“A leaked document from the CleanIT project shows just how far internal discussions in that initiative have drifted away from its publicly stated aims, as well as the most fundamental legal rules that underpin European democracy and the rule of law. The European Commission-funded CleanIT project claims that it wants to fight terrorism through voluntary self-regulatory measures that defends the rule of law. The initial meetings of the initiative, with their directionless and ill-informed discussions about doing ‘something’ to solve unidentified online ‘terrorist’ problems were mainly attended by filtering companies, who saw an interesting business opportunity. Their work has paid off, with numerous proposals for filtering by companies and governments, proposals for liability in case sufficiently intrusive filtering is not used, and calls for increased funding by governments of new filtering technologies.” I’ll just leave a link here to one of the most popular OSNews articles of all time.
I knew Europe could do a better job at Internet fascism than the USA. Way to go guys!
While in EU this sort of things need to be done behind close doors not to anger the population, in USA everything is done in name of “freedom” and “liberty”. Openly! And everyone applauds it because peopled dont want to be like the “socialists from Europe”.
Some of them:
-NSA Call database and warrant less surveillance
-USA Patriot/Homeland Security/etc Act
-Indiscriminate use of NSLs
-Plus the good old MPAA/RIAA/etc lobbying in congress.
Having said that, I am NOT defending EU if this horrendous piece of legislation ever sees the light of day. But before it comes in effect it is one more “attempt” that should be blocked by our representatives.
Just to clarify, I was definitely being tongue-in-cheek with that. As a member of the United States armed forces it sickens me to no end what has come of our freedoms in America post 9/11.
It’s even more frightening that Mitt Romney is actually a viable presidential candidate, and even if he loses the best we can hope for is 4 more years of Obama. Depressing times.
I like to sometimes play around with the idea of what would happen if I were to become a president candidate, what with me being pansexual, polyamorous, having a bunch of health-issues, being long-time unemployed, having been at the brink of alcoholism, gone through serious depression, I know absolutely f*ck all about politics and I don’t give a flying f*ck about the wishes of corporations if those wishes clash with the needs of the public or myself, plus I’m a fat loser who spends most of her time in front of a computer. How things play around here in Finland I might actually have a chance of winning the elections just on the basis of having lots in common with your Average Joe and standing so starkly apart from the other candidates!
As a matter of personal opinion, this is a direct consequence of a 2-party system. Such rigid setting automaticaly results in a boolean choice – there is no middle-ground, 3rd alternative (real one), etc. “Fuzzy logic” concept is not permitted. Polarization / confrontation is built into the system. Red and Blue can not and will not work together. By definition.
Under these conditions, defeating the opponent becomes the ultimate goal in itself – everything else is secondary. It is more evident in Republican philosophy, where all proposals from the Democrats, – however constructive and sensible they might be, – are automatically rejected, opposed, blocked, filibustered for one reason only – they came from the “other” camp, therefore we will fight them. Full stop. Dems are better at compromizing, but just barely.
Time to change the entire polytical system, non?
Fennec_Fox,
Doh, I couldn’t give you +1, but it’s the truth.
The bipartisan stage is horrible at promoting good representation. All to often we have to vote on politicians who are most likely to win instead of those who have the best ideas.
That seems like a weird construct, way of saying it – I mean, the connection between one and the other is… well, not a long time ago, polls showed that a majority of US soldiers still thought that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 (so, myths of the kind which brought that “what has come of our freedoms” cherished by members of the biggest stick in the world …and who do you think will crack down any major “civil disorder” in the US?)
Edited 2012-10-01 22:54 UTC
As in ACTA case, these kind of ‘secret plans’ always comes from inside European Commission. Typically when they have to face European Parliament (i.e. direct representatives of EU people) things starts to get ugly, as all questions are asked and all stones are turned (which is the reason those plans are kept secret until last minute… or later).
YES.
And I fear that we will see attempts to disguise legislation as something that no normal person would oppose: such as shoe horning a Trojan ammendment in something valid like child pornography laws. What kind of politician would want to be associated with blocking such a thing.
Good thing pirate parties are fighting big money.
Perfect response!
I think we all totally knew The Trapper was being ironic.
but perfect response anyway.
–To be honest, from my point of view I wish that so knowingly, so willfully even undermining our supposedly democratic processes ought to be a criminal offence!–
“incitement to bypass current legislature” or something. the people behind this ought to face such charges, t’were it possible. “IMHO”
What you propose could also be easily abused, I think… (look up Liberum veto and what it ultimately brought; similar problems, in both cases virtually no changes could be made if somebody doesn’t wish them)
So basically you don’t know anything about the American public. I don’t think you could have wrote that any more backwards.
the_trapper,
“I knew Europe could do a better job at Internet fascism than the USA. Way to go guys!”
Maybe the EU is just doing a worse job at keeping secrets?
Based on the article this is supposed to be eu wide. The first problem they will run into is cultural differences. What isn’t appropriate in one country is perfectly viable in another. A simple example of this is on Italian tv, shampoo adverts fairly often show some nipple of the woman showering, if you did that in the UK there would be an almost unlimited number of “strongly worded letters”.
I think that luckily this idea will be dead in the water well before it reaches a point of privacy invasion on the scale they appear to be discussing!
I wouldn’t bet on it. When those shady companies smell money, they push for it, and unless the public will push back – politicians would just play along.
That is the point of multiple cultures. It does not take too much for something to get blocked in EU. Get Finland, Estonia and Sweden to sign up and we’re done.
ISP’s are reporting a huge rise in double and triple encrypted VPN Traffic.
The are also reporting use of HTTPS has now exceeded HTTP for webbrowsing.
Double and triple encrypted?
I have already used HTTPS for everything via the HTTPS Everywhere – Firefox extension ( https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere ) for a long time now, I’m expecting its popularity to rise as people learn about it.
It would be great if you could provide a link
Want some privacy extensions? here you go:
– AdBlock Plus
– NoScript
– Ghostery
– Flashblock
– Cookie Whitelist, With Buttons
– Google Disconnect
– Facebook Disconnect
Search engines which respects users privacy:
https://startpage.com [lxquick]
https://duckduckgo.com
Privacy-oriented social networking:
– Diaspora
– Identi.CA
– LiberTree
OSs:
– GNU/Linux [check out DsitroWatch]
– BSD [FreeBSD/PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD]
I believe I have my privacy sorted pretty well thank you.
But I’m in the ISP business and I didn’t see such clear trends like that, so I wonder where those numbers are from.
I can imagine a few things which might cause such numbers, but I would just like to see them.
IMHO, one of the biggest problem in the EU is the European Commision. The European Commission is not elected, it’s nominated and usually likes to go to bed with the big industries, leaving the people’s will behind. Then the European Parliament, which is elected, has to shoot their stupid policies down. I know I’m being a bit cynical, but this is how I feel.
Hmm, true as far as it goes in that elected parliamentarians are a bit more semi-detached still…not that I hold out much hope against Corporatism here in Euroland or the Americas…we seem to be doomed and lovin’ it, blind or somesuch. Doomed anyway.
the world is teetering on the edge of surveillance of all unencrypted communications. secretly this is probably already going on in many places, judging from the leaks we’ve read. but we’ll pass this threshold at some point in the coming years, and encryption will be the only way for privacy. then the next step will be banning encryption — all communication must make sense or be blocked. this is the day privacy dies. in 20 years? 10?
…this will all be blamed on the USA.
Well, USA has built for itself a reputation of getting their noses into other countries’ politics, it doesn’t happen “just because”.
Well, you do have a habit of pushing your policies onto other countries and meddling in the decision making process of other sovereign nations.
Only if American diplomats become the spokespeople for US corporations once again.
That did not take long…
The current world view involves blame… blame others, never look at yourselves, after all, subjectivity is where it’s at!
What do you mean “blame others, never look at yourselves”? Of course we blame our politicans for doing things like this. But that doesn’t mean the US should get away if they’re involved, and history has taught us that they usually are.
Want examples? Here:
http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-extent-of-lapdoggery-…
If a group of people were actively trying to destroy your freedom and threatening you with punishment for not obeying their particular ideals, then these people need to be stopped.
Perhaps we do need stronger anti-terrorism laws to prevent groups like The Clean IT Project from using the internet.
-Brendan
I don’t think many terrorists will get caught, but they’ll probably start rounding up bittorrent and other p2p users and shoot them for being economical terrorists.
Wasn’t there an ad campaign a while back saying piracy aids terrorism?
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
It’s funny that terrorist are supposed to undermine our happy way of living, yet it’s the anti-terrorists schemes of our governments that does most damage to our liberties.
MOS6510,
“It’s funny that terrorist are supposed to undermine our happy way of living, yet it’s the anti-terrorists schemes of our governments that does most damage to our liberties.”
Terrorists are an excuse for government to do what it already wants to do anyways, they just couldn’t rationalise it. It’s very sad that governments are the biggest threat to civil liberties.
I’m just sick of this “bad torrents” scheme.
Fighting torrent sites? are they closing the roads permanently just because some bad guys escaped with robbery and using particular roads?
This is pure f#@$#%g nonsense!
Don’t let them convince people, that torrent is “bad”. Torrent is just a technology. I use it to get legal stuff, because it’s just faster to do it this way. I refuse to agree with this stupid, childish “bad torrents” scheme being used.
There IS a significant difference though – roads are overwhelmingly used for generally legal activity.
As for torrents… well, there happens to be one ~search engine of its DHT network, so most likely a quite decent global view of what kinds of torrents are most widespread: http://btdigg.org/top100.html
While we can clearly see some update files and such there, the activity of sharing of copyrighted works (films typically) is clearly dominant – much more than “some do it”
It’s even more the case when checking your typical popular torrent site… (I guess because those updates visible in btdigg are largely of an automatic kind, built into their parent application, anyway)
I’m just saying, if you plan to rely on that argument – it will be easily struck down…
I’m pretty sure that was the aim and operation of terrorism. To cause overreaction that ultimately ends in self harm, not the act of terrorism itself. That’s how terrorism undermines our happy way of living.
It’s basically extreme trolling, and ultimately, it’s how people handle themselves against trolls.
I’ll say it anyway:
The problem is not the government spying on the population.
The problem is the government spying on the population, and the population being unable to legally spy back. IMO there’s a balance of privacy between government and population at large. If one side or the other holds all the privacy cards, you get serious problems.
Perhaps a better way to put it is that privacy is a kind of power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely – both in the case of individuals, and the case of governments.
No, privacy is a right one has to fight for. It is not a war revolving around who can spy on who. Privacy is not power, but protection.
Having no privacy turns people into victims of all the irrationality and the boundless meddling of humanity. Some things simply aren’t our concern and people should have a right to have their private, harmless affairs kept to themselves if they desire this.
There is no need to know if John Smith likes lasagna. No need to know that he occasionally visits a dominatrix. No one is better of knowing that John doesn’t like Volkswagen. We don’t need to know that he got a divorce six years ago because his wife was more obsessed with an electro stimulator than John. We don’t need to know that John peeped at the boobs of Sally Sixpack When he was 12.
John is a 40 year old child psychologist and has successfully helped hundreds of children. He absolutely loves children (in the non-pervert way) and he is dedicated to helping them overcome their problems. He is widely recommended.
If your child was in need of a good psychologist and John was recommended, would you send your kid to see him if you only knew of his success rate with kids? I bet you would.
Would you do the same if you knew of John’s preferences for S&M, his ex-wife’s preference for electro stimulation and the fact that he took a curious peek at Sally’s boobs? Maybe you might, but how many people would just paint John as a sexual deviant, who’d probably rape and abuse minors the moment he is left alone with them?
Thing is, what John does with consenting adults behind bedroom doors has no bearing on what he does professionally. What his ex-wife prefers is even more irrelevant, as it doesn’t concern John’s affairs. Or will we condemn John for being a curious kid?
What are you “hiding”, that we need to know, so we can crucify you?
Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find something in them that will hang him. — Cardinal Richelieu.
Blog post from guy involved in CleanIT:
http://www.pascalgloor.ch/2012/06/05/je-fais-de-lanti-terrorisme/
Edited 2012-09-25 08:33 UTC
There are two major causes for this situation:
1. Politicians are dumb when it comes to IT. It’s easy to convince someone to something, when he/she doesn’t get it. You can then use things like “security” and “terrorism”, and it usually works.
2. There are big money and big corporations involved. Lobby groups are making preasure on governments, sometimes they act hand in hand with government.
How to solve this problem?
1. Educate, educate, educate people. Both politicians, decision makers and regular Joes. Teach about alternatives, teach about truly open and free culture, teach about standards and values of society.
2. Boycott big corporations. This is the ONLY way to show your huge disagreement to their practices. Stupid preasures? bad laws? oppressive IT regulations? NO MONEY FOR YOU APPLE, MICROSOFT, FACEBOOK and other CISPA/ACTA/post CISPA/ACTA supporters. Give your money to the people who respect you and your freedom. As long as you buy their products you are helpless and this situation will evolve to even worse direction.
The legacy of the great George W. Bush lives on…
The mail is still protected.