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Internet freedoms restrained - SOPA/PIPA/OPEN/ACTA/CETA/PrECISE-related updates
IainB:
www.themalaymailonline.com/what-you-think/article/trans-pacific-partnership-a-recipe-for-corporate-dictatorship-mun-loong-won
Highly relevant info there.
-Renegade (November 16, 2014, 04:30 AM)
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yes, that's a scary one.
There's also the related EU/USA version TTIP or TAFTA :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership#Controversy
-tomos (November 16, 2014, 09:03 AM)
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@Renegade: Thanks - the themalaymailonline.com article is quite telling.
@tomos: Thanks for those links. One never knows whether they are at liberty to disclose the whole story though.
IainB:
An interesting paper from 2010: http://www.ams.org/notices/201003/rtx100300357p.pdf
The Brave New World of Bodacious Assumptions in Cryptography - Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes (2010)
Also some accidental irony in the conclusions where there is an implication of the role of the NSA as some kind of approving authority on the matter, rather than as we know it today - i.e., as an apparently State-sponsored national and international security hacking authority.
:o
IainB:
German bureaucracy is pragmatic - and ironic, but honest with it:
German Government Refuses FOI Request By Pointing Out Document Already Leaked | Techdirt
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
rom the well-played dept
Freedom of information requests are a powerful way of finding out things that governments would rather not reveal. As a result, requests are often refused on a variety of grounds, some more ridiculous than others. The Netzpolitik blog points us to a rather unusual case concerning a request by the politician Malte Spitz for a letter from the Chief of Staff of the German Chancellery to members of a commission investigating intelligence matters. The request was refused on the grounds that the document was already freely available (original in German):
The information you requested may be obtained free of charge on the Internet by anyone, in a reasonable manner. The letter from the Chief of the Federal Chancellery, Federal Minister Peter Altmaier, to the chairman of the first committee of inquiry of the 18th legislature, Professor Dr. Sensburg, is publicly available and published in full at the following link:
https://netzpolitik.org/2014/drohung-des-bundeskanzleramtes-wir-veroeffentlichen-den-brief-in-dem-uns-altmaier-mit-strafanzeige-droht/
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The Netzpolitik link included there leads to an article that a few weeks earlier had not only leaked the document requested by Spitz, but also noted wryly that the letter from Altmaier threatens anyone leaking documents with legal action.
The German bureaucracy should be applauded for taking the adult view that once a document is leaked, it is publicly -- and officially -- available. This contrasts with the childish attempts by the British government to pretend that Snowden's leaks never happened, and its refusal even to pronounce the name of some of the surveillance programs he revealed.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
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Renegade:
^ That's funny!
IainB:
With the uneasy feel of having a burglar tell me how to take care of my house keys, I got this letter from one Derek Slater of Google:
SOPA is back,
In 2012, millions of Americans rose up to help defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The public sent a clear message to Congress: don't censor the web.
Now movie industry lobbyists at the MPAA are trying to resurrect web censorship via a back door. As revealed in the press, they've organized a campaign to achieve SOPA by other means, and are still more than eager to break the way the Internet works to achieve their agenda.
The MPAA was worried this strategy would "invigorate and galvanize ... the SOPA debates." Let's prove them right!
Together we defeated online censorship once—let's do it again. Share this graphic and tell the MPAA to kill the #ZombieSOPA.
Help defeat web censorship once and for all.
The MPAA needs to know that all of us who truly care about the Internet won't just stand aside and let them ruin what we love.
Thanks for stepping up,
Derek Slater
Google Inc.
P.S. Here's what we had to say today.
© 2014 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
You are receiving this email because you asked to receive updates on Internet legislation and initiatives from Google. To opt out of future communications, please click here.
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Regarding that matesy "Thanks for stepping up" bit, one gets the feeling that the correct response might be "Yeah, right" and to keep one's hands firmly in one's pockets.
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