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    The coming end of internet freedom

    This is an invitation to discuss issues related to Internet freedom, censorship, Internet economy and the like. I'm starting a separate discussion thread because it's a large and continuing issue that will get swallowed up by other issues if posted in the political discussions or "hot topics" thread.

    Russian data law fuels web surveillance fears

    A new law has been implemented in Russia that in theory demands companies store data about Russian citizens on Russian territory, throwing thousands of firms with online operations into a legal grey area.

    The law, which came into operation on Tuesday, is part of an attempt to wrest control of the internet, which president Vladimir Putin has called a “CIA project”. The Russian authorities are keen to ensure greater access for domestic security services to online data, and lessen the potential for foreign states, especially the US, to have the same access.
    EU ministers push ISPs to censor web after Paris attacks

    Right to be forgotten: Wikipedia chief enters internet censorship row

    Russia’s ‘right to be forgotten’ bill comes into effect


    WhatsApp blocked in Brazil for 48 hours by court

    Microsoft case: DoJ says it can demand every email from any US-based provider

    U.S. tech companies unite behind Apple ahead of iPhone encryption ruling

    Telcos propose licence regime for WhatsApp, Skype, others

    Airbnb's legal troubles: what are the issues?

    All these and more signal, in my opinion, the beginning of the end of internet freedom, and can be divided into three major trends:

    1- Drawing digital borders. Increasingly, states seek to bring under control and localize companies who run cross-border service operations via the internet. Demands to store data locally, pay taxes locally, comply with local state laws and get licensed locally for each country that the service reaches via the Internet create a situation in which Internet universality will soon be impossible; the global digital sandbox is being broken down into separate, increasingly isolated rooms. Logical continuation of these demands will lead to creation of local networks with watertight separation from the global Internet.

    2 - The end of Internet-based economy as we know it. The most common business model of Internet age - free on the user's end while collecting revenue elsewhere (via advertising and sale of metadata, sale of value-adding services on top of free base service) is made increasingly difficult to sustain by demands that Internet-based service providers (especially telephony and messaging) become subject to the same regulation as providers with physical infrastructure within state borders. The days of free Skype - and eventually email which is a form of text message - may soon be over. Likewise, the peer-to-peer economy (Airbnb, Uber, Ebay) made possible by the Internet is increasingly targeted for destruction by forcing it to comply with laws designed for brick-and-mortar economy, under which the Internet companies cannot possibly operate.

    3- Demand for access to, censorship of and management of any and all stored information. Ever-more laws in ever-more states force upon providers of Internet search, communication and news aggregation mind-boggling demands for access to private information, censorship of global internet search results, creation of mandatory backdoors into secure devices and other things that by their nature threaten Internet freedom.

    My pessimistic prediction is that these processes are all but inevitable and cannot be stopped. In the next 20 years, international message boards like Gateworld will be impossible to run.
    If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.- Abba Eban.

    #2
    ain't surprising coming from the ruskies (or the american DoJ)

    on the other hand: wouldn't that be a good thing? (if it's applied)

    Comment


      #3
      It was a given as soon as Internet use became widespread that governments would end up controlling it in some way; no government on the face of the earth or operated by humans would ever be happy with a communications medium that any citizen could access and they had no control over.
      The US alone has been trying various schemes to establish precedent for govt. oversight, usually under the guise of stopping pr0n or protecting youngsters for years.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by Annoyed View Post
        The US alone has been trying various schemes to establish precedent for govt. oversight, usually under the guise of stopping pr0n or protecting youngsters for years.
        or terrorism ("9/11 never forget etc.")

        Comment


          #5
          I read in several places that the USA is going to enforce a ruling starting during the summer of 2016, involving quoting copyrighted materials from news agency sites, which are currently designated to be used under the "Fair Use" law/bill.

          Some people interpreting that ruling believed it might merely apply mostly to song and entertainment industry materials to protect those materials from being pirated.

          Other folks believe it extends to the entire media, including providing links to headline news articles. Such actions will be penalized with a specific FINE, under the penalty of the Law being enforced.

          I don't have time to go look for it now, but I know it exists, and is supposed to become operational in a few months from now. Not sure how the actual "Law" will affect discussion of the various news events around the world, but if the worst case scenario results, might as well just stop talking or communicating all together about what happened where, etc.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by SGalisa View Post
            I don't have time to go look for it now, but I know it exists, and is supposed to become operational in a few months from now. Not sure how the actual "Law" will affect discussion of the various news events around the world, but if the worst case scenario results, might as well just stop talking or communicating all together about what happened where, etc.
            To the delight of big government types everywhere.

            Comment


              #7
              I have been getting banned from more and more MSGB's then normal of late....
              I like Sharky
              sigpic

              Comment


                #8
                I would say that the whole Net Neutrality issue is a good case study to look at. How companies, government, and internet users interact as these new developments unfold. How the extent of the knowledge, or lack thereof, of the internet plays a role as corporations and states try to find ways of making the internet work for them at the expense of the user.
                By Nolamom
                sigpic


                Comment


                  #9
                  WhatsApp Encryption Said to Stymie Wiretap Order

                  WASHINGTON — While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said.

                  No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service, would open a new front in the Obama administration’s dispute with Silicon Valley over encryption, security and privacy.

                  WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge’s wiretap order.

                  Continue reading the main story
                  RELATED COVERAGE

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                  As recently as this past week, officials said, the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.

                  The Justice Department and WhatsApp declined to comment. The government officials and others who discussed the dispute did so on condition of anonymity because the wiretap order and all the information associated with it were under seal. The nature of the case was not clear, except that officials said it was not a terrorism investigation. The location of the investigation was also unclear.

                  To understand the battle lines, consider this imperfect analogy from the predigital world: If the Apple dispute is akin to whether the F.B.I. can unlock your front door and search your house, the issue with WhatsApp is whether it can listen to your phone calls. In the era of encryption, neither question has a clear answer.

                  Some investigators view the WhatsApp issue as even more significant than the one over locked phones because it goes to the heart of the future of wiretapping. They say the Justice Department should ask a judge to force WhatsApp to help the government get information that has been encrypted. Others are reluctant to escalate the dispute, particularly with senators saying they will soon introduce legislation to help the government get data in a format it can read.

                  Whether the WhatsApp dispute ends in a court fight that sets precedents, many law enforcement officials and security experts say that such a case may be inevitable because the nation’s wiretapping laws were last updated a generation ago, when people communicated by landline telephones that were easy to tap.

                  “The F.B.I. and the Justice Department are just choosing the exact circumstance to pick the fight that looks the best for them,” said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital rights. “They’re waiting for the case that makes the demand look reasonable.”

                  A senior law enforcement official disputed the notion that the government was angling for the perfect case, and said that litigation was not inevitable.

                  This is not the first time that the government’s wiretaps have been thwarted by encryption. And WhatsApp is not the only company to clash with the government over the issue. But with a billion users and a particularly strong international customer base, it is by far the largest.

                  Last year, a dispute with Apple over encrypted iMessages in an investigation of guns and drugs, for instance, nearly led to a court showdown in Maryland. In that case, as in others, the company helped the government where it was able to, and the Justice Department backed down.

                  Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s founder, who was born in Ukraine, has talked about his family members’ fears that the government was eavesdropping on their phone calls. In the company’s early years, WhatsApp had the ability to read messages as they passed through its servers. That meant it could comply with government wiretap orders.

                  But in late 2014, the company said that it would begin adding sophisticated encoding, known as end-to-end encryption, to its systems. Only the intended recipients would be able to read the messages.

                  “WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have,” the company said this month when Brazilian police arrested a Facebook executive after the company failed to turn over information about a customer who was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation.

                  The iPhone case, which revolves around whether Apple can be forced to help the F.B.I. unlock a phone used by one of the killers in last year’s San Bernardino, Calif., massacre, has received worldwide attention for the precedent it might set. But to many in law enforcement, disputes like the one with WhatsApp are of far greater concern.

                  For more than a half-century, the Justice Department has relied on wiretaps as a fundamental crime-fighting tool. To some in law enforcement, if companies like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram can design unbreakable encryption, then the future of wiretapping is in doubt.

                  “You’re getting useless data,” said Joseph DeMarco, a former federal prosecutor who now represents law enforcement agencies that filed briefs supporting the Justice Department in its fight with Apple. “The only way to make this not gibberish is if the company helps.”

                  “As we know from intercepted prisoner wiretaps,” he added, “criminals think that advanced encryption is great.”

                  Businesses, customers and the United States government also rely on strong encryption to help protect information from hackers, identity thieves and foreign cyberattacks. That is why, in 2013, a White House report said the government should “not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption.”

                  In a twist, the government helped develop the technology behind WhatsApp’s encryption. To promote civil rights in countries with repressive governments, the Open Technology Fund, which promotes open societies by supporting technology that allows people to communicate without the fear of surveillance, provided $2.2 million to help develop Open Whisper Systems, the encryption backbone behind WhatsApp.


                  Because of such support for encryption, Obama administration officials disagree over how far they should push companies to accommodate the requests of law enforcement. Senior leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have held out hope that Congress will settle the matter by updating the wiretap laws to address new technology. But the White House has declined to push for such legislation. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, said on Friday that he was skeptical “of Congress’s ability to handle such a complicated policy area.”

                  James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, told Congress this month that strong encryption was “vital” and acknowledged that “there are undoubtedly international implications” for the United States to try to break encryption, especially for wiretaps, as in the WhatsApp case. But he has called for technology companies and the government to find a middle ground that allows for strong encryption but accommodates law enforcement efforts. President Obama echoed those remarks on Friday, saying technology executives who were “absolutist” on the issue were wrong.

                  Those who support digital privacy fear that if the Justice Department succeeds in forcing Apple to help break into the iPhone in the San Bernardino case, the government’s next move will be to force companies like WhatsApp to rewrite their software to remove encryption from the accounts of certain customers. “That would be like going to nuclear war with Silicon Valley,” said Chris Soghoian, a technology analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union.

                  That view is one reason government officials have been hesitant to rush to court in the WhatsApp case and others like it. The legal and policy implications are great. While no immediate resolution is in sight, more and more companies offer encryption. And technology analysts say that WhatsApp’s yearlong effort to add encryption to all one billion of its customer accounts is nearly complete.
                  It's spreading.
                  If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.- Abba Eban.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by Womble View Post
                    It's spreading.
                    Of course it is. As I've said before, no government made up of humans is going to be happy with a communications medium that everyone can participate in that they cannot control.
                    It will take time, but this can only end one way.

                    Did you ever watch the now defunct TV series "Continuum"? One episode has a flashback where we learn that the population is forbidden to posess printed media, such as books because the corporate government in power at the time can't control or monitor the content of non-electronic media.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Originally posted by Annoyed View Post
                      Of course it is. As I've said before, no government made up of humans is going to be happy with a communications medium that everyone can participate in that they cannot control.
                      but here's it the law enforcement who want companies to decrypt customers' private data, are you saying you wish to hinder the work of law enforcement? how leftist of you :|

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Hello dark web!

                        Problem solved, if you don't want anyone knowing where you're hiding your website, or where you're hailing from.

                        Goverments have been blocking websites for ages - nothing new there. Just look at China blocking left, right and center.
                        Or Turkey, more recently, after the recent bombings, took both Facebook and Twitter out of the ether.

                        If any of you are surprised it's happening, then I'd have to call you very naive.

                        Also, to the copyright thing -- everything is copyrighted. Everything has an owner, but people simply forget that -- negligence or they simply don't know.
                        Heightmeyer's Lemming -- still the coolest Lemming of the forum

                        Proper Stargate Rewatch -- season 10 of SG-1

                        Comment


                          #13
                          France fines Google over 'right to be forgotten'

                          The French data protection authority said it has fined Google (GOOGL.O) 100,000 euros ($111,720) for not scrubbing web search results widely enough in response to a European privacy ruling.

                          The only way for Google to uphold the Europeans' right to privacy was by delisting inaccurate results popping up under name searches across all its websites, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL) said in a statement on Thursday.

                          In May 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that people could ask search engines, such as Google and Microsoft's Bing (MSFT.O), to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results appearing under searches for people's names - dubbed the "right to be forgotten".

                          The U.S. Internet giant has been at odds with European Union data protection authorities over the territorial scope of the ruling.

                          Google complied, but it only scrubbed results across its European websites such as Google.de in Germany and Google.fr in France on the grounds that to do otherwise would have a chilling effect on the free flow of information.

                          In May last year the CNIL ordered Google to expand its application of the ruling to all its domains, including Google.com, because of the ease of switching from a European domain to Google.com.

                          "Contrary to Google's statements, applying delisting to all of the extensions does not curtail freedom of expression insofar as it does not entail any deletion of content from the Internet," the CNIL said.


                          A spokesman for Google, now a unit of holding company Alphabet Inc, said the company had worked hard to implement the "right to be forgotten ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe."

                          "But as a matter of principle, we disagree with the CNIL’s assertion that it has the authority to control the content that people can access outside France, and we plan to appeal their ruling," Al Verney, Google's spokesman, said.

                          The company did try to assuage the regulator's concerns in February by delisting search results across all its websites - including Google.com - when accessed from the country where the request came from.

                          That meant that if a German resident asks Google to de-list a link popping up under searches for his or her name, the link will not be visible on any version of Google's website, including Google.com, when the search engine is accessed from Germany.

                          But the CNIL rejected that approach, saying that a person's right to privacy could not depend on the "geographic origin of those viewing the search results."

                          "Only delisting on all of the search engine's extensions, regardless of the extension used or the geographic origin of the person performing the search, can effectively uphold this right," it said.
                          In a nutshell, the French regulator wants the "right to be forgotten" to be applied globally. Google attempted several compromises - delisting the required search results from the French-language results, from European results, from world results if searched from France - but because the nature of the Internet is such that all those can be easily bypassed, the French regulator insists that nothing less than delisting the information from ALL search results worldwide no matter who searches for it, from where and in which language, will count as compliance. They claim that it does not infringe on the public's right to know because well, they aren't asking to delete the information from the Internet itself. They're just asking to make it inaccessible. It'll still be out there, just not available for anyone to find.

                          The French government seriously lays claim to regulating the entire Internet.
                          If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.- Abba Eban.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Do you feel at least some of the problem here is that the internet is one of the few truly global systems in the world, and part of this desire to control it is -because- it is global?
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                            ALL THANKS TO THE WONDERFUL CREATOR OF THIS SIG GO TO R.I.G.
                            A lie is just a truth that hasn't gone through conversion therapy yet
                            The truth isn't the truth

                            Comment


                              #15
                              It's very human wanting to control everything - even a global communication system. But I wouldn't be that pessimistic - there will always be a way around censorship. IMO it's similar (in one way or other) to the doping problem - officials can only react, the acting is always with the athletes. People will always use doping and just like that there will always be a way to find a way around censorship in the internet!
                              CARPE DIEM
                              ANJA

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