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Any EU project called "Clean IT",
with all that implies for elements that are regarded as "dirty", is
worrying enough. But combined with a stated intention of "reducing the
impact of the terrorist use of the Internet", the concerns naturally
grow. After all, it is precisely by invoking the vague and emotional
threat of "terrorism" that the UK government has sought to short-circuit
criticism of many of its most illiberal policies, most recently with
the ill thought-out Draft Communications Bill.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
As Tim Cushing rightly noted earlier this week, the UK's "Free Speech" laws are more about the many things you can't say. As if to back up that view, in the last few days, there's been yet another case of somebody being arrested there for "an offensive Facebook page."
On
Techdirt.
Back in February we wrote
about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to
combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, we
suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared
(pdf), amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial
removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as
deranged.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has written about earlier moves
by India to block Web sites and censor Twitter accounts. The central
concern seems to be that inflammatory online activity might stoke or
provoke local outbreaks of violence of the kind seen recently in Assam. Now The Times of India is reporting that the Indian government wants to go further, and actively monitor who's saying what by setting up a new agency:
On
Techdirt.
They say that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has
got its boots on, and the same seems to be true about Internet policy:
the bad ideas spread like wildfire, while the good ones languish in
obscurity. Snooping on the Net activity of an entire population is the
latest example: now Australia wants to join the club that currently
consists of the US and UK, with Canada waiting in the wings. Here's part of the EFF's excellent summary of what the Australian government is proposing:
On
Techdirt.
Recently, Techdirt reported
on the ruling by a German court on the issue of filtering -- whether
Internet sites have a responsibility to block files continually if they
have been notified about infringing materials once, sometimes called
"Notice and Stay Down". The German court basically said they do, but
the highest French court has taken a different view (French original.)
On
Techdirt.
One of the the reasons why legislation like SOPA and treaties like
ACTA are so dangerous is that their loose definitions allow measures
intended to deal with copyright infringement to be used to censor
inconvenient opinions. Unfortunately, that's not just a theoretical
problem with future legislation, but one that is already happening, as this post from Rick Falkvinge makes clear:
On
Techdirt.
Last week Techdirt wrote about the possible introduction of an "opt-in" license to view porn online in the UK. As we noted then, there is nothing to stop parents from installing their own filters to block access to certain kinds of Web sites now. But it seems that soon, they won't even have to do that:
On
Techdirt.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who hopes to be re-elected as French President this
year, seems to have little love for the Internet. At best, he regards
it as a "Wild West" that needs taming. Despite that, Sarkozy joined Twitter last week -- you can follow him @NicolasSarkozy.
Posts are mainly written by his re-election team, although there seem
to be a handful of personal tweets (marked "NS"). But at least he's
finally engaging with the new medium on its own terms.
On
Techdirt.
Twitter has taken quite a lot of heat
for putting in place the capability to block tweets on a geographical
basis. This begins to look a little unfair in light of the fact that
Google quietly adopted a similar policy before Twitter. That's shown by
the answer to a question on Google's Blogger site about blogs being redirected to country-specific URLs, which at the time of writing was last updated on 9 January 2012. Here's what it says:
On
Techdirt.
One of the useful side-effects of the groundswell of protest against
SOPA and PIPA is that a surprising number of people in positions of
power have come out against their approach, notably in Europe. First,
we had Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission
responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, who tweeted:
On
Techdirt.
There is a rather odd atmosphere within the parts of the online
community that fought so hard against SOPA this week – relief that all
that work seems to have had an effect, mixed with a certain disbelief
that for once the outside world sat up and took notice of the tech
world's concerns. Amidst all the justified back-patting, there is a
temptation to celebrate the fact that both SOPA and PIPA are "delayed", and to move on.
On Techdirt.
A few weeks back, Techdirt reported on an Indian minister asking Internet companies to do the impossible:
On
Techdirt.
Against a background where some European courts are telling ISPs that they must block access to certain sites (in Finland and the UK, for example), this news from Germany comes as a refreshing change (original German article in Der Spiegel):
On
Techdirt.
In my last column,
I suggested that one of the best things that Mozilla could do in order
to promote the Open Web and openness in general would be to support the
battle for online freedom in more general ways. That's something it has
already started doing, notably in trying to halt the passage of the
awful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that is currently grinding through the US legislative process.
On
The H Open.
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