Liberty News

The newly appointed German Federal Minister for 'Justice' Marco Buschmann has called for the prosecution of people who spread misinformation and hate on social platforms. Supporters of censorship singled out Telegram as the most popular avenue for spreading misinformation and hate speech.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the heads of several states are in favor of stricter speech control. At a conference Thursday, they said that open social networks with mass communication should be legally regulated.

The Federal Office of Justice noted that Telegram is not merely a messaging service, but a social network. Therefore, like Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, Telegram should follow the requirements of the Network Enforcement Act (Germany's social networks and platforms regulation).

The rules would force Telegram to establish a system for users to report harmful content and a system through which the German courts can send demands.

Given that fully jabbed people can pass on covid then it seems ineffectual for countries to insist on vaccine passports for venues.

Perhaps the point is rather to ensure that most customers are carrying their phones so enabling secret state snooping.

Rights groups in Israel have called on the country's top court to repeal the recently announced measures to use the counter-terrorism phone (presumably GPS) tracking system to track carriers of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced emergency measures including phone tracking to locate those infected by the Omicron variant. The Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency's phone-tracking technology was to be used to enable to surveillance.

The phone tracking system can match the carriers of the virus locations to other phones nearby to identify people that might have been exposed.

The UK government has announced that it is funding five projects to snoop on your device content supposedly in a quest to seek out child porn. But surely these technologies will have wider usage.

The five projects are the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund, which aims to encourage the tech industry to find practical solutions to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse online, without impacting people's rights to privacy and data protection in their communications.

The winners will each receive an initial £85,000 from the Fund, which is administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Home Office, to help them bring their technical proposals for new digital tools and applications to combat online child abuse to the market.

Based across the UK and Europe, and in partnership with leading UK universities, the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund are:

• Edinburgh-based Cyan Forensics and Crisp Thinking, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and Internet Watch Foundation, will develop a plug-in to be integrated within encrypted social platforms. It will detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) - by matching content against known illegal material.
• SafeToNet and Anglia Ruskin University will develop a suite of live video-moderation AI technologies that can run on any smart device to prevent the filming of nudity, violence, pornography and CSAM in real-time, as it is being produced.
• GalaxKey, based in St Albans, will work with Poole-based Image Analyser and Yoti, an age-assurance company, to develop software focusing on user privacy, detection and prevention of CSAM and predatory behavior, and age verification to detect child sexual abuse before it reaches an E2EE environment, preventing it from being uploaded and shared.
• DragonflAI, based in Edinburgh, will also work with Yoti to combine their on-device nudity AI detection technology with age assurance technologies to spot new indecent images within E2EE environments.
• T3K-Forensics are based in Austria and will work to implement their AI-based child sexual abuse detection technology on smartphones to detect newly created material, providing a toolkit that social platforms can integrate with their E2EE services.

Since August, EFF and others have been telling Apple to cancel its new child safety plans . Apple is now changing its tune about one component of its plans: the Messages app will no longer send notifications to parent accounts.

That's good news. As we've previously explained , this feature would have broken end-to-end encryption in Messages, harming the privacy and safety of its users. So we're glad to see that Apple has listened to privacy and child safety advocates about how to respect the rights of youth. In addition, sample images shared by Apple show the text in the feature has changed from "sexually explicit" to "naked," a change that LBTQ+ rights advocates have asked for, as the phrase "sexually explicit" is often used as cover to prevent access to LGBTQ+ material.

Now, Apple needs to take the next step, and stop its plans to scan photos uploaded to a user's iCloud Photos library for child sexual abuse images (CSAM). Apple must draw the line at invading people's private content for the purposes of law enforcement. As Namrata Maheshwari of Access Now pointed out at EFF's Encryption and Child Safety event , "There are legislations already in place that will be exploited to make demands to use this technology for purposes other than CSAM." Vladimir Cortés of Article 19 agreed, explaining that governments will "end up using these backdoors to ... silence dissent and critical expression." Apple should sidestep this dangerous and inevitable pressure, stand with its users, and cancel its photo scanning plans.

Apple: Pay attention to the real world consequences, and make the right choice to protect our privacy.

It is not only the British parliament that is clamouring to control their subjects via an identity verification requirement fo social media users. Governments are=round the world are doubling their efforts to end online anonymity by proposing and introducing new laws that force users to hand over their identity documents (IDs) to use social media and by framing online anonymity as something that needs to be eradicated.

While most of these government efforts to end online anonymity have been widely covered in the media, America's recent proposals have managed to stay out of the spotlight. But despite flying under the radar, these proposals do exist in a discussion draft that was introduced by Congressman John Curtis in May.

The discussion draft aims to require a provider of a social media service to verify the identity of users of the service, and for other purposes and prevent anyone from creating a social media account without verifying their identity.

Not only does this discussion draft intend to make ID verification mandatory for anyone who wants to create a social media account but it also wants to force social media companies to report users to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) whenever they suspect users have submitted fake IDs. Additionally, it contains a requirement for the FTC to submit these reports to the United States (US) Department of Justice (DOJ).

While the discussion draft does include an exception for social media providers that have annual revenues of less than $1 billion for three consecutive years, the large social media platforms where the vast majority of the more than three billion total social media users are registered will be forced to verify the real identity of their users.

The UK Ministry of defence has published a wide ranging paper about better ways for it to catalogue and analyse data from multiple sources, mostly for military purposes.

The document contains a brief section speaking of a capability to monitor social media with a view to analysing changes in political sentiment:

The below present example scenarios for Defence to drive battlespace advantage and business efficiency through exploiting its data in a multi-domain and integrated environment.

Political demonstration:

• Sensors: Automated scanning of social media platforms (analysing key words and interactions) detects change in population sentiment.

• Decision makers: Local authorities are quickly informed of change in sentiment. Decision making is enhanced by local surveillance of groups of interest.

• Effectors: Escalated monitoring and intelligence gathering, with heightened readiness measures to respond in place.

Surely an incredibly short paragraph to describe such an enormous capability for state snooping.