Internet News

Swedish parliament proposals for an extension to mass internet snooping have been leaked local ISP Bahnhof.

Sweden's government wants to extend the holding period under existing data retention legislation. Today, providers have to retain users' IP address information for six months, but a submission to the inquiry asks that be raised to 10 months.

The use of VPNs is also under fire with a demand that ISPs log the first activation of each new anonymisation service.

There's also talk of demanding providers rework their networks to reduce sharing of IP addresses between users.

Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung writes that it looks like Sweden is imitating China, where the state requires the network to be tailor-made for monitoring, not for the internet to work as well as possible.

Rick Falkvinge of Private Internet Access writes that Sweden is ignoring a 2014 European Court of Justice ruling against data retention , instead doubling down on the forbidden concept of surveillance of people who are not currently any suspicion.

Facebook has revealed new plans to censor supposed 'fake news'. It has announced that any pages which are flagged for hosting stories that are considered unpolitically correct will be banned from buying advertising to publicise themselves.

A group of third party fact checkers will be tasked with highlighting these pages.

In a statement, Satwik Shukla and Tessa Lyons, who are both product managers, wrote:

Currently, we do not allow advertisers to run ads that link to stories that have been marked false by third-party fact-checking organizations. Now we are taking an additional step.

If Pages repeatedly share stories marked as false, these repeat offenders will no longer be allowed to advertise on Facebook.

This update will help to reduce the distribution of false news which will keep Pages that spread false news from making money.

About 1,000 Russians demonstrated in Moscow on 26th August against repressive government controls on Internet use. They shouted slogans such as Russia will be free and Russia without censorship ,.

In July, Russia's parliament voted to outlaw web tools that let Internet users sidestep official bans of certain websites. It allows telecommunications censor Roskomnadzor to compile a list of so-called anonymiser services and prohibit any that fail to respect the bans, while also requiring users of online messaging services to identify themselves with a telephone number.

The Director of public prosecutions has announced plans for more prosecutions and harsher punishments for online insult. Prosecutors will be ordered to treat online hate crime as seriously as offences carried out face to face.

Alison Saunders said the Crown Prosecution Service will seek stiffer penalties for abuse on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. Saunders says the crackdown is needed because online abuse can lead to the sort of extremist hate seen in Charlottesville in the United States last weekend, which left one person dead.

Writing in the Guardian, Saunders said:

Left unchallenged, even low-level offending can subsequently fuel the kind of dangerous hostility that has been plastered across our media in recent days. That is why countering it is a priority for the CPS.

The new policy documents cover different strands of hate crime: racist and religious; disability; and homophobic, biphobic and transphobic. They also say that victims of biphobic hate crime, aimed at bisexual people, have different needs and experiences compared to those suffering anti-gay and transphobic offences.

Offsite Comment: Censored whilst claiming to be uncensored

23rd August 2017 See article from thesun.co.uk

Free speech lawyer Myles Jackman, of the Open Rights Group, said:

It's incredibly clumsy guidance and a strict interpretation is chilling.

Robust discourse in a civilised society is essential and means people sometimes disagreeing in very strong terms.

Social media is a minefield and people can be wholly unpleasant in a friendly way.

Offsite Video: A clamp down on free speech

23rd August 2017 See video from youtube.com

Hate Crime' Crackdown by TheBritisher

Offsite Comment: We don't need the state to police hate

26th August 2017 See article from spiked-online.com by Naomi Firshtstaff

Let's trust citizens, not officials, to challenge prejudice online.

The US internet company DreamHost is fighting government demands for it to hand over details of millions of activists.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) wants all visitors' IP addresses - some 1.3 million - to a website that helped organise a protest on the day of President Trump's inauguration. In addition to the IP addresses, DreamHost said that the DoJ requested the contact information, email content and photos of thousands of visitors.

DreamHost is currently refusing to comply with the request and is due in court on 18th August,

In a blog post on the issue, DreamHost said that, like many other online service providers, it was regularly approached by law enforcement about customers who may be the subject of criminal investigations. But, it added, it took issue with this particular search warrant for being a highly untargeted demand.

Civil liberties group The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping DreamHost fight its case, said: No plausible explanation exists for a search warrant of this breadth, other than to cast a digital dragnet as broadly as possible.

Update: Government data demand narrowed down a little

24th August 2017 See article from theregister.co.uk

The US Department of Justice has eased up in its legal fight against hosting company DreamHost, saying it no longer wants all IP logs associated with a Trump protest site.

That is not the end of the matter, however. The DoJ still wants records related to what it suspects was the planned coordination of illegal acts. It has slightly limited the request to a six-month window ending on the day of the protest itself, to subscribers of the site as opposed to simple visitors, and it has said it does not want draft blog posts or images.