste they were not worthy of such legal action. “I’m scared of a society in which freedom of expression, however regrettable it may be, can lead to jail sentences,” Lucia Carrero Blanco wrote.
The Guardian: Spanish woman given jail term for tweeting jokes about Franco-era assassination »
Putting the interests of Internet providers over Internet users, Congress today voted to erase landmark broadband privacy protections. If the bill is signed into law, companies like Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon will have free rein to hijack your searches, sell your data, and hammer you with unwanted advertisements. Worst yet, consumers will now have to pay a privacy tax by relying on VPNs to safeguard their information. That is a poor substitute for legal protections.
EFF: Repealing Broadband Privacy Rules, Congress Sides with the Cable and Telephone Industry »