internet surveillance

Big Brother is still out there

June 1, 2010

In amongst all the excitement of the new coalition government, it’s important to still remember that much of Labour’s big brother legislation is still active. The awful Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (or RIPA), which sounds like it controls and limits the state’s ability to spy on us, actually empowers vast swathes of jobsworth prodnoses [...]

Read the full article →

Four webmasters jailed

April 17, 2009

              A Swedish court has convicted four men linked to the popular Pirate Bay file-sharing site of breaking Sweden’s copyright law. It bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” and is ranked as the 108th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The Stockholm district court sentenced Gottfrid Svartholm [...]

Read the full article →

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls…….

April 6, 2009

It tolls for thee, yeoman of the land of Magna Carta. Whilst you slumbered last night, and in the many months before, the sinister shape of Directive 2006/24/EC crept into your lives and stole your freedom and your privacy. Would it have made any difference if this burglar had worn a striped jumper and carried [...]

Read the full article →

Putting the boot in.

March 27, 2009

Jacqui Smith’s heart must have beat a little faster this week, when news reached her of the advances in the science of Internet censorship made in Germany. 11 German detectives descended on the home of Theodor Reppe, in the name of ‘discovery of evidence of distribution of pornographic material’. Without informing Theodor of his rights, [...]

Read the full article →

The Great Firewall of Australia.

March 18, 2009

The Australian Minister for Censorship Stephen Conroy, has previously claimed that his proposed Internet censorship regime was focused on blocking ‘illegal sites’.  Until now. At a Senate committee on Monday, Conroy said that the trial of the filter now underway was based on blocking ‘illegal sites’, but the censorship of other legal content would be [...]

Read the full article →

Too little latitude.

March 14, 2009

Google’s new people-tracking software, Latitude – charmingly pegged as a way to “keep tabs on someone special” – is receiving what has become today’s typical response of ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ and ‘grave concerns about the erosion of civil liberties’.  How ironic that ‘latitude’,  a word once used to indicate freedom has now [...]

Read the full article →

Big Brother goes undercover……

March 3, 2009

Late last night, after the House of Commons had virtually emptied, a vote was taken on on a new clause of the Political Parties and Elections Bill right at the end of the Report Stage, sneaked in just before the Bill was rubber stamped by the Commons for the Third Reading. Just one MP queried [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries