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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:

• Time Warner
• IBM
• General Motors
• Eli Lilly and other Big Pharma companies
• biotech companies
• the RIAA, MPAA, and a number of other lobby groups formed to protect corporate “intellectual property” interests
• Monsanto

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.

The Obama administration is using “national security” as an excuse to keep a lid on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Somehow I’m not surprised.

Here’s what happened. Six weeks ago, an American nonprofit filed a Freedom of Information request asking for copies of various documents related to ACTA. Now, in its reply denying the request (PDF), Obama’s foreign trade office is claiming that the documents are “classified in the interest of national security.”

It’s a preposterous claim. ACTA has nothing whatsoever to do with national security. It is a copyright treaty — one that would make penalties for copyright infringement even more severe, and quite possibly invade your privacy and violate your rights in the process. That makes it bad policy, but it’s not even remotely a national security matter. “National security” is simply, and blatantly, being invoked as a quick and easy way to keep a lid on another draconian, unnecessary, and unpopular multilateral trade agreement.

Not that excessive secrecy is anything new when it comes to ACTA. Other parties to the negotations, including Canada and the European Union, have been criticized for refusing to share information about the treaty with their citizens. Last fall, over 100 public interest groups from around the world signed a letter sharply criticizing the secrecy surrounding the treaty process. The EFF is even suing the US government over its refusal to release ACTA-related documents.

Sadly, this sort of closed-door policy development is a growing trend. In the face of several high-profile failures at supposedly “representative” organizations like WIPO and the WTO, not to mention more than fifteen years of broad public opposition, trade negotiations have increasingly been conducted in ways that prevent most of the world’s population from having any real voice. Check out this excellent article on “counterfeit policy-making” for an in-depth analysis of the problem and its consequences. When the White House invokes “national security” to keep ACTA secret, it’s deliberately making international policy development even less democratic than it already was — all for the benefit of the corporate interests that shape government policy in the US and other liberal democracies. Keep that in mind the next time you see a bunch of crazy anarchists marching through the streets: it’s the protesters, not the government policy-makers, who are standing up for your interests.

Ironically, the day after he took office, Obama signed a memorandum committing his administration to “accountability through transparency” and ordering that FOI requests “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” But when it comes to defending the profits of big business — and make no mistake, that’s what the copyright battle is really all about: protecting outmoded business models that benefit large corporations at our expense — Obama’s White House isn’t going to let a little thing like the public interest stand in its way.

Remember when the Bush administration conveniently “lost” 5 million emails? Two public interest groups responded by suing the administration for its “knowing failure to recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications created and/or received within the White House.” Bush’s people, of course, spent the remainder of their time in office trying to get the lawsuit dismissed.

And now that Obama’s people are in charge, they’re doing the same thing:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed. [...]

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department ”apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

Because, you know, transparency in government is for the other guys.