BOSTON (Reuters) - Chinese human rights activist Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2005 after authorities tracked him down using data provided by Yahoo. The Internet service supplied information that it garnered about his location when he accessed his Yahoo e-mail account. That was enough to find him and put him in jail. Now, human rights activists are looking to a new generation of Internet privacy tools to keep companies from gathering such data, hoping that it will protect dissidents like Shi. One, called Tor, scrambles information, then sends it over the Web. It hides the user's location and gets past firewalls. Those features make it popular with activists in countries like China and Iran.

Nearly four in ten companies have staff whose main job is to monitor the outgoing email of colleagues, according to US data security research. More than a third of the companies surveyed hired staff to perform only that monitoring function. Email security company Proofpoint interviewed email chiefs at 220 companies which employed more than 1,000 people. It found that companies were so worried about employees leaking information via email that 38% of them paid other employees to monitor communications. "An increasing number say they employ staff to read or otherwise analyze the contents of outbound email (38 percent, up from 29 percent in 2008)," said a Proofpoint statement. "The pain of data leakage has become so acute in 2009 that more US companies report they employ staff whose primary or exclusive job is to monitor the content of outbound email (33 percent, up from 15 percent in 2008)." The survey suggested that companies have reason to be careful. Proofpoint said that 43% of the companies told it that they had investigated email leaks of confidential information in the past year. "Nearly a third [of companies], 31 percent, terminated an employee for violating email policies in the same period (up from 26 percent in 2008)," said Proofpoint's statement.

Italian bloggers went on strike in July to protest against government measures that they claim could kill the internet. They say the Alfano decree restricts the rights of bloggers to express their opinions without fear of comeback. Demonstrators online and on the streets say the Italian government is trying to muzzle the internet. If the Alfano decree becomes law, it would put websites on a par with newspapers, giving a right to reply to anyone who believes their reputation has been damaged by something published on the internet.

The Chinese government is scaling back plans for compulsory net filtering for all citizens. China's minister of industry, information and technology said Green Dam Filtering software would be compulsory for all computers in schools and public internet cafes, but not for individual PCs. The government originally demanded that all machines should have the software either pre-loaded or at least included in the bundle of software discs included with new PCs. This was meant to start from July but was delayed.