Category Archives: Link Digest

eG8 Summit takes place in Paris
A two-day forum convened by French President Nicolas Sarkozy has seen industry bosses come together in Paris to discuss proposals for future internet regulation, the BBC reports. Their conclusions will be presented to G8 leaders later this week at the G8’s 2011 summit in Deauville. A consortium of civil society actors, including la Quadrature du Net, the Association for Progressive Communications, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and European Digital Rights (EDRi) have signed a joint statement condemning the lack of civil society voices at the summit.
Report | Protest statement

Azerbaijan tables law to criminalise spreading “misinformation” online
Eurasianet reports on amendments being proposed to Azerbaijan’s Criminal Code that would outlaw “distribution of disinformation with the aim of spreading panic among the population, false information about terror”. The amendments, which also target attacks on computer networks and online copyright violations, will be debated by Azerbaijan’s Parliament in the Autumn. Government officials this month charged Wikipedia with spreading disinformation about Azerbaijan. There are fears that the new law could be used to restrict free speech online.

Suit says Cisco helped China pursue Falun Gong
A lawsuit filed in California by the Human Rights Law Foundation on behalf of members of Falun Gong claims Cisco customised its internet routing technology to help China track Falun Gong members, the New York Times reports.

Brazil pushes forward with copyright reforms
Following a period of uncertainty around the future of long-fought-for reforms to Brazil’s copyright law, the Ministry of Culture is holding a seminar in Brasilia to finalize the preparation of the Draft Law.

US: “International Strategy for Cyberspace” launched
The US Whitehouse launched its “International Strategy for Cyberspace” last week, emphasising the expansion of access to secure networks as an economic good, and calling for the development of new international norms to promote an open internet. This week, the Center for Democracy and Technology has released a four-part analysis of the proposals.
Strategy | Analysis

India: Centre for Internet and Society demands list of blocked websites
The Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society has filed a Right To Information request with India’s Department of Information and Technology, asking for a list of websites blocked by the Indian government.

European Commission launches IPR strategy
The European Commission has launched a new Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) strategy this week. LINX reports: “Notable promises include a commitment to legislate to enable pan-European copyright licensing [and] measures to enable libraries to digitise orphan works. A new copyright enforcement directive is also proposed. EDRi have produced a shadow report setting out how “the EU has been making policy ‘blind’, building their strategies on faith not fact and ignoring objective, robust evidence”.
LINX | EDRi shadow report

Rwanda: Kagame gets into Twitter spat with journalist
Balancing Act Africa reports on a heated exchange on the state of press freedom in Rwanda between the country’s president Paul Kagame and British columnist Ian Birrell that took place on Twitter this week.
Report | Exchange

Magna Carta 2.0: a transparency research agenda
The Sunlight Foundation make an impassioned plea for transparency and accountability activists to seize the current moment of fiscal tightening to effect a rebalance of power, by promoting “the financial and efficiency benefits that transparency brings to the operation of government and our society”.

Twitter’s oral culture
Zeynep Tufekci examines Twitter’s oral culture and “the reemergence of oral psychodynamics in the public sphere” in response to an opinion piece in the New York Times by its Executive Editor Bill Keller berating the growth of social media.

Research: Administration of FOI law in Chile
This study of Chile’s two-year old Freedom of Information (FOI) Law highlights serious problems for those wishing to use the internet to make requests. Less than half of organisations examined allowed for online FOI requests.

Video: Ben Fry on visualisation future and data literacy
An eight-minute interview with information designer Ben Fry about the history and evolution of data visualisation.

Open science: a future shaped by shared experience
This long-form Guardian feature is a great introduction to issues and practice in open science.

Demonstrators take to streets across Turkey to protest internet bans
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Turkey last weekend to voice their opposition to a new law that will mandate state-controlled internet censorship. The law is scheduled to come into force in August.

UK: Independent review rejects “lobbynomics” and suggests copyright reform could lead to economic boost
A six-month independent review commissioned by the UK government has recommended changes to the copyright system it says could add up to £7.9bn to the UK’s economy, the Financial Times reports. The changes revolve around strengthening exceptions and limitations to copyright law, and linking enforcement to licensing practice. Professor James Boyle, a copyright scholar and advisor to the review, has written a cogent analysis of its findings.
FT report | Boyle analysis

Burma: Ban on CDs, USB drives in internet cafes
Burma’s communications ministry has issued a new regulation forbidding the use of external data storage devices in internet cafes. Democratic Voice of Burma reports: “The ban on CDs, USB sticks and floppy drives comes two months after the government prohibited the use of services like Skype and VZOchat that allow internet users to make free or cheap international phone calls”.

EU to fund African internet infrastructure for research
The European Commission’s EuropeAid Cooperation Office and the international research network operator DANTE have announced a new contract to provide support for sub-Saharan African intra-regional research networking infrastructure to boost its connection to the pan-European research network, GÉANT. Worth just under €15m, 80% of the project funding will come from the Commission, with African partners contributing the remaining 25%.

The Quiet Revolution in Open Learning
This Chronicle of Higher Education feature reveals the history of the Obama administration’s landmark $2bn open education resources policy and charts the likely future of an initiative it says “could have a catalytic effect on a movement that increasingly looks like the future of higher-education reform”.

Fair Mobile – Two Years On
Steve Song compares the difference in price drops for mobile services over the past two years between South Africa and Kenya, and introduces a new survey from Fair Mobile of affordability across the continent.

Brazil’s Copyright Reform: Timeline
Pedro Paranaguá offers a useful timeline to help understand Brazil’s currently stalled copyright reform, eight years in the making. The process, writes Paranaguá, has gone from open and participatory to closed and opaque.

Video: What the internet is hiding from you
Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org shows how advances in technology can tailor the web to each of its individuals users, noting the downsides this might have for education, pluralism and cross-cultural understanding: “What we’re seeing is a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones”.

Audio: NPR’s On The Media “The Data Show”
US National Public Radio explore the seductions of data in this special episode of On the Media: “Wallmart logs more than 2.4 petabytes of information about customer transactions every hour, equivalent to 167 times the books in the Library of Congress”.

India rejects intellectual property talks set outside the WTO
India will not accept bilateral attempts to discuss changes to global intellectual property norms, the country’s commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma has announced. The statement comes in the context of India’s ongoing objection to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a bilateral treaty with provisions for copyright and patent enforcement which go far beyond norms established by the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

EU: Threat of copyright term extension emerges again
A proposal to extend the term of copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 70 years is being revived and may go to the European Council for approval in a matter of weeks, despite the objections of economists and copyright experts.
An overview by Bernt Hugenholtz | ORG’s campaign page: http://bit.ly/etwjkw

US: Lawsuits and legal reform raise hopes of a future for digital privacy
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) reports on new legislation being proposed in the United States that they assert “moves us one step closer to the enactment of needed baseline privacy protections”. Meanwhile, according to Wired, smartphone application manufacturers could be facing two separate legal cases where they stand accused of illegally handling or sharing private data.
Legal reform | Lawsuits

Germany chooses deletion over blocking to fight online child abuse content
The German government has announced it will drop child-protection legislation that would have forced internet service providers to block websites, in favour of a policy of removing websites showing images of child sex abuse at source. The decision, which was based on evidence of the effectiveness of the delete-at-source approach, will do much to strengthen arguments against similar web-blocking legislation currently being discussed at the European Parliament.

US: Legislators move to overturn regulators on net neutrality
Legislators in the United States House of Representatives have voted to adopt a procedural measure that could allow them to veto new regulations established by the US Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality.

How Sudan used the internet to crush a protest movement
This McClatchy feature details the Sudanese government’s success in repressing popular protest using digital surveillance and intimidation tactics: “In Sudan, the “Arab spring” that’s shaken most other Arab countries feels like a grim wintry chill”.

“Big Content” is strangling American innovation
This op-ed in the Harvard Business Review argues that the US music and film industries “are attempting to protect themselves from change so aggressively that they risk damaging America’s position as a world leader in innovation”.

One man’s cyber-crusade against Russian corruption
The New Yorker profiles Alexey Navalny, “the Russian Julian Assange”, detailing his efforts to expose corporate corruption.

Open source biology deserves a shot
This feature on approaches to data-sharing in the biotech industry profiles Sage Commons, a platform for sharing genomic data.

Audio: Interview with Malte Spitz
This feature on Malte Spitz, the German campaigner and politician who sued his mobile provider Deutsche Telekom to hand over all the information they possessed about him, features an audio interview. “Under the terms of a settlement between Spitz and Telekom, he received a massive file detailing his movements anytime his phone was on, often with precision down to a few hundred meters of his actual location.”

US to shut down major digital transparency projects
The Sunlight Foundation reports that the US federal government’s two open government data portals, data.gov and USASpending.gov face “virtual extinction” if current budget proposals being considered by US legislators are made law: “The funding source for these e-government initiatives is the Electronic Government Fund, a $34 million bucket of money that would be drained to $2 million for the remainder of this fiscal year”.

Czech Constitutional Court rejects data retention law
European Digital Rights (EDRI) report that the constitutional court of the Czech Republic has ruled that the country’s implementation of the European Data Retention Directive is unconstitutional. The ruling was made on the grounds that the law represented an unacceptable level of mass surveillance. The law was repealed by the court.

Campaign launched to expand open access policy
The Right to Research Coalition has launched a campaign to put pressure on US federal funding agencies to mandate open access policies on all research they fund. This week is the third anniversary of the National Institutes of Health adopting such a policy.

Appeal begins in gene patents case
The Council for Responsible Genetics reports on the opening days of a hearing at the US Court of Appeals which will rule on whether patents on two genes associated with increased breast and ovarian cancer risk are valid, or whether the genes can’t be patented because they are “products of nature”.

Profile: the Guardian Project
The Personal Democracy Forum blog profiles the Guardian Project, an initiative to create a secure, private communications platform for activists and journalists on top of Google’s Android mobile phone operating system.

WikiLeaks: The illusion of transparency
This working paper by US legal professor Alasdair S. Roberts sets out a clear and compelling argument why, despite the excitement over Wikileaks, the forces stacked against radical transparency are more powerful than those acting in its favour.

A critique of legislative monitoring websites
David Sasaki uses the story of a successful grassroots campaign against legislation to enact an “internet tax” in Mexico to show where legislative monitoring websites are going wrong.

Designers make data much easier to digest
This New York Times feature is a great introduction to why information design matters.

Audio: Interview with Tim Wu
Little Atoms interview Tim Wu, author of the Master Switch and recent appointment to the Federal Trade Commission, about business cycles in telecommunications and media and their effect on free expression.

Uzbekistan tightens control over mobile internet
The Uzbek Agency for Communications and Information has demanded that mobile operators notify them of mass distributions of SMS messages containing “suspicious content”, telling operators they would also have to switch off access to the internet at the behest of the Uzbek authorities. Eurasia.net reports: “until now, internet users surfing the Web through their mobile phone browsers have been able to access otherwise blocked sites unimpeded”.

Iranian hackers obtain fraudulent HTTPS certificates
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports on a hacking incident at one of the web’s 650 Certificate Authority organisations, Comodo. The work of Certificate Authorities underpins secure (HTTPS) web-browsing, and the EFF have been at the centre of research and awareness-raising about current flaws in the system: “the incident got close to — but was not quite — an internet-wide security meltdown”. Strong circumstantial evidence locates the perpetrators of the attack in Iran.

Chinese government crackdown on dissent growing
The New York Times reports that the recent sentencing of democracy activist Liu Xianbin to ten years in prison, based largely on articles he had written advocating for human rights and democracy, is part of a growing crackdown. “In recent weeks nearly two dozen writers, lawyers and civil society advocates have been detained on criminal charges and 11 more people have vanished into police custody.”

Sudan to unleash “cyber jihadists”
Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party has warned anti-government campaigners that attempts at organising protests online will be crushed by the government’s own “cyber-battalion”. However, according to this BBC report, “despite the NCP’s threat, there is little evidence regarding the size or nature of the cyber battalion”.

US develops “panic button” for democracy activists
This New York Times report details some of the projects being targeted by the US State Department’s $50m “Internet Freedom” fund, including a mobile phone application that will wipe its own address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists if confiscated by police.

More Google Books analysis
The Director of Harvard University Library Robert Darnton analyses the recent Google Books decision and sets out his case for a Digital Public Library of America, while the Chronicle of Higher Education interviews Pamela Samuelson, the law professor whose amicus brief proved highly influential in the recent case.
Darnton | Samuelson

Report: Use of Western technologies by Middle East censors
Building on their work documenting internet filtering across the globe, the Open Net Initiative analyse the use of tools manufactured in the West to censor social and political content in at least nine Middle Eastern and North African states.

Interview: Elizabeth Eagen
Information Program Officer Elizabeth Eagen outlines the strategy behind the Human Rights and Information Initiative, a joint initiative with the Human Rights and Governance Grants Program that focuses on equipping human rights practitioners with documentary and advocacy tools and skills fit for the digital world, in this interview with David Sasaki.

Book Review: The Information, by James Gleick
Cory Doctorow’s exuberant review of James Gleick’s masterly “biography” of information theory, The Information: “Gleick takes us through Wikipedia and the meaning of information, the debates about it, the helplessness of information overload, the collisions in namespaces – even through his beloved chaos math – until he has spun out his skeins so that they wrap around the world and the universe”.

Court rejects Google Books settlement
The BBC reports that a New York federal district court has rejected the settlement proposed in the class action suit brought against Google by the Author’s Guild of America. The judge ruled that the settlement, which would have permitted Google to continue digitising and making available books protected by copyright in exchange for an annual flat royalty fee, would give Google a “de facto monopoly” over digitised books. Inside Higher Ed reports on the various interests which influenced the case, highlighting law professor Pamela Samuelson’s influential amicus brief, while the Chronicle of Higher Education discuss an alternative solution to licensing book digitisation being promoted by the director of the Internet Archive, Peter Brantley. Noted Google critic Siva Vaidhyanathan praises the court’s decision, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) focus on the judge’s acknowledgement of the worrying privacy implications of the settlement.
BBC report | Inside Higher Ed report | Chronicle of Higher Education report | Siva Vaidhyanathan | EFF

US/Azeri “weaponisation” of social media: reports emerge from hacked emails
The Guardian reports that United States Central Command, a branch of the US military, has commissioned software to help its agents manage multiple “online personas” designed to intervene in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto-language online conversations. According to The Tech Herald, the existence of the persona management software contracts first emerged from hacked emails belonging to US security firm HBGary and released on the web by associates of Anonymous. Links with ongoing security service operations in Azerbaijan against opposition activists who use social media are currently being investigated by Global Voices.
Guardian | The Tech Herald | Global Voices

Member States refuse to provide information on EU transparency negotiations
Access Info Europe have released a report which highlights the dire state of transparency at Europe’s Council of Ministers. Of 27 Member States approached by Access Info, 23 used domestic right to information law exceptions to excuse themselves from releasing all or part of the information requested, which – ironically – had to do with ongoing negotiations at the Council around proposed transparency reforms.

Open Networking Foundation pursues new standards
A large group of information technology companies including Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Verizon this week launched the Open Networking Foundation, a new initiative to cooperate on a suite of open networking standards called OpenFlow. The New York Times reports: “the benefits, proponents say, would be more flexible and secure networks that are less likely to suffer from congestion”.

The coming battle for Africa’s internet
This Atlantic feature predicts how local and global web and software developers will seek to exploit Africa’s fast-growing online market.

Crowdsourced data is not a substitute for real statistics
Members of the Benetech community debunk recent research suggesting that crowd-sourced data could meaningfully help disaster relief efforts.

An introduction to the federated social network
This is a great primer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the rise of new approaches to social networking that remove the need for personal data to be controlled by centralised corporations “whose business models are generally based on gathering, using, and monetizing data about you; and which may be vulnerable to government pressure tactics.”

ONI: Year in Review
The Open Net Initiative publish their annual report into the state of internet censorship across the world.

Interview: Claudio Aspesi
Richard Poynder interviews market analyst Claudio Aspesi about his dark predictions for the world of scholarly publishing as the Open Access movement and the global financial downturn each serve to threaten its bottom line.

Data visualisation: an interactive timeline of Middle East protests
An innovative and compelling visual index of the Guardian’s coverage of popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.

State Department may lose anti-censorship cash
Politico reports that legislators on both sides of the political divide in the United States are considering proposals to transfer a large part of the budget allocated to the State Department to support online censorship circumvention technology to another government entity, following the State Department’s slowness at spending the $50m in funds. US academics and practitioners including Ethan Zuckerman, Evgeny Morozov, Rebecca MacKinnon and staff from the Center for Democracy and Technology have written an open letter condemning the proposals.
Story | Letter

United Nations continues to undermine IGF
Kieren McCarthy reports for dot-nxt on why bureaucratic uncertainty surrounding the future of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) may mask more fundamental disagreements between China and the West on the scope and shape of the institution.

Burmese junta rules VoIP illegal
The Burmese military junta has issued an official instruction stating that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype are illegal under existing telecommunications legislation. The instruction states that use of VoIP services has caused a decline in revenue from official overseas calls through the state’s own communication services. The Irrawaddy reports that “overseas phone calls using the junta-run service are so expensive that the majority of people in Burma cannot afford to use them”.

Agency has valuable Japanese radiation monitoring data it can’t share
The Nature blog reports news that the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CNTBTO), an international agency that collects extensive data on radiation levels across the world, is unable to release that data to the wider public because it has no mandate to do so. By contrast, the agency has had a mandate to release hydroacoustic and seismic for the purposes of tsunami warnings ever since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

US proposals for secret “Son Of ACTA” treaty leaked
Techdirt reports on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a new secret trade agreement being pushed by the United States Trade Representative that contains many of the draconian intellectual property enforcement provisions of early drafts of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The report labels the new initiative “a sickening display of crony capitalism and regulatory capture at work”.

Turkish Blogspot blocking order revoked
Public Prosecutors in Turkey have revoked a blocking order on the popular blogging platform Blogspot that has been in place since January this year. The move follows several appeals lodged by both Google and Cyber-Rights Turkey.

European Court of Justice rejects stem-cell patents
The European Court of Justice has issued a preliminary opinion that procedures involving human embryonic stem cells are not patentable. The opinion follows a case presented to the court by the German Federal Supreme Court after it was asked to rule on a stem cell patent in a case brought by Greenpeace on ethical grounds.

A Legacy at Risk: How the new Ministry of Culture in Brazil reversed its digital agenda
Ronaldo Lemos, director of the Center for Technology and Society at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) School of Law in Rio de Janeiro, argues that Brazil’s new culture minister, Ana de Hollanda, is betraying the legacy of her predecessor, Gilberto Gil.

Report: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies
This major new report from the Social Science Research Council brings together expertise and hard data from around the world to expose the industry myth-making around digital copyright infringement that lies behind draconian enforcement legislation and protectionist trade agreements. Includes contributions from the Association for Progressive Communications and the Center for Technology and Society (FGV, Brazil).

Eight lessons from three years working on transparency
An essay by Owen Barder of AidInfo on the lessons he’s learned from three years working with major donors to open up data about international aid.

Anonymous no more
This Economist feature details how a combination of advances in behavioural tracking and browser vulnerabilities are serving to effectively de-anonymise the web.

oAfrica: Tracking ICT Progress
Online Africa is a new website dedicated to disseminating information relating to the African internet.

Interview: Yochai Benkler
This interview with Yochai Benkler summarises his forthcoming article on the legal case, or lack of one, the US government has against Wikileaks: “It is not, as a matter of law, sustainable to treat WikiLeaks or Assange any differently than the New York Times and its reporters”.

US and UK governments linked to national DNA database in UAE
The Council for Responsible Genetics and GeneWatch UK have uncovered links between the UK and US governments and plans in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to develop a universal national DNA database. “A universal DNA database would allow the Emirates to track every citizen and identify their relatives: a frightening prospect for dissidents and women” said Dr Helen Wallace, Director of GeneWatch UK.

More Facebook activists face arrest
Movements.org report arrests of activists using Facebook to plan protest activities or share messages of solidarity on Facebook in Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. The reports highlight issues around Facebook’s contentious ongoing policy against user pseudonyms on the site.

China pledges to step up administration of internet
Reports submitted to the National People’s Congress in China this week indicate Chinese authorities’ intention to step up regulation of the internet in order to keep pace with technological developments. Enhanced investment in fiber optic broadband was also announced.

Obama administration joins critics of ICANN
The United States Commerce Department has “put ICANN on notice”, according to this report in the Washington Post, for failing to respond to concerns about its practice being voiced by the international community. ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the US-based non-profit organisation responsible for regulating the assignment of domain names across the web, and was created with the help of the US government in 1998.

Zim mobile provider cuts off unregistered users
Zimbabwe’s News Day report that the country’s three mobile phone operators began disconnecting tens of thousands of their customers this week, after a deadline passed mandating them to register their SIM cards. Mandatory SIM card registration is widely perceived as a policy used by governments to facilitate surveillance of their citizens, and has also been proposed in, among other places, Nigeria, the Philippines and Mozambique.

Libya withdraws from internet
Internet monitoring firms are reporting that internet traffic flows in and out of Libya appear to have been completely severed. The London Internet Exchange reports: “Because all of Libya’s international traffic flows through a single, state-run provider, the authorities were able to put the internet in ‘warm standby mode’ rather than shutting it down completely. Compare this with Egypt, where the Mubarak regime had to grapple with five independent ISPs with international connectivity.”

Facebook and Twitter opt not to sign free speech pact
This New York Times article calls out Facebook and Twitter for refusing to sign up to the Global Network Initiative, and discusses the initiative’s future: “the recent Middle East uprisings have highlighted the crucial role technology can play in the world’s most closed societies, which leaders of the initiative say makes their efforts even more important”.

A Declaration of Cyber-War
This Vanity Fair feature tracks the story of Stuxnet, a computer virus that targeted industrial systems and that is speculated to have had the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility as its ultimate target: “Stuxnet is the Hiroshima of cyber-war… We have crossed a threshold, and there is no turning back.”

The internet’s unholy marriage to capitalism
This long essay by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney for the Monthly Review charts the internet’s transformation from military-funded research project through anti-commercial hippy utopia to engine of global capitalism.

Economist debate: Internet democracy
At the end of February, the Economist hosted a lively online debate between John Palfrey and Evgeny Morozov around the motion “This house believes that the internet is not inherently a force for democracy”.

Churnalism.com
This new website created by the UK Media Standards Trust allows users to identify “churanlism”, news articles published as journalism which are essentially just rehashes of corporate, government and other third party press releases.

Visualisation: African Undersea Cables
Steve Song provides a visual history of the development of undersea cables to serve the African continent.

Infographic: Social media equivalents in China
This inforgraphic displays the Chinese equivalents of the rest of the English-speaking web’s most popular social media services.

Net neutrality: review of Tim Wu and Barbara van Schewick
Evgeny Morozov reviews two new works which address net neutrality for the Boston Review.

Interview: David Hammerstein of TACD
Knowledge Ecology International interview former member of the European Parliament David Hammerstein about his work on behalf of the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) advocating at the World Intellectual Property Organisation for better access to reading materials for the visually impaired.

EFF responds to Hilary Clinton’s second Internet Freedom speech
Last week, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton delivered her second speech on Internet Freedom, on the same day the US Department of Justice was justifying its demands that Twitter hand over data on five of Wikileaks’ staff and supporters in a Virginia court. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have responded to Clinton’s speech, noting that “for every strong statement about preserving liberty, freedom of expression, and privacy on the global Internet, there exists a countervailing example of the United States attempting to undermine those same values”. Plus analysis from Evgeny Morozov, Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman.
Speech | EFF response | Morozov | MacKinnon | Zuckerman

Did the KGB hack Belarusians social network accounts?
[via Google Translate] Charter 97 report that several of their readers arrested during demonstrations against fraudulent elections in Belarus in December last year have since told them that while they were under arrest, their contacts on the social networks Facebook and Vkontakte saw them online and even received messages containing provocative questions. The reports prompt the newspaper to conclude that the Belarusian secret service, the KGB, hacked into the accounts.

Ugandan Communications Commission issued order to intercept SMS messages in week before election
This week, Uganda held its presidential elections, amid accusations of fraud. The Daily Nation reports that in the week before the elections took place, the Ugandan Communications Commission issued instructions to mobile phone companies to intercept SMSs and flag them if they contained one of 18 keywords, including “Tunisia”, “Egypt” and “dictator”.

Forensic DNA records to be wiped in UK
Under proposed law called “The Freedom Bill”, the United Kingdom would remove the DNA records of up to 1m UK citizens from its forensic DNA database, Genewatch UK report. Only the profiles of people suspected of serious offences of sex or violence will be retained and then only for a maximum of five years. The UK forensic DNA database is currently the largest in the world.

Video sparks debate, anger and scepticism in Cuban blogosphere
Global Voices report on the emergence of a 52-minute video presentation, leaked onto the web, which allegedly shows a Cuban intelligence official demonstrating US cyberwar tactics. Speculation around the Cuban diaspora has focussed on whether the video was released to dissuade Cubans inside the country from staging Egypt-like uprisings.

Yochai Benkler: A free irresponsible press
Yochai Benkler highlights the “deep vulnerability of the checks imposed by the first amendment in the context of a public sphere built entirely of privately-owned infrastructure”, in this important analysis of the wide-ranging legal and ethical implications of events surrounding Wikileaks in 2010. The paper is in draft and will be published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

Protecting Human Rights in the Digital Age
This report, commissioned by the Global Network Initiative, “describes the evolving freedom of expression and privacy risks faced by information and communications technology (ICT) companies and how these risks can be more effectively mitigated by the industry.”

Safaricom – A Modest Proposal
This blog post from Steve Song responds to statements from Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore by calling on the Kenyan mobile incumbent to open up their spectrum to non-profit players if they can’t cope with making less than 50% profit on supplying connectivity to rural Kenyans.

Free trove of music scores on web hits sensitive copyright note
This New York Times feature tells the story of the International Music Score Library Project, a crowdsourced scanning project for musical scores. The website has adapted its practices to attempt to conform with copyright law, yet still gets a mixed reception from traditional score publishers.

Interview: Rebecca MacKinnon on the internet in China
The New Yorker interview Chinese internet expert Rebecca MacKinnon, to understand how the Chinese regime is reacting to online organising in the Middle East, and to assess the effect Hilary Clinton’s speech will have on Chinese internet policy. During the interview, MacKinnon exposes the different camps in Washington vying to influence where the US State Department spends the $30m it has earmarked for “Internet Freedom”.

Middle East internet Scorecard
Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, presents his analysis of internet traffic in the Middle East over the past few weeks of unrest: “Overall, our data shows pronounced changes in Internet traffic levels in two Middle East countries last week: Bahrain and Libya. While network failures and other exogenous events may play a role in decreased traffic volumes, we observe the changes in Bahrain and Libya are temporally coincident with the onset of recent protests.”

Visualisation: Egypt influence network
This breath-taking visualisation by Kova Boguta, based on the “follows” of Twitter users covering recent events in Egypt, maps networks of influence across the Arab- and English-speaking web: “Experts say Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future. Now that Mubarak has stepped down, I can share the work I’ve done making that metaphor tangible, and visualizing the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and across the Middle East.”

Video: Margaret Atwood on the author as “primary source”
In her keynote at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference, Margaret Atwood gives an engaging and incisive author’s perspective on challenges faced by the publishing industry by changing technology.