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Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates
Renegade:
They're ba-a-ack!
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/12/senate-nsa-secret-cybersecurity-information-sharing-act
The Senate is giving more power to the NSA, in secret. Everyone should fight it
Politicians are still trying to hand over your data behind closed doors, under the guise of 'cybersecurity' reform. Have we learned nothing?
One of the most underrated benefits of Edward Snowden's leaks was how they forced the US Congress to shelve the dangerous, privacy-destroying legislation– then known as Cispa – that so many politicians had been so eager to pass under the guise of "cybersecurity". Now a version of the bill is back, and apparently its authors want to keep you in the dark about it for as long as possible.
Now it's called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), and it is a nightmare for civil liberties. Indeed, it's unclear how this kind of law would even improve cybersecurity. The bill was marked up and modified by the Senate intelligence committee in complete secrecy this week, and only afterward was the public allowed to see many of the provisions passed under its name.
Cisa is what Senator Dianne Feinstein, the bill's chief backer and the chair of the committee, calls an "information-sharing" law that's supposed to help the government and tech and telecom companies better hand information back and forth to the government about “cyberthreat” data, such as malware. But in reality, it is written so broadly it would allow companies to hand over huge swaths of your data – including emails and other communications records – to the government with no legal process whatsoever. It would hand intelligence agencies another legal authority to potentially secretly re-interpret and exploit in private to carry out even more surveillance on the American public and citizens around the world.
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Feinstein. Hmm... Where have I heard that name before?
Yeah... more at the link. Same old, same old. Just this time it's called "CISA".
IainB:
Could be worth making a bookmark for this and even putting it in your feed-reader...
I detest the whole idea of censorship of legitimate publicly available information - in hardcopy media or on the Internet - by those who have something they are ashamed of or simply wish to hide, or would rather the public did not see.
There is such a thing as publicly accepting responsibility and accountability for one's actions, or the actions of one's family or company - something that a great many criminals, perverts, political/financial/scientific fraudsters, ne'er-do-wells and media and other corporates tend to refuse to do. Allowing these miscreant people/organisations to draw a veil over their past sins is an attempt at rewriting history and risks being a step down a slippery slope to Totalitarianism by the dirty-handed (also in the legal sense) members of society.
It is thus perhaps unsurprising that this cack-handed idea was introduced by EU legislators.
'Hidden From Google' Remembers the Sites Google Is Forced To Forget
Posted by Unknown Lamer on Monday July 14, 2014 @08:12PM
from the freedom-eagle dept.
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Hidden From Google, the brainchild of a web programmer in New Jersey, archives each website that Google is required to take down from European Union search listings thanks to the recent court decision that allows people to request that certain pages be scrubbed from Google's search results if they're outdated or irrelevant. That decision has resulted in takedown requests from convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies, among thousands of others."
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IainB:
Openness and transparency.
Here is something else of interest along similar lines as the above:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Bot Tweets Anonymous Wikipedia Edits From Capitol Hill
samzenpus posted yesterday | from the noting-the-changes dept.
89
mpicpp writes about a new Twitter bot that reports all of the anonymous Wikipedia edits being made from the US Senate and House of Representatives. Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits, a UK Twitter "bot" that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament's internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress. "The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful transparency tool," Summers wrote in his personal blog. "So using my experience on a previous side project [Wikistream, a Web application that watches Wikipedia editing activity], I quickly put together a short program that listens to all major language Wikipedias for anonymous edits from Congressional IP address ranges and tweets them." The stream for the bot, @congressedits, went live a day later, and it now provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages are made. Summers also posted the code to GitHub so that others interested in creating similar Twitter bots can riff on his work.
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Renegade:
Openness and transparency.
Here is something else of interest along similar lines as the above:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
-IainB (July 15, 2014, 12:54 AM)
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I posted about that in a new thread here: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=38393.0
It's making news as well.
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/political-staffers-tried-to-delete-the-senate-scandal-and-other-bad-behaviour-from-wikipedia
POLITICAL STAFFERS TRIED TO DELETE THE SENATE SCANDAL (AND OTHER BAD BEHAVIOUR) FROM WIKIPEDIA
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IainB:
Sorry, I didn't mean to duplicate anything you had posted - in fact I wasn't aware of that other discussion thread (hadn't seen it). I bunged it in here as it followed on from the "Right to be forgotten nonsense", as I said:
I detest the whole idea of censorship of legitimate publicly available information - in hardcopy media or on the Internet - by those who have something they are ashamed of or simply wish to hide, or would rather the public did not see.
There is such a thing as publicly accepting responsibility and accountability for one's actions, or the actions of one's family or company - something that a great many criminals, perverts, political/financial/scientific fraudsters, ne'er-do-wells and media and other corporates tend to refuse to do. Allowing these miscreant people/organisations to draw a veil over their past sins is an attempt at rewriting history and risks being a step down a slippery slope to Totalitarianism by the dirty-handed (also in the legal sense) members of society.
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