Source: penamericanPEN Calls on Obama to Oppose Cyber Intelligence Bill
PEN American Center sent a letter to President Obama urging him to oppose the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) because of its expected deleterious impact upon writers, bloggers, and civil society activists.
photo by Kobo on a CC license
Source:The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday considers whether to allow a challenge to a federal law that provides for large-scale electronic surveillance of international phone calls and emails. The case is not a direct test of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Rather, it is a test of whether the law can even be challenged in court at all.
Source: bit.lyMalaysian social and alternative media is describing an impending ‘National Harmony Act’ as “Orwellian” and “draconian.”
Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak announced that Malaysia’s Sedition Act of 1948 is to be repealed, and replaced with the National Harmony Act (NHA.)
The Sedition Act, a hangover from Malaysia’s era of colonial rule, was originally introduced to quell opposition against the British, but is infamous for its vague definitions and use by the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition to silence political opposition.
Datuk Seri Mohamed Nazri Abdul Aziz, a minister in the Prime Minister’s department, stated that unlike the to-be-repealed Sedition Act, the NHA will allow for criticism of the Malaysian government:
“There should be no absolute freedom to the extent we can call people pariah, pimps and so on. It is obvious we want to protect the Institution of the Malay Rulers. They are above politics and this country practises Constitutional Monarchy.”
Read more here: http://bit.ly/NXrcJV
Catherine Crump, ACLU on the U.S. government’s attempt to read our emails without a warrant
Is US government reading email without a warrant? It doesn’t want to talk about it - Red Tape
Trevor Timm, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Source: penlivePEN’s Freedom to Write director Larry Siems introducing the panel Life in the Panopticon: Thoughts on Freedom in an Era of Pervasive Surveillance. From left, Julian Sanchez (Research Fellow at the Cato Institute), Catherine Crump (ACLU attorney), Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russian novelist), Ken Macleod (UK science fiction author), Gabriela Adamesteanu (Romanian novelist), and Corina Suteu (translator and director of the Romanian Cultural Institute).
Deftly moderated by Julian Sanchez, who offered poignant introductory remarks on the interplay between fiction and surveillance, the panel covered wide ground, exploring the role of surveillance in the Soviet Union as well as imagined futures in the far-flung realm of science fiction. Catherine Crump identified the unexpected interplay between surveillance technologies and over-reach by the state into our lives. It became clear that the ACLU battles in the courts—in which PEN American Center is participating—lay at a critical juncture where well intentioned surveillance, such as tracking drug lords, can quickly slide towards the dystopian. As Sanchez observed, citing scholar Dan Solov, we tend to examine surveillance by reference to George Orwell and Big Brother, but it may be more appropriate to consider privacy issues with respect to Kafka—with headless bureaucracies that order our lives at whim. The government does not always peek into our lives in a coordinated fashion. And we are simultaneously inviting in social media networks and advertisers by the choices we make while walking under CCTV cameras or while surfing the net.
Becoming philosophical, Russian author and thinker Ludmila Ulitskaya stressed the role of the self in surveillance states. Whether or not surveillance increasingly pervades our lives, we can control our acceptance of it, and we must master our own paranoia. The implication is that the intrusion or lack of intrusion by a surveillance state does not remove our individual need to become at peace with ourselves.
There was, of course, a lot more discussed during this fascinating panel and I am paraphrasing irresponsibly. We hope to have Julian Sanchez’s introductory remarks available and there will be a video recording of this landmark discussion as well.
—Deji Olukotun
Protesting surveillance and data mining, German politician Malte Spitz releases phone records in an interactive map that tracks his movements for 9 months. via @eff
Source: zeit.deGreen party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet.
By pushing the play button, you will set off on a trip through Malte Spitz’s life. The speed controller allows you to adjust how fast you travel, the pause button will let you stop at interesting points. In addition, a calendar at the bottom shows when he was in a particular location and can be used to jump to a specific time period. Each column corresponds to one day.
So instead of focusing on the technology being sold, we recommend that any formal or informal effort to address the problem of misuse of surveillance technologies look at thegovernment customers as the ultimate chokepoint. To that end, EFF has proposed a “know your customer” framework, based on already existing legal frameworks in the U.S. that can be implemented without significant overhead cost to government or businesses.
Simply put, companies selling surveillance technologies to governments or government providers need to affirmatively investigate and “know their customer” before and during a sale. EFF has already detailed extensive framework for such regulations including questions, definitions, and procedures for how to accomplish it.
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Several articles detailed the sale of corporate technology to regimes in Syria, Libya, and other countries with repressive regimes. Here are the companies’ responses. They are very interesting, varying from pointing the finger, to shirking blame, to accepting responsibility and leaving the country altogether.
