A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm

European Digital Rights (EDRI) en XS4ALL zijn een online petitie gestart tegen de bewaarplicht verkeersgegevens. Internetgebruikers wordt gevraagd de petitie tegen de bewaarplicht te ondertekenen op www.dataretentionisnosolution.com. De officiële start van de petitie vond plaats aan de start van het hacker festival What the Hack op 28 juni. De ondertekeningen van de petitie worden aangeboden aan de Europese Commissie en het Europees Parlement.

De petitie zegt dat:

- de bewaarplicht een ingrijpend middel is dat invloed heeft op het leven van iedereen;
- het opslaan van persoonlijke gegevens van iedereen in strijd is met Artikel 8 van het Europees Verdrag voor de Rechten van de Mens, omdat het niet proportioneel is;
- veiligheid door bewaarplicht denkbeeldig kan zijn, omdat het mogelijk is dat verkeersgegevens gekoppeld worden aan een bepaalde persoon terwijl ze in werkelijkheid bij een ander horen, of bij een proces dat niet gerelateerd is aan de activiteiten van die persoon;
- de redenen waarmee men dit beleid probeert door te voeren niet legitiem zijn. Sommige lidstaten hebben dit beleid zonder succes geprobeerd door te voeren via hun eigen parlement en proberen dit nu verplicht te stellen via EU-wetgeving onder het mom van harmonisering en internationale samenwerking.

lees hieronder meer details:
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John Palfry:

We at the OpenNet Initiative released our study on Iran today. Of the states that we have studied, Iran has one of the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship regimes. Iran has demonstrated its commitment to extensive Internet filtering through the targeting of weblogs, particularly those written in Farsi, the local language. The state blocks political, religious, and cultural statements on a range of topics from being written and seen online.

Update: /. has an article up about this

De petitie verzoekt de Tweede Kamer om de volledige informatie-uitwisseling in de publieke sector op open standaarden te baseren. Ook moet de software die met overheidsgeld ontwikkeld wordt op termijn volledig onder open source licenties vrij ter beschikking gesteld worden.
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Incommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else

Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards a critical survey of the current state of ‘info-development’, also known as the catchy acronym ‘ICT4D’ (ICT for development). Before the recent “flattening of the worldâ€? (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a ‘digital divide’ that follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging.

Public event on wednesday evening, work conference on thursday and friday.

More info: conference website

China has reportedly developed a system called “night crawlerâ€? that can “locate and blockâ€? websites located in China (by IP address range) that have not registered with the Ministry of Information Industry (MII). Nart Villenueve of Citizenlab explains what this system really is about. Of course we already knew for a long time that they have the great Chinese firewall and that they shutdown internet cafes, weblogs, and fora that are not in lign with current Chinese policies. For more information on internet in China read this in depth article: “China: The Net Effect” by Steven Cherry.

But not only communist and dictatorial countries use filtering software. More and more companies and countries use software like smartfilter to deny people from accessing certain sites. See smartfilters promotional flash movie, which explains how it works. And yes, also European companies use netfilters more and more (dutch article about netfilters in companies).

As a result of reading articles like this wired article on internet censorship, Richard Rogers and Auke Touwslager are mapping routes to avoid internet censorship as well as mapping the countries which have most censorship. I’m interested in their findings and will give a link to their research later on.

To be able to monitor which sites are blocked by which countries, I wrote a script that first got a list of public proxy servers, and then queried a whole bunch of sites through those proxies (see wikipedia on proxies if you don’t know what they are). The problem is that I don’t know which rules are enforced on those proxies. Each proxy can specify which sites it blocks and I don’t know if the proxies I found are the government controlled proxies. Therefore I cannot do good empirical research. I guess citizenlab’s current approach is the only way to go: put your own proxyservers in all countries through which you query sites. This way you know you will be routed through the countries’ proxy servers and not through a proxy with different rules. Bummer for my research

For more information on internet censorship see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/, the open net intiative, and wikipedia on internet censorship.

Update:

Users of Microsoft’s new China-based Internet portal have been blocked from using the words “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights” in an apparent move by the US software giant to appease Beijing. … Microsoft is not the only international tech company to comply with China’s stringent Internet rules. Yahoo! and Google — the two most popular Internet search engines — have already been criticized for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor the Internet. (link)

The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) will meet at the United Nations in Geneva from 14 to 16 February 2005. The Meeting is to discuss issue papers that have been prepared according to this list, which was developed at the First Meeting of WGIG.

A N N O U N C E M E N T

De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam
http://www.debalie.nl/media
Wednesday February 9 , 2005 / 20.00 - 22.00 hrs

ART IS NOT ‘BIOTERRORISM’

STOP THE WAR ON FREE KNOWELDGE

A live benefit concert and performance event with Snowcrash (.nl), The
Yesmen and Critical Art Ensemble in support of artist Steven Kurtz and
scientist Robert Ferrell, both threatened by an unjustifiable
prosecution for “bioterrorism”.

Presented in collaboration with:
Transmediale Festival, Berlin (http://www.transmediale.de)
& The Arts Catalyst, London. (http://www.artscatalyst.org)

Live On-line at:
http://www.debalie.nl/live
http://www.snowcrash.nl
http://live.nu

Info: (more…)

A recent study (PDF) found that “44% of [American] Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files.”

The study goes on to explain:

“Who creates content? Content creators as a group are younger than the average American. However, in the Internet population, all age cohorts are equally as likely to create content. Content creators are more likely to be urban and suburban than rural, perhaps explained by the greater levels of broadband connectivity in urban centers than in rural areas. Content creators as a group are evenly divide between men and women and show similar racial and ethnic breakdowns as Internet users as whole. Content creators are likely to have higher levels of education – 46% have a college degree or more compared to 26% of all Americans. Income levels are also generally higher among content creators, with 31% living in households earning more that $75,000 annually, compared to 18% of all Americans who live in such households.”

That’s interesting in its own right. But these sorts of trends get really interesting when we think about the diffusion of these tools globally and throughout the civic sphere. That’s where ideas like “Blogger Corps” and Global Voices Online could start to grab some serious intellectual traction.
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Wired News:

Eyes on the Prize, the landmark documentary on the civil rights movement, is no longer broadcast or sold new in the United States. It’s illegal.

The 14-part series highlights key events in black Americans’ struggle for equality and is considered an essential resource by educators and historians, but the filmmakers no longer have clearance rights to much of the archival footage used in the documentary. It cannot be rebroadcast on PBS (where it originally aired) or any other channels, and cannot be released on DVD until the rights are cleared again and paid for.