Grass-roots activists organizing boycotts against large corporations like Target stores and BP now find themselves directing some of their ire at another corporate monolith: Facebook. The boycotters turned to the popular social media site to spread word about their pressure campaigns and keep participants up to date on the latest developments, but those efforts became much more difficult last week when Facebook disabled key features on the boycott pages. As the number of Facebook members signed up for the “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics” page neared 78,000 in recent days, Facebook personnel locked down portions of the page — banning new discussion threads, preventing members from posting videos and standard Web links to other sites and barring the page’s administrator from sending updates to those who signed up for the boycott.

WASHINGTON: Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations of the internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications – including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking websites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype – to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. The legislation, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering technological innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally. James X Dempsey, vice-president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the internet revolution” – including its decentralised design. “They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

SINGAPORE: The Censorship Review Committee has issued its report after nearly a year of deliberations. Among its recommendations is making it mandatory for Internet Service Providers to offer optional Internet filters to give parents more control and responsibility over what their children can access online. Filtering services are currently available through Internet Service Providers SingTel and StarHub but "there has been minimal marketing and take-up of these services", said the report. A recent survey by the committee found that less than half of respondents had heard of such filters. Goh Yew Lin, chairman of the Censorship Review Committee, said: "The survey shows that over 30 percent of people think that the government is more responsible than parents. We're not saying that the government is not responsible or should not be responsible. Government has a key role to play, but that role should be in support of parents making choices and guiding their children appropriately."

Judging by the response of some governments, their biggest fear about the internet is its ability to bring about their downfall. Pick your poison. Over the past couple years, we've seen Tweeting revolutionaries, anti-war wikileaks and, of course, good old cyber warfare, usually in the form of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks from one country against another. Last week Australia saw a reversal of that. Thanks to a proposal by the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, that promised to bring high-speed internet access to more areas of the country, the Labour party was able to grab the allegiance (at least temporarily) of the two additional MPs it needed to have a majority in parliament. In Australia, the lack of internet access is seen as a problem that is hindering economic growth.