Global Digital Download

Early moves by Thein Sein to ease Internet censorship are viewed as a limited concession to press freedom, since Burma has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the world. Now, planned foreign investments in mobile infrastructure promise to expand access, but a draft telecommunications law would leave intact many of the vague legal restrictions used to curb online freedoms in the past.

Google, Facebook and Microsoft on Tuesday asked the government for permission to reveal details about the classified requests they receive for the personal information of foreign users. They made the request after revelations about the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, known as Prism, for collecting data from technology companies like e-mail messages, photos, stored documents, videos and online chats. The collection is legally authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which forbids companies from acknowledging the existence of requests or revealing any details about them.

Mohamed al-Hadi, an antigovernment activist in Syria, had just received a Skype briefing from rebels about the Ming military airport near the northern city of Aleppo, a protracted battleground in the country’s civil war. Then he learned that the United States government had the ability to monitor that call, as well as a broad range of other information transmitted through the Internet. “I’m really shocked,” he said in a Skype conversation. “Eighty percent of our secrets were already known to the Americans. Now, all of our secrets are disclosed.”

If you thought the astounding (and ongoing) revelations about the NSA’s PRISM regime were going to hurt America’s reputation, it appears you were right. Freedom House just made it official. In an exclusive statement to Future Tense, the internationally renowned rights watchdog said it’s going to downgrade the U.S. in its annual Internet freedom rankings. “The revelation of this program will weaken the United States’ score on the survey,” the organization told me in an email.

The U.K. government may have been complicit in secretly gathering intelligence from Internet companies, which were named on Thursday by a Washington Post report. According to The Guardian, which has covered the brewing and ever-developing privacy saga extensively, the ability for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- the U.K. government's electronic intercepts and listening station -- to tap directly into the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM database, may bypass mutual intelligence and information sharing treaties.

The Indian government should enact clear laws to ensure that increased surveillance of phones and the Internet does not undermine rights to privacy and free expression, Human Rights Watch said today. In April 2013, the Indian government began rolling out the Central Monitoring System (CMS), which will enable the government to monitor all phone and Internet communications in the country. The CMS will provide centralized access to the country's telecommunications network and facilitate direct monitoring of phone calls, text messages, and Internet use by government agencies, bypassing service providers. 

This CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force warns that "escalating attacks on countries, companies, and individuals, as well as pervasive criminal activity, threaten the security and safety of the Internet." The number of "state-backed operations continues to rise, and future attacks will become more sophisticated and disruptive," argues the Task Force report, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet. With the ideal vision of an open and secure Internet increasingly at risk, the Task Force urges the United States, with its friends and allies, "to act quickly to encourage a global cyberspace that reflects shared values of free expression and free markets."

Turkish authorities have freed 33 protesters who were detained in Izmir for posting "misinformation" via Twitter, hours before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan returns from an overseas trip to face angry demonstrators. The Tweeters were detained on Tuesday as part of a crackdown on hundreds of people fighting to save a park in Istanbul's Taksim Square. A police officer also died on Thursday after he fell from a bridge while pursuing protesters in Adana, bringing the total death toll during the unrest to three, Al Jazeera confirms.

Australian Internet users have been cursed for over a decade by governments who appear to neither understand nor care about the consequences of Internet censorship. The current Communications minister, Stephen Conroy, has been particular notorious on this matter: after failing to get parliamentary approval for his Internet blacklist plans, he announced that government departments, including his own, had powers to block websites anyway under the ambiguously-written powers of Section 313 of the fifteen-year old Telecommunications Act.

A week after Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes requested that the European Parliament help save European citizens’ “right to access the open internet by guaranteeing net neutrality” in a speech on May 30 in Brussels, Kroes avoided language that would have directly supported net neutrality while speaking at a panel event organized by Access at the European Parliament. In her speech, Kroes identified “transparency,” “consumer choice,” and the ability for consumers to switch providers without encountering “countless obstacles” as key priorities, rather than endorsing net neutrality. “For me, an open platform is built on competition, innovation transparency, and choice,” she said.