Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.
When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers' activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made and emails sent and received.
The response from European citizens was swift and outraged. Under the banner of Freedom Not Fear, mass protests were held in cities all across Europe and beyond. The charge was led by the German Working Group on Data Retention (AK Vorrat), which in 2007 filed a class-action lawsuit of nearly 35,000 people challenging the German law.
The suit's complaints were mostly upheld by last week's German Constitutional Court decision. The court held that the blanket data retention mandated by the EU directive violated Article 10 of the German Constitution, which guarantees the basic right to private life and correspondence. The Court said that an infrastructure of exploratory surveillance results in an exceptional intensity of interference with human rights, which must be proportionately protected with appropriate safeguards. It also significantly narrowed the options for similar EU retention laws on other types of data. The court ordered the immediate deletion of all the data stored since the law went into effect in 2008 and ordered the suspension of data collection until a revised national law is proposed.
However, the court did choose to leave many important questions about the EU directive unanswered. In highlighting the need for increased safeguards, the court failed to recognize that the storage of data itself is what violates human rights. For instance, a survey of German citizens in 2008 found that 1 in 2 people would not have conversations with counselors or therapists by phone or email because of their concern about data retention.
A bolder stance was taken in October 2009 by the Romanian Constitutional Court, which ruled that the EU directive fundamentally violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private life and correspondence. Data retention itself, the court wrote, is "likely to overturn the presumption of innocence and to transform a priori all users of electronic communication services or public communication networks into people suspected of committing terrorism crimes or other serious crimes." As a result, all citizens would become "permanent subjects to this intrusion into their exercise of their private rights to correspondence and freedom of expression."
The rulings in Romania and now Germany set the stage for an imminent series of decisions on the status of national data retention laws across Europe. The recent Bulgarian vote on data retention legislation met with sharp criticism and protests. Petitions against the Belgian data retention law are available in both French and Flemish. The constitutional challenge against the Retention of Data Bill brought by Digital Rights Ireland may be referred to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, despite the fact that the European Commission won its lawsuit against the government of Sweden for failing to implement the directive, the minimal penalty turns out to be worth the political risk.
In order to overturn a directive, the European Commission, Parliament, and Council have to agree. Viviane Reding, the incoming European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, declared at her confirmation hearings her dedication to defending the right to privacy. The members of the European Parliament, inaugurating their new term, flexed their political muscle when they recently rejected assenting to the SWIFT agreement that would have enabled the wholesale transfer of Europeans' financial data to the US. The European Council, representing the ministries of the individual Member States, will respond to the political climate in their home countries.
All in all, the threats to privacy and free speech posed by the Data Retention Directive are on their way to being nullified. In Germany, AK Vorrat launched its campaign against the new law being devised and set its sights on ending data retention on the European level. They will need the help of citizens across Europe to raise awareness and speak out for their rights on national levels.
Freedom Not Fear is planning another series of protests later this year – stay tuned to Deeplinks or sign up for FNF's mailing list to find out what is being planned near you.
Google Reader Play is a new Reader feature that plays a slideshow of cool items from around the web based on the stories you star. It's like a 10-foot viewing experience for your newsreader.
In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.
You can also just run Reader Play as a auto-advancing slideshow if you just want to sit back and bask in the stream. Thanks Joey!
We condemn a) web-blocking and disconnecting internet connections b) the threat to the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals and businesses from the monitoring of their internet activity, the potential blocking of their websites and the potential termination of their internet connections. c) the Digital Economy Bill for focusing on illegal filesharing rather than on nurturing creativity and innovative business models. We support a) the principle of net neutrality, through which the freedom of connection with any application to any party is guaranteed, except to address security threats or due to unexpected network congestion. b) the rights of creators and performers to be rewarded for their work in a way that is fair, proportionate and appropriate to the medium. Conference therefore opposes excessive regulatory attempts to monitor, control and limit internet access or internet publication, whether at local, national, European or global level.
We support a) the principle of net neutrality, through which the freedom of connection with any application to any party is guaranteed, except to address security threats or due to unexpected network congestion. b) the rights of creators and performers to be rewarded for their work in a way that is fair, proportionate and appropriate to the medium. Conference therefore opposes excessive regulatory attempts to monitor, control and limit internet access or internet publication, whether at local, national, European or global level.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The FCC is considering dedicating a portion of the wireless spectrum to "free or a very low cost wireless broadband service," according to Reuters. They didn't offer much in terms of details, and you can file this one under the believe-it-when-we-see-it category, but it's a nice thought. [Reuters via Gizmodo]
(Incidentally, the LibDem Lords' support for web-censorship has sparked a rebellion in the party, and there's an exciting pro-Net-Neutrality, pro-freedom emergency motion that's to be put to the party conference this coming weekend in Birmingham)
In Labour, Tom Watson, John Grogan and others have raised strongly their voices about disconnection, from their Labour values of social justice and progressive politics: but their party is pushing for the punishment of the innocent in the Digital Economy Bill. The Conservatives, the friends of liberty in markets, remain supportive of the opposite, through of disconnection and harsh IP enforcement in the Digital Economy Bill. What can we do to make our political representatives understand the consequences of their actions, and how they are being misled into working against their own values? Protests, letters, press work, this all helps, but we need a deeper change. In companies, board rooms, and in every social network - voices that understand the impacts of the digital age are needed. From the Greens and the Pirate Party - we need greater dialogue and connection with groups like ours. In short - we need a much bigger movement, crossing every political and social divide. We need you. We need you to join ORG.
The Conservatives, the friends of liberty in markets, remain supportive of the opposite, through of disconnection and harsh IP enforcement in the Digital Economy Bill.
What can we do to make our political representatives understand the consequences of their actions, and how they are being misled into working against their own values? Protests, letters, press work, this all helps, but we need a deeper change.
In companies, board rooms, and in every social network - voices that understand the impacts of the digital age are needed. From the Greens and the Pirate Party - we need greater dialogue and connection with groups like ours.
In short - we need a much bigger movement, crossing every political and social divide. We need you. We need you to join ORG.
"What is "traffic"? I suspect Snell is talking about page views. ... When I switched DF's free public RSS feed to full-content in August 2007, DF's web page views had been growing steadily month-to-month. After the switch, web page views were stagnant, with no growth, for about a year. (If anything, they went down in the first few months.) But readership clearly continued to grow: subscribers to the feed skyrocketed. And, about a year ago, even web page views started growing significantly once again -- going from a little over one million per month to a little over two million per month.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a friend-of-the-court brief today urging a federal court judge to block two criminal statutes that unconstitutionally limit the free expression of millions of adults who use the Internet and other electronic forms of communication, bringing the threat of criminal sanctions for private, lawful speech.
At issue are provisions of federal law that require anyone who produces a visual depiction of sexually explicit expression to maintain extensive records -- including copies of drivers' licenses, the dates and times images were taken, and all URLs where images were posted -- and often force public disclosure of a creator's home address. Even more troubling, the regulations allow law enforcement warrantless entry into homes or offices in order to inspect the records that are supposed to be kept. While these statutes regulate the commercial pornography industry, they also likely apply to a staggering number of Americans who create and share images of themselves over social networks, online dating services, personal erotic websites, and text messaging.
"The plain language of the statute subjects ordinary Americans, who are using emerging communications technologies at an ever-increasing rate, to onerous record-keeping and inspection requirements for lawful speech. They could face up to five years in prison if they don't follow the statutory requirements to the letter," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "Speakers who engage in private, expressive activity protected by the First Amendment should not be at risk of criminal sanctions for violating an overbroad statute that they likely know nothing about."
A coalition of artists, producers, distributors, and educators filed suit against the provisions last year, arguing that the law censored their artistic and educational work. In its amicus brief in support of the coalition filed today, EFF asked the judge to throw out the record-keeping regulations as an unconstitutional chill on adult free expression in the digital age.
"Digital cameras, camcorders, and the Internet make it easy to create and share lawful adult material in a wide variety of ways. Thousands of ordinary Americans are doing just that, only to find themselves subject to these record-keeping and inspection requirements," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "This just doesn't square with the Constitution."
For the full amicus brief: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/fsc_v_holder/EFF%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf
For more on Free Speech Coalition v. Holder: http://www.eff.org/cases/free-speech-coalition-v-holder
Contacts:
Matt Zimmerman Senior Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation mattz@eff.org
Jennifer Stisa Granick Civil Liberties Director Electronic Frontier Foundation jennifer@eff.org
If you like to travel light but have a well stocked toiletries bag upon arriving at your destination, Suite Arrival makes it easy to ship your bathroom favorites ahead.
Suite Arrival's business model is based on the idea that you'd rather pay low and reasonable prices for toiletries and have them shipped to your hotel than have to check a bag at the airport and lug around the said toiletries. Definitely geared towards business travelers who want to travel with only a carry-on—and thus are forced to deal with the ridiculous TSA regulations on container sizes—Suite Arrival could benefit anyone who hates having to check a bag just to bring enough shampoo and body wash for a long trip.
We compared the prices at Suite Arrival to those of online retailers like Drugstore.com as well as the price you'd pay stopping at a corner store once you've arrived. Short of driving out of your way to go to a big box retail store—not really an option if you don't have a rental car—you're not going to save much money and definitely no time by running around at your destination trying to beat out the Suite Arrival prices. We'll be the first to admit we assumed, before the comparison, the prices at Suite Arrival would be inflated enough to dissuade anyone but the most time-crunched of business travelers but we were pleasantly surprised.
Check out the offerings at the link below and if you have a great way to make traveling less of a hassle—shaving cream related or otherwise!—let's hear about it in the comments.
Moodstream is an interesting mashup of several forms of media, designed to bring you music, images, and video in sync with the mood you're in—or the mood you want to be in!—through a simple interface.
Click on the image above for a closer look.
Moodstream streams music accompanied by images and video clips to create a sort of audio-visual ambient mix. We've covered some interesting mood-based music streaming services here before, like StereoMood and Sourcetone, but none of them have incorporated a visual element.
At Moodstream you can select from the presets of Inspire, Excite, Refresh, Intensify, Stabilize, and Simplify. Each preset is a mixture of the mood spectrums on the Moodstream mixer—happy/sad, calm/lively, warm/cool, and so on. You can start with a preset and then mix things up including the type of image transition, whether you want more or less vocals in your music selection, and how long images and video will stay, among other settings.
One area where Moodstream falls short of the other mood-based services we've covered is that it doesn't play the entire song. Songs blend into one another in 30 second segments, instead of playing the full track. Although it sounds disconcerting the actual experience isn't bad and if you really love certain tracks you come across you can add them to your Moodboards—mini playlists within the Moodstream service you custom build for your specific moods and tastes.
Have a cool music-related service to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.
For my Guardian column today, I took the LibDem Lords to task for introducing legislation that would ban web-lockers because these services allow for copyright infringement. I won't argue that copyright infringement takes place on services like Google Docs and YouSendIt, but the reason that these services are great for piracy is that they're great for privacy: the same feature that lets me use YouSendIt to send a family member a private video of my kid in the bath is the feature that lets a copyright violator to share a pirated movie. And you can't get rid of the copyright violations without eliminating our ability to privately share large files for legitimate reasons.
And separate from that, there's the infrastructural cost of establishing a Great Firewall of Britain in order to block access to web lockers. Developing a system whereby parts of the net can be shut off for all of Britain creates the possibility that someone will use the system to shut off the wrong part of the net. I'm not just talking about the danger of a hijacker breaking into the system to shut down or redirect traffic to legitimate sites (say, Microsoft Security Centre or the BBC), but the attractive nuisance presented by such a system. Once you create the facility to shut off parts of the internet that are implicated in civil disputes, how long will it be before people who've alleged a libel or are worried about a trade secret being not so secret are lobbying to have this turned to their aid? Which isn't to say that this will actually stop infringement. File sharers have already demonstrated their ability to use the perfectly legal, widespread proxy services abroad to circumvent network blocks - ask any 14-year-old whose school network is censored by blocking software and I guarantee you'll get an education in how to evade this kind of thing. Which is great news if you're a pirate, but why should sound engineers, doting grandparents, and solicitors have to learn how to evade the Great Firewall in order to conduct their legitimate business?
And separate from that, there's the infrastructural cost of establishing a Great Firewall of Britain in order to block access to web lockers. Developing a system whereby parts of the net can be shut off for all of Britain creates the possibility that someone will use the system to shut off the wrong part of the net. I'm not just talking about the danger of a hijacker breaking into the system to shut down or redirect traffic to legitimate sites (say, Microsoft Security Centre or the BBC), but the attractive nuisance presented by such a system. Once you create the facility to shut off parts of the internet that are implicated in civil disputes, how long will it be before people who've alleged a libel or are worried about a trade secret being not so secret are lobbying to have this turned to their aid?
Which isn't to say that this will actually stop infringement. File sharers have already demonstrated their ability to use the perfectly legal, widespread proxy services abroad to circumvent network blocks - ask any 14-year-old whose school network is censored by blocking software and I guarantee you'll get an education in how to evade this kind of thing. Which is great news if you're a pirate, but why should sound engineers, doting grandparents, and solicitors have to learn how to evade the Great Firewall in order to conduct their legitimate business?
My Lords, you can't please the entertainment industry and sustain privacy
(Image: Lockers 3, a Creative Commons Attribution file from dizfunkshinal's photostream)
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) submitted a petition signed by more than 7000 people to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today demanding that the agency close a loophole for copyright enforcement in its proposed regulations for network neutrality.
The petition is part of EFF's reply comments in the FCC's net neutrality rulemaking. The FCC's proposed rules generally prohibit ISPs from discriminating or blocking lawful content, but include a loophole for 'reasonable network management' by ISPs. The proposed rules then define 'reasonable network management" to include measures taken by ISPs to block unlawful content or transmissions. This exception would effectively permit ISPs to violate net neutrality rules and block lawful activities in the name of copyright enforcement.
"We can't afford to let lawful speech become collateral damage in Hollywood's war on copyright infringement," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Net neutrality regulations should not excuse ISPs that interfere with lawful content just because they claim they were acting as copyright cops."
EFF's original comments to the FCC, submitted in January, also question whether the FCC has the legal authority or political independence necessary to properly regulate the Internet. Additionally, EFF has called on the FCC to protect the interests of individuals who offer open WiFi Internet access to their neighbors or local communities.
"Before the ink is dry on net neutrality regulations, we already see corporate lobbyists and 'public decency' advocates pushing for loopholes," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "A loophole like this could swallow network neutrality, with ISPs claiming copyright enforcement as a pretext for all sorts of discriminatory behavior."
For EFF's full reply comments to the FCC: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/nn/EFF%20NN%20reply%20comments2b.pdf
For more on net neutrality: http://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality
Fred von Lohmann Senior Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation fred@eff.org
Unfortunately, this amendment is even worse in some ways. In a posting on Liberal Democratic Voice, Lord Clement-Jones explains that his amendment is intended to attack "web-lockers," such as YouSendIt and RapidShare:
The Digital Economy Bill, as currently drafted, only deals with a certain type of copyright infringement, namely peer-to-peer file sharing. Around 35% of all online copyright infringement takes place on non peer-to-peer sites and services. Particular threats concern "cyberlockers" which are hosted abroad. There are websites which consistently infringe copyright, many of them based outside the UK in countries such as Russia and beyond the jurisdiction of the UK courts. Many of these websites refuse to stop supplying access to illegal content. It is a result of this situation that the Liberal Democrats have tabled an amendment in the Lords which has the support of the Conservatives that enables the High Court to grant an injunction requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to sites.
There are websites which consistently infringe copyright, many of them based outside the UK in countries such as Russia and beyond the jurisdiction of the UK courts. Many of these websites refuse to stop supplying access to illegal content.
It is a result of this situation that the Liberal Democrats have tabled an amendment in the Lords which has the support of the Conservatives that enables the High Court to grant an injunction requiring Internet Service Providers to block access to sites.
1. Web-lockers are useful for more than piracy. I routinely use web-lockers for my own business and personal affairs. When I need to send a large video of my daughter playing to my parents, a web-locker is the simplest way of doing this. Web-lockers are also a vital part of how I produce my audiobooks and podcasts, since they allow me to privately share large pre-release audio-files with readers, editors and publishers. Web-lockers are also how I communicate with my attorneys and accountants for transmission of sensitive documents, such as scans of my passport and bills.
2. The reason web-lockers are useful for piracy is because they support privacy. The entertainment industry's principle objection to web-lockers is that their contents are private, and cannot be readily survielled by copyright enforcement tools. When I send a video of my daughter in the bath to her grandparents, the only people who can download that video are the people who have access to the private URL for the locker. This is the same mechanism that infringers use to avoid detection: upload an infringing file and share the URL with friends. You can't fix the web-locker problem without attacking the right of Internet users to privately share large files with one another.
3. The establishment of a national blocklist is itself a bad idea. Creating a facility whereby ISPs can be compelled to block entire websites is a bad idea on its face. The security problems raised by such a facility are grave (a hijacker could use it to block the BBC, or Parliament, or Google), and the temptation to extend this facility for use in other civil actions, (say, libel) will be great. Also, as my friend Lilian Edwards has pointed out, the LibDem proposal does not stipulate how long sites must be blocked for, nor what the procedure is for unblocking them.
4. There is no evidence that this will work. Dedicated infringers have shown a willingness and capability to use technologies such as proxies to evade firewalls. These proxies -- many of them legitimate businesses at home and abroad -- are cheap and easy to use, and make it trivial to evade ISP-level filtering. However, "good guys" (small traders, individuals wishing to share private material with friends and family) should not have to bear the expense and difficulty of evading the Great Firewall of Britain to do legitimate business on the net.
5. This is bad for the nation. The only country to enact anti-web-locker legislation to date is South Korea, which brought in a similar measure to the LibDem proposal as a condition of its Free Trade Agreement with the USA, whose IP chapter focused largely on locking down the Korean Internet. In the time since the US-Korea FTA, Korea has slipped badly in the global league tables for ICT competitiveness, going from being a worldwide leader in technology to an also-ran.
I have sent a version of these comments to both of the LibDem peers using ORG's Write to Them links. I hope you'll get in touch with them, too. This is a grave blunder for the supposed "party of liberty," especially on the eve of a national election.
Update: According to a post on LibDem Voice, Clement-Jones draws a salary of £70,000 to serve as Co-Chairman of law firm DLA Piper's global government relations practice. DLA Piper is "one of the largest groups of IP lawyers in the world" and has "acted for, and lobbied on behalf of, the RIAA and MPAA in the past."
The Hollywood Reporter asked Viacom if the network intends to go after websites or bloggers who post unauthorized clips.
"Yes, we intend to do so," PR rep Tony Fox told THR. "My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem."
What a big steaming pile of epic fail. How 'bout blogs (like, oh, let's say Boing Boing) start suing Viacom for every time a Comedy Central writer lifts an idea, a blog post, a funny turn of phrase, or a story—and fails to credit, namecheck or pay us? Cmon guys, you know you do it. Television suit-people, when will you ever learn: we are the internet. We are your traffic machine. We are your idea machine. We are the engine that propels your shows. Why do you treat us like thieves? (via EFF)