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WeGov

EU Court to Determine if People Googling Themselves Have the Right to Censor Search Results

BY Julia Wetherell | Wednesday, February 27 2013

Google Spain.

If an Internet user sees that their reputation is getting tarnished online, should they have the right to request that the data be removed from search results?  That’s the premise of a case from Spain that the European Court of Justice will be deliberating over the next several months, after the country’s highest court ruled that Google was responsible for the spread of the harmful information. 

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WeGov

Israel Has Two Pirate Parties That Hate Each Other

BY Lisa Goldman | Wednesday, January 30 2013

Screenshot from Pirate Party Israel website.

In a 21st century digital echo of Monty Python's Life of Brian, Israel, a country of just over 7 million, has two Pirate Parties. One is called Pirate Party Israel and the other the Israel Pirate Party. Neither party recognizes the legitimacy of the other; nor do their founders have anything positive to say about one another. Read More

WeGov

Open Letter Urges Skype to Come Clean on Data Collection and Monitoring

BY Julia Wetherell | Monday, January 28 2013

TOM-Skype, the partner site that operates Skype service in China.

Skype has been coming under fire from Internet freedom advocates for its lack of transparency on user privacy. An open letter to Skype appeared online last week – undersigned by Reporters without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others – calling it “effectively…one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies,” and decrying “persistently unclear and confusing statements about the confidentiality of Skype conversations.” Read More

The Guns and Gun Data Debate, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the End of Privacy

BY Nick Judd | Friday, January 11 2013

Public equals online. We just don't yet understand what that means. Read More

WeGov

China's WeChat Now Automatically Censoring Social Media Updates

BY Julia Wetherell | Thursday, January 10 2013

Screengrab from WeChat's website

The Chinese mobile social media app WeChat is now automatically censoring certain keywords, in a further development to the Southern Weekly scandal that has rocked China’s netizens over the past week. Read More

WeGov

Police Surveillance in Sao Paolo is at All-Time High, as Crime Wave Shocks City

BY Julia Wetherell | Wednesday, January 2 2013

A military police officer with a camera-mounted EagleEye backpack, from BBC Future Video.

BBC Future has a look into the Orwellian surveillance technology that police in Sao Paolo are using to monitor crime in the metropolis of 41 million. An integrated network of databases, tablet technology and mobile cameras are giving law enforcement officials an unprecedented eye on activity in the city streets. Read More

WeGov

EU Data Retention Laws May Be Illegal, Rules Austrian Court

BY Julia Wetherell | Wednesday, December 19 2012

On the tails of the U.K.’s deliberation on the Data Communications Bill , an Austrian court has ruled that the E.U.’s data retention policies could be illegal. Read More

Prizes for Most Innovative Digital Rights Projects To Be Unveiled Monday

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, December 7 2012

As this dramatic account of the beating of a Syrian protestor attests, sometimes dissidents' devices can betray them even when their comrades will not. Similar stories are playing out across the globe, and New York City-based digital rights group Access is keenly aware of all this. So it's devoting itself to developing and promoting technologies to protect individuals' ability to speak freely and to organize politically. On Monday evening, the group will hand out $20,000 each in prizes to the five most innovative technology and media projects designed to help people to freely communicate, tell stories and organize themselves. The awards categories: "Blackout Resilience," "Making Crypto Easy;" "Freedom of Expression;" "Grassroots Technology," and "Facebook." Read More

WeGov

U.A.E. Passes New Law Prescribing Mandatory Jail Time for Online Dissidents

BY Lisa Goldman | Tuesday, November 13 2012

The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) is cracking down on dissent with a new law that stipulates jail time for anyone who criticizes the government online, reports the Global Arab Network. Read More

Mac Computer Users Experiencing a Sharp Rise in Malicious Cyber Attacks

BY Lisa Goldman | Tuesday, October 9 2012

Mac computers have long been considered far more secure than those on the Windows operating system. Over the past year, however, there has been a sharp rise in the number of malware attacks directed at Mac users — particularly those who work for human rights organizations, reports Andy Greenberg for Forbes. Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed friday >

Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

GO

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

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. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

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thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

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wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

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PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

tuesday >

Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

Tools to Keep Independent Media Online in Hostile Environments

Websites and media outlets in developing countries or countries with corrupt or repressive regimes struggle daily to fend off hacker attacks, some from their own government — like the Malaysian news portal Sarawak Report, which techPresident reported was taken down in April by sustained denial-of-service attacks. The negative attention controversial reporting draws can scare local advertisers away as well, making it difficult for a media company to support itself. Media Frontiers offers two services to websites dealing with either of those problems.

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monday >

Ahead of September Elections, German Pirate Party Picks Its Platform

The German Pirate Party held its election year convention over the weekend and approved its party platform, following lengthy debate over the role that online decision-making should have within the party, as German news sources reported and the party outlined on its own web platforms. GO

Peruvians Petition their President to Stick Up for their Digital Rights

Peru’s civil society advocacy groups have started an online petition outlining their ‘non-negotiable’ demands for digital rights and freedom of speech. The campaign was prompted by the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Lima, Peru, will soon host the 17th round of secretive TPP trade talks, which will take place from May 15 – 24.

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Gun Control Advocates Take Aim At LivingSocial for Promoting Guns and Alcohol

A coalition of advocacy groups is launching a new campaign this week against the promotion of American gun culture. The campaign focuses on the daily deals site Living Social, which hasn't stopped promoting social events Hunter S. Thompson would have loved (they promote shooting off guns and letting off steam and drinking.) GO

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