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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 09 Aug 2011
BlackBerry smartphone maker Research in Motion Ltd. said it is assisting London police with investigating the use of the company’s messaging service by rioters to plan disturbances, as they prepare for another night of “mass disorder.”
“Police have got very extensive monitoring of the Blackberry Messenger model,” Stephen Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, told reporters today. “A lot of people who are seeing those messages are forwarding them to police” who are “planning for mass disorder again tonight.”
David Lammy, the U.K.’s intellectual-property minister, today called for a suspension of BlackBerry service to prevent its use among rioters to communicate plans, according to a statement from his office. Kavanagh has said technology is being used to organize people and undermine the police, who must adapt their policing style to deal with it.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 09 Aug 2011
The New Republic has published a piece online this week taking the US State Department to task for its seeming lack of urgency in doling out its internet freedom budget — and its choices over which tools that budget has so far been used to fund. Author Max Shulman argues that this reality is at odds with the image Hillary Clinton has portrayed to the world of the US as the benefactor of internet freedom fighters toiling away in repressive regimes.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 09 Aug 2011
The demand to monitor Twitter and Facebook follows similar requests for access to other online services: India's communications ministry has been asked by the home ministry to monitor social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook amid fears that the services are being used by terrorists to plan attacks.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 09 Aug 2011
An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor: Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 08 Aug 2011
The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has found a novel way of raising badly needed cash, according to the South Korean authorities: unleashing young hackers on South Korea’s immensely popular online gaming sites to find ways to rack up points convertible to cash.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 08 Aug 2011
OpenDemocracy.net reports on today's attempt to burn down the apartment of a Donetsk-based investigative journalist Aleksey Matsuka: “It is widely assumed that the attack was ordered by elements working within the local political and business elite, who have served as the focus for much of Aleksey's investigative work.”
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 08 Aug 2011
Wendy Seltzer, Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, talks with Bloomberg Law's Lee Pacchia about a new approach between Internet Service Providers and content providers to curb online copyright infringement.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 08 Aug 2011
A U.S. federal court has ruled that the domain seizure of sports streaming site Rojadirecta does not violate the First Amendment, and has refused to hand the domain back to its Spanish owner. The order stands in conflict with previous Supreme Court rulings and doesn’t deliver much hope to other website owners who operate under U.S. controlled domain names.
The decision of District Court Judge Paul Crotty to stand firmly behind the Government is worrying for all other websites who operate under U.S. controlled domains. It’s yet another step in granting the Government and copyright holders more control over the Internet, at the expense of smaller businesses and the rights of citizens.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 08 Aug 2011
Amid escalating violence against anti-government protesters in Syria, the Anonymous hackers have launched their own offensive against President Bashar al-Assad by defacing the country's Ministry of Defense website.
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By: Jackie Kerr
Date: 08 Aug 2011
Russian government submitted a new anti-extremism legislation for approval to the Russian Parliament. News agency ITAR-TASS reports that according to the news legislation, distribution of extremist content online can be punished with 5 years in jail. Vzglyad website explains the legislation treates the publication of content in blogs as public distribution and makes the status of blogs similar to status of mass media.
