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Rwandan government expands stranglehold on privacy and free expression - 24 août 2012
Last week the Rwandan government tightened its grip on citizens when the national parliament adopted legislation that sanctions the widespread monitoring of email and telephone communications.1
The law, an amendement to the 2008 Law Relating to the Interception of Communications,2 empowers the police, army and (...)
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This is not surveillance as we know it : the anatomy of Facebook messages - 23 août 2012
Modern communications surveillance policy is about gaining access to modern communications. The problem is that the discourse around communications policy today is almost the same as it was when it was simply a question of gaining access to telephone communications. "Police need access to social network activity (...)
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The ’Cookie Law’ - 13 août 2012
Our vision is a world in which privacy is protected by governments, respected by corporations and cherished by individuals. We believe that technological developments should strengthen, rather than undermine, the right to a private life, and that everyone’s personal information and communications must be carefully (...)
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Police drones in the UK ? Watch this airspace"¦ - 8 août 2012
Drones are back in the headlines, with the news that the Ministry of Defence plans to develop unmanned underwater vehicles for use in submarine warfare. Human rights groups have already raised concerns over the UK’s use of airborne military drones, which have played a key role in UK operations in Afghanistan since (...)
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Has Hacking Team’s government trojan been used against journalists ? - 7 août 2012
Hacking Team is a supplier of "lawful intercept" technology based in Milan. A regular attendee of surveillance industry conferences around the world, last year one of the company’s founding partners told the Guardian that Hacking Team had sold surveillance software to 30 countries across five continents.
Hacking (...)
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Surveillance companies : real responsibility goes beyond the letter of the law - 6 août 2012
Earlier this year, Privacy International began research into the corporate social responsibility policies of companies that sell communications surveillance technology. Given that this technology is known to facilitate human rights abuses in repressive regimes around the world, surveillance tech companies that (...)
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Mass surveillance and classified patents - 4 août 2012
As part of Privacy International’s investigation into the mass surveillance industry we have examined hundreds of legal documents, brochures and, most recently, patents. Patents are a form of intellectual property ; patent-holders publicly disclose their inventions in exchange for the exclusive rights to use and (...)
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Access to private communications is a privilege, not a right - 2 août 2012
Governments have no automatic right of access to our communications. This will sound highly controversial to some, even downright radical. But the demands of national security and crime prevention do not, in fact, immediately trump every other right and responsibility in the complex relationship between citizen (...)
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Foreign companies complicit in Bahrain’s human rights violations - 30 juillet 2012
Last week’s revelation that Bahraini human rights activists have been targeted by advanced surveillance technology made by British company Gamma is yet another nail in the coffin of privacy and freedom of expression in Bahrain.
Over the past ten years, Bahraini citizens, among the most internet-connected in the (...)
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Who gets to see the confidential UK surveillance annex ? - 28 juillet 2012
Every year the Interception of Communications Commissioner in the UK reviews the interception warrants in the UK (of which there are around 1500 warrants per year), and a small subset of the requests for communications data (of which there are around half a million requests per year). Each report has statements (...)
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Privacy in constitutions : The data - 26 juillet 2012
Privacy International has compiled data on the privacy provisions in national constitutions around the world, including which countries have constitutional protections, whether they come from international agreements, what aspects of privacy are actually protected and when those protections were enacted. We are (...)
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Human rights issues with the draft Communications Data Bill - 18 juillet 2012
This report was submitted to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Under the current version of the draft Communications Data Bill, records of every person or entity with whom any given individual has communicated electronically would be collected continuously and stored for one year. These records would include (...)
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The British government knows more about surveillance exports than it is letting on - 17 juillet 2012
The first joint report from the Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), released last Friday, highlighted the importance of careful licensing and independent scrutiny for the export of "˜controlled’ goods, to prevent sales that could "˜facilitate internal repression’ in authoritarian regimes abroad. And as we wrote (...)
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Network shutdowns, secure communications and the Olympics - 17 juillet 2012
It was recently reported that President Obama has signed an executive order giving the Department of Homeland Security powers to prioritize government communications in emergencies, and to effectively seize control of telecommunications companies. In the run up to the Olympics, questions have been asked about (...)
information
Local police forces in US expanding use of drones - 16 juillet 2012
Last Friday the Electronic Frontier Foundation received new information from the US Federal Aviation Administration in response to their FOIA demanding data on certifications and authorizations the agency has issued for the operation of unmanned aircraft.
The information includes extensive details about the (...)
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Civil servant admits British police grabbing location data of thousands of innocent people - 15 juillet 2012
In the first public admission of its kind, the Home Office’s Peter Hill admitted this week that the British government routinely sweeps up the identities of thousands of people in a given area - with a single request to a mobile phone network.
The statement was made during the first hearing of the Joint Committee (...)
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Why Twitter has taken the wrong fork in the road - 2 mars 2012
Earlier this week it was announced that UK-based Datasift would start offering their customers the ability to mine Twitter’s past two years of tweets for market research purposes. The licensing fees will add another revenue stream to Twitter’s portfolio - but at what cost to the company’s reputation ? Twitter, once (...)
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Thoughts on Google’s Policy changes - 1er mars 2012
Last month, within thirty seconds of the BBC publishing a quotation from me on the latest round of the nymwars and Google+, my phone rang. Caller ID indicated that it was someone I know who works at Google. "Had I said something wrong ?" was my first thought. I quickly retraced in my mind what it was that I had (...)
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What does Twitter know about its users ? #NOLOGS - 16 février 2012
Inspired by the Europe v. Facebook campaign and further motivated by revelations that individuals associated with WikiLeaks and the #occupy movements in Boston and New York have had their Twitter data disclosed to American law enforcement authorities, Privacy International is launching a campaign to encourage (...)
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Tracking Protection comes of age - 3 février 2012
It used to be that visiting a website was simple. You instructed your computer to shake hands with an external site, which then sent its content to your machine.
But in recent years a vast marketing industry has emerged that has the sole purpose of making profits by tracking what you look at on the Internet. This (...)
