South Africa: Groundup Op-Ed – a Stealthy Attempt At Censorship

Posted on by

analysis

Freedom of speech is a fundamental right recognised in our Constitution. But that doesn't mean everyone has to allow that speech anywhere you want to make it. By KEVIN CHARLESTON for GROUNDUP.

You can stop your drunken uncle from uttering his racist rants at your festive dinner table. Commercial enterprises have the right to limit "speech" on their communication platforms if they feel that content is going to harm them, their customers or their investors.

Internet service providers (ISPs) give us a connection to the public internet. For most of us, who cannot afford to host our own web-servers, they also provide shared web servers or hardware. In exchange, we pay them to provide us with a communication platform so that we can exercise our freedom of speech. This is particularly important for activists and critics who might not otherwise have access to places where their points may be heard.

And that's where things get a bit messy.

Dr. Harris Steinman has published his CamCheck website on Hetzner South Africa's shared website hosting platform since 2009. This website focuses on false and exaggerated medical advertising claims. Since almost all public advertising of normal medicines is heavily regulated (and thus there...

See more here:

South Africa: Groundup Op-Ed - a Stealthy Attempt At Censorship

Russian Wargames: NATO chief says sudden, unpredictable military maneuvers contribute to instability – Video

Posted on by


Russian Wargames: NATO chief says sudden, unpredictable military maneuvers contribute to instability
NATO #39;s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said, in an interview with UK #39;s the Guardian, that Russia is conducting snap wargames without giving its neighbors any prior warnings. Check...

By: UKRAINE TODAY

Read this article:

Russian Wargames: NATO chief says sudden, unpredictable military maneuvers contribute to instability - Video

Russian Submarine Drills: NATO says Russian exercises could be used for seizure of territory – Video

Posted on by


Russian Submarine Drills: NATO says Russian exercises could be used for seizure of territory
A Russian nuclear submarine has joined large-scale military exercises in the Arctic. The submarine left port in the northern Murmansk region a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered...

By: UKRAINE TODAY

Original post:

Russian Submarine Drills: NATO says Russian exercises could be used for seizure of territory - Video

Russian Treaty With South Ossetia Breaks International Law: NATO – Video

Posted on by


Russian Treaty With South Ossetia Breaks International Law: NATO
Russia #39;s new treaty with Georgia #39;s breakaway South Ossetia region breaks international law and hampers efforts to strengthen regional security, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said...

By: wochit General News

See the rest here:

Russian Treaty With South Ossetia Breaks International Law: NATO - Video

"NATO's bombing no obstacle to cooperation" – FM

Posted on by

Source: Tanjug

BRUSSELS -- With the signing of the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), Serbia "entered a new phase in relations with NATO," said Ivica Dacic and Bratislav Gasic.

"Our neutrality is not called into question by this plan," Dacic, who serves as Serbia's foreign minister and deputy premier, told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday after a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

He said that "no one can change what happened 16 years ago when NATO bombed Serbia" - but that "it should not be an obstacle to building partnership relations in the future."

Stoltenberg, said Dacic, recently spoke with Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, "so further development of relations with the alliance should be expected."

He said that he received guarantees from Stoltenberg that "no kind of Kosovo's armed forces will have access to the north of Kosovo,", recalling that the previous NATO chief gave similar guarantees.

Dacic said that IPAP "opens the possibility of cooperation between Serbia and NATO in many fields, including science, public diplomacy and participation in international peacekeeping operations."

"These, of course, are not combat operations," remarked Dacic, and explained that it means cooperation in rescue operations during natural disasters.

He said that NATO was "also important for Serbia because of KFOR and the support to the Brussels agreement," and recalled that the KFOR commander recently met with the Serbian army chief.

Dacic said that his meeting with Stoltenberg touched on many issues, "including relations with Russia and Serbia's role as chairman of the OSCE."

Continued here:

"NATO's bombing no obstacle to cooperation" - FM

Become an NSA Spook in This iPhone Puzzle Game

Posted on by

If youve ever wondered what its like on the other side of the surveillance stateto be the one doing the snooping, as opposed to being the one getting snooped onyou now have the chance, in a somewhat unlikely form: A Laser Chess-style puzzle game for your iPhone.

In TouchTone, you play an NSA analyst, alternatively solving simple geometric puzzles and scanning peoples emails for national security threats. The puzzles are fun, but its the stuff in between thats really interesting. The game presents a simple, stylized take on the job, to be sure, but it can be a powerful experience nonetheless. As youre trying to decide whether a particular message is pertinent to national security, you cant help but feel in a very visceral way the queasy ambiguity at the heart of state surveillance.

The game was created by Michael Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend, who work together under the name Mikengreg. Theyre responsible for the well-known games Solipskier and Gasketball. More recently, Wohlwend illustrated the cheerful visual design of the hit puzzle game Threes.

Boxleiter had worked out the basic puzzle elements of TouchTone for a game jam in 2012, but the two were struggling to figure out the extra something needed to make the game feel complete. The answer came suddenly with Edward Snowden and the PRISM revelations.

The concept fit well with the puzzle mechanics, which the developers felt had a bit of a hacker vibe all along. Still, it took a while to figure out the right tone for the controversial issue. At first we were going to go for a little satire, and throw in some jokes at the NSAs expense, Boxleiter says. I realized after a while that maybe we could say something a little more real and a little more important.

Boxleiter ended up writing an elaborate story centering around a American Muslim engineer, which unfolds in the form of emails intercepted over the course of the game. It took months of writing and rewriting. Not many people have made a game like this, so it feels like uncharted territory, Boxleiter says.

The game ends up balancing subtle satire with a vague, sinister vibe. At one point in the development process, after theyd shed the initial jokiness and embraced a straighter approach to the conceit, Boxleiter and Wohlwend took the game to a play-testing event in Chicago and claimed they were contracted by the NSA to make it. At least one beta tester believed them, a reaction Wohlwend and Boxleiter took as a job well done.

More:

Become an NSA Spook in This iPhone Puzzle Game

Posted in NSA

The DOJ Is Sneaking in a Policy That'd Crap All Over the 4th Amendment

Posted on by

The rules for how the Department of Justice tracks down criminals in the digital age are woefully arcane, but the DoJ's recent proposed changes to update those rules go way too far, using vague terms to grant sweeping remote search powers that would radically undermine the Fourth Amendment.

Under the auspices of probable cause, it'd give FBI agents the power to install tracking malware on computers all over the world, without telling people they've started surveillance. Even though it looks like a minor rule change, the proposal would make it much easier for FBI agents to get warrants on computers without first figuring out their exact location. It gives judges much more flexibility on handing out remote search warrants outside of their jurisdictions. And that would give federal agents way more power to search computers.

This proposal isn't just the DOJ being Big Brothery for no reason. Remote computer searches are difficult to execute right now and that's an obstacle for combating digital crime and hunting criminals who use anonymizing software. This is a real problem, and something that needs to be addressed. But not this way. This is like using a nuke instead of a sniper rifle, and it's going to blow up our privacy rights.

I'm not going to lie, I didn't think I'd ever write an article about a DOJ procedural change because frankly, that sounds like comically dull policy housekeeping. And comically dull is what they were going for: It's a lot easier to slip in a major expansion of power if no one cares enough to pay attention.

But this proposal is way too big not to notice, no matter how boring-sounding and rote the DOJ tries to make it.

"Basically, we think this is a substantive legal change masquerading as a mere procedural rule change," Electronic Frontier Foundation staff counsel Hanni Fakhoury told me via email. "The government is essentially pushing for approval of the idea that it should have the power to deploy malware and execute remote searches. To us, it seems like that's a decision Congress should make."

The vague language of these rules could galvanize an avalanche of covert government surveillance by making it totally OK in certain situations to search peoples' computers without ever letting them know. And that's a violation of the Bill of Rights hidden inside a wonky-sounding procedural adjustment.

Right now, law enforcement officials can get a warrant to search computers remotely, as long as they have probable cause. But, apart from rare, limited circumstances, they need to find the right jurisdiction to petition for a warrant, and they need to give notice of their searches to whoever they're investigating. Notice is an important part of our Fourth Amendment privacy right. It's generally not legal for FBI agents to search you and never tell you. Except this change would make it so.

"The rule itself would be an acknowledgement that remote access searches are valid without notice, without special justification," Electronic Privacy Information Center general counsel Alan Butler told me. "Notice is one of the essential procedural protections of the Fourth Amendment. Validating a rule that implies that notice will never happen does not comport with the Fourth Amendment."

Here is the original post:

The DOJ Is Sneaking in a Policy That'd Crap All Over the 4th Amendment