Never knew that the Netherlands and Brazil are the only countries in the world that have net neutrality as a law. Like with legal euthanasia, drugs, gay marriage, etc., as a Dutchman I'm amazed at how non-liberal much of the world is.
As a Portuguese, I have never felt the need for net neutrality laws. I have four ISPs competing to provide me service, and as far as I know they're all "neutral", including with regard to bittorrent traffic and such.
I also raise you full decriminalization of all drug consumption :) though I'd still like to see legalization at least of a few softer drugs.
As far as i know its not the government that keeps the data itself, is the ISP's and service providers.. its a minimum period of archiving, for them to respect, so if a law enforcement signed by a judge ask them to reveal some logs for instance, they should have it, if its in the date range they have defined, or else they would also be accountable.
There's a voluntary program in the Netherlands that financially compensates ISPs for uploading logs to a central database where law enforcement is free to query it without, in practice, judicial oversight.
Laws are great, but they're easily circumvented. Especially in the Netherlands. That's why this "Free Internet" project is reasonably useless. Its view is too narrow, focusing only on official laws and not on actual practices. For instance, after the whole Project-X incident[1], law enforcement has been looking into being able to remove social media posts on a whim, without judicial oversight. Such underwater erosion of rights is common in the Netherlands.
And a maximum. Privacy laws also dictate that data should not be retained longer than needed for the purpose for which you're storing it. If you store data for statistics, a few days would be the max because you can count hits and anonymize data almost immediately. If you store data for the government and the government only needs it for 6 months, then after 6 months you have no right to store it anymore. And ISPs really stick to this.
The description mentions the ISP-controlled, opt-in "filtering" plans, but not the state-mandated no-opt-out censorship of an indeterminate number of websites (the lists are not public)
In the UK, they have censored filestube, took down filecrop and others. Why I mention this instead of TPB? Well, filestube, at the time of the censorship, didn't encourage copyright infringement, it litterly was just a search engine for file host links. The excuse they gave for censoring it was that they couldn't keep up with the takedown notices. Imagine if they applied that logic to Google.
Why does "left to market" seem to imply "less protected"? I have much more trust in my connection with five competing ISPs than I would have with five regulators. I also find communication with the customer retention department smoother and more productive than trying to figure out which complaint form I need to fill.
Not always, obviously. But I think it's important to at least differentiate between the purpose of law and the purpose of business. Assuming the best case for the former but the worst case for the latter doesn't make a lot of sense.
Laws at the very least could act to limit the ability of corporations to limit access and mine user privacy - but businesses in the best case are still going to attempt to do what makes money, which will almost never mean the less lucrative option of allowing their customers greater freedom and more privacy.
I think the general thesis here is that internet freedom is more secure in an environment where it is considered a right and not a term of service.
Funny how the Nobel for economics goes exactly for the guy who try to address that..
Well if you let things unregulated, it might work, or it might not.. think Comcast, or Lehman Brothers.. thats one of the reasons why we have Governments; Given that companies working for profit its not necessarily equal to common good, specially when theres monopoly
Thanks. Led me to this... wonder if they've implemented ES6 yet? :P
> Red Star OS features a modified Mozilla Firefox browser titled Naenara used for browsing the Naenara web portal on the North Korean intranet network known as Kwangmyong. [1]
Tell me, what's the difference between government acting without a court order and one acting with a secret court order based on questionable laws. the result is the same. Also, when I know that there's government surveillance and weak privacy, I am less willing to speak free, which is effectively no free speech.
"The Free Internet Project is a nonprofit whose mission is to provide the public with information about the latest legal and technological efforts to protect Internet freedoms around the world"
What am I missing here? What are these guys doing that EFF, EPIC or other organizations isn't already doing?
Wasn't India one of the countries that demanded intercept capabilities from Skype and Blackberry? ie. Break your product or you can't do business. That's pretty hostile as far as internet freedom goes.
This is interesting. Allow me to provide some counterpoints to the bullet points listed for a few (major) countries.
China:
* The Great Firewall of China blocks people's access to many websites, e.g., Facebook, Google.
* Government engages in extensive censorship especially related to political organizing or protests.
* Foreign social media apps are banned. Users must use real names on social media.
The Great Firewall and the blocking of media apps does also function as a Firewall. It is not merely a censorship technology. The United States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc.
The Snowden leaks and the history of (especially) Google but also other US businesses in China (and export exceptions limiting the purchase of infrastructure technologies) tell a tale of the US trying to export compromised services to China. China does not want its citizens' informations in America's XKeyScore nor it's citizens Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc data in America's PRISM. (There's a reason all of those programs get permission through the FISA "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" Court).
Just this past year the CIA (under USAID) pretended to be a grassroots movement on Twitter served 'news' critical of the Cuban regime that nearly caused a Cuban uprising.
The DoD's MINERVA project specifically looks to understand the cultural components of stability of various countries and mechanisms to encourage or disrupt that stability. Among a great number of social studies you will find DoD research on how to seed information inside of specific Asian countries, including China, for the targeted introduction of instability. I will leave speculations of possible connections to the Hong Kong protests to the reader.
It's a global issue right now. This year Egypt sentenced Al Jazeera journalists that they believed were partnered with geopolitical interests of other states.
As of this year Putin is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail international influence.
America, too, faces challenges. A number of journalists have called out that the state has been extremely aggressive to dissenting opinions, even to go so far as labeling current policy on the issue "War on Journalism". American officials have exported a number of journalists with Middle Eastern descent and journalists like Ayman Mohyeldin have been pulled from Gaza and other conflicts when reporting has erred on the side of other state interests.
And of course there's the article "I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days", which is definitely worth a read. The TL;DR is that below the thin surface of social information bubbles enormous amounts of radicalizing geopolitical and domestic political ads and campaigns.
>As of this year Putin is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail international misinformation.
Yeah, totally, and not because the massive protests in late 2011-early 2012 were partly organized by a blogger/activist.
Some of these attempts at what you call "preventing NSA/other evil foreign agency collecting our citizen's data" are more like "let's prevent them from using Facebook/Google/etc., force them to switch to our networks where we can happily get the data ourselves". Which is probably what's going to happen here in Russia in 2016.
This is a fallacy of the excluded middle. If the blogger was in fact a domestic blogger (was it?), it can in fact be both about domestic efforts to organize and international influence.
The United States and allies have other ways of handling domestic movements, like Fusion Centers and Free Speech Zones (in the US) and partnerships and leverage on media providers.
Meanwhile as an american I can freely watch russia today on youtube, read presstv without a proxy, and hang out on conspiracy websites like globalresearch.ca and infowars.com.
Maybe I'm just a dumb american but at least my protectionist nannystate allows me to watch the "bad" tv channels.
I'm just reminded of a quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
The US government nudges public opinion (Fallujah PsyOp, Judith Miller, Ken Dilanian, operation MOCKINGBIRD, purposeful placement of objective aligned messages on international media lines, "Heroes in Error", partners with astroturfing services/HBGary).
It breeds capabilities to influence individuals and groups (NSA JTRIG, GCHQ BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM/ETC, MINERVA) and will wield capabilities to track and target information to groups in limited circumstances ("The Cave").
It also will quiet groups, even if they are domestic, that significantly challenge the stability or justifiability of the nation/system/structure (COINTELPRO, MINARET, Fusion Centers).
You say that as if the US plans the same freedoms given to it's citizens extended to regimes it disagrees with. You can watch everything freely because there's no antagonistic hugely powerful and apt state effectively able to spy on all US citizens and take undercover measures to destabilize the US. I'm not saying I agree with this or that regime, but to me it's clear that the US can be very liberal because it doesn't feel threatened technologically.
>>>> Just this past year the CIA (under USAID) pretended to be a grassroots movement on Twitter served 'news' critical of the Cuban regime that nearly caused a Cuban uprising.
Is this a bad thing?
This is just one of the double standards I see people touting. They want every country to enjoy all the freedoms we have and none of the oppressive regimes these people live under. Yet these same people are highly critical of American efforts to help get those same people to start fighting against some of these countries holding them down.
These ideas never made sense to me:
People living under dictators and oppressive regimes is bad.
Developers helping these people circumvent the technology that holds them down is good.
America government helping people start revolutions, spread information about how bad their government is and fight back is a bad thing.
People creating technology to avoid the NSA and CIA snooping is good thing.
I guess it just depends on who's OX is being gored.
> Developers helping these people circumvent the technology that holds them down is good.
That isn't what they were doing. They were creating a tool to manipulate public opinion among its users without their consent.
> I guess it just depends on who's OX is being gored.
No, it has to do with manipulating people through deception.
You don't seem to understand the difference between:
I offer you money/aid/etc and manipulate you into doing what I want.
vs.
You are doing what I want and therefore I provide aid to you.
USAID does both of these things. The first one is bad. The second one is fine.
> America government helping people start revolutions, spread information about how bad their government is and fight back is a bad thing. People creating technology to avoid the NSA and CIA snooping is good thing.
No. The US creates the revolutionaries through manipulation. That is the programs the OP and I are opposed to. "Hey kid, use this service. Oh, we won't mention we plan to study the activities of you and everyone else to see what kind of news we can release to increase revolutionary activity as part of the process."
You have to wonder why the America intelligence agencies are working towards this uprising though, interference of American authorities into another countries have proven hurtful[0].
So I guess is all in the intent, while a developer may give their software for free because he believes in free speech. Why would a country want the uprising of another country, which lives under a economic system the former has been arguing against for so long? Why is information about the NSA (and other operations) being hidden but suddenly they're heroes because they release information of other countries?
The problem I have with those practices is that they all happen in secret - so that the US can deny their involvement if, for example, an uprising goes out of hand and people die by the dozens. I'm all in favor of getting rid of oppressive regimes and such, and I approve of the people living in said regimes standing up for themselves, but I don't like how the US's involvement is all under cover and in secret, or why it's only the US doing those things (apparently).
I'm not passing moral judgement or making normative claims about goodness or the badness, etc. What I am doing is explaining the incentives that these countries are responding to - showing you not just where the actors are but how the stage is set up. Policy does not exist in a vacuum.
>China does not want its citizens' informations in America's XKeyScore nor it's citizens Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc data in America's PRISM.
The is a laughable justification. If you actually believe in freedom of information you cannot condone China's policy, no matter how much you dislike America.
Your comment comes across as China is just avoiding the West's intelligence services but most of their censorship is for internal control. You don't ban all reference to June 4th because you are protecting your citizens from the NSA.
The blocking of Facebook and Google is directly related to PRISM, social contagion theory, international surveillance, and weaponized media.
These issues are extremely complex and no single article or HN comment is going to cover it in it's entirety. I think the second bullet point is awfully good justification for China to have a 'less free internet score'. I'm definitely not going to claim that China doesn't engage in domestic censorship outside of international pressures - I believe they absolutely do.
But that's a different issue and not what I was trying to establish. In part, the comment is a good opportunity to alert people who don't understand that weaponization of media (psyops warfare) is prevalent on the internet today - including the 'free countries'. Thankfully, readers will observe this section of the thread and get clarity. :)
>The blocking of Facebook and Google is directly related to PRISM, social contagion theory, international surveillance, and weaponized media.
Google wasn't blocked in China until the company refused to censor their search results back in 2010. Facebook wasn't blocked until Uygher activists started using it as a communications network during riots back in 2009. Social networks that allow the government unlimited power to snoop on messages and censor content are still widely used.
China's internet censorship has absolutely nothing to do with the United States' surveillance and has everything to do with the Chinese Communist Party controlling its citizens. It's completely misleading to frame it as anything else.
If you remember in 2010 China hacked into Google's infrastructure and gained access to the interface and databases set up for US intelligence surveillance.
China can and does filter content at a packet level and TLS 'strong encryption' doesn't protect you when CAs are both owned by the government, proprietary Chinese drivers run on Operating Systems, the large companies provide hardware backdoor access to the government (US bans Lenovo for government use for this reason), and networking companies likewise provide all hands access.
Just like any other internet service, China can filter FB/Google content directly - though it is easier with partnership and alas FB/Google has allied themselves with the US.
"The company, which in 2010 blamed China for an attack on its computer networks, said it recently discovered the Gmail campaign, which "appears to originate from Jinan, China," and targeted specific individuals." - http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/china-hacks-go...
"Chinese hackers who breached Google’s servers several years ago gained access to a sensitive database with years’ worth of information about U.S. surveillance targets, according to current and former government officials." - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...
Weaponized media? Yes the truth is dangerous to dictatorships. You may not be bothered by censorship but you should still realize how futile it is in the internet age.
Sorry if this is off topic, but I wonder how many people typically donate when they see a "donate" button on a website. I imagine it's very small if any at all. Am I wrong?
I don't have a donate button, but I made some Bitcoin addresses specifically for donations and spread them around forum signatures, link in my GitHub page, etc.
One random day I was syncing my blockchain and noticed a ~$10 donation. Made me really happy :)
Unfortunately I'm not even sure what triggered it, but I probably helped someone on an internet forum and he wanted to give back. Thanks, random stranger!
So, to sum it up, according to my experience the total amount of donations on the internet is >= $10.
greenyoda, what do you require to assign a colour to Austria? I could maybe help you out here doing some research according to your criteria.
One of the last major "freedom initiatives" in Austria was our government's decision to abolish the data retention law on Juli 1st to comply with EU law - a small victory for data protection activists.
Poland actually hosts a lot of the popular file related websites because it's "untouchable" being located in Poland for such websites. Zippyshare, Filestube, Torrentz.eu, etc. Maybe Poland doesn't clamp down on such sites for economic reasons, and the reason the USA isn't forcing Poland to takedown the websites is because they need Poland since they're strategically needed to combat Russia. Just my theory.
Poland and others that suffered under Communism know first hand how bad it can be and value their new life, Hong Kong is going in the other direction unfortunately.
Hong Kong doesn't really have a choice in the matter; it can't exactly just decide "hey, I don't want to be ruled by mainland China any more" and become independent, China would never allow that.
