Six years after Denmark passed a law mandating that telecommunication companies retain and store their customers' personal data for up to two years, local advocacy groups and the telecom industry are pushing for immediate changes to the legislation. The practice of keeping records of private citizens' Internet use is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, they say. The police, meanwhile, have concluded that requiring telecoms to store subscriber data has not helped them track criminals, which was the the ostensible purpose of the practice. But the Danish government still wants to postpone an evaluation of the law for another two years. Read More

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. Read More

Civil society organizers engage South Africans in the fight against corruption by employing both an old and new media awareness strategy about the gravity of this issue. Read More

The Iraqi government has banned eight television news stations from broadcasting in the country, accusing them of inciting sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. Read More

Canada’s federal Liberal party elected a new leader last week. And for the first time in the party's history, the voting took place online. Justin Trudeau, the telegenic son of the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Canada's most famous leader, won in a landslide with over 80 per cent of the vote. But online voting critics say that despite the decisive results, the Internet remains an unsafe place to cast your vote. Read More

A clear majority of Danish parliamentarians supports the new Freedom of Information Act, which would increase the right of government to keep internal documents and correspondence between members of the legislative and executive branches of government secret from the public. The law could prevent the media from exposing political scandals. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and it is the civil servant culture. Read More

Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian and eccentric 36 year-old leader of Chechnya, has issued a statement regarding the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens who are suspected of committing the Boston Marathon bombings. Kadyrov published his statement on Instagram. Read More

Riven by ethnic conflict and destabilized by geopolitics, the year ahead might prove to be a tumultuous one in the three South Caucasus countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Armenia held its presidential election in February but is still experiencing ongoing protests. Now eyes are already starting to focus on its two neighbors, which will hold their elections in the autumn. In 2013, with Internet penetration continuing to increase, new tools are playing a significant role in mobilizing citizens and in monitoring potential outbreaks of violence. Read More