Google argues against censorship calls

Πηγή: FT
By Maija Palmer
March 28 2012

Google has rejected calls from UK politicians to put in place additional measures to stop people breaking Ryan Giggs-style privacy injunctions online, saying it would be impossible to censor material on the web effectively.

“Requiring search engines to screen the content of their web pages would be like asking phone companies to listen in on every call made across their networks for potentially suspicious activity,” Google said on Tuesday. “Google already remove specific pages deemed unlawful by the courts. We have a number of simple tools anyone can use to report such content, which we then remove from our index.”

Twitter similarly said it would continue to operate its current system, under which it evaluates legal requests to remove material on a case-by-case basis. Facebook said it was still reviewing a report from UK politicians that had called for a change in internet companies’ behaviour.

A committee of MPs on Tuesday called for internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to take practical steps to stop people from using the internet to find out information that had been protected by court orders. The joint committee on privacy and injunctions said that if the companies failed to do this, laws should be developed to force them to do so.

“Google and other search engines should take steps to ensure that their websites are not used as vehicles to breach the law and should actively develop and use such technology,” the report said. “We recommend that if legislation is necessary to require them to do so it should be introduced.”

The issue of privacy injunctions hit the spotlight last summer, when it emerged that Giggs, the Manchester United footballer, had taken out a super-injunction to prevent the newspapers from reporting allegations he had an extramarital affair with Imogen Thomas, a model. However, details of the injunction and the alleged affair were widely reported on social networking sites, such as Twitter, eventually leading John Hemmings, a Liberal Democrat MP, to name Giggs in Parliament.

Max Mosley, the former head of Formula One, has also sued Google over the internet company’s refusal to remove links to a sex video, in which he featured, from its search results.

These proceedings, in France and Germany, continue.

The events sparked an extensive debate over privacy and injunctions, and prompted David Cameron, prime minister, to set up a committee to investigate free speech and privacy.

The committee said on Tuesday that new privacy laws were not necessary, but called for an enhanced press regulator, with powers to fine newspapers. It also singled out internet companies for criticism.

Google has argued that it would be difficult to put in place a mechanism to identify banned pictures or words, because such as system would not understand context.

However, the committee said Google’s objections to putting a system in place were “totally unconvincing”.

The government must to respond to a select committee report within 60 days of publication and publish its response. However, it is not obliged to take the matter further or enact legislation.

FTC releases final privacy report, says ‘Do Not Track’ mechanism may be available by end of year

In recent years, lawmakers and advocacy groups have made increased efforts to protects users’ privacy online. Here are some cases that helped stoke the debate about tracking and privacy on the Web.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Hayley Tsukayama
March 26 2012

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday outlined a framework for how companies should address consumer privacy, pledging that consumers will have “an easy to use and effective” “Do Not Track” option by the end of the year.

The FTC’s report comes a little over a month after the White House released a “privacy bill of rights” that called on companies to be more transparent about privacy and grant consumers greater access to their data but that stopped short of  backing a do not track rule.

The FTC goes further than the White House, saying that the commission will work with industry groups to “complete implementation” of “a Do Not Track”system to give consumers an easy way to stop online tracking.

“Although some companies have excellent privacy and data securities practices, industry as a whole must do better,” the report states.

The agency also called on companies to obtain “affirmative express consent” from consumers before using data collected for a different purpose and encourage Congress to consider baseline privacy legislation and for measures on data security and data brokers.

The FTC also reiterates its prior recommendations that Congress pass legislation to provide consumers with access to the data about them that is held by companies that compile data for marketing purposes.

The 73-page report focuses heavily on mobile data, noting that the “rapid growth of the mobile marketplace” has made it necessary for companies to put limits on data collection, use and disposal. According to a recent report from Nielsen, 43 percent of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers own a smartphone.

The commission called on companies to work to establish industry standards governing the use of mobile data, particularly for data that reveals a users’ location.

Commissioner Thomas Rosch dissented from the other commissioners in a 3-1 vote on the privacy report. Rosch said that while he agrees with much of what the agency released Monday, he disagrees with the commission’s approach to the framework, which focuses more on what consumers may deem “unfair” as opposed to actual deception perpetrated by companies.

“Unfairness is an elastic and elusive concept,” Rosch wrote, saying that it is difficult to determine how consumers feel about privacy.

He also said in his dissent that the recommendations were overly broad and would apply to “most information collection practices.”

“It would install ‘Big Brother’ as the watchdog over these practices not only in the online world but in the offline world,” Rosch wrote of the report.

While the FTC is not a rule-making but an enforcement agency and needs explicit authority from Congress to create new codes, Rosch said he believes that there should be no pretense that the report’s recommendations are “voluntary.”

Many firms, he wrote, may “feel obliged to comply with the ‘best practices’ or face the wrath of ‘the Commission’ or its staff.”

Google will know more about you than your partner

Under fire: Google's new privacy policy comes into effect on March 1

Πηγή: MailOnline
By TED THORNHILL
March 3 2012

• Now users will be bombarded with ads related to their online searches
• Critics say company will amass 'cauldron of data' on users
• Company says products will be 'beautifully simple and intuitive'

Google has been savaged by critics after revealing plans to link user data across its email, video, social-networking and other services.

In a move denounced by some as a massive invasion of privacy, the changes will piece together information from Gmail to YouTube to the Google Plus social network.

For example, if you spend an hour signed in to a Google account searching the Web for skateboards, the next time you log into YouTube, you might get recommendations for videos featuring Tony Hawk, along with ads for his merchandise and the nearest place to buy them.

However, this could also apply to searches relating to sensitive topics such as meetings in your calendar.

Privacy problems are particularly pertinent to those who share a Google account with other members of their family.




Google sees the changes as making its products easier to use by sharing a privacy policy - and information - across everything from Gmail accounts to YouTube while users are signed in

Cecilia Kang, of the Washington Post, described collation of vast tracts of information as a ‘massive cauldron of data.’

‘Privacy advocates say Google's changes betray users who are not accustomed to having their information shared across different Web sites.’ she said.

‘A user of Gmail, for instance, may send messages about a private meeting with a colleague and may not want the location of that meeting to be thrown into Google's massive cauldron of data or used for Google's maps application.’

Technology site Gizmodo said that the change was the end of Google’s ‘don’t be evil motto.

The site’s Mat Honan wrote: ‘It means that things you could do in relative anonymity today, will be explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number.

'If you use Google's services, you have to agree to this new privacy policy. It is an explicit reversal of its previous policies.’

Larry Dignan, meanwhile, writing on ZDnet.com, described the new policy as ‘Big Brother-ish’.

He wrote: ‘Google will know more about you than your wife does. Everything across your screens will be integrated and tracked.

‘Google noted that it collects information you provide, data from your usage, device information and location. Unique applications are also noted.



Sites such as Gizmodo were quick to lampoon Google's founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page and the site's former slogan, 'Don't be evil'


Even Google's own Plus network was filled with complaints about the new changes

‘Sure you can use Google’s dashboard and ad manager to cut things out, but this policy feels Big Brother-ish.’

The changes, due on March 1, are a massive overhaul of Google’s privacy policy which the company claims will create a ‘beautifully simple and intuitive’ user experience.

More than 70 different company policies are being streamlined into one main privacy policy and about a dozen others.



Commenters on Twitter were concerned by the changes - with some saying that the policies were similar to Facebook's

Separate policies will continue to govern products including Google's Chrome Web browser and its Wallet service for electronic payments.

Google’s last attempt to link information across its services triggered a wave of privacy complaint which helped kill the its Buzz social networking service.

The company hopes to avoid similar legal hurdles with its new policy.

"If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries - or tailor your search results - based on the interests you've expressed in Google (Plus), Gmail and YouTube,’ the company says on a new overview page for its privacy policies.

‘We'll better understand (what) you're searching for and get you those results faster.’

Currently, users of Google products have to agree to a new set of privacy policy and terms of services almost every time they sign up for a new service.

After the new policy comes into effect, if you’re signed in, you’ll be treated as a single user across all of Google’s products.

‘If you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services,’ Google's director of privacy, product and engineering, Alma Whitten wrote in blog post.

‘In short, we'll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.’

Google pointed out that cookies and 'identifiers' will not be tagged to sensitive categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation or health.

It also emphasised that the new privacy policy will not force users to become Google Plus account holders and that it will still be possible to search Google without signing in, or to sign in and then elect to search anonymously.

The changes follow the shutdown of Buzz last month. After its introduction less than two years ago, the social networking tool was ridiculed for exposing users' most-emailed contacts to other participants by default, inadvertently revealing some users' ongoing contact with ex-spouses and competitors.

Google has since made Plus the focal point of its challenge to Facebook's social network.

In the first seven months since its debut, Plus has attracted more than 90 million users, according to Google.

To promote Plus, Google recently began including recommendations about people and companies with Plus accounts in its search results.

That change has provoked an outcry from critics who say Google is abusing its dominance in Internet search to drive more traffic to its own services.

Google and the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement last year that forbids Google from misrepresenting how it uses personal information and from sharing an individual's data without prior approval.

Google also agreed to biennial privacy audits for the next two decades.

Google said it talked to regulators about the upcoming privacy changes, which it will apply worldwide. An FTC spokeswoman declined to comment on the changes or say whether the agency was consulted.
Some critics saw Google as trying to beat regulators to the punch by setting a precedent before the FTC unveils its own framework for protecting online privacy.


Defence: Google argues that its new policy will give users 'a more intuitive experience'

Jeff Chester, executive director of the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy, said Google hopes ‘that by creating a one-stop shop for privacy policy it will deflect regulatory action.’

Vivian Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, welcomed Google's announcement: 'Google was quick. Google made the first in the step of more privacy rules. I can only applaud more companies to try to move in the right direction.'

Google, Facebook and other popular Internet services all want to learn as much as possible about their users so they can sell more advertising at higher rates to marketers looking to target people interested in specific products, such as golf clubs or skinny jeans.

Google says users who opt to see personalised ads are 37 percent more likely to respond to an ad than people who opt out of targeting.

The changes follow a rare letdown in revenue growth at Google's lucrative advertising network.

Google's fourth-quarter earnings report last week showed the company's average revenue per click fell 8 percent from the previous year, despite robust growth in online shopping at the holidays.

Google shares, which have fallen 9 percent since the report, closed Tuesday at $580.93, down $4.59 for the day.

Ryan Calo, director for privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said Google is trying to make its policy privacy transparent instead of bogging users down with pages of legalese; the new privacy policies run about 10,000 words, down from 68,000.

But he said the company must ensure that the ways it uses data help users without revealing sensitive information.

‘If it creeps people out, then they need to be aware of that,’ he said

Voluntary guidelines for Web privacy backed by Obama administration

In recent years, lawmakers and advocacy groups have made increased efforts to protects users’ privacy online. Here are some cases that helped stoke the debate about tracking and privacy on the Web.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Cecilia Kang

Feb 23 2012

The Obama administration on Thursday plans to announce voluntary guidelines for Web companies to protect consumers’ privacy online, a win for Google, Facebook and other Internet giants that have fought against heavier federal mandates.

The White House did not include a much-debated “do not track” rule that would have forced companies to offer users the choice of stopping advertisers from tracking their activities across the Web.

In what it has dubbed the “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights,” the administration outlined several principles. It said users should have more control over data collected about them and how the information is used; consumers should be able to limit the collection of personal information, especially about children; and users should be able to correct false information about them.

“As the Internet evolves, consumer trust is essential for the continued growth of the digital economy,” Obama said in a statement. “For businesses to succeed online, consumers must feel secure.”

The move by the U.S. government gives Web giants leverage in their negotiations with regulators in Europe, where the companies can now make a stronger case for voluntary rules, analysts say.

The Federal Trade Commission will police companies that agree to the guidelines. The administration said that it will seek legislation to codify the rules and that the Commerce Department will soon bring together companies, consumer groups and academics to come up with more specific codes of conduct.

A recent spate of controversial practices by Web companies have sparked concerns about privacy among state attorneys general, lawmakers and consumer groups.

Google, for instance, announced that it would begin next week to pull data from all of its sites to create profiles of users who have signed into their accounts. The search giant also has been accused of circumventing mobile-device browsers’ privacy protections so that it could track the activities of consumers.

In light of such controversies, privacy groups had urged government officials to adopt the “do not track” mandate, but software developers and advertising firms have decried the technology as expensive and difficult to implement.

In a news briefing Wednesday, White House officials said a consortium of advertisers had come up with anti-tracking software that companies can choose to implement.

“Any ‘do not track’ mechanism needs to be robust and meaningful and cannot be more of the same self-regulatory system,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of consumer group the World Privacy Forum.

The biggest Web firms — including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL — are expected to adopt the guidelines and have agreed to implement the “do not track” browser technology, government officials said. Many of those firms say they offer consumers anti-tracking options.

At the same time, the firms have urged government officials to resist legislation that could hamper their ability to tap the lucrative behavioral marketing business.

The White House report doesn’t specifically address privacy on mobile devices — an area that firms are eager to protect from federal regulation. On Thursday, Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft agreed to clearly disclose the privacy policies of app developers at their app stores.

The FTC reported last week that Google, Apple and most mobile app developers do not offer any information about how they collect information about users.

Facebook settles with FTC over deception charges

This Oct. 11, 2010 file photo, shows the logo of the online network Facebook, recorded in Munich with a magnifying glass of a computer screen of a laptop. Facebook said Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011, it is settling with the Federal Trade Commission over charges it deceived consumers. The FTC had charged that the social network told people they could keep the information they share private and then allowed for it to be made public. The charges go back to 2009.

Πηγή: AP
By BARBARA ORTUTAY

Nov 29 2011

NEW YORK (AP) -- Facebook is settling with the Federal Trade Commission over charges it deceived consumers with its privacy settings to get people to share more personal information than they originally agreed to.

The FTC had charged that the social network told people they could keep the information they share private, then allowed it to be made public.

The charges go back to at least 2009, when Facebook changed its privacy settings so that information users may have deemed private, such as their list of friends, suddenly became viewable to everyone.

"They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance," the FTC said.

The FTC said the settlement requires Facebook to get people's approval before changing how it shares their data.

In a blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has made a "bunch of mistakes." But he adds that this has often overshadowed the good work Facebook has done. He says Facebook has addressed many of the FTC's concerns already.

The settlement is similar to one Google agreed to earlier this year over its Buzz social networking service. Like Google, Facebook has agreed to obtain assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years.

Facebook isn't paying anything to settle the case, though future violations could lead to civil fines.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has created two new executive positions - a chief privacy officer of products and a chief privacy officer of policy as part of its response to the settlement.

Supreme Court worries that new technology creates ‘1984’ scenarios

Πηγή: Washington Post
By by Robert Barnes

Nov 9 2011

The government is free to attach a GPS device to the car of any American and record that person’s public movements for a month or more without a warrant or suspicion of wrongdoing, a government lawyer told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Even the nine justices.

“You could tomorrow decide that you put a GPS device on every one of our cars, follow us for a month. No problem under the Constitution?” asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

It is allowed under the court’s own precedents, replied Deputy Solicitor General Michael R. Dreeben, and is no different than if the FBI “put its team of surveillance agents around the clock on any individual and follow that individual’s movements as they went around on the public streets.”

But to many of the justices, something did seem different. In an intense hour-long exchange in which the Big Brother of George Orwell’s novel “1984” was referenced six times, the justices wondered how the dizzying pace of technology has changed a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

The justices pondered a world in which satellites can zero in on an individual’s house, cameras record the faces at a crowded intersection and individuals instantly announce their every movement to the world on Facebook. They wondered about the government placing tracking devices in overcoats or on license plates.

“How do we deal with this?” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked. “Do we just say, ‘Well, nothing is changed,’ so that all the information that people expose to the public is fair game?”

The court is trying to apply the Constitution’s centuries-old protection against unreasonable searches and seizures at a time when devices such as a GPS can essentially do police officers’ work for them.

The court, Dreeben said, has already settled the greater question: “What a person seeks to preserve as private in the enclave of his own home or in a private letter or inside of his vehicle when he is traveling is a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.”

He added: “But what he reveals to the world, such as his movements in a car on a public roadway, is not.”

In 1983, the court ruled in United States v. Knotts that police were within their power to track a car traveling from one state to another with a beeper device they had placed in a can of chemicals used for drug production. “A person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another,” it said.

The case at hand, Dreeben said, is directly analogous. It involves a suspected D.C. drug kingpin named Antoine Jones, who was convicted in part because of evidence gathered from the use of a GPS device placed on his car that tracked his movements on public roads for 28 days.

His conviction was overturned when a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the use of the GPS and extended period of surveillance required a warrant (investigators had obtained a warrant for Jones, but it expired before they attached the device to his car).

Other appellate courts have held that GPS surveillance does not require a warrant.

The justices displayed varying degrees of alarm about the government’s theory. “If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.

Dreeben said the court should hold those concerns for a case in which there was an abuse. “This case does not involve universal surveillance of every member of this court or every member of the society,” he said. “It involves limited surveillance of somebody who was suspected of drug activity.”

He estimated that the number of times federal investigators have used GPS tracking is in the “low thousands.”

But the justices also appeared conflicted about where to draw a constitutional line.

Stephen C. Leckar, representing Jones, said police should be required to persuade a judge to issue a warrant for each use of a GPS device. But the justices wondered how that squared with their previous rulings that no warrant is needed when the person being targeted was being monitored in public places.

“If there is no invasion of privacy for one day, there is no invasion of privacy for 100 days,” Justice Antonin Scalia said.

Alito said Leckar had not shown that using a GPS device was any different from traditional police surveillance.

Dreeben agreed when he made his rebuttal. “The fact that GPS makes it more efficient for the police to put a tail on somebody invades no additional expectation of privacy that they otherwise would have had,” he said.

He told the court that the government’s “fallback” position would be that police need “reasonable suspicion” before using GPS surveillance, a lower legal standard than would be needed to obtain a warrant. But such decisions, he said, would be made by police.

The case is United States v. Jones .

Wiretapped Democracy

During the recent turmoil of the Arab Spring West countries heavily criticized the authoritarian regimes of the African continent for the repression of human rights underlying their support to the freedom of assembly and expression, which apply also on the Internet. Meanwhile in USA prepared a bill titled "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010" with witch Internet becomes a National Asset, a government agency management is created while  the US President is granted with powers to seize control of and even shut down the Internet with devastating results on the rest of the world. On top of this the UK Prime Minister Cameron coping with the recent London riots suggested that maybe the rioters should be banned from using social media. But how looks in fact the situation on freedom and privacy in the so called developed countries? Lets have a look.


Strange deaths

It seems that the economic crises in Europe is not the only reason for people to commit suicide. People that involve into wiretapping cases have a similar trend. Adamo Bove - head of security at Telecom Italia, the country's largest telecommunications firm - back in 2006 who at the direction of Milan prosecutors, he'd used mobile phone records to trace how a "Special Removal Unit" composed of CIA and SISMI (the Italian CIA) agents abducted Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric, and flew him to Cairo where he was tortured and the year before of his counterpart Costas Tsalikidis, a software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece that had just discovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in the company's mobile network, both found dead allegedly committing suicide. The bug was used to transmit the eavesdropping on the prime minister's (backing the Plan Pythia I) and other top officials' cell phone calls, including civil rights activists, the head of Greece's "Stop the War" coalition, journalists and Arab businessmen based in Athens, all in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation.

One similar case comes from the Wall Street. Mr. Karpel a trader that had agreed in 2008 to cooperate with federal authorities, and for about a year he taped conversations with fellow traders. Two days after federal prosecutors played for a jury a secretly recorded telephone conversation in a Manhattan courtroom, Karpel, one of those traders, hanged himself in his Fifth Avenue office although was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Recently, Mr. Sean Hoare so allegedly did commit suicide, being the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff concerning the News International phone hacking scandal. Well, before someone complains that these specific cases are rather outsiders as not connected to the public privacy - which is not correct - some recent facts point to the opposite direction.

Surveillance and Interceptions for everyone

For three years in thirty countries, Google's Street View cars collected data, including the content of personal emails, from wireless routers located in private homes and businesses. Several countries, including the U.K., Germany, Spain, and Canada, have conducted similar investigations and determined that Google violated their privacy laws.
While on July the Facebook's executive Randi Zuckerberg declared that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away" echoing the voice of a former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who previously called for "true transparency and no anonymity" on the Web, the death certificate of the whistleblowers is signed as they lose one of their most essential tools. Anonymity's real value is rooted in helping the powerless to challenge the powerful as the case of WikiLeaks exemplifies. In Congress last month, when a House committee moved forward a proposal forcing Internet service providers to keep logs of all online activity by their users. Clearly, if it ultimately becomes law, this legislation would undermine not just anonymity in public spaces, but privacy in general. Should it succeed, we may achieve transparency, but at far too high a cost.

Talking about privacy and Internet security here is a fictional scene "directed" by an expert of the field:

"An American executive is in France for a series of trade negotiations. After a day of meetings, she logs in to her corporate webmail account using her company - provided laptop and the hotel wireless network. Relying on the training she received from her company's IT department, she makes certain to look for the SSL encryption lock icon in her web browser, and only after determining that the connection is secure does she enter her login credentials and then begin to upload materials to be shared with her colleagues. However, unknown to the executive, the French government has engaged in a sophisticated man-in-the-middle attack, and is able to covertly intercept the executive's SSL encrypted connections. Agents from the state security apparatus leak details of her communications to the French company with whom she is negotiating, who use the information to gain an upper hand in the negotiations. While this scenario is fictitious, the vulnerability is not".

Beyond these in US there is an elation of Industrial Espionage and Electronic Surveillance as the State Department estimates that there are over 700,000 eavesdropping devices sold each year reporting that over 6,500 incidents of industrial espionage occur in the United States each year with an average economic impact of $1.25 million.

The present step against privacy in the web has the name of mandatory Internet surveillance - or mandatory data retention - a bill that will force ISPs to surrender personal details about customers to law enforcement without a warrant. This bill is at the center of controversy already in Canada backed by the conservatives as the government has been trying to modernize its surveillance and wiretapping laws for years now, to take into account the growth of cellphone and Internet communications. These requirements compel ISPs and telcos to create large databases of information about who communicates with whom via Internet or phone, the duration of the exchange, and the users’ location. These regime require that your IP address be collected and retained for every step you make online. Privacy risks increase as these databases become vulnerable to theft and accidental disclosure. Meanwhile, service providers have to dealt with the expense of storing and maintaining these large databases.

Mandatory Data Retention

The EU Data Retention Directive, adopted by the European Union in 2006 (for the background facts click here), is the most prominent example of a mandatory data retention framework (for a detailed analysis click here). The highly controversial Directive compels all ISPs and telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a subscriber's incoming and outgoing phone numbers, IP addresses, location data, and other key telecom and Internet traffic data for a period of 6 months to 2 years, for all European citizens, including those not suspected or convicted of any crime. The Directive has been opposed by lawmakers in the European Parliament who argue that it fosters a surveillance society and undermines fundamental rights. The European Data Protection Supervisor named the Directive as "the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the EU in terms of scale and the number of people it affects."

Despite that the the Bundestag's legal experts of the Working Group on Data Retention on April published an opinion stating that "it is impossible to rephrase the Directive in such a way that it would ensure compliance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights", a number of countries have already transposed the Directive into national legislation including Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein(see page 127), Malta (see also), the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal,Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom along with some non European Union countries such as Serbia and Iceland.
Other countries fight against it like Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece (I sense that the pending change of Constitution will bear surprises), and Romania.

The Dutch Senate on April approved a long-anticipated shortening of mandatory retention periods for internet data to six months, it published its correspondence with the Dutch Minister of Security and Justice on the Data Retention Directive evaluation by the European Commission. The Senate criticized the report for "too easily sidestepping" several Constitutional Court cases across the European Union, in which implementation laws were ruled unconstitutional or the principle of blanket data retention itself was deemed in breach of the ECHR.

It is worth noting that on May the European Commission rushed into an agreement with US concerning the exchange of PNR (Passenger Name Record) data on individuals and circulated the final agreement prior to formally submitting to the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament for their agreement. The European Commission's Legal Service coming later advised that the PNR is "not compatible with fundamental rights".

In USA according to the newly released 2010 Wiretap Report, federal and state courts approved that wiretaps reached a new all - time high. increased by a 34%. It must be noted that in the data are not included interceptions regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) or interceptions approved by the President outside the exclusive authority of the federal wiretap law and the FISA).

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports, on July the House passed a bill that contains a mandatory data retention provision that would require your Internet service providers to retain 12 months' worth of personal information - while the National Sheriffs Association strongly supported the bill asking for a 18 months period - that could be used to identify what web sites you visit and what content you post online. The bill was re-written to also include the enforced retention of customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers and bank account numbers. This came as a result of the calls of the DOJ back in January when Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said that data retention was crucial to fighting Internet crimes, especially online child pornography. In response to questions, he added  that up to two years of data retention "would be a useful starting point," which echoes what FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress in 2008.

The internet and telecom providers can handle the additional open-ended costs of mandatory data retention, since those costs will be transferred to the consumers. It will be the same as a new hidden tax. Smaller businesses, and start-ups may not be able to bear the added costs, thus reducing innovation, and killing competition with the big internet companies. Many organizations are actively opposing the bill claiming that it will devastate human society and U.S. Society as whole. By the same time the chief lawyer of the National Security Agency testifying to a Senate hearing stated that he believes the agency has the authority to track Americans via cell phones.

With the fiscal deficit plague infecting the whole West it is very possible that social unrest is on the top list of future events. In this upcoming time of crises the West governments will be called to prove that they are not authoritarian powers, that they listen and serve the population's demands and finally that they are credible and accountable entities enhancing the democratic liberties at the expense of their own political careers. Don't hold your breath...

Twitter unmasks anonymous British user in landmark legal battle

Twitter's actions have prompted concerns over free speech on the internet. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle / Rex Features

Πηγή: The Guardian

California court forces site to reveal personal details of user accused of libelling local authority in north-east England

By Nigel Green and Josh Halliday

Sunday 29 May 2011 13.17 BST

Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of a British user in a libel battle that could have huge implications for free speech on the web.

The social network has passed the name, email address and telephone number of a south Tyneside councillor accused of libelling the local authority via a series of anonymous Twitter accounts. South Tyneside council took the legal fight to the superior court of California, which ordered Twitter, based in San Francisco, to hand over the user's private details.

It is believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users and comes amid a huge row over privacy and free speech online.

Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer named as being the plaintiff in a gagging order preventing reporting of an alleged affair with a reality TV model, is separately attempting to unmask Twitter users accused of revealing details of the privacy injunction.

However, Giggs brought the lawsuit at the high court in London and the move to use California courts is likely to be seen as a landmark moment in the internet privacy battle.