At the moment, the only half-way serious attempt at justifying the NSA's "take it all" approach to surveillance is to claim that there is no alternative if we want intelligence agencies to spot and stop extreme threats like terrorism:
Back in June, Mike wrote about the important Myriad Genetics judgment from the Supreme Court, which said that naturally-occuring genetic material could not be patented. However, because of some hedging from the judges, there were concerns about how much this would block gene patents in practice. Last week we had an indication that the impact is indeed likely to be significant, as VentureBeat reports:
We noted last week that Japan was bringing in severe new punishments designed to discourage whistleblowing. That might suggest that following Snowden's leaks, there will now be a period of repression where potential whistleblowers lie low to avoid bringing down the wrath of governments on their heads. One person with a better idea than most about what is really going on here is Jesselyn Radack. She's employed by the General Accountability Project (GAP), a leading US whistleblower protection and advocacy organization. Here's part of her biography on the GAP site:
Earlier this year we wrote about how AbbVie, the pharma company spun out of Abbott Laboratories, had gone to court to stop the European Medicines Agency (EMA) from releasing clinical trials information about one of its drugs. Despite what AbbVie claimed, this was not commercially sensitive in any way, but simply basic data about safety and efficacy.
It's always heartening to come across new ideas for ways to make creations more widely available to the public while allowing artists to benefit. Here's one from the German film director Fred Breinersdorfer, probably best known for his film "Sophie Scholl". In an article that appeared recently on the newspaper site Süddeutsche.de (original in German), he complains about the fact that searching online for his film throws up plenty of unauthorized versions, but precious few authorized ones.
One of the many worrying aspects of the Snowden saga is an attempt in the US to reframe whistleblowing as treason, and to make it harder for people to reveal information to journalists or the public that might embarrass the government there. However, things are even worse in other parts of the world. In Japan, for example, there are plans to bring in a new secrecy law that will make whistleblowing even more risky, as Reuters reports:
Techdirt has been reporting for a while on India's growing success in providing its population with access to low-cost generic drugs, making use of the permissions to do so granted by TRIPS. That has naturally earned it the ire of Western pharma companies, which now seem to be striking back, as this post on Infojustice.org explains:
Edward Snowden's leaks show that the NSA and GCHQ have been systematically subverting key technologies that underlie the Internet. That betrayal of trust has prompted some soul-searching by the Net engineering community, which realizes that it needs to come up with more surveillance-resistant approaches. This story from Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) provides information about the kind of thing they are working on in one key group, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It reports on a speech given by the IETF's chair, Jari Arkko, at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia.
Last week we wrote about the rising threat of corporate sovereignty, known more obscurely as "investor-state dispute settlement", that allows companies to sue countries for alleged loss of future profits. Just how grave that threat is for developing nations can be gauged by the following, reported by Tico Times:
In my previous TTIP update, I reported on an extremely important leak about the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), which is the other half of the US attempt to stitch up world trade through supranational treaties.
I've always been a big fan of Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, even when it was unfashionable to admit it. Because, for the last few years, the view amongst those "in the know" was that email was dead, that nobody used it, and that even if they did, Web-based systems like Gmail meant that Thunderbird and its ilk were dinosaurs.
A few weeks back, I wrote about the troubling prospect of DRM being baked into HTML5. At the centre of a related piece was a post by Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering for Mozilla. As I noted then, it was somewhat opaque, in that I found it hard to understand how exactly Mozilla intended to react to the W3C's pernicious proposal to discuss DRM - specifically, the idea of adding Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5. By a happy chance, Eich was passing through London recently, and so I was able to find out more about Mozilla's attitude and plans in this area.
Today's update is a little odd, since it's not actually about TAFTA/TTIP, at least not directly. Although the second round is taking place this week, it's almost certain we'll be told nothing about the real substance of the discussions. That's because even though these massive trade agreements affect hundreds of millions of people, the latter are not given any opportunity to see the draft texts as they are discussed, or to have any meaningful dialogue with the negotiators. That may have been acceptable 30 years ago, but in the age of the Internet, when it is trivial to make documents available, and easy to enter into online discussions, it's outrageous.
One of the key issues during the ACTA negotiations was transparency - or rather the lack of it. Despite a few token gestures from the European Commission initially, TAFTA/TTIP looks like it will be just as bad. Here's a rather cheap trick the negotiators have just played:
You may recall back in 2011, there was an extraordinary bidding war for the patents of Nortel Networks:
As you may recall, back in September the European Commission finally came out with its proposals for net neutrality, part of its larger "Connected Continent" package designed to complete the telecoms single market. I learned yesterday that the European committee responsible for this area, ITRE (Industry, Research and Energy), has launched something of a stealth consultation on these proposals. Stealth, because neither I nor anyone else that I know covering this area, was aware of them, which is pretty bizarre.
Remember all those years ago, when people laughed at the first Android phones (which were, to tell the truth, pretty clunky, but still...). Remember how Apple fans have always insisted that however well Android did in the smartphone market, it would always be second best, and never seriously threaten Apple's dominance? Well here's what actually happened:
Bitcoin shares with drones the unhappy distinction of being the subject of almost exclusively negative reports. Just as drones are usually doing bad things to people, so Bitcoins are usually helping people do bad things because of their supposed untraceability. So it makes a pleasant change to come across an upbeat Bitcoin story like this, as told by the Guardian:
VKontakte is not only the largest social networking site in Russia, but is also one of the biggest unauthorized repositories of copyright music, thanks to its file-hosting service. Given the moves to clamp down on copyright infringement in Russia, it seemed only a matter of time before VKontakte found itself in hot water because of this. And yet, as Torrent Freak reports, something unexpected has happened:
There aren't many upsides to Snowden's revelations that NSA is essentially spying on the entire Internet, all the time, but if one good thing has already come out of that sorry state of affairs it's the emergence of security expert Bruce Schneier as a mainstream commentator on the digital world. That's largely because his core expertise has been shoved into the very center of our concerns, making his thoughts on what's going on particularly valuable.
One of the difficulties of making people aware of the huge impact that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses in TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are likely to have on their lives, is that the name is so boring, and so they tend to assume that what it describes is also boring and not worth worrying about. And yet what began as an entirely reasonable system for protecting investments in emerging economies with weak judiciaries, through the use of independent tribunals, has turned into a monster that now allows companies to place themselves above national laws, as Techdirt has reported before.
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