Global Digital Download - Global News

Rather than trying to keep up with the threats posed by rapidly evolving malicious software, agencies can leverage the security features being built into hardware to ensure that computing devices are safe and remain uninfected, says Larry Hamid, chief architect for IronKey by Imation. Malware has gone from being a nuisance to a serious tool for crime, espionage and possibly terrorism, Hamid said during a presentation at the FOSE conference in Washington, D.C. Responding to these developments puts defenders in a perpetual game of catch-up in which the bad actors have the advantage. Moving away from software for security solutions could help shift the advantage to defense, he said.

It’s a big week for digital freedom and internet governance, with two key summits taking place in Geneva ahead of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day on Friday, May 17, Brian Pellot reports. The week-long World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum bills itself as the “largest annual gathering of the ‘information and communication technologies for development’ community”. This multi-stakeholder UN forum brings together government, business and civil society to discuss internet policy and governance issues.

Last week, Mozilla took an important step in the fight against the proliferation of pervasive surveillance technologies by sending a cease and desist letter to Gamma International, demanding Gamma stop using Mozilla’s trademark. Gamma makes the notorious Finspy and Finfisher malware that has ended up in the hands of authoritarian regimes. Citizen Lab’s Morgan Marquis-Boire has spearheaded research showing that Finspy tries to trick users by using the Mozilla Firefox name to masquerade as legitimate software.

In this policy paper, ARTICLE 19 proposes a set of recommendations to state actors and policy makers about what they should do to promote and protect the rights of bloggers domestically and internationally. It also gives practical advice to bloggers about their rights and explains how - and in what situations - they can invoke some of the privileges and defences that traditional journalists have found vital to the integrity of their work.

We typically focus on the positive aspects of online social networks - but what about their negative aspects? As we’re seeing in the investigation into the Boston Bombers, online social networks can rapidly transform into participatory surveillance networks, in which everyone participates, at least indirectly, in the creation of a digital surveillance state. Suddenly, our friendships on Facebook or our followers on Twitter can link us to people or content we'd rather not be linked to. The more we share online, the more likely that this will happen. In some cases, the videos you've watched on YouTube or the photos you've posted on Instagram could become the basis for a criminal investigation.

Fast and reliable infrastructure of any kind is good for business. That it's debatable for the Internet shows we still don't understand what the Internet is — or how, compared to what it costs to build and maintain other forms of infrastructure, it's damned cheap, with economic and social leverage in the extreme. Here's a thought exercise… Imagine no Internet: no data on phones, no ethernet or wi-fi connections at home — or anywhere. No email, no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon, no Skype. That's what we would have if designing the Internet had been left up to phone and cable companies, and not to geeks whose names most people don't know.

A year ago this month, Stanford Law School hosted a little-noticed meeting that may help decide the future of free speech online. It took place in the faculty lounge, where participants were sustained in their deliberations by bagels and fruit platters. Among the roughly two-dozen attendees, the most important were a group of fresh-faced tech executives, some of them in t-shirts and unusual footwear, who are in charge of their companies’ content policies. Their positions give these young people more power over who gets heard around the globe than any politician or bureaucrat—more power, in fact, than any president or judge. 

Google released its semi-annual transparency report today, indicating an increase in government requests for content removal worldwide--although more than half came from a handful of countries. At the same time, the report also revealed that government requests for user data have plateaued, and for the first time, both the proportion and raw number of user accounts whose data was turned over in response to requests decreased, leading to the question: Is this a turning point for privacy?

Instead of polemical cowboy columns, a systematic approach around key concepts and underlying traditions (such as libertarianism) could have a more devastating effect on the study of the internet and its political and social potential. In March 2013 the Belarusian-American wunderkind Evgeny Morozov published his second book, not long after his bestselling The Net Delusion from 2011.

The “quantity v. quality” debate around global digital access seldom gets the attention it deserves. Here I define “quantity” as the spread of internet access to remote and marginalised communities and “quality” as the extent to which these connections are free from corporate or government restrictions and surveillance. With more than four billion people yet to come online around the world, basic connectivity is an obvious and necessary prerequisite for digital access. But handing out one laptop per child and selling low-cost smartphones does not solve the quality problem, and can in fact worsen it.

"For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected. #NewDigitalAge" The above statement was tweeted by Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Saturday, April 13. Given Schmidt’s prominence and the boldness of his claim, it naturally sparked a lively discussion as to whether it would be possible (and desirable) for the entire world population to be online by 2020. Considering the fact that, as of 2012, only a good third of the world’s 7 billion people were online, it seems unlikely that Schmidt’s prediction will come true. What’s more important, millions of those 7 billion people are suffering from malnourishment and lacking access to clean drinking water, so providing them with internet access shouldn’t and probably won’t be a priority in the next few years.

Everybody in the world will be on the Internet within seven years. That's what Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said this weekend in public comments that inspired everything from excitement to incredulity. "For every person online, there are two who are not," Schmidt wrote Saturday on his Google+ account. "By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected."

This month sees iDCLOAK Technologies’ first major service release of 2013: a fully customizable Proxy Servers List that has been compiled and developed as a free tool for bypassing internet censorship. What is unique about iDCLOAK's unblock proxy list is that it is fully user configurable. By constantly updating it with fresh proxies, it is specifically designed for censorship circumvention.

As we noted in an earlier post, Microsoft released its first-ever transparency report, the 2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report, the other week, explaining its approach to criminal law enforcement data requests around the globe. The report includes detailed information and data about the communications platform Skype, making it the first official public clarification of the company’s legal standing and jurisdiction since Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011.

As much as we would rather not report on yet another Android malware scare (we think security issues are overblown and that any platform is vulnerable, anyway), this one seems to be a first in the Android ecosystem. Security researchers have discovered what may be the first targeted Android malware attack, which is basically a smartly-crafted social engineering attack that specifically targeted a Tibetan activist, with the intent of spreading itself through the target’s contacts, thereby gaining access to their devices and information.

We all know YouTube is the biggest video sharing site around, but how big is it, exactly, when compared to sites such as Facebook or Twitter? Here's a hint: YouTube has just hit one billion monthly unique users. For comparison, Facebook hit that milestone in October 2012. It took the social network eight years to reach one billion active users — almost the exact amount of time as YouTube, which was founded in February 2005. Twitter, which has been around since March 2006, has more than 200 million monthly active users.

After Google unceremoniously announced it would be killing Reader later this year, much of the outraged response focused on its use in the U.S. But there's a whole other aspect to the service: for thousands of users around the world, it's one of the few ways they can get around their country's censors. A "save Google Reader" petition hosted by Change.org has received 125,000 signatures so far. And as Change.org revealed to Mashable Monday, 75% of those signatures come from users outside the U.S. — and 12% of them total say they live in countries that Reporters Without Borders or the OpenNet Initiative report say have active Internet censorship by government forces.

On March 12, World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, Reporters Without Borders is releasing a Special report on Internet surveillance, available at surveillance.rsf.org/en. It looks at the way governments are increasingly using technology that monitors online activity and intercepts electronic communication in order to arrest journalists, citizen-journalists and dissidents. Around 180 netizens worldwide are currently in prison for providing news and information online.

Last May, two security researchers volunteered to look at a few suspicious e-mails sent to some Bahraini activists. Almost one year later, the two have uncovered evidence that some 25 governments, many with questionable records on human rights, may be using off-the-shelf surveillance software to spy on their own citizens. Morgan Marquis-Boire, a security researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and Bill Marczak, a computer science doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the e-mails contained surveillance software that could grab images off computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes.

Threats to digital freedom are growing just as the number of people accessing the internet is taking off, with millions more likely to join the digital world through mobiles and smartphones in the coming years. The range of challenges is wide: from state censorship, including firewalls and the imposition of network or country-wide filters, to increasing numbers of takedown requests from governments, companies and individuals, corporate hoovering up of private data, growing surveillance of electronic communications, and criminalisation of speech on social media.

After the death of Hugo Chavez was announced this week, individuals across the globe -- from everyday Venezuelans to Barack Obama to Billy Bragg -- took to the Twitterverse to comment on the late Latin American leader's passing. Some mourned his death, while others expressed vehement support or outright rejection of his political ideologies. This mixed bag of reactions was evident among the tweets of U.S. politicians alone.

Facebook users became much more protective about who sees sensitive information about them, even as they were urged to share more about themselves on the social network, according to an unusual seven-year study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The study followed the privacy settings of roughly 5,000 Facebook users who were part of the university network on Facebook between 2005 and 2011. It is among the first longitudinal efforts aimed at gauging how Facebook users try to protect their information.

Mozilla recently announced a change to its default cookie policy for Firefox that will help protect users against unwanted tracking by invisible third parties. In short, a user will have to intentionally interact with a site in order for the site to be able to set a tiny snippet of data used for identification purposes known as a "cookie" on the user's machine. This change – currently available to users running the Nightly test build of Firefox – will bring Firefox in line with its competitor Safari, which has had a very similar policy in place for a decade. It is far from a silver bullet against tracking, as there are several other methods to track users, and this will not block cookies that currently exist in a user's browser.

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship.In this talk, Jon Penney—Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab and Berkman Fellow—examines some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance activities through three case studies involving past global communications censorship and information conflicts—telegraph cable cutting and suppression, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking—and the world community's response to these conflicts.

More than three out of every 10 smartphone owners don't have a password on the device that could give easy access to their e-mail, bank account, credit card information and other sensitive info. That's one of the findings of a recent worldwide survey by Web security company McAfee. On top of that, 15% of people surveyed said they save password information on their phones to apps and websites they use and more than half (55%) who do have passwords said they've shared those passwords with others.

Recently, the network research and analytics company Renesys tried to assess how hard it would be to take the world offline. They assessed disconnection risk based on the number of national service providers in every country, finding that 61 countries are at severe risk for disconnection, with another 72 at significant risk. That makes 133 countries where network control is so centralized that the Internet could be turned off with not much more than a phone call.

With three months remaining until the World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) still has an opportunity to facilitate meaningful civil society participation in the event. This is the message that civil society groups worldwide are delivering in a letter to Secretary General Touré this week. CDT strongly supports the letter and encourages other civil society organizations to sign on.

Although the WCIT is over, international debate about Internet governance and policy continue, full speed ahead. December’s treaty conference closed with a complex set of national positions and reservations, with 55 countries opting not to sign the new draft of the International Telecommunication Regulations. Many have attempted to piece together a coherent story of what happened during the WCIT. The not-so-subtle subtext running through all these accounts is that many of the policy issues and concerns raised at that conference will be on the agenda for the ITU’s next big meeting, the World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF). 

States around the world are faced daily with the challenge of protecting their populations from potential and real threats. To detect and respond to them, many governments surveil communication networks, physical movements, and transactional records. Though surveillance by its nature compromises individual privacy, there are exceptional situations where state surveillance is justified. Yet, if state surveillance is unnecessary or overreaching, with weak legal safeguards and a failure to follow due process, it can become disproportionate to the threat—infringing on people's privacy rights.

In his commentary The Internet Yalta, Alexander Klimburg, Fellow and Senior Adviser at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, argues that the December 2012 meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) may be the digital equivalent of the February 1945 meeting of the Allied powers in Yalta: the beginning of a long Internet Cold War between authoritarian and liberal-democratic countries. Klimburg contends that the battles over Internet governance that surfaced at WCIT are not just about competing visions of the Internet: They are also about two different visions of political power.

On Thursday, Microsoft plans to unveil a new print, television and online advertising campaign that attacks Google on an issue that Microsoft believes is one of its great vulnerabilities: privacy. The ads will showcase research that shows most people don’t know that Web e-mail providers like Google scan the contents of their e-mail messages to deliver personalized ads to them — and when they do find out, they don’t like it. If Gmail was a physical product, Microsoft’s actions would amount to putting a sticker on it that said, “Warning: Google is creepy.”

When you use the Internet, you entrust your thoughts, experiences, photos, and location data to intermediaries — companies like AT&T, Google, and Facebook. But when the government requests that data, users are usually left in the dark. In the United States, companies are not required by law to alert their users when they receive a government request for their data. In some circumstances, they are explicitly prohibited from doing so. As part of our ongoing Who Has Your Back campaign, EFF has called on companies to be transparent by publishing their law enforcement guidelines and statistics on government requests for user data.

For the past few months, some of the world’s leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention. Today, they’ve decided it’s time to tell all. Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented technological transition, characterized by growth in the volume and diversity of people, devices, and data connected to the Internet. Across the globe, billions of people are using information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure to conduct business, interact with governments and each other. The World Economic Forum recently observed that “more than 70 percent of the world’s citizens live in societies that have just begun their digitization journeys. 1” With so many people moving towards an increasingly digital lifestyle, the world that emerges at the conclusion of this transition will likely be very different than the world we know today.

All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that's only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general.

January 28 marks International Privacy Day. Different countries are celebrating this day calling attention to their own events and campaigns. This year, EFF is honoring the day by sharing some advocacy strategies utilized by human rights advocates and activists from Argentina, the UK, Canada, and the United States, that have helped to defeat overreaching surveillance proposals that threaten civil liberties.

Yesterday, Twitter released its second semi-annual transparency report, which details the numbers behind every user data demand, censorship order and copyright takedown request that the micro-blogging site received in the second half of 2012. As with Google’s transparency report last week, there was a clear increase in government demands for user data, with the United States leading the way by far. Censorship requests from around the world also increased. In addition, the report shed valuable light on the copyright takedown procedure that also often results in undue censorship.

Today (January 28) is Data Privacy Day, an international holiday that marks the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Council of Europe’s Data Protection Convention 108. Data Privacy Day, which is celebrated all over Europe, Canada, and the US, recognises our fundamental right under human rights law and the importance of privacy to the maintenance of democratic societies, the advancement of human dignity, and the flourishing of other rights such as freedom of expression and association.

Google Inc. (GOOG), which says it gets about 1,400 requests a month from U.S. authorities for users’ e- mails and documents, is organizing an effort to press for limits on government access to digital communications. The company has been talking to advocacy groups and companies about joining a lobbying effort to change the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, said Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman. He declined to elaborate. “Given the realities of how people live and where things are going in the digital world, it’s an important time for government to act” to update the law, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said in an interview. “It’s a bipartisan issue and I think the momentum is going to build because citizens are expecting this.” Google officials say changes in the law are needed to prevent law enforcement from obtaining certain e-mails and other content without search warrants, and to give documents stored on cloud services the same legal protections as paper documents stored in a desk drawer. Cloud services, which didn’t exist when the privacy law was passed, let users store and process data on remote servers via the Internet.

The Internet turned 30 earlier this month. On Jan. 1, 1983, engineers launched the basic protocol for sharing bits between computers, setting in motion the networked world we live in today. It’s during anniversaries like these that we have a chance to take stock of this remarkable network and the people who make it what it is.

Microsoft needs to open up about the trustworthiness of its Skype software for confidential conversations, according to an open letter to the company posted today. The letter, from an array of privacy advocates, Internet activists, journalists, and others, calls on Microsoft to provide public documentation about the security and privacy practices around Skype, which facilitates video and voice communications over the Internet. Microsoft completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype in October 2011.

Even before the World Conference on International Telecommunications took place last month in Dubai, Internet activists anticipated trouble. So did Congress, which issued a resolution calling it “essential” that the Internet remain “stable, secure and free from governmental control.” The worries proved prescient. The conference, which supposedly was going to modernize some ancient regulations, instead offered a treaty that in the eyes of some critics would have given repressive states permission to crack down on dissent. The United States delegate refused to sign it. Fifty-four other countries, including Canada, Peru, Japan and most of Western Europe, voted no as well.

The famed technology writer Steven Levy starts his long-form history of Facebook's newest product—Graph Search—by describing it as a feature that "promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists." Though it takes quite a lot to torment us these days, Graph Search does raise a few eyebrows. The new feature allows users to use structured searches to more thoroughly filter through friends, friends of friends, and the general public. Now one can more easily search for "My friends who like Downton Abbey" or "People in San Francisco, California who work at Facebook." Facebook then returns a list of individuals whose public or shared aspects of their profile match the search terms.

Here in the United States, if you whip out a clamshell flip phone, chances are you’ll be called a caveman or Luddite. But elsewhere, there are still some emerging countries where the old-school cellphone has yet to become passé. In India, Russia and Brazil, the older types of cellphone are still the most popular, according to a study published Thursday by Nielsen, the research firm. In India, 80 percent of phone users own an old-style feature phone, and only 10 percent have a smartphone, according to Nielsen’s estimates. In Brazil and Russia, feature phones account for roughly half the market.

One year ago, U.S. lawmakers discovered what happens when you mess with the internet, as Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and millions of ordinary users helped “black out” the net on January 18 to protest SOPA and PIPA—two controversial pieces of legislation that were designed to fight online piracy, but threatened instead to censor the internet and disrupt the way it functions. Since that day, there has been a rise in new laws around the world that restrict free speech online and prompt arrests of internet users, a key trend identified in Freedom House’s 2012 Freedom on the Net report.

Last month, a majority of the members of the International Telecommunications Union voted for a murky proposal, suggesting that the ITU has the power to regulate the Internet. The proposal was passed despite vociferous objections by the US and other developed countries. In the end, 55 countries refused to sign on, while 89 did sign the resolution. That was seen as a success for the US and its allies, but anyone celebrating the outcome might be doing so too soon.

Last week, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published an information note from Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré dated December 14 in which he reports to ITU Members on the ITU’s “ongoing and constructive dialogue with Civil Society.” The information note responds point by point to concerns raised in a December 9 letter from members of civil society and provides an account of a December 10 meeting between Touré and members of civil society present in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT).

When dozens of countries refused to sign a new global treaty on internet governance in late 2012, a wide range of activists rejoiced. They saw the treaty, crafted under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as giving governments pernicious powers to meddle with and censor the internet. For months groups with names like Access Now and Fight for the Future had campaigned against the treaty. Their lobbying was sometimes hyperbolic. But it was also part of the reason the treaty was rejected by many countries, including America, and thus in effect rendered void.

Access is encouraged to see that Yahoo! is now supporting HTTPS globally for its mail and messaging services, an important and overdue step for the security and privacy of its users. Pending technical analysis of its implementation, we believe this decision by Yahoo! responds to some of the concerns raised by civil society and security experts, and signals a continuing strengthening of their services’ privacy protections.

Internet recently turned 30, but it could be easily dubbed as 13 going on 30 looking at the ways in which it’s being dealt with by government authorities who are attempting to clamp the freedom of the online world—much like parents try to restrict their wayward teenagers. The very open and free nature of Internet was threatened in the 2012 as government around the world tried to clamp the service. While these attempts were met with protests from netizens, we can’t afford to let the guard down in the coming year or our Internet freedom will be seriously affected.

While Internet access to certain sites is blocked in some parts of the world, these restrictions are often circumvented using proxies outside the censored region. Often these proxies are blocked as soon as they are discovered. In this paper we propose a browser-based proxy creation system that generates a large number of short-lived proxies. Clients using the system seamlessly hop from one proxy to the next as these browser-based proxies appear and disappear. We discuss a number of technical challenges that had to be overcome for this system to work and report on its performance and security. We show that browser-based short-lived proxies provide adequate bandwidth for video delivery and argue that blocking them can be challenging.

At Global Voices Advocacy (GVA), we are dedicated to defending freedom of expression online. We have always been keen on publishing guides and tools to help our fellow netizens navigate the internet safely, circumvent censorship and protect themselves online. That is why, in 2013, we are committed to continue to defend your rights as netizens by publishing original reports and a new series of guides covering areas as diverse as circumvention, anonymity, surveillance, privacy, citizen journalism, visualization, online activism and advocacy.

Reactions to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) and its resulting treaty have painted a dramatic picture of a world divided into two camps fighting over the future of the Internet. The decision of many countries not to sign the treaty, or to return home without signing in order to further deliberate over its meaning, has fed the bi-polar image. Without question, the new treaty did nudge the text further in the direction of impacting privacy and free expression, and the Internet-focused Resolution from the conference makes it clear that treaty-signers envision a larger role for the ITU in global Internet policymaking moving forward. 

The credibility of the Internet depends on how much civil society – the broad label given to worldwide activism outside government – is able to take part in its evolution, a United Nations independent expert said today. “Civil society participation is essential to ensure legitimacy of global discussions on the future of (the) Internet,” the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, said in comments on a recent global telecommunications conference that aimed to update a world treaty containing general principles for assuring the free flow of information worldwide.

When the history of early 21st century Internet politicking is written, the meltdown of a United Nations summit last week will mark the date a virtual Cold War began. In retrospect, the implosion of the Dubai summit was all but foreordained: it pitted nations with little tolerance for human rights against Western democracies which, at least in theory, uphold those principles. And it capped nearly a decade of behind-the-scenes jockeying by a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, created in 1865 to coordinate telegraph connectivity, to gain more authority over how the Internet is managed.

For most of its almost-150-year history, the meetings of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations' communications standards body, have been rather predictable affairs. Representatives of the world's governments regularly gather to sign off on technical recommendations drafted by the technocrats of telephone companies and government bureaucrats. The diplomats would then return home to encode the minutiae of the regulations into their governments' communications policies. 

The world’s governments have just concluded the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), where they updated the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), a binding international treaty on telecommunications provision and interoperability. While the ITRs were certainly in need of updating, the government-controlled conference produced a text that crossed the red lines of several states, who have either said that they will not sign or that they need to consult their capitals. Still, many of the most problematic proposals failed to make it into the final draft. 

The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai failed to reach consensus today, leaving many delegates frustrated after nearly two weeks of intense deliberations. The United States, joined by a growing list of countries, has declared that it will not sign the revised International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). Many of those rejecting the treaty text, which included the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, Australia, and the Czech Republic, cited concern about treaty provisions on the Internet-related issues of security and spam, as well as a Resolution explicitly addressing future ITU involvement in Internet policy. 

Facebook is to make sweeping changes to its privacy controls, making them easier to find and offering people the means to review every publicly available picture of them on the site. The move follows repeated criticism that the site made it too hard to keep information private, and kept shifting default settings to open up more data. The change is the biggest overhaul to its privacy settings in more than a year, and will begin appearing to the site's 1 billion registered users over the next few weeks. The most visible change will be "privacy shortcuts" which will show up as a tiny lock at the right-hand side of the screen, at the top of the "news feed", with a menu offering answers to questions such as "Who can see my stuff?" and "Who can contact me?"

Since Friday’s plenary session, the big question at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) has been whether or not the joint Russia, UAE, China, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan (RUCASS) proposal would see the light of day and change the course of the conference. Although the RUCASS proposal turned out to be dead on arrival, it may have still been a game changer. Seeing the potential that the proposal had to disrupt negotiations, WCIT Chairman Mohammad Al-Ghanim managed to suppress it altogether, and decided instead to work with the heads of regional groups to draft a new consensus text based off the work of Committee 5, which may be the base treaty text for negotiation.

Friday’s surprise announcement of a new proposal from the United Arab Emirates, the host country of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), added an air of anticipation and frustration to this weekend’s work. Though there was still no official proposal in the ITU’s system, a leaked version reveals the text of a fully revised International Telecommunications Treaty (ITRs) with sign on from Russia, UAE, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt, though Egypt later announced via Twitter that it never supported the proposal.

The ITU has stated multiple times, specifically in relation to human rights and freedom of expression concerns of civil society, that it is impossible for the ITRs to contravene the ITU Constitution. Considering the state of conflict of treaty law, or lack thereof, that may not be the case. It may just create an impossible world where states have to correctly follow two conflicting agreements. The ITU constitution states in Article 33 that all content, services, and security “shall be the same for all users in each category of correspondence without any priority or preference” which basically requires the ITU, and by extension the ITRs signatories, to not filter through public correspondence.

Nearly a week into a global conference to draft a treaty on the future of international telecommunications, delegates remain divided on a fundamental question: should the Internet feature in the discussions? The United States says no, arguing that including it in an intergovernmental agreement could result in regulations that would hamper its development, which has been led by the private sector.

Last week’s jarring shutdown of the entire Syrian Internet raised a number of questions, some of them scary: How does this even happen? How could an entire country be pulled offline so quickly? Who else is vulnerable?

Two thousand delegates from 193 countries are meeting for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai this week to negotiate a treaty on telecoms regulation that has not been updated since 1988 - before the internet was in mainstream use. Up for negotiation at WCIT are the International Telecommunications Regulations, or ITRs, which cover everything from improving internet access for the elderly and disabled, to enabling access for the 4.6bn people in the world with no access at all, improving cybersecurity and, most controversially, discussing the "sender pays" economic model of delivering web content.

Today in Dubai, the world’s governments gathered for the opening of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). Over the course of the next two weeks, they will update a major international telecommunications treaty, the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), and in doing so, decide whether or not to put the internet under this international regulatory framework.

At the end of the 20th century, an incredible revolution took place. Barriers to the free flow of information were knocked down and a powerful cycle of technological innovation was set in motion, transforming the economy, first in the United States and then around the world. No, I am not talking about the internet. I am referring to the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry, which led to a huge economic revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. It started with a big bang: the breakup of the AT&T monopoly. As early as the mid- 1960s, policy-makers knew they didn’t want the emerging information services industry to be dominated and stifled by an enormous monopoly. 

WCIT begins tomorrow (December 3) and lasts for two weeks. This is where the much-discussed International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) treaty will be renegotiated and discussed for the first time since 1988. The ITU was founded in the 1860s as a single place in which telephone and telegraph standardisation could take place across multiple countries and territories with differing standards and payment systems. The ITRs as a treaty was one way in which this could be achieved through the ITU process, and the 1988 ITRs focused on telephone exchanging and payments.

First, it was Egypt. At the height of the protest against the Mubarak regime in 2011, authorities shut the Internet down. This week, it was Syria. Just as rebel forces there were making big gains, someone pulled the plug on the Internet, and Syria went dark. Service was restored on Saturday, but Andrew McLaughlin, former White House adviser on technology policy, expects we'll see more of this.

How hard is it to disconnect a country from the Internet, really? That's the number one question we've received about our analysis of the Egyptian and Syrian Internet blackouts, and it's a reasonable question. If the Internet is so famously resilient, designed to survive wars and calamities, how can it fail so abruptly and completely at the national level?

Today, Internet rights advocates are urging their governments to vote for openness at the conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Beginning Monday, Member States of the UN agency will decide whether the ITU should expand its regulatory authority to the Internet — a move that could threaten privacy, free expression, and access to information for Internet users around the globe.

Government requests for so-called “lawful access” to user data are trending in both democratic and non-democratic nations, presenting one of the greatest challenges for the protection of fundamental rights. From recent allegations involving Skype handing over user data without a warrant to TeliaSonera’s permitting abusive regimes in Belarus, Azerbaijan and elsewhere to access its very networks, the threats to privacy are only increasing.

On 27 November, Reporters Without Borders will launch a website called WeFightCensorship (WeFC) on which it will post content that has been censored or banned or has given rise to reprisals against its creator. This original website's aim is to make censorship obsolete. It is an unprecedented initiative that will enable Reporters Without Borders to complement all of its other activities in defence of freedom of information, which include advocacy, lobbying and assistance. 

If you live in the West the answer to the question ‘How much freedom do you really have online?’ is probably ‘quite a lot’. But this month I learned that the freedom TO speak doesn’t always lead to being free AFTER you speak, when I met journalists and campaigners at the 7th annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), held in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Some things change, but others stay the same. While the types of threats facing Internet users worldwide have diversified over the past few years, from targeted malware to distributed denial of service attacks, one thing has remained constant: governments seeking to exert control over their populations still remain the biggest threat to the open Internet.

According to law enforcement agencies, the rising popularity of Internet chat services like Skype has made it difficult to eavesdrop on suspects’ communications. But now a California businessman is weighing in with what he claims is a revolutionary solution—a next-generation surveillance technology designed to covertly intercept online chats and video calls in real time.

Digital and online tools are irreversibly changing the way professional and citizen media access, consume, produce, and share information. Whether researching stories using a shared computer in a newsroom along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or talking to contacts in the refugee camps in Africa using mobile phones, journalists and media producers need to understand not just how to use these devices, but also how to protect themselves and the sources they rely on for information. SpeakSafe is dedicated to journalists and media workers in the business of information. It is produced through Internews’ Global Human Rights Program, which works to strengthen the capacity of media to report safely on human rights issues.

A new security hole has been discovered in Microsoft’s Skype that allows anyone to change your password and thus take over your account. The issue was first posted on a Russian forum two months ago and has been confirmed by The Next Web (we have not linked to any of the blogs or posts detailing the exploit because it is very easy to reproduce).

As the annual United Nations-run Internet Governance Forum (IGF) convenes in Baku, Azerbaijan this week, it is a bitter irony that a multi-stakeholder conference to discuss the Internet’s future is being held in a country where the government has no qualms aboutlocking up its online critics. And the IGF itself has, according to the Expression Online Initiative, even prevented the consortium of Azeri freedom of expression groups from distributing copies of two reports: Searching for Freedom: Online Expression in Azerbaijan and The Right to Remain Silent: Freedom of Expression in Azerbaijan ahead of the 7th Internet Governance Forum.

The United Nations agency which deals with freedom of expression on the Internet today warned that restrictions directly limiting Internet access appear to be on the rise, and called on governments to implement policies that facilitate broadband connectivity instead of putting up barriers particularly during political developments.

An international training institute to teach online tactics for human rights campaigners is being set up in the Italian city of Florence. The first students, starting in the new year, will be drawn from human rights activists around the world - with the aim of arming them with the latest tools for digital dissent. As the Arab spring showed, protests are as likely to be about individuals using social networking as much as public demonstrations. Street protests have become Tweet protests.

If members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—a UN agency known for its non-transparent, government-centric structure—vote to expand ITU authority to cover Internet policy and technical standards, Internet openness, affordability, and functionality could be at risk. This shadow of uncertainty has propelled CDT’s recent advocacy ahead of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December, where governments will update the agency’s treaty and decide whether or not the ITU should expand its authority to areas of Internet governance.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of nine other groups launched the Open Wireless Movement today – a new project to promote a landscape of shared, wireless Internet. "We envision a world where sharing one's Internet connection is the norm," said EFF Activist Adi Kamdar. "A world of open wireless would encourage privacy, promote innovation, and benefit the public good, giving us network access whenever we need it. And everyone – users, businesses, developers, and Internet service providers – can get involved to help make it happen."

The ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) could have dire implications for global economic growth and development. Proposed revisions to the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) could fundamentally change the way the Internet works, diminishing the positive impact of the Internet on economies around the globe. Certain treaty proposals would exacerbate the global digital divide by increasing the cost of sending traffic over the network and inhibiting nations from adopting network neutrality rules. Such extreme revisions to the treaty could change the economics of the Internet by shackling the Internet to the rules and operating principles of twentieth-century telecommunications systems.

A recent UN report from the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force reads like a primer on Internet control and censorship. Entitled “Use Of The Internet For Terrorist Purposes,” the document, which discusses the dangers of “open Wi-Fi” and suggests ISPs maintain retention standards, focuses on the possibility of “terrorists” using the “Internet” to terrorize, a problem akin to trying to solve the problem of “criminals” walking in “parks.”

The more we live our lives online, the greater the temptation for governments and private companies to spy on us. Padraig Reidy highlights the dark side of our increasing dependence on digital communications. While the internet offers opportunities for mass communication and social interaction unprecedented in human history, the chances for governments to monitor and control how we communicate are also ample.

Security is not just about strong encryption, good anti-virus software, or techniques like two-factor authentication. It’s also about the “fuzzy” things … involving people. That’s where the security game is often won or lost. Just ask Mat Honan. We – the users – are supposed to be responsible, and are told what to do to stay secure. For example: “Don’t use the same password on different sites.” 

Using an organizational informatics approach, this study explores the implications of human rights organizations’ use of censorship circumvention technologies. Through qualitative analyses of data collected through in-depth interviews, the research examines
the factors influencing the use of circumvention technologies and the organizational effects of their use. The outcomes include a revised model of censorship circumvention technology use as well as a new model situating human rights organizations and their audiences in bidirectional information flows. The research provides recommendations for practice as well as insight for organizational informatics and information systems security research in the areas of protective technologies, awareness, detection, and physical security.

But the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) highlighted huge disparities in the cost of services, with the poorer parts of the world tending to pay the most. "On the back of the increase in broadband services worldwide, the number of people using the Internet grew by 11 percent over the past year ... ie, 2.3 billion people," the ITU said in its 2012 report on information and communication technologies (ICT). In terms of affordability, Macau, Norway and Singapore topped the list of 161 countries featured in the report.

On October 26, Microsoft is planning to launch a new version of Internet Explorer that has privacy baked in. It will have a “Do Not Track” signal turned on by default, so that those people who still use Internet Explorer and who actually take the time to upgrade to the new version will be automatically telling websites and advertisers that they don’t want data about them to be collected or used to target them with ads while they browse the Internet. (If that is in fact what “Do Not Track” turns out to mean.)

The arrest of a senior executive rarely brings helpful headlines. But when Brazilian authorities briefly detained Google’s country boss on September 26th—for refusing to remove videos from its YouTube subsidiary that appeared to breach electoral laws—they helped the firm repair its image as a defender of free speech.Two weeks earlier those credentials looked tarnished. Google blocked net users in eight countries from viewing a film trailer that had incensed Muslims. In six states, including India and Saudi Arabia, local courts banned the footage. In Egypt and Libya, where protesters attacked American embassies and killed several people, Google took the video down of its own accord.

This December in Dubai, world governments will gather to renegotiate a key treaty under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency that specializes in global telecommunications. The meeting, known as the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), has been billed as a mortal threat to Internet freedom, a rare opportunity to fix inequitable flaws in the existing global economic framework for communications infrastructure, and all or none of the above. 

While Internet access to certain sites is blocked in some parts of the world, these restrictions are often circumvented using proxies out-
side the censored region. Often these proxies are blocked as soon as they are discovered. In this paper we propose a browser-based proxy creation system that generates a large number of short-lived proxies. Clients using the system seamlessly hop from one proxy to the next as these browser-based proxies appear and disappear. We discuss a number of technical challenges that had to be overcome for this system to work and report on its performance and security. We show that browser-based short-lived proxies provide adequate bandwidth for video delivery and argue that blocking them can be challenging.

Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time.

Brutal attacks against bloggers, politically motivated surveillance, proactive manipulation of web content, and restrictive laws regulating speech online are among the diverse threats to internet freedom emerging over the past two years, according to a new study released today by Freedom House. Despite these threats, Freedom on the Net 2012: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media found that increased pushback by civil society, technology companies, and independent courts resulted in several notable victories. 

More repressive regimes are combating online critics by paying pro-government bloggers to “tout the official point of view, discredit opposition activists, or disseminate false information” in online comment streams and on social media, according to an international watchdog report released Monday. This practice was once mostly limited to China and Russia, according to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2012 report, but it has cropped up during the past year in 14 of the 47 nations studied.

If you want to go hunting for it, you'll find pictures of the Arab Spring uprising across YouTube, uploaded by participants or onlookers on their mobile phones. Years ago, that wouldn't have been possible, because (a) there weren't too many phones, and (b) smartphones weren't that easy to use. You could also add (c) many countries had lousy data capabilities. Now that's changed. Let's take Egypt as an example. According to data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there were 18 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants of Egypt in 2005.

Disturbing online censorship and self-censorship measures have been taken in an attempt to prevent the circulation of "Innocence of Muslims," a US-produced video that denigrates Islam, and to defuse the resulting violence. Access to the video and/or platform hosting it has been blocked on the initiative of the authorities in some countries. In other countries, it is Google, the company that owns YouTube, that has suspended access to the video’s online links (see below for details of the blocking methods).

It is hard to look at the international protests surrounding the Innocence of Muslims video and the contemporaneous (though seemingly unrelated) fatal attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya and not feel as though we are witnessing an important moment in the Internet's development. Of course, posting material online has lead to drastic, even fatal, consequences in the past. But it is hard to think of another time where a single piece of online content has brought about such an overwhelmingly serious and negative reaction. And given that the creator's initial anonymity led news reports to declare the video as coming "from the Internet," it's quite possible that this will remain a video whose origin is attributed primarily by where it was published rather than who made it. In the minds of many, this will remain an action of the Internet – and an action with very serious consequences.

Secret negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) continued this week in a golf resort outside Washington DC, and the process continues to be as secret and undemocratic as ever. TPP is yet another example of how the US entertainment and pharma industry are pressuring lawmakers to push forward overprotective intellectual property laws that will also put the Internet and its users at risk. Last Sunday, EFF was at the negotiations to participate in the “stakeholder” events hosted by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR). There were noticeably more organizations and companies present at the three-hour stakeholder tabling session than the last round of negotiations in San Diego.

In a joint statement, civil society groups voice concerns about proposals made by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that would threaten the openness of the Internet. To Member States and Government Delegations of the International Telecommunication Union: In the interests of promoting and protecting global Internet openness and the exercise of human rights online, we write to urge International Telecommunication Union (ITU) member states and their delegates to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) to refrain from expanding the scope of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) treaty to include the Internet.

On Sept. 14 – 17, activists with the Freedom not Fear movement will stage an international week of action to oppose surveillance measures from Europe to Australia. To support this effort, EFF is examining surveillance trends and spotlighting international grassroots activism launched in response. David Lyon is a prominent sociologist, author, and director of the Surveillance Studies Center at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. His most recent book, co-authored with Zygmunt Bauman, is titled Liquid Surveillance. Lyon spent an hour talking with EFF about contemporary surveillance trends such as biometrics, CCTV cameras and legislative proposals for broadened online spying powers for law enforcement.

Black Lotus is pulling the wraps of a distributed denial-of-service-mitigation service that uses behavioural factors to pick up on low-volume botnet attacks that nevertheless can cripple Web servers. Called Protection for Services, the offering runs customer traffic through proxies that employ human behavior analysis to discover and temporarily block offending IP addresses, says the Black Lotus President Jeff Lyon.

How is Moore's Law and ever-cheaper computing and interconnectedness affecting our world? Activists, individuals, and governments are using digital technologies like social media as powerful forces for change. From 2009-2011, Andrew McLaughlin was a member of President Obama's senior White House staff, serving as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. In that role, Andrew was responsible for advising the President on Internet, technology, and innovation policy, including open government, cybersecurity, online privacy and free speech, spectrum policy, federal R&D priorities, entrepreneurship, and the creation of open technology standards and platforms for health care, energy efficiency, and education. 

Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are considering this year whether to extend the ITUʼs regulatory authority to the Internet. Several proposals have been made to revise the ITUʼs basic treaty to include provisions addressing the security of networks or information. These proposals have rightly raised controversy not only because of their implications for Internet freedom, but also because of concerns that ITU intervention could distract from or undermine other ongoing efforts by institutions better suited to address Internet security. 

Facebook is often invoked in popular discourse as a device for the potential exploitation of individual privacy. Facebook users invite surveillance, and personal information revealed by Facebook users is compiled into aggregated databases of linked information, preferences, and behaviors. In the interest of the ideals of individual empowerment, cultural integrity, social responsibility and equality, social networking communities are forming to interrogate networked surveillance. This article examines those communities of resistance in the form of “sousveillance” tactics that have emerged as a backlash to the surveilled environment. Sousveillance is “watching from below,” a form of inverse surveillance in which people monitor the surveillors.

In his interview with CNET, Luigi Gambardella, chairman of ETNO’s executive board, explains clearly the idea behind the proposed principle of ‘sender-party-pays’ for Internet traffic. In a nutshell Gambardella explains: ‘...the operators are free to negotiate commercial agreements beyond best effort. These commercial agreements are based on the value of the information, not the bits.’

Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s chief lawyer, says that fighting for free speech is more than a good idea. He thinks it is a competitive advantage for his company. That conviction explains why he spends so much of Twitter’s time and money going toe to toe with officers and apparatchiks both here and abroad. Last week, his legal team was fighting a court order to extract an Occupy Wall Street protester’s Twitter posts.

The thing that still blows my mind about the internet is that through all the dramatic changes over the last two or three decades, it remains a mostly open public commons that everyone can use. There are many land ownership battles happening all around it, but it has so far withstood challenges to its shape, size, governance and its role in all aspects of our lives.

In Dubai this December, the world's governments will decide whether the International Telecommunication Union – a UN agency – should expand its authority to cover Internet policy and technical standards, a move that could pose grave risks to the exercise of human rights online.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) is rapidly approaching and governments around the world are in the process of finalizing what their delegations will bring to the table when they arrive in Dubai for the start of the conference on December 3. Among the issues being debated at WCIT is whether or not to expand the mandate of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN specialized agency that is convening the conference, to include internet policy issues .

December will see the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialised UN agency that sets standards for international telephony. The Dubai-based conference will bring together 190 nations and, while members have been meeting behind closed doors, various policy proposals have been leaked by activists on the website WCITLeaks.

India blocked 245 web pages for provocative content on Monday in an effort to prevent the spread of hate messages and lessen communal tensions in the country, and suggested via an official release on the website of the Press Information Bureau that more could follow. As was widely reported in the days that followed, most websites blocked were not related to the ethnic clashes in Assam.

The Dictator's Practical Guide to Internet Power Retention, Global Edition is a wry little 45-page booklet that is, superfically, a book of practical advice for totalitarian, autocratic and theocratic dictators who are looking for advice on how to shape their countries' Internet policy to ensure that the network doesn't loosen their grip on power.

In horror movies, the scariest moments usually come from the monster you can't see. So the same goes for real life, or at least online life. Over the past few years, largely out of sight, governments have been clawing back freedoms on the internet, turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a tool for surveillance and control. In the next few months, this process is set to be enshrined internationally, amid plans to put cyberspace under the authority of a largely secretive and obscure UN agency.

Denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly common phenomena, used by a variety of actors—from activists to governments—to temporarily or indefinitely prevent a site from functioning efficiently. Often, the attack saturates the target with server requests designed to flood its bandwidth, leaving the server unable to respond to legitimate traffic.

We never get tired of saying it. Freedom of expression and the Internet are related: if one is affected, the other will be also. However, in modern democracies it is sometimes difficult to detect threats to online freedom of expression. Therefore, at this stage of the “Don’t fear the Internet” [es] campaign we will focus on how some copyright laws and practices end up discouraging the use of the Internet for expression.

The public consultation process for WCIT-12 opened today, with interested parties able to make their written contributions to the WCIT-12 discussions via ITU’s website in any of the six official UN languages. The site opened for contributions today at 15:00 CET.

It can be accessed at www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/public.aspx 

The site is the result of a decision by ITU Council on 11 July 2012 to make a draft of the principal input document to the WCIT-12 conference publicly accessible, and to establish a website where all stakeholders can express their views and opinions on the content of that document or any other matter related to WCIT.

When Americans are displeased with their politicians, they like to threaten to move to Canada. But if you’re tempted to move north—or even further afield—to get away from plans for increased Internet surveillance by the government, think again. Controversial new surveillance laws proposed in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia have quite a bit in common. And it’s no coincidence.

As Steve wrote last week, Small World News is developing a new mobile multimedia reporting app for Android. This app will also include an entire mobile multimedia reporting curriculum, including journalism and digital safety and security basics. We will be adapting our Guide to Safely Producing Media where appropriate and working with our colleagues John Smock and Mark Rendeiro to produce the photo and audio reporting lessons.

Censorship is no longer limited to printed media and videos. Its impact is felt much more strongly with regard to Internet related resources of information and communication such as access to websites, email and social networking tools which is further enhanced by ubiquitous access through mobile phones and tablets. Some countries are marked by severe restrictions and enforcement, a variety of initiatives in enforcing censorship (pervasive as well as implied), as well as initiatives to counter censorship. 

There is a need for drastic action to be taken to prevent young people being exposed to disturbing material on the internet. The majority of today's parents know less about technology than their own kids do, and have little control over the internet content their children can access. It's not just pornography that is a problem; the internet is full of inappropriate material, including material on self-harming, anorexia, bomb making sites and suicide sites. 

Thanks very much and good morning. I’m gonna talk, or try and talk, about what real terrorists do with modern encryption tools in the 21st century, do they succeed in communicating securely, do they know how to, how they build their own effective methods. I’ll try to respond to these questions using evidence, including a strain of real terrorism cases in which specialists, including myself, have examined computers and Internet records. But first, throw out everything you’ve read in the press (that, by the way, is my other profession). In the real world the evidence is never going to be complete or perfect, we’ll look at some of that in a minute.

We assembled execs from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Zynga who help not-for-profits and activists use their platforms. For the first time, they broke bread together to discuss the power of "slacktivism," breaking out of the viral-hits mind-set, and whether philanthropy is the future of marketing.

On Monday we announced that the Global Voices-led “translathon” yielded a whopping 63 translations of the Declaration of Internet Freedom. Among the translated languages are K’iche’, Galician, Afghan Dari, Bengali, Estonian and Hebrew. Now a bunch of the translators involved in the effort are offering their take on the process and the importance of the fight for Internet freedom in their countries. These are some of the greatest testaments to the free and open Internet we’ve seen in a long time.

As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I thought it would be useful - and maybe entertaining - to look at an anti-net neutrality article for the insights it gives us about how the other side views things. It's called "Pick Up On One and Let The Other One Ride", and appears in the Huffington Post. Here's how it frames the discussion: One direction follows the lead of activists who worry that without "net neutrality," a non-competitive broadband world will lead the major broadband infrastructure companies to stifle the flow of Internet content and extract a pound of digital flesh from the content they do allow.

Defending networks from malicious hacking exploits depends in large part on the voluntary, cooperative efforts of network operators, device makers, and Internet users.Today the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) -- a group of technical experts dedicated to building consensus about broadband network management -- has released a series of targeted, balanced recommendations to help stifle an emerging type of network attack.

Sachin Pilot, minister of state for communications and information technology, believes countries like India, with growing internet users, should have far more share in the running of the internet. Speaking with Monobina Gupta, Pilot discusses how managing the global internet currently lies within the purview of very few nations, why this must change - and how he is against any form of online censorship.

The recent acquisition of Skype by Microsoft, coupled with a series of infrastructural changes, has resulted in a flurry of responses, concerns and analysis of exactly what kind of assistance Skype can provide to law enforcement agencies. Under this heightened scrutiny, Skype released a statement on their blog on 26th July, purporting to re-affirm their commitment to the privacy of their users.

When he's not working on DNSSEC, Dan Kaminsky is taking on censors, both in government and in private industry, with plans for a series of user-friendly tools that will map out where information is being deleted or blocked online.

Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.

Snooping, like so many things in life, is going mobile and online. In 2011 Google received 12,271 requests for data from the American government and acceded to all but a few of them. American mobile-phone carriers together fielded more than 1.3m such requests. 

New surveillance laws being proposed in countries from the United States to Australia would force makers of online chat software to build in backdoors for wiretapping. For years, the popular video chat service Skype has resisted taking part in online surveillance—but that may have changed. And if it has, Skype’s not telling.

We begin this week’s Netizen Report with South Korea’s net neutrality advocates and telecommunications companies, who are at odds after the Korean Communications Commission allowed three domestic mobile carriers to block access or add surcharges for mobile voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) services. The decision, which would also affect peer to peer apps such as Skype, emerged after Korean mobile telecoms SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ claimed their data networks would be degraded by the expanding use of applications such as KaKao Talk, which is used by 36 million Koreans. Net neutrality advocates protesting restricted access include several civil society groups and Google’s Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, who told the Korea Times it would stifle innovation.

On July 4, a group of digital rights and other advocacy organizations unleashed a set of rights and principles for the Internet dubbed the Declaration of Internet Freedom. Amongst its initial signatories were organizations such as Free Press, Access, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as Global Voices Advocacy.  As it spreads, bloggers have begun to comment–and critique–the document and the process behind it. Here are just a few reactions.

The past few weeks have seen promising developments in the use of online journalism to counter official narratives in countries under political upheaval. In this week’s Netizen Report, we cover more Internet innovations created by netizens to promote political and social change, alongside other developments related to the global struggle for freedom and control on the Internet.

In a ground-breaking vote on an issue that affects all of us, the United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday endorsed a resolution upholding the principle of freedom of expression and information on the Internet. The broad support for the resolution demonstrated that maintaining the free flow of information on the Internet is a global call and not something pushed only by a few Western states.

Many forms of hacktivism exploit illegal access to networks for financial gain, and cause expensive damage. Other forms are used primarily to advocate for political or social change. Applicable law in most developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, generally prohibits hacktivism. However, these countries also protect the right to protest as an essential element of free speech. This Note argues that forms of hacktivism that are primarily expressive, that do not cause serious damage, and that do not exploit illegal access to networks or computers, sufficiently resemble traditional forms of protest to warrant protection from the application of anti-hacking laws under widely accepted principles of free speech.

Following in Google's wake, Twitter has released for the first time data on government requests for user information. The table shows that the US government is significantly more interventionist in terms of the number of times it has asked Twitter to hand over information than any other government in the world. From 1 January 2012, the US made 679 user information requests out of a total of 849, compared with 98 requests from the Japanese government, 11 each from the Canadian and British governments and under 10 for a slew of other countries.

It's been year-and-a-half since the outset of the Arab revolutions that brought down Zine el Abidine Ben Ali's longstanding regime in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak's in Egypt; three years since the beginning of the Iranian election protests of 2009-2010; and more than three years since the start of civil unrest in Moldova. It's widely accepted by now that these and other pro-democratic protest movements globally would have been impossible without smart phones and social media. But the significance of these technologies to democratization is still a matter of debate. If it occurred to you to wonder what the view on this issue looks like from the top of the tech industry, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg asked Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Freedom of Speech and Censorship in the Internet Age -project was launched in January 2011. The main goal of the project is to research the status of censorship during the internet era. To reach this goal, the theme of internet censorship is divided to several subtopics e.g. internet culture, technologies, marketplace, privacy and anonymity in different articles. The outcomes of the project include a doctoral thesis, research articles, a web site as well as contents and tools for broader discussion on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Book club).

As public awareness and debate about the ITU’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) widens, a point of contention has been whether “Internet governance” will be on the table. A number of regulators, industry, and civil society groups, including CDT, have raised concerns about the WCIT’s potential to stray into areas of Internet governance and policy, moving beyond mere technical interoperability issues. Others have dismissed these concerns as “rumors,” echoing the ITU Secretary General’s assurances that the ITU is just a technical body and there are no references to “Internet governance” in the preparation documents for the WCIT.

Disproportionate penalties for copyright violations have reached new heights in Japan with the passage of a new bill this month that will make downloading copyrighted material punishable by imprisonment or fines. Previously, imprisonment was possible for uploading files, but this bill expands the penalty to downloaders as well. The bill will go into effect on October 1.

Twitter is preparing to introduce new measures to reduce the visibility of “hate speech” or “trolling” on the site. But management faces a struggle to balance some Twitter users’ desire for anonymity and free speech – such as contributed to the Arab Spring protests – with the wish of others to be protected against abuse.

Social media is profoundly affecting the work of security and law enforcement, even more than the invention of the telephone over a century ago. As more of us transfer details of our lives -- our whereabouts, interests, political views, friends, and so on -- online, it inevitably involves and interests the agencies tasked with keeping us safe.

The Global Network Initiative urges the retention of the multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance as global policy forums create policy for the future. Several important decisions are to be made around Internet governance in the coming year. The roles of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the World Telecom Policy Forum and proposals to the UN General Assembly on the future of Internet governance have not been top of mind for the billions of people around the world that increasingly rely on the internet as a means of providing social connection or an opportunity for political or economic engagement.But decisions to be made in the next 12 months may impact on the way users around the world connect to the Internet in the coming years.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit group that manages the Web's address system, named Fadi Chehadé as its new president on Friday. He will succeed Rod Beckstrom, who announced last year that he will leave the organization on July 1 when his contract ends. Chehadé was born in Lebanon to Egyptian parents and was educated in the United States. He has worked for IBM and founded RosettaNet, a nonprofit that establishes standards for the sharing of business information.

UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Secretary General Hamadoun Touré today in Geneva announced he would propose to the ITU Council later this month to make the draft documents for the much-debated International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) publicly accessible. According to participants at today’s meeting, Touré said he would also recommend a public consultation on the draft ITR, to be held during the last preparatory meeting for the December World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) at which the ITR will be updated.

The takeaway is simple: any attempt to regulate speech online — whether in service of “stopping piracy” or “defending against cyberattack” — must be ruthlessly interrogated for how it will be abused. Because it will be abused. Those with censorious impulses will push the four corners of the law as far as possible to silence speech they don’t like. It is depressingly common to see the mere threat of a lawsuit cause a withering of speech online. It’s vitally important that we recognize and call out the certainty that even well-intentioned laws that impact expression will be used as a bludgeon against the open expression of information and ideas online. In addition to opposing SOPA and its ilk, here are three areas where companies can take a stand to protect free speech on the Internet.

People around the world have come to rely on Facebook for political activism and discourse -- from the Green Movement in Iran, to revolutionaries in Egypt, to U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Facebook is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its "population" comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people's online activities and identities.

More than 1,000 new internet "top level domains" – such as .app, .kids, .love, .pizza and also .amazon and .google – could come online beginning early next year, with the potential to radically change the face of the web. But the move by Icann, the US-appointed company which decides what new domains can be added to the web, has been criticised by some as allowing a commercial landgrab of the internet.

Proposed new top-level domains for internet addresses to rival .com and .uk will be revealed in London on Wednesday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) received 1,930 proposals for 1,410 different internet suffixes by the 30 May deadline. There are already about 300 suffixes in use. The expansion will allow suffixes that represent hobbies, ethnic groups, corporate brand names and more. Icann has only revealed general trends so far and not specific details but some bidders have disclosed their ideas, including .lol, .bank, .baby, .music, .doctor, .YouTube and .Google.

Back in the early days of the Web, we set up Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status messages to let people know what was going on with a Web server. Today, we still use 401 error messages for pages you’re not authorized to see, 403 pages for pages you can’t see even with authentication, and the ever popular 404 for Web pages that can’t be found. Now, with the rise of Internet censorship, Tim Bray is proposing a new HTTP code: 451, for Web servers and pages that are being censored. Bray, a leading Google Android developer and co-creator of one of the first Web search engines, Open Text and XML, has proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that code 451 be used for, “when resource access is denied for legal reasons. This allows server operators to operate with greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public policy affect their operation. This transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end users.”

There were a couple of interesting stories in ComputerWorld last week from the cyber guerrilla war front. According to this story, whoever is controlling the Flame virus has ordered it to self-destruct and erase all traces of itself to impede the forensic analysis of its code.

The last few weeks have offered the strongest indications yet that nation-states are using customized software to exploit security flaws on personal computers and consumer Internet services to spy on their users. The countries suspected include the United States, Israel, and China. Journalists should pay attention--not only because this is a growing story, but because if anyone is a vulnerable target, it's reporters.

In countries whose governments disrespect free speech and privacy, the introduction of new telecommunications (telecoms) infrastructure generally creates a new layer of censorship and surveillance. One of the latest examples is Ethiopia. Last week Ethio Telecom, the sole telecommunication service provider in Ethiopia, announced a plan to relaunch its 3G wireless network to improve the quality and speed of Internet connections. However Tor, a project which supports anonymous online communication, recently found that Ethio Telecom has deployed or begun testing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) of all Internet traffic, and has also blocked Tor. The Tor team has since developed a workaround for users in Ethiopia.

A new Internet standard giving the global network more room to grow came into effect Wednesday, a move that users probably won't notice. The switch occurred at 0001 GMT Wednesday, when Internet operators switched to a new standard called IPv6 that allows for trillions of "IP" numbers or addresses, up from the current 4.3 billion.

The formal mechanism for producing a consolidated input towards a revision of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) that shaped the ICT networks of today will see its final meeting June 20-22. The Council Working Group to prepare for the World Conference on International Telecommunications will meet for the last time, in Geneva, to produce a report that will be considered at the conference in Dubai, 3-14 December.

Galvanized through Twitter and Facebook, tens of thousands of protesters marched in Mexico's capital last week calling for more engaging issue campaigns by politicians and less biased reporting by Mexico's mainstream media of the upcoming July 1 presidential election. The Twitter campaigning under #YoSoy132 began with protests in reaction to a May 11 speech at Iberoamericana University in Mexico City by Enrique Peña Nieto, front-runner candidate for the Mexican presidency and member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (also known as the PRI), which ruled Mexico for seven decades before the last presidential election 2000.

By 2016, global Internet traffic is expected to reach a staggering 1.3 zettabytes annually, according to a new report from Cisco. To put that into perspective, it's the equivalent of 38 million DVDs per hour. The network equipment maker predicts that monthly Internet traffic in 2016 will be four times the level seen in 2011.

Last fall, “Kardokh,” a 25-year-old dissident and computer expert in the Syrian capital of Damascus, met with British journalist and filmmaker Sean McAllister. McAllister, who’s made award-winning films in conflict zones like Yemen and Iraq, explained that he was shooting a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 about underground activists in Syria, and asked if Kardokh would help him.  But some of McAllister’s practices made him uneasy, Kardokh said. He worried that the filmmaker didn’t realize how aggressive and pervasive the regime’s surveillance was. Kardokh and his fellow activists took elaborate measures with their digital security, encrypting their communications and using special software to hide their identities online. “I started to feel that Sean was careless,” Kardokh told me. He said he had urged McAllister to take more precautions in his communications and to encrypt his footage. “He was using his mobile and SMS, without any protections.”

Azerbaijan is a classic example of how, even when people are free to connect to the global Internet, they can be subject to pervasive, unaccountable, and unconstrained surveillance. It is also a case of how, while western democratic governments have been quick to follow the lead of the United States and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in calling for a free and open global Internet, they are much more conflicted when it comes to surveillance. The democratic world has failed to address the freedom-eroding potential of government surveillance through commercial networks.

Today, Google expanded its transparency reports program by releasing a detailed report of content removal requests from copyright holders. The new copyright report joins its semi-annual government takedown transparency report, and covers more than 95% of the copyright takedown requests it has received for Search results since July 2011.

Azerbaijan, host of the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest, has faced a number of digital disruptions as it prepares to host the annual singing competition this week. The song contest websites www.eurovision.az and www.eurovision.tv have been the subject of a cyber attack by an unknown group, followed a day later by the shutdown of a major mobile network which affected more than a million Azeri users. The government has meanwhile, announced it is taking steps to expand broadband Internet infrastructure in the country, helping more of its citizens to stay connected.

Twitter says it will honour requests from users who do not want their online behaviour tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with web companies such Google and Facebook whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data. Twitter announced that it will officially support "Do Not Track," a standardised privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the US Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser.

This page features a letter from academics and civil society groups from around the world to International Telecommunication Union Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Touré regarding the lack of opportunity for civil society participation in the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) process.

Facebook shareholders may be grumbling about the inordinate amount of control founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds under the company’s relatively unique corporate structure, but new privacy-policy explanations the company announced on Friday - and will explain in a conference call Monday - return some privacy control back to users.

In May 2011 UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Frank La Rue released a groundbreaking report on human rights on the Internet. The report, which was endorsed by 41 governments, detailed how established human rights principles apply to the internet and made recommendations for putting these principles into practice. After a year of inaction, the time has come for a concerted, collective effort by democratic countries to carry out the recommendations of the La Rue report.

When repressive regimes, which restrict free expression and torture their critics, acquire internet censorship or surveillance capabilities, they are very likely to use them to commit human rights abuses. The security services of Bahrain, Iran, and Qaddafi's Libya are known to have employed Western surveillance technology to target dissidents. However, the U.S. and European governments have in fact taken few if any tangible steps to stem the flow of sophisticated technology for controlling the internet and mobile communications to repressive regimes. There are currently no effective measures in place to prevent a company like TeliaSonera or the dozen others that came before it from supplying dictators with the technological means to violate fundamental rights.

The Global Network Initiative (GNI) is pleased to announce that Facebook is the first company to gain observer status with GNI. Observer status is an opportunity for companies who are actively considering joining GNI to examine the initiative's programs as well as its principles on free expression and privacy. “Given Facebook’s influence in the industry and its importance to a growing global user base, we look forward to collaborating with them on the issues they are facing around the world," said GNI Executive Director Susan Morgan.

This report finds that U.S. efforts to bolster independent media and an open Internet overseas are having significant impact but face a lack of funding, growth in online censorship and surveillance, and rising attacks on journalists. It makes recommendations to strengthen independent media around the world, including: expand funding; increase coordination; build citizen journalist capacity; embed digital media and project evaluation into all programs; and put greater emphasis on business skills, legal issues, community radio, and investigative journalism.

U.S. efforts to bolster independent media and an open Internet overseas are having significant impact, but face a lack of funding, growth in online censorship and surveillance, and rising attacks on journalists, according to a new report by the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), a special initiative of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

A summary of events worldwide concerning the practices and policies of Internet content filtering, surveillance, and information warfare.

A guide for covering the news in a dangerous and changing world.

The Global INET 2012 is a 3-day international forum that will celebrate the Internet Society’s 20th anniversary. The meeting will be held 22-24 April, 2012 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference agenda features roundtable discussions and keynotes by Internet, technical, policy, and other thought leaders on issues critical to the health and vitality of the Internet.