Did New Zealand Spooks Tap Into PRISM To Spy On Dotcom?

As Techdirt has reported, the attempts to extradite Kim Dotcom from New Zealand to the US have turned into one of the most catastrophically bungled legal cases in a long while. One of the biggest scandals to emerge was that New Zealand citizens had been wiretapped in an effort to gain evidence against Dotcom, since domestic spying was forbidden there just as it is in the US (oh, wait...). Unfortunately, rather than rapping knuckles and telling the local spooks not to do it again, the New Zealand government has instead just brought in new legislation to make it legal in the future.

On Techdirt.

German Minister Calls Security A 'Super Fundamental Right' That Outranks Privacy; German Press Call Him 'Idiot In Charge'

One of the striking features of the Snowden story is that there has been no serious attempt to deny the main claims about massive, global spying. Instead, the fall-back position has become: well, yeah, maybe we did some of that, but look how many lives were saved as a result. For example, the day after the first leaks appeared, it was suggested that PRISM was responsible for stopping a plot to bomb the NYC subways. However, further investigation showed that probably wasn't the case. 

On Techdirt.

Leaked EU Policy Papers Show TAFTA/TTIP's Huge Challenges -- And Some Subtle Signals

After last Wednesday's debate, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the subject of NSA surveillance, which included the following mild wrist-slap: 

On Techdirt.

Controversial EU Data Protection Regulation May Be Negotiated In Secret In Breach Of Parliamentary Process

Today, the European Parliament held a three-hour long debate on PRISM, Tempora and what the EU response should be. Many wanted TAFTA/TTIP put on hold; others didn't. But one theme cropped up again and again: the need for strong data protection laws that would offer at least some legal protection against massive and unregulated transfer of Europeans' personal data to the US. 

On Techdirt.

How Much Would It Cost To Store All US Phone Calls Made In A Year?

An early criticism of Snowden's leak about NSA spying activity was that the $20 million annual cost for PRISM -- whatever that turns out to be -- was simply too low to be credible. One person who knows more about storage costs than practically anyone -- well, outside the NSA, at least -- is Brewster Kahle, who set up the Internet Archive, essentially a backup for the entire Web plus a wonderfully rich store of many other materials. He's carried out a fascinating back-of-the envelope calculation of how much it would cost annually to record every phone call made in the US and store it in the cloud: 

On Techdirt.

Filtering an Inclusionist Wikipedia

Why didn't somebody think of this before?

Wikipedia for schools is ... a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. The current version has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fit on a DVD with good size images) and is “about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words)”. It was developed by carefuly selecting for content, then checking for vandalism and suitability by “SOS Children volunteers”. You can download it for free from the website, or as a free 3.5GB DVD.

The following point is even more interesting:

I also see this as a potential future model for Wikipedia — allow people to edit, but have a separate vetting process that identifies particular versions of an article as vetted. Then, people can choose if they want to see the latest version or the most recent vetted version. To some, this is very controversial, but I don’t see it that way. A vetting process doesn’t prevent future edits, and it creates a way for people to get what they want... material that they can have increased confidence in. The trick is to develop a good-enough vetting process (or perhaps multiple vetting/rating processes for different purposes). This didn’t make sense back when Wikipedia was first starting (the problem was to get articles written at all!), but now that Wikipedia is more mature, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a new need to identify vetted articles. Yes, you have to worry about countries to whom “democracy” is a dirty word, but I think such problems can be resolved. This is hardly a new idea; see Wikimedia’s article on article validation and Wikipedia’s pushing to 1.0. I am sure that a vetting/validation process will take time to develop, and it will be imperfect... but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

Indeed. What this means is that different organisations could pass the whole of Wikipedia through their particular prisms - like that filtering stuff for children. This is a very strong argument for Wikipedia being inclusionist - having as much stuff as possible - and letting the filters take out stuff that particular groups don't want. These would then offer their seals of approval to that particular cut - even if many people would disapprove of the choices made. That's freedom for you, I'm afraid.

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Through a PRISM Darkly

Ho-ho, things are hotting up among the opponents of open access:

The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) was established to protect the quality of scientific research, an issue of vital concern to:

* scientific, medical and other scholarly researchers who advance the cause of knowledge;

* the institutions that encourage and support them;

* the publishers who disseminate, archive and ensure the quality control of this research; and

* the physicians, clinicians, engineers and other intellectual pioneers who put knowledge into action.

Implying, of course, that open access has has no research integrity, does not advance the cause of knowledge, and is somewhow opposed to intellectual pioneers.

This is a really important development, because it is the clearest demonstration yet that the traditional publishers see open access as a real threat, and that it is succeeding - you don't take these kind of measures against something that is flailing. For the best rebuttal of the misleading issues and non-issues raised and obfuscated on this site, see Peter Suber's comments.