Internet News

Groklaw , a respected legal analysis website, has ceased publication out of concern of inadequate privacy for its users due to US email surveillance.

The website shutdown comes just weeks after two providers of secure email, Lavabit and Silent Circle, opted to discontinue their services.

Groklaw founder and editor Pamela Jones said she cannot continue to operate her community-based website, which often relies on confidential tips, without some degree of email privacy.

Citing LavaBit founder Ladar Levison's observation that if we knew what he knew about email, we wouldn't use it either. Lavabit previously offered email privacy but seems to have been forced to close by the US authorities

Surveillance comes with an associated cost: It drives businesses away from the United States. The Information Technology and Innovation Institute, a technology think tank, estimates that U.S. cloud service providers, unable to assure privacy, could lose between $22 billion and $35 billion to competitors in Europe over the next three years.

But that rather assumes that Europe doesn't operate equally invasive internet snooping.

Unfortunately, some of the negative effects of a report abuse button that people have feared seem already to have happened. Shortly after the function became available on certain smartphone apps, accounts like @transphobes - which retweets the kinds of violent threats and hate trans women and men get online, to raise awareness of bigotry against them - was suspended.

Whether it was targeted by a concerted campaign of opponents or automatically suspended without being reviewed by Twitter is unclear. It certainly raises the question: how easy is it to mistake awareness-raising for bigotry?

Within 48 hours the account was reinstated. But other similar accounts have also reported problems, with accounts devoted to revealing the bigotry against sex workers and others also facing suspension in the past. However the groups raising awareness of this kind of bigotry do not as yet gain mainstream notice - so who would notice when they disappear?

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A Facebook has taken down a group page entitled Virgin Mary Should've Aborted. The page had at its peak about 6,800 likes. The ban was likely due to complaints from Christian activists.

Created in February, the Mary Should've Aborted page included humerous pictures plus a mix of mockery and truth eg:

The bible is a load of outdated traditional horse manure and has no place in education, laws, politics or government.

Organized religion is a man-made tool to control society and justify oppression, currently dividing and destroying the planet.

The admins encouraged debate on religion and politics, explaining that if individuals are offended by their page then they should join it and offer arguments in response.

A Facebook group called Catholics & Protestants Against FB Religious Discrimination, has been campaigning for a ban. An online petition calling for its removal reached about 16,000 signatures.

Campaigner Cary Bogue spouted:

We're not trying to censor anyone ...BUT.. .this falls under the category of hate speech.

It's one thing to say we're atheists and we're proud of it...it's another thing to say his mother should have aborted him.

A new group page has now been created named Virgin Mary STILL Should've Aborted.

Prosecutors have charged Sedat Kapanoglu and 40 account holders with the blasphemy on the religious values of a society fraction due to their entries on Ekssiso zlu k, a popular social media website in Turkey.

Those charged face prison sentences from 6 up to 12 months.

Turkish blasphemy laws are framed with:

The purpose of protecting the sentiments of those who believe in God, religion, prophets, holy writings and sects. Individuals may certainly express their opinions and criticize certain aspects. However, they must do this while not hurting other people's religious sentiments. Therefore, nobody has the right to damage the respect of others towards their sacred concepts.

Over 100 illegal websites have been shut down by Chinese authorities since early May. Many believe that the crackdown is aimed at independent watchdog sites in mainland China.

According to the State Internet Information Office, the 107 websites were shut down for failing to obtain official permission to establish and run sites, allegedly blackmailing government and corporate officials, and using terms such as China and people in their names.

However the Chinese authorities didn't mention the onerous expense and conditions that make it nearly impossible for small websites to actually obtain such permission.

For individuals or small groups wanting to start their own websites, these regulations create large, often insurmountable obstacles. Many do not have the resources to comply with government requests for content removal and user data, which can easily become a full-time job for one or more people. Others are unable to obtain the costly business licenses needed to apply for an online content provider license.

To get around these bureaucratic procedures, some choose to affiliate themselves with established institutions or corporations so that they can register as a web-branch of a legitimate entity. Currently, there are many privately-run websites registered as web-branches of established institutions. A crackdown on these web-branches would be disastrous.

A handful of sites on the crackdown list are indeed linked to corporate extortion. But most of the so-called blackmailing activities are citizen initiatives that uncover corruption of government officials and party members.

Websites that use terms such as people , China and Chinese to name themselves are considered fraudulent and thus deemed illegal . The Chinese authorities claimed that websites such as People's Voices or People's shopping , People's News mislead the public, giving the false impression that these sites are affiliated with the Party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily.

Among the sites recently taken down are several devoted to citizen legal rights and anti-corruption efforts, including China Legal Rights Net, Xiaoxiang Anti-corruption Forum, Legal Rights Defense Net, China Legal System Monitor, People's Rights Monitor, Legal Report, People's Petition, and many other similar organizations.

Police in Thailand have opened investigations of four people for supposedly causing panic by posting rumours of a possible military coup on Facebook.

Such rumours are commonplace in Thailand and it would take more than a few articles on Facebook to create even a credible rumour. But of course authorities are prone to go over the top, and a police chief has threatened to charge anyone who even liked the postings.

The move comes as Bangkok braces for possible political protests this week coinciding with a reconciliation bill related to the 2006 coup in the country.

Technology Crime Suppression division chief Police Maj. Gen. Pisit Paoin said that the four posted Facebook entries with false information that could damage the country. Among those accused are Sermsuk Kasitipradit, the political editor of public television channel TPBS, and a local pro-government protest leader. The postings mentioned a possibility of a military coup and urged the public to hoard food and water. Pisit threatened:.

Those who 'liked' and 'shared' the posts will also face charges, so we would like to ask the public to contemplate very carefully about the way they use social media,

More than 1,000 anti-government protesters kicked off a rally in Bangkok on Sunday as lawmakers were scheduled to deliberate on the controversial bill on Wednesday. Last week, the government invoked the Internal Security Act in three Bangkok districts, citing the possibility of protest violence. The act, in effect from Aug. 1 - 10, authorizes officials to seal off roads, take action against security threats, impose curfews and ban the use of electronic devices in designated areas. Peaceful and unarmed rallies are allowed under the law.

Britain hosts the third biggest volume of internet pornography in the world and is home to more than half a million sites. There are more than 52million pages of pornographic content in the country registered under the national domain .co.uk.

There are no restrictions on pornographers registering their sites under Britain's domain name, for which a private company called Nominet UK is responsible.

John Carr, an anti-porn campaigner acting as an adviser to the government on child internet safety, called on Nominet to ban websites containing certain words like rape and said the free for all should end. He said that all porn sites should be under the domain name .xxx and declared:

The UK should not provide succour and comfort to porn merchants. Nominet should have a policy that websites registered under the national domain name do not contain depraved or disgusting words. People should not be able to register websites that bring disgrace to this country under the national domain name.

Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, is now writing to Nominet to ask what its plans are to prevent abusive behaviour . He added that he took Carr's complaint 'extremely seriously' .

The evidence that Britain hosts more pornography than any other country apart from the US and Holland will be presented by a web analysis company called MetaCert this week. Apparently Britain hosted six times as many porn web pages as Germany in fourth place and ten times as many as France in fifth place. The US is home to nearly two-thirds of the world's pornography.

The boss of Twitter UK has said sorry to women who have experienced abuse on the social networking site. Tony Wang said the threats were simply not acceptable and pledged to do more to tackle abusive behaviour.

The apology came as Twitter updated its rules and confirmed it would introduce an in-tweet report abuse button on all platforms, including desktops.

In a series of tweets, Twitter UK general manager Wang said:

I personally apologize to the women who have experienced abuse on Twitter and for what they have gone through. The abuse they've received is simply not acceptable. It's not acceptable in the real world, and it's not acceptable on Twitter. There is more we can and will be doing to protect our users against abuse. That is our commitment.

Twitter has clarified its guidance on abuse and spam - reiterating that users may not engage in targeted abuse or harassment . The report abuse button already available on the iOS Twitter app and mobile site will also be rolled out to the main website and Android app from September, Twitter said. The bosses said in the blog that additional staff were being added to the teams that handle reports of abuse.

David Cameron's plan to protect children from obscene material online has been dismissed as absolutely ridiculous by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. He said:

It's an absolutely ridiculous idea. It won't work. The software you would use to implement this doesn't work.

My view is that instead of spending literally billions of pounds, billions of dollars, snooping on ordinary people and gathering up all of this data in an apparently fruitless search for terrorists, we should devote a significant proportion of that to dealing with the real criminal issues online - people stealing credit card numbers, hacking into websites and things like that.

Unfortunately we're not seeing a lot of that. We see a lot of flash and a lot of snooping. But this is, at the end of the day, going to take an investment in real, solid police work.

Wales said problems like online child abuse, hacking social media sites and abusive or threatening messages could be tackled without the introduction of new legislation.

Wales also spoke of the issue of abusive tweets. He suggested that Twitter should make it easier for users to report abuse, but rejected calls for tighter censorship of the social network. He said:

When you think about rules about verbal threats, human society has a long history of rules and laws around this, and those rules and laws are very well thought-out. They deal with complicated cases.

I do think that Twitter has needed in the past to do more to give people more control of the environment, to allow faster means for people to complain and to have people behaving badly exposed, blocked or arrested as necessary.

But it is not like we don't have a law against threatening people. We do, and people are quite rightly being called up on this.

The DCMS has published an official wide ranging paper on internet and communications policy. Many of the censorship aspects have already been described by David Cameron in his recent speech. Here are a few paragraphs fleshing out some of the proposed censorship ideas:

Material Promoting Terrorism

The Prime Minister has convened an Extremism Task Force which will be looking closely, in the coming months, at the role the communications industry can and should play in reducing the availability of material promoting terrorism online.

A watershed for internet TV

We want to ensure that the living room remains a safe space for children.

TV remains central to our lives, with people in the UK watching on average more than four hours of broadcast TV every day. Families still get together to sit around the television and watch the latest period drama, talent competition, or catch the latest episode of their favourite soap.

But increasingly, set-top boxes and TVs connected to the internet enable programmes and films to be viewed on-demand, to fit viewing around our own schedules. These can fall outside of regulatory frameworks. People tend to consider connected TVs to be a TV-like experience and expect to be more protected than they are from content accessed through PCs and laptops. Yet, the technology means that it is easy to flick  between regulated and unregulated spaces. Since this is not always clear, this increases the risk of people inadvertently accessing content that may be offensive, inappropriate, or harmful to children.

The technology is already available to enable people to be provided with more information about programmes, and for locks to be put in place to prevent post- watershed programmes from being viewed by children on-demand. But more needs to be done to make sure that these practices are adopted more widely, and to make sure that tools, like pin-protection, are straightforward and easy for people to use.

We also want it to be clear to people when they are watching TV in a protected, regulated space, and when they move with just a few clicks to an unregulated area of the internet. We want industry, broadcasters, manufacturers and platform providers, to lead the development of consumer tools in this area, working with regulators to consider what mechanisms can be applied to clearly label regulated and unregulated content. One such mechanism, may be, for example, using the electronic programme guide itself to define the protected space. We will work with industry to ensure that best practice is developed and can be shared and standardised. Given this is an area where we are seeing rapid developments, we will keep progress under close review, and if necessary, we will consider the case for legislation to ensure that audiences are protected to the level that they choose

R18 on internet TV

The popularity of video-on-demand services (VoD) has grown dramatically in recent years, providing consumers with great new choices about what they want to watch when and where. But with this new opportunity comes risk, and this is particularly the case when it comes to harmful content that is now more readily available. In hard copy, content rated R18 by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is only available in licensed sex shops and content that was even stronger is banned outright. The VOD regulations in this area do not currently provide the same level of certainty and protection as on the high street. As on-demand services become increasingly prevalent we want to make sure that regulation of on-demand content is as robust as regulation of content on a DVD, bringing the online world into line with the high street.

We will legislate to ensure that material that would be rated R18 by the British Board of Film Classification is put behind access controls on regulated services and we will ban outright content on regulated services that is illegal even in licensed sex shops.

More Dangerous Pictures

We will also close a loophole in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, so that it is a criminal offence to possess extreme pornography that depicts rape.

Website Blocking

We are seeing good progress in this area:

• Where children could be accessing the internet, we need good filters that are preselected to be on, and we need parents aware and engaged in the setting of those filters. By the end of this year, when someone sets up a new broadband account, the settings to install family friendly filters will be automatically selected; if you just click next or enter, then the filters are automatically on.

• By the end of next year ISPs will have prompted all existing customers to make an unavoidable decision about whether to apply family friendly filters.

• Only adult account holders will be able to change these filters once applied.

• All mobile phone operators will apply adult filters to their phones. [Does this allow adults to turn off the blocking?]

• 90% of public Wi-Fi will have family friendly filters applied to wherever children are likely to be present.

• Ofcom will regularly review the efficacy of these filters

But we are clear that industry must go further:

• We expect the smaller ISPs to follow the lead being set by the larger providers.

• We want industry to continue to refine and improve their filters to ensure they do not, even unintentionally, filter out legitimate content.

• We want to see mobile network operators develop their child safety services further; for example, filtering by handset rather than by contract would provide greater flexibility for parents as they work to keep their children safe online.

Paying for PC advert censorship

The UK benefits from a healthy and successful advertising sector, underpinned by an exemplar of successful self-regulation, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The A administers a system which is flexible and responsive, and is industry funded, through 0.1% levy on non-broadcast advertising spend levied by the Advertising Standards Boa of Finance (ASBOF). This levy is voluntary, but is well supported by industry; however, will be important to ensure that this continues to be sustainable in the future. The relatively recent extension of the ASA's online remit to cover marketing on companies own websites and on social media demonstrates the increasing importance of online advertising, and advertising spend in the future is likely to increase its focus on these online markets. Therefore, it will be important to ensure that this self-regulatory, industry-funded model remains sustainable for the future, and that the regulation of online and offline advertising alike can continue to be supported by the industry levy. Some concerns have been raised over the degree to which collection of the levy in the digital world has kept pace with the rate at which advertisers are now operating there.

We think it is incumbent upon all parts of the industry, including the digital media, to safeguard this continued funding by playing their part in the collection of the levy.

The ToryDiary website writes:

Respondents were asked in our latest survey whether or not they supported David Cameron's proposals on the internet and pornography.

• 57 per cent said that they do.

• 27 per cent said that they don't.

• 15 per cent said that they have no view.

This represents decisive support for the Prime Minister's proposals, which have been strongly driven by the Culture Department. It's worth adding that at this stage this is very much support in principle: we have yet to see the detail.

However Tory MPs don't seem to be lining up make their pro-censorship views known to the electorate. Perhaps too many votes to be lost.

A secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its widest-reaching system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

I, sitting at my desk, said Snowden, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email .

Training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA' s widest reaching system developing intelligence from computer networks -- what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence ( DNI ). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata .

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a US person, though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a "selector" in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted. Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used.

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