27 May 2011 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
The European Commission’s plan to tackle internet copyright infringements, such as illegal media downloads, would require internet service providers to work with the entertainment industry to monitor content. Critics fear this could lead to censorship and over-monitoring. BEUC, the European Consumers’ Organisation said, “Such practices would turn ISPs into some sort of Internet police that monitors the online behaviour of users and enforces copyright legislation. Fundamental rights of users will be jeopardized, namely the right to privacy and the right to due process.” Just last year, a judge ruled in Australia that an ISP company was not responsible for illegal downloading, stating that “If the ISPs become responsible for the acts of their customers, essentially they become this giant and very cheap mechanism for anyone with any sort of legal claim.”
9 May 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
China has set up a new office wielding the whip of internet censorship, as if current levels of online control weren’t enough.
China’s State Council Information Office (the government’s propaganda arm) said was creating a new agency, the State Internet Information Office, under its jurisdiction to control all facets of life on the web.
Its duties are manifold, ranging from directing online content management, licensing online news providers, online gaming, video, promoting major news websites, register domain names and managing online marketing for the government. It will also investigate websites and punish violators.
Responding to criticisms, an unnamed government officer was quoted by the State news agency Xinhua as saying these remarks were “untenable” and were spread with an aim to “tarnish the image of China.” The new body, it said, would help regulate the Internet in ways similar to many other countries, and control vulgarity, fake news and online gambling.
According to the New York Times the growth of the internet in China has “spawned a sort of land rush for regulatory turf by government agencies that see in it a chance to gain more authority or more money, or both.” At least 14 government units, it says, have their finger in internet control in some form of another.
It suggests that this new agency may cause some infighting between it and these other units.
22 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
On Miller-McCune this week, I walk through a new US government proposal for what’s shaping up to be a kind of ID card for the internet. The government swears the idea is benevolent — that such a system wouldn’t track users, collect data or block content — but imaginations in the US privacy community are already running wild. In part, that’s thanks to one of the proposal’s primary authoring agencies: the Department of Homeland Security. Here’s an extract from the article, for the full piece, click here.
Last Friday, the U.S. government unveiled its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a blueprint for the private-industry development of voluntary tools that would authenticate and consolidate your identity online. We need such a thing, the government says — in a pamphlet titled, well, “Why We Need It” — because our proliferating online passwords are inconvenient and insecure, and because last year 8.1 million adults in the U.S. suffered identity theft or fraud, at a cost of $37 billion.
The idea seems like one mandated by the moment. Increasingly, important commerce, banking and government services have migrated online, demanding ever more accounts and passwords and logins to remember.
But Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, explains that this proposal has actually been years in the making. And the history of its development suggests the concept is equal parts promising and risky — a reality hardly captured in the government’s enthusiastic 45-page rollout, complete with “Envision it!” sidebar scenarios.
18 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Freedom House released a report last week offering a kind of product review of internet circumvention tools available to web users living in countries where their access to online content is regularly blocked and filtered.
Circumvention tools — or at least the idea of them — have become a popular cause for politicians and some net freedom activists in the West who see the technology as the best antidote to internet firewalls.
But as Freedom House points out, the array of tools available come with tradeoffs many users may not be considering. Freedom House’s survey of users in Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran, reveals that many are prioritising quick access over personal safety and security — something they may be doing, the authors speculate, “out of ignorance of the risks taken.”
And in a further sign of the fractured debate around such tools — and the high stakes for anyone in, say, Iran trying to use them — a prominent US developer behind one of the tools examined by Freedom House has heavily criticised the report.
Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers behind the Tor Project (perhaps even better known as a player in the US government’s Twitter confrontation over access to the personal information of users connected to WikiLeaks), has written that the report “in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.”
He critiques Freedom House’s methodology for examining the tools, including Tor’s, and suggests in particular that the report may mislead users on the security level of various circumvention options available to them.
For all their seeming popularity in concept — a theme discussed in the current Index magazine in Danny O’Brien’s profile of the imploded project Haystack — circumvention tools may not even be reaching many of their intended users.
Last year, a Berkman Center circumvention usage report estimated that no more than 3 per cent of internet users in countries with substantial internet censorship use circumvention tools at all. After surveying savvy net users most likely to know about such tools, Berkman concluded that the true usage rate is likely even lower.
These debates about the quality of existing tools and the extent of their actual impact matter for US internet policy for one significant reason: The State Department must decide how to deploy about $25 m in funding to support international Internet freedom, and some — including powerful Republican Senator Richard Lugar — would like to see that money go entirely to develop circumvention tools.
Rebecca MacKinnon, in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, describes what’s become a political fight in Washington over how to spend this money. It pits, on one side, circumvention tool developers like the Global Internet Freedom Consortium that have actively lobbied media and politicians, and on the other Internet advocates (MacKinnon included) who warn that circumvention tools only address a small piece of the problem of free speech censorship online.
Hillary Clinton seemed to place herself in the latter category during her February speech on internet freedom when she said the government would invest in a “portfolio of technologies, tools and training.”
The bigger question, though, may not be which technologies and which tools, but can the US best help the global cause of internet freedom by investing in technology tools, or human infrastructure?
As Ethan Zuckerman has argued: “We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.”
