Please stop equating militant labor action with death threats and workplace shootings (listen to the audio to see what I mean). The workers may be angry, but they’re not going to hurt you. Honest.
Sincerely,
textsfornothing.com
German police have raided the home of the guy who owns the German domain name for Wikileaks, a well-known non-profit organization that anonymously publishes sensitive documents that governments and other institutions would like to keep under wraps.
What’s going on here? Well, it all starts in Australia, where the government has proposed legislation that would impose mandatory filtering of the Internet. They plan to do this by having a state agency maintain a blacklist of websites with content that some government bureaucrat thinks Australians shouldn’t be allowed to see. If the proposed legislation passes, Australian ISPs will be required to block all URLs in the list, and anyone who links to one of those URLs would face an $11,000-per-day fine. Child pornography is, of course, the main pretext here, as it so often is in Internet censorship cases.
Earlier this month, Wikileaks published Australia’s blacklist, revealing that numerous legitimate websites were wrongfully included on the list (which is no surprise, given that there’s virtually no accountability for the blacklist maintainers). Of course, the list also presumably includes some child porn sites; that’s what the program is supposed to be blocking, after all. Which brings us to Germany, where the current government has been pushing a scheme not unlike Australia’s — again, using child porn as a pretext for censoring Internet access. Since the blacklist published by Wikileaks presumably links to child porn sites, the German authorities figure that this makes Wikileaks guilty of helping to provide access to child porn — thus justifying the raids. Wikileaks, meanwhile, regards the raids as part of a broader political struggle over Internet censorship in Germany, and rightly so. Whatever you think of Wikileaks’ decision to publish the Australian blacklist, it’s hard to dispute that the raids are in part an attempt to intimidate opponents of the German government’s censorship plans.
Australia is far from the first country to try to censor its citizens’ Internet access under the guise of fighting child pornography. Nor is it the first to abuse its censorship powers to silence dissent and other legitimate speech: to take just one example, Finland got caught doing it last year. And the raids in Germany are only the latest attempt by the authorities in one country or another to clamp down on Wikileaks. Last year, for instance, in the course of a lawsuit over a different set of Wikileaks documents, an American judge ordered the site’s registrar to take its domain offline — a decision the New York Times described as “akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article.” (The same judge later reversed his own ruling, citing “the futility of attempts to censor information … after it has been posted to the internet.”) The trend is clear. I think we can expect more and more of this sort of thing in the months and years ahead.
And lest you think we’re immune to this sort of thing here in Canada, please note that we already have a “voluntary” censorship program — voluntary, that is, for the big ISPs that have signed onto it, not for their customers. The program is called Project Cleanfeed, and its blacklist, too, is secret. It’s maintained by a fairly reputable non-governmental organization that is specifically dedicated to fighting child porn, and for that reason (and also because I was more naive back then), I was willing to give the project the benefit of the doubt when I first heard about it in 2006. But having seen the results of similar programs in Australia, Finland, and elsewhere, and the lengths to which the authorities in other countries will go to prevent the dissemination of information they find distasteful, I no longer believe we should give Project Cleanfeed or any other such program the benefit of the doubt.
Michael Geist has reviewed a couple of recent cases here in Canada (including one I wrote about last month) with implications for the privacy of your online activity. His conclusion: As far as the courts are concerned, your ISP’s terms of service override your privacy rights. When you signed up for Internet service, you agreed to let your provider decide whether to hand over your personal information to the cops without a warrant.
These decisions place the spotlight on the fact that customer privacy on the Internet is not guaranteed by national privacy law. Rather, the law actually leaves the disclosure decision in the hands of the organization that has collected the information, which can choose whether to turn over personal information in certain circumstances without a warrant.
Moreover, most Internet-focused organizations such as ISPs have drafted user agreements in which their customers have consented to such disclosure policies. These cases confirm that courts will typically enforce user agreements regardless of whether subscribers have taken the time to read them.
While most companies are reluctant to publicize their disclosure practices, according to government documents recently obtained under the Access to Information Act, the RCMP estimates that 30 percent of Canadian organizations do not reveal personal information to law enforcement without a warrant.
The RCMP estimates did not include specific data on ISPs, but their estimates are borne out by current practices. Bell and Rogers chose to reveal customer information in the Wilson and Vasic cases, however, not all Canadian ISPs would have followed suit. For example, in Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant in an all non-emergency situations.
Privacy hint: If you use Tor, your online activity will be anonymous, even to your ISP. For other tips on how to protect your privacy when using information technology, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense Project.
As I mentioned last week, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been shrouded in secrecy since its inception. Governments all over the world have refused to share information about ACTA with their citizens.
Big business, though, has as much access to information about ACTA as anyone could want. Check out this list of “cleared advisors” to the Office of the US Trade Representative. Everyone on the list has full access to the draft text of the agreement and all related documentation. Organizations appearing in the list include:
Notably absent from the list are public interest groups — you know, the groups that advocate for policies that serve ordinary people instead of big business. The closest thing you’ll find to a public interest group is ANSI. Almost every other organization in the list is either a corporation or a corporate lobby group.
To be fair, this is not a list of groups directly involved in ACTA negotiations. These are just the groups that have access to information about ACTA by virtue of being cleared advisors to the US foreign trade office. In other words, these are the groups that get the special treatment and privileged access that ordinary citizens have been denied, the groups that actually get to sit at the table and shape American government policy.
Now you know whose interests ACTA is being designed to serve.
This Sunday is the International Day Against Police Brutality. In the spirit of the day, the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre is organizing a black market in the DTES to protest against police harassment of neighborhood residents:
Significant street sweeps have been occurring in the DTES from increased and aggressive ticketing for things like jaywalking to “illegal” vending. As verified by the VPD itself, a year-end performance report shows that officers issued 467 tickets for violations of the Safe Streets Act in 2008, compared to 202 tickets in 2007. Police officers also handed out 133 tickets for violations of the Trespass Act, up from 95 in 2007. Tickets for city-bylaw infractions, including tickets for vending, panhandling, and loitering, shot up to 439 tickets in 2008 compared to 247 tickets in 2007.
Leading up to the 2010 Olympics, such measures are meant to ‘cleanse’ the neighbourhood and to intimidate DTES residents through the use of no-go orders for “chronic offenders” (i.e vendors/binners) and street checks by VPD Beat Enforcement Team officers.
In response to this, the Power to Women group is organizing an afternoon of “illegal vending” in front of the Vancouver Police Station on Sunday March 15th, International Day Against Police Brutality. We strongly encourage supporters and allies of the group and of DTES residents who are facing this increased onslaught to please come out and make your presence visible. We are standing together and we ask you to come out and support the Power to Women “black market” which will also help fund the groups ongoing activities! If you have any items (clothing, appliances, books, art, crafts etc) to donate to our “illegal vending” efforts, please bring them with you on Sunday!