The Internet's Voltaire Moment Subscribe to this blog About Author With a focus on open source and digital rights, Simon is a director of the UK's Open Rights Group and president of the Open Source Initiative. He is also managing director of UK consulting firm Meshed Insights Ltd. Contact Author Email Simon Twitter Profile Google+ Profile Linked-in Profile Let me say up front that I am not a massive fan of Wikileaks. For me, it falls into the same category as The Pirate Bay; there's plenty to disagree with in what they are doing, but the crisis they provoke is fundamental to the operation of the Internet and we ignore it at our peril. Topological Change The weaknesses are not caused by Wikileaks. The problem arises from the fact that those serial intermediaries believe the solution the challenge to their existence is to reinforce their hub-and-spoke control points. Is Your Cloud Safe? Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay similarly stress the uncomfortable weaknesses in our various democracies. Vote With Voltaire
Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (9780195152661): Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu The Internet, Ignored No More: Morozov’s Case Against “Freedom.gov” » Article » OWNI.eu, Digital Journalism Thankfully, Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov, a frequent critic of the U.S. State Department’s push to advocate in favor of “Internet freedom” around the planet, has boiled down his objections into a concise piece. The gist: it’s not just the impression given of American contractors being given a leg up by the U.S. government in foreign lands, with insufficient thought to local impact, in a way that evokes American foreign policy’s log history of doing just that (and doing it, it’s worth mentioning, in the diplomatic space that as a practical matter exists outside the direct supervision of the other two branches of government). Or, at least, it’s not just that. What’s particularly galling is that throwing the weight of the federal government of the United States of America behind the idea of online freedom politicizes the Internet in a way that forces people to take sides: The Internet Freedom Agenda has similarly backfired. Well worth a read.
Wikileaks ISP Anonymizes All Customer Traffic To Beat Spying In order to neutralize Sweden's incoming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive, Bahnhof, the Swedish ISP and host of Wikileaks, will run all customer traffic through an encrypted VPN service. Since not even Bahnhof will be able to see what its customers are doing, logging their activities will be impossible. With no logs available to complete their chain of investigation, anti-piracy companies will be very, very unhappy. In 2009, Sweden introduced the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED). This prompted Jon Karlung, CEO of ISP Bahnhof, to announce that he would take measures to protect the privacy of his customers. Now, in the face of Sweden’s looming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive which will force them to store data, Bahnhof – who are also Wikileaks’ Swedish host – will go a step further to protect the anonymity and privacy of their customers. Bahnhof Servers
Life & Arts - The new power of the press In the past year journalism, which in the west sees itself as beset by decline, has vastly increased its power. Three large developments have made the implicit, yet huge, claim that journalism, our way of knowing what is happening in our complex world, is essentially a matter of competing high-decibel political dispute and total transparency. Taken together, these developments – the takeover of US politics by the broadcast media; the revelations about governments around the world from the WikiLeaks website, and The Daily Telegraph exposé of business secretary Vince Cable’s true feelings about the UK coalition government – ensured that the media ended the year with large victories over politics and politicians. What’s more, all three were claimed in the public interest. These journalistic innovations are seen by their champions as greatly expanding the scope and power of journalism. The effect of their prominence on politics is clear. Journalists have used undercover disguises before.
What the attacks tell us The current row over the latest WikiLeaks trove of classified US diplomatic cables has four sobering implications. 1. The first is that it represents the first really serious confrontation between the established order and the culture of the Net. As the story of the official backlash unfolds – first as DDOS attacks on ISPs hosting WikiLeaks and later as outfits like Amazon and PayPal (i.e. eBay) suddenly “discover” that their Terms of Service preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks — the contours of the old order are emerging from the rosy mist in which they have operated to date. As I read the latest news this morning about the increasingly determined attempts to muzzle WikiLeaks, my mind was cast back to a conversation I had in the Autumn of 2000 on an island in the Puget Sound. My friend is one of the wisest people I know. At that point my confident Utopianism began to evaporate. 2. 3. 4. I have no illusions about the press. Yep.
La belle histoire de la neutralité des réseaux » Article » OWNI, Digital Journalism Perdu dans la neutralité ? Pour y voir plus clair, Lobbynomics réalise un éclairage original du concept, à travers l'histoire des réseaux de télécommunication. L’histoire de la neutralité des réseaux depuis la fin du 18e siècle, quel intérêt ? Lobbynomics a retracé la sinueuse histoire réticulaire dans une infographie, consacrée au déploiement des lignes de télécommunications américaines et européennes entre 1770 et 2010. Les éclairages historiques laissent rapidement la place à l’étude du seul cas Internet, l’infographie opérant un rafraichissement de nos mémoires salutaire, particulièrement en ces temps d’adoption de la Loppsi en France, dont l’article 4 met un sérieux coup de boutoir à la neutralité, ou de définition du concept de neutralité des réseaux aux États-Unis -nous y reviendrons. C’est d’ailleurs dans cette perspective mi-figue, mi-raisin que la FCC, équivalent de notre Arcep national aux États-Unis, s’est effectivement prononcée, peu avant Noël.
Freedom.gov - By Evgeny Morozov A year ago this January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage at Washington's Newseum to tout an idea that her State Department had become very taken with: the Internet's ability to spread freedom and democracy. "We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights," she told the crowd, drawn from both the buttoned-up Beltway and chronically underdressed Silicon Valley. Call it the Internet Freedom Agenda: the notion that technology can succeed in opening up the world where offline efforts have failed. That Barack Obama's administration would embrace such an idea was not surprising; the U.S. president was elected in part on the strength of his online organizing and fundraising juggernaut. A year later, however, the Internet Freedom Agenda can boast of precious few real accomplishments; if anything, it looks more and more like George W. But the Internet Freedom Agenda's woes extend far beyond a few botched projects.
Vaizey's net neutrality knock-out The FT World Telecoms Conference is an annual gathering of top management from telecoms carriers throughout the world. It isn’t a high profile event for the general public, yet this is the platform where minister Ed Vaizey announced the future of the internet in the UK. Mr Vaizey praised the UK’s grossly inadequate current investment in internet infrastructure - however, the key point in his speech was about the abandonment of net neutrality in the UK. What does net neutrality actually mean? According to Wikipedia, the principle also states that if a given user pays for a certain level of internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access. Do we have net neutrality today? In some ways we don’t. Imagine to all intents and purposes, not being able to read Left Foot Forward (or even Guido Fawkes), yet managing to read the Daily Mail? Paid-for access A lack of transparency
What if WikiLeaks' Dream of Open Society Became Reality? The torrent of confidential U.S. government documents posted to the WikiLeaks website may have slowed over the Christmas holidays, but diplomats and military officials across the world continue to count the cost of the leaks — and question their long-term effects on governance. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his organization's goal is to force governments into total transparency by making all official documents available to the public. But just how transparent would governments be under such forced scrutiny? Such questions have been a source of speculation in the U.S. following WikiLeaks' release of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, but there's one country where official openness is not just a hypothetical way of governing. But even as it takes its transparency laws for granted, Sweden has long debated whether absolute openness leads, paradoxically, to greater secrecy. But while support for WikiLeaks' project remains high in Sweden, Assange's popularity has dipped.
France adds to US pressure The French government today added to international calls for WikiLeaks to be prevented operating online, warning that it is "unacceptable" for a "criminal" site to be hosted in the country. Today's move by the French government is particularly significant because the 250,000 US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks to the Guardian and four other media organisations are hosted by a French company, Octopuce. The industry minister, Eric Besson, today wrote to the French body governing internet use warning that there would be consequences for any companies or organisations helping to keep WikiLeaks online in the country. French companies are banned from hosting websites that have been deemed "criminal" and "violate the confidentiality of diplomatic relations", Besson added. The site's cache of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables are also hosted in part by Octopuce, though they are also widely available on peer-to-peer filesharing sites which do not sit under the jurisdiction of one state.