kagablog

Since Friday, it’s been impossible to access popular blogging platform Blogger or any *.blogspot.com domain from a Turkish IP address, due to a ban imposed by a court in the south east of Turkey.

Previously it was rumoured that Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, might have caused the new ban, since he successfully got Wordpress and Google Groups banned in the past, as well as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ website. However, this rumour was refuted by someone pointing out that Oktar operated in Istanbul courts and the verdict banning Blogger was passed in Diyarbakır, at the other side of Turkey.

Blogger’s banned in Turkey screenshot
Click to enlarge.

It’s now reported that it is not Oktar that got Blogger banned, but Digiturk, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the rights to the live broadcasting of Turkish football league games. Apparently, Digiturk asked Blogger to take several blogs or blog entries down containing links to pirated transmissions of the live games. Blogger did nothing, Digiturk went to court and under Turkish intellectual property law, they managed to get Blogger banned completely, effectively banning millions of websites that have nothing to do with Turkish football or pirating.

Digiturk’s court cases in the past have managed to block Justin.tv and MyP2P TV for the same reasons.

Turkey’s NATO membership and EU ambitions seem paradoxical to the infringement on the freedom of press and speech of its citizens, residents and visitors by banning sites like Blogger and YouTube. The EU’s making a blacklist of censoring countries and are creating software for people in these countries to use to bypass the censorship (see: Global Online Freedom Act).

Thanks to safak for his tip about Digiturk!

Some useful links to unblock YouTube/Blogger (blogspot)/other blocked pages in Turkey:

* http://atunnel.com/
* http://unblocked.org/
* http://unblockyoutube.org/

this article first appeared on basbasbas.com

PARIS, Nov. 1 (UPI) — The French Senate has approved a three strikes law for Internet users who download copyrighted entertainment without paying for it.

The legislation must also be approved by the lower house of parliament, the EU Observer reported. The goal is to force people now engaged in electronic piracy of movies, music and video games to use legal sources like iTunes.

The “graduated response” would start with an e-mail warning. Those who persist would get a letter by snail mail.

Internet service providers would cut off access for a year to those who continue to pirate copyrighted material after the second warning.

The Senate passed the law 297 to 15 with Communists abstaining. The Senate rejected an amendment by Bruno Retailleau, a right-wing senator, who wanted to substitute a fine for the service cut-off. Retailleau argued that depriving people of Internet access is unfair because the service often comes bundled with television, telephone and other services.

this article first appeared on upi.com

at Madame Claude
Lübbener Str. 19 in Kreuzberg - Berlin

Thursday, October 30th
doors: 19h
screening: 21h30

Screening of extremely subversive short films from the most perverted filmmakers from Quebec.

In total opposition with the recent hypocritical interest towards Quebec cinema, Cinema Abattoir burst from a complete hatred and contempt for this governmental and academic cinema. The National Film Board, a production and broadcasting structure absolutely moribund, now gives praise to youthful debility. Young filmmakers birthed from institutions not only formatted and televised, but sodomized and defecated. A new generation emulating Denys Arcand. The new commercialized Quebec cinema upholds the mediocre Quebecer. It is morally weak, projecting a cinema of prostration, of amnesia, of defeat.

There is Pop Corn cinema and Cinema Abattoir: your friends are not ours!

A diagonal architecture scarifies itself through those cinematographic mazes. A tormented path, butting nearly forty years of stupidity to hunt down a few transgressives remains that are still vivacious (dating from « Cinéma direct ») or politically (Front de Libération du Québec). Cinema Abattoir then suggests Heretics: Iconoclastic Quebec Cinemas, a symmetric negation of that national cinematography currently in circulation. Only one common context, the underground. Only one solution, the subversion. You crave chromatic pixels storm, thermocalypses, kinetic atomisation, retinal aneurisms, cortical electroshocks, acoustic concatenations, solarised iris injections, narrative deconstructions, playful pedopathologies and coital scorns?

Welcome to Cinema Abattoir!
For the full program:
http://www.cinema-abattoir.com/projection-abattoir/heretique/heretique.html

Written by Ernesto on October 23, 2008

Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay and the most active pro-piracy lobbyists and politicians, is drafting a new law that would make it easier to go after individuals who share copyrighted files on filesharing networks such as BitTorrent. The new law, likely to be opposed by a large number of Swedes, will go into effect April 2009.

The law will make it easier for copyright holders to get a court order in order to force ISPs to release the customer info linked to a suspect IP-address. The Local reports that, although the law is based on a EU directive, the current draft goes further than that.

In order to obtain the personal details, copyright holders will have to prove that there is “probable cause” that a person, or rather an IP-address, has actually shared copyrighted material with others. With the current state of evidence gathering, where mistakes and false accusations are fairly common, this may not be that easy to achieve.

The many unsecured Wireless routers complicate the evidence gathering even further, and BitTorrent trackers have also implemented countermeasures of their own. Earlier this week we reported that the Pirate Bay tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not actually downloading data. This is done on purpose, to pollute the evidence gathering of anti-piracy outfits.

The new law is also heavily opposed by Swedish Pirate Party Chairman Rick Falkvinge who told TorrentFreak: “These laws are written by digital illiterates who behave like blindfolded, drunken elephants trumpeting about in an egg packaging facility. They have no idea how much damage they’re causing, because they lack today’s literacy: an understanding of how the Internet is reshaping the power structures at their core.”

“We have good hope of putting an end to these ridiculous developments. Either the existing politicians start to understand what they’re actually doing at work all day, or they will escalate the conflict to the point where we’re replacing them in office. Either way, copyright will be scaled back,” Falkvinge added.

It is to be expected that opposition against the new anti-piracy law will be great, similar to the public outrage when Sweden introduced a wiretapping law earlier this year, and after the raid on The Pirate Bay in 2006. It wouldn’t surprise us if The Pirate Bay fights this battle at the front, clashing with local politicians and media once again.

‘Pirates’ demonstrating in Stockholm following the raid on The Pirate Bay raid in 2006

this article first appeared on torrentfreak.com

By Peter Bright |

Last year one of the more troubling provisions of the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) finally came into effect. This piece of legislation made it a criminal offense to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data residing within the UK if demanded by authorities as part of a criminal investigation. The penalty for failure to decrypt is up to two years imprisonment for “normal” crime, and up to five years for “terrorism.”
Related Stories

* Bush’s hand-picked Privacy Board clears domestic spying program
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As two men accused of “terrorism” discovered last week, the long-standing right to silence does not trump the RIPA powers. The UK’s Court of Appeal judged last week that the pair, named only as “S” and “A,” could not depend on their right of silence to refuse to provide decryption keys. In the decision, the Court stated that although there was a right to not self-incriminate, this was not absolute, and that the “public interest” can supersede this right in some circumstances.

Further, the court also drew a distinction between making a statement that is incriminating, and evidence that happens to incriminate. Encryption keys, and encrypted data itself, exist independently of the accused men, and although the data may be incriminating, the men were not being asked for the data; they were being asked for the decryption key. As such, there was deemed to be no question of self-incrimination; the decryption keys are neutral, neither incriminating nor exculpating.

Though the decision is unsurprising—British courts are loathe to gut legislation, even if it is poor legislation—it is nonetheless unfortunate. The court argued that a decryption key was no different from a physical key, something harmless and incapable of incriminating, but there are significant differences between the two. Most obviously, one cannot be compelled to hand over a physical key; if the police or intelligence services should find it then they can use it, but if they cannot, they must work around its absence. That workarounds are considerably harder for encryption than they are for physical locks is unfortunate for law enforcement, but surely should not diminish the rights of the accused.

More fundamentally, the legislation is useless against criminals who know what they are doing, because such criminals can use encryption software that gives them plausible deniability. The best-known program achieving this is TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt allows the creation of encrypted disk with two passwords, with each password providing access to different data, one set harmless, the other truly secret. The would-be criminal can then disclose the password to the harmless data, thereby keeping the truly secret data secret. There is no way to tell from the encrypted data itself that this scheme is in use, so it should provide ample protection against investigations.

Orwell’s Britain

Moving swiftly on, the British government has outlined a number of options it is considering legislating next year. Chief among these is the creation of an immense database containing information about every phone call and Internet connection made within the UK. Unsurprisingly, this has been widely branded as an Orwellian, Big Brother database.

ISPs and phone companies within the UK already keep voluntary databases of mobile phone calls (recording dates, times, durations, and locations) and Internet traffic (web pages visited, e-mail addresses used). These databases contain 12 months of data, and requests to view the data can be made by law enforcement as part of their investigations into crimes. The new proposal is to centralize and consolidate this database, making it government-owned and operated. This upside is that this would increase the information available, and make it far easier for law enforcement agencies to look at. The downside, of course, is that this would increase the information available, and make it far easier for law enforcement agencies to look at it.

The justification for the database is, of course, terrorism. Terrorists use mobile phones and e-mail to coordinate their activities, so clearly the government—specifically, GCHQ, the service responsible for SIGINT, which devised the plans—needs to know about all the e-mails and phone calls that people are making. They’re stopping short—at the moment—of demanding the actual contents of the e-mails and phone calls, but, if such a database were implemented, that would surely be the next logical step.

At this stage, the database is not legislation, nor even proposed legislation. The proposals are an indication of one direction the government will follow, but so far nothing has gone before Parliament. Even within the Home Office, however, there has been considerable backlash; a memo leaked to the Sunday Times expressed grave misgivings about the plans among senior Home Office officials; the database was decried as “impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful from a human rights perspective.” Coming from civil servants, that’s harsh criticism indeed.

Passport, please

Knowing that a phone call has been made doesn’t do much if you don’t know who owns the phone numbers. In the days of land-lines, this wasn’t a problem; just look up the addresses that the numbers correspond to and Bob’s your uncle. Mobile phones are another matter; prepay phones offer great anonymity, as they can be bought for cash.

If the UK government gets its way, that practice will come to an end. The plan is to demand that anyone buying a phone will have to show their passport. Vendors will collect this information, and it will be entered into a national registry. With 72 million mobile phones in the UK, some 40 million of which are prepaid, this measure is necessary if GCHQ’s database is to be of any value. A database that could not identify the majority of mobile phone users would fill this gap.

Future privacy, or, rather, the lack thereof

All this paints a pretty sorry picture of the future of privacy in the UK. We here in Airstrip One already have an unparalleled density of closed-circuit TV, but CCTV is a different animal to the proposals here. CCTV has one fundamental difference from Orwell’s telescreens; CCTV records what we do in public, whereas the telescreens recorded us in our own homes. We might not like our public behavior being recorded by the government, but in a sense, it is merely a scaled-up version of what the police and MI5 can already do.

These database proposals are a different kettle of fish. They cross over from monitoring of public behavior into monitoring of private behavior. That the phone company knows who I call is a necessary feature of the technology (the phone network obviously needs to know where the endpoints are, and I have itemized billing), but the government has no such justification. The underlying argument—that terrorists use encryption, mobile phones, e-mail, and that to stop terrorists we have to be able to monitor these technologies—can be used to justify just about anything. Once the hardware was in place to perform the monitoring—and GCHQ trials of interception hardware have already begun on the Vodafone network—it would be easy to argue that it was necessary not just to record that calls were made and e-mails were sent, but that it had become necessary (for national security, naturally) to actually listen to those calls and read those e-mails.

Slippery slopes aside, the most likely outcome is not that more terrorists are caught, but simply that they use alternative means of communication. Perhaps they will be able to import phones from abroad (roaming is expensive, but surely a small price to pay if the alternative is being caught up in the government’s net), perhaps they will depend more heavily on stolen phones (pity the poor sod whose stolen phone links him to the next terrorist attack), or perhaps they will simply rely on other communications mechanisms. Mobile phones are convenient, but if they’re unsafe for conducting terrorist operations, terrorists will just stop using them.

It would not surprise me to see Skype, and other VoIP systems, as the next subject of government scrutiny. Likewise, many e-mail services offer SSL connections to non-UK servers for mail transfers; any terrorist concerned about the government monitoring could use one of these. Just as there are data encryption systems that can defeat RIPA, there are communication systems that defeat the proposed database, and which do so before the legislation has even been passed to create the database in the first place. This is truly pointless legislation that will make us no safer.

These flaws are compounded by the government’s rampant inability to run IT projects successfully, and to properly safeguard sensitive data that it has collected. These databases will be expensive to create, the monitoring hardware expensive to deploy, and leaks are, given this government’s track record, inevitable. Even if we were convinced by the need for such databases, should we not at least demand that the government puts its house in order first? They cannot properly manage the data they already have; giving them more data is asking for trouble.

Though these plans are dismal, there is a slight glimmer of hope. The British government has suffered some legislative setbacks recently; its legislation to allow suspects to be held for 42 days without charge did not get through our (unelected, undemocratic, but absolutely priceless) upper house, and it looks like the government does not have the support or the will to force the legislation through. A similar backlash against any new proposals is not out of the question, and that they have already been preemptively panned by Home Office employees could be an indication of a broader rejection of greater government intrusion. For the good of our civil liberties and wallets alike, let’s hope that our elected representatives take the same view.

this article first appeared on arstechnica.com

Posted by Cory Doctorow, October 15, 2008 7:40 PM | permalink
Andy sez,

In a move that seems to be happening without comment from the Australian media, the Australian government is introducing a censorship regime ostensibly targeted at stopping teenagers accessing online porn.

But rather than being an opt-in system, it’s “opt-out”. I use the scare quotes because, and this is most insidious part, you can’t actually opt out - you can merely be placed on a alternative blacklist which, instead of blocking “content innappropriate for children”, block any material deemed to be illegal.

The fact that it will likely reduce everyone’s internet performance is secondary; It will most likely incorrectly block 1% of sites, and now what you are allowed to view online is determined and controlled by the state (although most likely quite inaccurately).

The rationale is that since they’re setting it up anyway, they’re morally obliged to block traffic deemed illegal:

“Illegal is illegal and if there is infrastructure in place to block it, then it will be required to be blocked — end of story.”

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail about the potential threat to our civil liberties.

People of Australia, please write to your MPs to voice your opposition to this.

this article first appeared on boingboing.net

raf:texte - published in German (Cavefors), Swedish (Cavefors), Italian (Bertani) and (a part of it in ) France (Maspero). The proof with all corrections is still in the Bo Cavefors Archive at the University of Lund. / Bo I. Cavefors.

Rote Armee Fraktion - Documents

This is a collection of 1,166 digitized documents by and on the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, ‘RAF’). The aim of this website is to provide these documents in their authentic form to researchers, historians and other people interested, not to support or oppose any views expressed in these documents. The collection is the digitized version of the original documents held at the Rote Armee Fraktion Collection of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (see http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/r/10844439.php).

The Rote Armee Fraktion was founded in 1970 as a group of urban guerilla in West Germany. The group considered itself part of a larger anti-imperialist movement in the continuation of liberation movements in the Third World and the student revolts of the sixties. In May 1972, the group committed its first bomb attacks against US-Army bases in West Germany and other targets. After the arrest of its leaders, the struggle was continued in prison, with hunger strikes and a learning program. Despite several waves of arrests, the group continued to be operational, e.g. with the kidnapping of German Employers Federation president Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the killing of captains of industry and representatives of the political establishment. In the course of 1992 activities stopped, and in 1998 the group was dissolved.

In an odd twist on the campaign trail, Gov. Sarah Palin made a viscous attack on America’s cultural landscape, specifically mentioning BlazeVOX [books] a Buffalo, NY based publisher, as “Anti-American and unpatriotic.”

Standing before a sea of red T-shirts and homemade signs reading “No Communists!” and “Palin’s Pitbulls,” Ms. Palin on Tuesday nestled in to her Republican base. Ms. Palin struck at some of the same themes, portraying BlazeVOX [books] as a liberal poetry outlet with a “left-wing agenda that’s packaged and prettied up to look good like mainstream poetry.”

Mentioning poets as Kent Johnson, Michael Kelleher, Anne Waldman, Ted Greenwald, and others; and identifying BlazeVOX [books] founder and publisher, Geoffrey Gatza, as the man Cheney should have shot in the face!

Find out why you should support BlazeVOX [books] more than ever! Check out our new catalog and buy a book – if only to burn!

http://www.blazevox.org/catalog.htm

By Chris Baldwin

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Prosecutors in Russia want to ban the award-winning satirical U.S. cartoon South Park, calling the series “extremist” after receiving viewer complaints, a spokeswoman said Monday.

South Park, a cartoon aimed at adults and featuring a group of nine-year olds in a Colorado ski town, has courted controversy from its 1997 debut, parodying celebrities, politicians, religion, gay marriage and Saddam Hussein.

Basmanny regional prosecutors office spokeswoman Valentina Titova said investigators filed a motion after deciding an episode broadcast on Moscow television station 2×2 in January “bore signs of extremist activity.”

“In accordance with the conclusions made by experts from the court investigations committee, a claim has been filed against 2×2 for its broadcast of an episode of South Park,” Titova said.

South Park has won two Emmy Awards and was first shown on the U.S. Comedy Central network. It is dubbed into Russian and rebroadcast on local networks, including 2×2, a channel which broadcasts animated series in Moscow and St Petersburg.

A representative for 2×2 was not immediately available for comment.

The Russian Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith had asked prosecutors to ban South Park after it said 20 experts had studied the show for its effect on young viewers.

The group’s leader, Konstantin Bendas, said “South Park is just one of many cartoons that need to be banned from open broadcast…as it insults the feelings of religious believers and incites religious and national hatred.”

“Our complaint is against a lot of cartoons, but this one was from South Park season three, episode 15,” he said.

The episode, called “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics” on the cartoon’s website www.southparkstudios.com, first aired in December, 1999, and features the cast singing Christmas carols.

“It’s one thing if they are on cable TV and viewers pay money and make a conscious choice. But young children should not be able to turn on the TV after school and watch this. They need to be defended,” Bendas said.

Russia passed a 2006 law widening the definition of extremism to include “the abasement of national dignity” and “inciting religious and national hatred,” which backers say was needed to stem a wave of violence aimed at ethnic minorities.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)

this article first appeared on reuters.com

Sture Johannesson grips his cigarette tightly and draws from it as if it’s his last drag. The cigarette is tiny in his massive hand; smoke curls up and spirals into the end of his snow white pig-tailed hair, drawn back tightly from a forehead deeply creased with lines of concentration. My camera is running, I’ve got a tight frame that has tilted from the cigarette up to his face and back again for over four minutes of unbearably painful silence. I’ve asked him to talk about his years in the Swedish state orphanage, years that fuelled his passionately anti-establishmentarian approach to art but also years that taught him to rock the boat with great subtlety and humour.

Suddenly Johannesson looks up at me, directly into the camera lens and shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t talk about those days right now. There’s too much. It’s impossible to find a place to start.”

Let’s start right now. It’s summer 2008 and Johannesson has been invited by the new Director of the Malmo Konsthall to participate in a group show called AUTO STOP which will take place all over Sweden throughout the holiday season. Works of art will travel across the country, carried by hitchhikers, the idea being to break open the sanctity of the gallery, of the museum as mausoleum, and inject some fun into the sterile Swedish art world. Johannesson’s contribution is a ruthlessly scathing re-enactment of the Brillo Box scandal that rocked the Malmo Konsthall in the late nineties when it was discovered that the Gallery was manufacturing fake Warhols. But instead of producing the replicas of the Brillo Boxes himself, Sture has arranged for a classroom full of ten year olds at a primary school in the seaside town of Skanor to hand paint the “fakes” as part of their official art assignment.

The 73 year old’s face suddenly breaks into an impish and utterly charming grin, “It’s the best art work of mine that I never made.” He is excited about this new chapter in his heavily censored career. When I interview the Director of the Malmo Konsthall, Jacob Fabricius, he is at a loss to explain Johannesson’s peculiar history. “I’m Danish, and think Sture is a really great artist.If he had been in any other country but Sweden he would have exhibited a lot more, made a lot more money. He is much better known outside Sweden.”

Johannesson continues his story about the orphanage in our second interview session that takes place in the university town of Lund. I’ve brought extra blank tapes with me, alerted to the silence-filled speaking patterns of this extraordinary man whose every word seems to cost him pain. Working in the kitchen of the orphanage Johannesson discovered that sedatives were mixed in with the butter in order to keep the kids docile and easy to control. Of course butter was immediately removed from his list of dietary neccessities. A decade later, in the early sixties, Sture and his wife Ann-Charlotte started the legendary Cannabis Gallery in Malmo, the third largest city of Sweden, where Johannesson’s Situationist and Dada influences fused with his reading of Marshall McLuhan to produce the radical psychedelic poster series that made him a counter-culture icon as well as public enemy number one of the conservative Social Democrat state.

The poster he designed for the planned February 1969 Underground Art exhibition at the prestigious Lund Konsthall created a furore. Entitled “Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness!” the poster foregrounds a naked woman smoking an elongated hash pipe, next to her is a marijuana leaf symbol. It’s an image that would have made perfect sense in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury or swinging London’s Soho but it wasn’t time for the Summer Of Love in Sweden yet. The board of the gallery fired the director, the gallery was closed down and Johannesson was ordered by the police to destroy all 1000 copies of the poster. It was a scandal the likes of which the Swedish art world had never seen. In any other country the event would have rocketed Johannesson into the A-league. In conformist Sweden the galleries closed ranks and Sture found it impossible to have his colourful and socially relevant work exhibited.

Our third interview session is once again in Johannesson’s house in Skanor. He pulls out an archived box of letters dating back to the orphanage years. He’s kept in contact with other survivors of this harsh period, has all the documentation necessary to back up his grim tale of how the ostensibly nurturing social state in fact treated those who were dependent on her. He talks about beatings that were commonplace, about psychological torture, and most horrific, about medical experiments that closely resemble what we associate with the Nazi period. His voice is level and measured and his eyes gaze directly into my camera while he speaks, “The Worlds first Race-Biological Institute was founded 1922 at Uppsala University. The German Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Race Biology came later and the whole project culminated in the Holocaust! ”

It’s creepy information and as I walk through the radically segregated ghettoes of Malmo that remind me of the apartheid South Africa I grew up in it’s ironic to remember how Sweden profiled itself as an anti-apartheid voice in the United Nations in the sixties and seventies and still claims for itself a position on the cutting edge of progressive politics.

But the story of Sture Johannesson is evidence of a very different Sweden, a country that has more in common with the Jackboot dictatorships of Communist Eastern Europe. 1976 sees the Police closing down a group exhibition at the Stockholm KulturHuset where Johannesson has made an installation in homage to Ulrike Meinhof, a co-founder member of the anti-capitalist resistance movement Rote Armee Fraktion. Despite the Swedish state’s rhetoric of democracy, when it comes to the crunch, real dissidence is not tolerated at all. A dark cloud hangs over Johannesson for decades. He becomes an untouchable.

But after decades of neglect from the official Swedish art circuit, Johannesson is considered worthy of rehabilitation - after all times have apparently changed and psychedelia hardly seems as threatening to the state as it did in 1968. The re-opened Lund Konsthall presents a complete retrospective of Johannesson’s career in May 2004, and then, inexplicably, maddeningly, the police raid the premises the day before the opening and confiscate one of the central exhibits of the show, a display of (legal) hemp plants. Johannesson is devastated, he had after all phoned the police with his intentions and cleared the event with them, had made sure that everything in the exhibit was strictly legal. The police give no explanation for their actions, nobody is called to order, no apology is made.

There is a bitter tinge to his voice as Johannesson recounts how he’s had enough of Sweden, how he doesn’t want to die holding a Swedish passport, doesn’t want to be claimed by posterity as a “great Swedish artist”.

“I would rather change nationality, become Danish!”.

Johannesson explains his tactics, “Violence doesn’t pay in resistance and attacks on the authorities in power, but humour and
playfulness can work - that is something I learnt and experienced in the orphanage. And now, grown up and as an old man, I still practice this technique.”

As the AUTO STOP show begins it seems for a moment that Johannesson is going to break out of the peculiar exile within Sweden that his been his lot for forty years. But then the recurring pattern of authoritarian intervention with this iconoclastic artist’s career manifests itself again. At the end of June 2008 Johannesson is ordered into hospital for acute surgery on the arteries of both legs. Sture takes up the story, “and just after I left the hospital I took a tour through the Konsthall to check how my project description was published. And yes, as usual, it was completely washed out, only four silly meaningless questions and my answer were left. Everything else about the project was censored.”

My final meeting with Sture Johannesson is in a harbourside coffee bar in Malmo. We discuss his love of the Sex Pistols. “I interviewed Johnny Rotten when the Sex Pistols toured Sweden in 1977. He sang “Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it”, my own take on that is “Don’t know where I’m going but I know how to get there.” The interview lasts two hours. My final question is about the orphanage. What kind of experiments were performed on the kids? Johannesson describes how a swimming pool was filled up and allowed to go bracken; how the children were forced to swim in it - their resulting ailments monitored by the orphanage staff. My camera zooms in to a close up of his face.

“Were you forced to swim in that pool?”

He stares back at me unflinchingly, “We all were.”

Sture Johannesson’s orphanage years forged an attitude of resistance to state authority and control that is unbroken to this day. When we shake hands goodbye, his grip as firm as steel, his eyes steady, with just the slightest hint of a smile, he gives me a final piece of advice: “It’s important not to give up.”

aryan kaganof

(an abridged version of this article first appeared in the sunday times lifestyle of 7 september 2008

more detailed information about sture johannesson on his website

I don’t know if Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt sent you already the same message. He wanted to present in Montreal some films by J.X. Willams but he was interrupted because the local authorities said that the poster (coming from a film by the same filmmaker) was a “nazi” one, because the jewish star appears, as in William’s film “Virgin Sacrifice”. He changed two dates and screening places (in Montreal) but finally it was canceled.

dionysos andronis

2008-7-25 15:33

Cape Town - Cape Town Pride held a protest outside the Media24 building in Cape Town on Friday in response to the comments by Sunday Sun columnist Jon Qwelane.

Qwelane angered the gay community by writing that he could only pray politicians would one day have “the balls” to scrap the sections in the Constitution that sanctioned gay and lesbian marriages.

He also predicted that soon people would start demanding the right to marry animals.

Protesters, sporting pink cowboy hats, shouted slogans like: “Fire Qwelane”, “We are wild, but we are not animals”, “Down with hate speech” and “We are not Zimbabwe”.

Organiser of the peaceful protest and chairperson of Cape Town Pride, Ian McMahon, handed a petition to the CEO of Media24’s newspaper publishing division Abraham van Zyl, calling for an apology and for the media house to suspend ties with Qwelane.

McMahon also urged editors to be more sensitised to homophobia.

When asked what action will be taken if their demands are not met, McMahon responded by saying that “no battle plan had been set yet,” as the decision to protest happened so quickly.

Glenn De Swardt, director of Cape Town Pride, added that “freedom of speech shouldn’t infringe on human rights”.

De Swardt said that editors should take responsibility for what is published and, if they don’t, then it should become the responsibility of the publishing houses.

Media24 statement

Van Zyl issued a statement to McMahon, which reads:

Media24 acknowledges the protest arising from Jon Qwelane’s column in Sunday Sun dated 20 July 2008 and does not associate itself with the contents of the article.

We respect the rights of complainants to express themselves freely in this matter and the recourse they may have.

Media24 also respects the editorial integrity of its titles and therefore it must be the prerogative of the editor of the Sunday Sun to respond to the complaints.

# News24 is part of 24.com, which is owned by the Naspers subsidiary Media24

Sticking it to evesdroppers in the ear

By Kelly Fiveash
Published Monday 23rd June 2008 10:56 GMT

Nail down your security priorities. Ask the experts and your peers at The Register Security Debate, April 17, 2008

The Pirate Bay plans to offer encryption services to people who use the BitTorrent tracker site in a direct attempt to combat a new controversial snoop law passed in Sweden last week.

Peter Sunde, who is one of the men behind the notorious tracker site, said in a blog post yesterday:

“Many people have asked me what we’re planning to do – and the answer is ‘A lot!’. We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law,” he said. “This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption – both for your hard drives and your net traffic.”

Sunde said that The Pirate Bay also plans to lower the price for a system that runs VPN-tunnels and that it will be opened up for international use too.

He also called for ISPs to boycott Sweden. “More stuff is planned - together with other people that work against the law we’ve talked about asking the international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden,” Sunde said.

“Yes, that’s right! We want Sweden to be banned from the internet. The ISPs need to block Sweden in order to protect their own customers integrity since everything they do on Swedish ISPs networks will be logged and searched.”

The Pirate Bay, which isn’t located in Sweden, hopes that wrapping SSL security around its site will add a layer of protection for anxious Swedes worried about having their internet activities snooped on.

Sweden’s parliament ushered in its contentious wiretapping law last Thursday after the proposal was amended earlier that day.

Under the new law, all communication across Swedish borders will be tapped, and information can also be traded with international security agencies, such as America’s National Security Agency.

On Friday Sweden’s Pirate Party, which strongly defends the BitTorrent site, said it will take Sweden to the European Court of Human Rights because the law is a clear breach of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

this article was first published on theregister.co.uk ®
Nail down your Security priorities at The Register Security Debate, 24th September 2008.

Dear Aryan,

Your understanding and analysis of sweden’s past and the connection with
today’s conditions are very clear. And how the concept and ideas between
state art control and state race biology are connected, where I have
experienced both. It is something that I have carried my whole life, but
which was impossible to mention until 1988. Sensationally for me, the at
that time social democratic newspaper Aftonbladet surprisingly published a
book review of the American professor Steven Koblik and his book:
‘The stones cry out’ (in Swedish: ‘Om vi teg skulle stenarna ropa’ a quote
from the Bible). After that I could began tell as a witness.

But it took ten years more, until 1997, before the World got to know about
the sterilization program and Swedish race biology, in articles in DN
(Dagens Nyheter) by Maciej Zaremba.
Best,
Sture

By David Kravets

Mpaaa

The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.

“Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances,” MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

“It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement,” van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.

A Duluth, Minnesota, jury in October dinged Thomas $222,000 for “making available” 24 songs on the Kazaa network in the nation’s first and only RIAA case to go to trial. United States District Court Judge Michael Davis instructed the 12 panelists that they need only find Thomas had an open share folder, not that anyone from the public actually copied her files.

(It is technologically infeasible to determine whether the public is copying an open share folder, although the RIAA makes its own downloads from defendants’ share folders, produces screen shots and, among other things, captures an IP address. An Arizona judge ruled last month in a different case that those downloads count against a defendant, a one-of-a-kind decision being appealed on grounds that the RIAA was authorized to download its own music.)

Judge Davis suggested last month that he might have erred in giving that “making available” jury instruction, and invited briefing from the community at large. A hearing is set for August, and the judge is mulling whether to order a mistrial.

The deadline to submit briefs to the judge was Friday. Among the briefs, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the United States Internet Industry Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association all jointly filed a brief, saying the law did not allow damages for “attempted” copyright infringement.

“Given the serious consequences that flow from copyright’s strict liability regime, the court should resist plaintiffs imprecations to expand that regime absent an unequivocal expression of Congressional intent,” the groups wrote, noting that the language in the Copyright Act demands actual distribution to the public of protected works.

It was a similar brief in tone to the one that a group of 10 intellectual property scholars lodged earlier in the week.

But the MPAA, long an ally to the RIAA, which has sued more than 20,000 individuals for file sharing of copyrighted music, told Judge Davis that peer-to-peer users automatically should be liable for infringement.

“The only purpose for placing copyrighted works in the shared folder is, of course, to ’share,’ by making those works available to countless other P2P networks,” the MPAA wrote.

(Click here for Threat Level’s in-depth look at the Thomas case, its implications and Judge Davis’ decision to rethink his jury instruction.)

Other groups meeting Davis’ deadline include the Intellectual Property Institute at William Mitchell College of Law and the Progress & Freedom Foundation.

this article originally appeared on wired.com

21-06-2006
Door Maurits Martijn

Studenten van het Sandberg Instituut communiceren een maand lang alleen via postduiven. ‘Privacy bestaat niet meer.’

Op het dak van het oude PTT-gebouw, naast het Centraal Station in Amsterdam, staan Apple-computers, beamers en biertjes. Het waait hard en het is koud. Op het dak staat ook een klein houten huis voor zeventien duiven. Studenten van de Designafdeling van het Sandberg Instituut, de aan de Rietveld Academie verbonden vervolgopleiding voor afgestudeerden aan een kunstacademie, hebben de duiven de afgelopen maanden getraind en gevoed. Nu zijn ze klaar om post te bezorgen.

Vanavond, in de schemering, worden de duiven losgelaten als startschot van het project Something to hide. Tien studenten zetten een maandlang hun mobiele telefoons uit en laten hun e-mailboxen dicht. De postduiven zijn hun enige communicatiemiddel. Hier in Amsterdam, maar als het moet vliegen de duiven ook vanuit Berlijn of Barcelona veilig terug naar de til op het oude postgebouw. ‘Omdat moderne communicatietechnologie ons leven domineert en omdat onze persoonlijke gegevens worden opgeslagen, is het steeds moeilijker dingen voor jezelf te houden. Privacy bestaat niet meer. We denken dat we niets te verbergen hebben, maar het gaat om ons privéleven. Iedereen heeft iets te verbergen,’ zegt student Dirk Vis, vlak voordat de vogels gaan vliegen.

De studenten bedachten dat met postduiven wel veilig kan worden gecommuniceerd. Die zijn niet snel verdacht, worden niet gevolgd. Ook andere ‘alternatieve’ communicatiemiddelen zullen in het project worden ingezet. Dirk Vis: ‘We plakken posters in de stad, op plaatsen waar dat eigenlijk niet mag. Zie het als interventies in de publieke ruimte, als reactie op bestaande communicatie.’

Chat-gesprekken
Dan is het zover - de duiven gaan vliegen. Ze komen wat onwennig, schokkend met hun kopjes, uit het houten huis. Even lijkt het alsof ze niet willen. Eén schiet er weg en in een ruk volgt de rest om in een soepele zwaai weg te draaien, richting Zeeburg. Studente Ghalia Elsrakbi kijkt trots toe hoe de duiven even later als een soort eskader langs het dak scheren. ‘Toen we research deden, kwamen we erachter hoe erg het is gesteld met onze privacy. Chat-gesprekken bijvoorbeeld worden opgeslagen en gebruikt bij rechtszaken. We vinden dat mensen zich daar bewust van moeten zijn. We willen niet de wereld verbeteren, maar het project is geslaagd als er meer vragen worden gesteld. Bijvoorbeeld: “Waarom hangt hier een camera?”‘ Ze lacht: ‘En het zou mooi zijn als meer mensen duiven gingen gebruiken. Er zijn er hier in Amsterdam genoeg.’

this article first appeared on vrijnederland

Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal

Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal

Buffalo, NY—Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at
Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group
Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire
fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the
government’s entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on
its face.” This means that even if the actions alleged in the
indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they
would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty
days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in
this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According
to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn,
the DoJ will not appeal Arcara’s ruling and will not seek any new
charges against Kurtz.

For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz
and Critical Art Ensemble’s educational art projects, which use common
science materials to examine issues surrounding the new
biotechnologies. In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr.
Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University
of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two
harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects. The
Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material
from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus
constituting mail fraud.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was
increased from five years to twenty years in prison.

Dr. Kurtz has been fighting the charges ever since. In October 2007,
Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring
bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment
prevented him from continuing the struggle.

KURTZ SUMS UP END OF FOUR-YEAR NIGHTMARE

Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a
statement, responded stoically: “I don’t have a statement, but I do
have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four
years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do
I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department
wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a
Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has
turned on those it is sworn to protect?”

Said Kurtz’s attorney, Paul Cambria, “I am glad an innocent man has
been vindicated. Steve Kurtz stared in the face of the federal
government and a twenty-year prison term and never flinched, because he
believes in his work and his actions were those of a completely
innocent man. Clients like him are a blessing, and although I have had
many important victories, this one stands at the top of the list.”

As coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, a group organized to support
Kurtz from the beginning of the case, Lucia Sommer sees the end of the
prosecution as bittersweet, and like Kurtz, is thoughtful about the
broader significance of the case: “This ruling is the best possible
ending to a horrible ordeal—but we are mindful of numerous cases still
pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush
administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture,
in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance,
the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode
Americans’ constitutional rights.”

Referring to the international outcry the case provoked, involving
fundraisers and protests held on four continents, Sommer said, “The
government has unlimited resources to bring and prosecute these kinds
of charges, but the accused often don’t have any resources to defend
themselves. This victory could never have happened without the activism
of thousands of people. Supporters protested, vocally opposed the
prosecution, and refused to let it go on in silence. And without their
efforts at fundraising, Kurtz and Ferrell would not have been able to
defend themselves from these false accusations.”

Sommer added that the next step for the defense will be to get back all
of the materials taken by the FBI during its 2004 raid on the Kurtz
home, including several completed art projects, as well as Dr. Kurtz’s
lab equipment, computers, books, manuscripts, notes, research
materials, and personal belongings. The four confiscated art projects
are the subject of an exhibition entitled SEIZED on view at Hallwalls
Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 18:
http://www.hallwalls.org/visual_shows/2008/show_seized.html.

BACKGROUND TO THE CASE

The case originated in May 2004, when Kurtz’s wife Hope died of heart
failure as the couple was preparing a project about genetically
modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Police who responded to Steve Kurtz’s 911 call deemed the Kurtzes’ art
materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. Kurtz explained that the
materials (legally and easily obtained basic life science equipment and
two harmless bacteria samples) had already been displayed at museums
throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the
public. However, the following day, Kurtz was illegally detained for 22
hours on suspicion of bioterrorism, as dozens of agents from the FBI,
Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, Department of Defense,
ATF, and numerous other law enforcement agencies raided his home,
seizing his personal and professional belongings. After a federal grand
jury refused to charge Kurtz with bioterrorism, Kurtz and Ferrell were
indicted on two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud
concerning the acquisition of $256 of harmless bacteria for one of
Critical Art Ensemble’s educational art projects. (Critical Art
Ensemble is the recipient of numerous awards for its projects,
including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky
Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, in recognition of twenty years of
distinguished work: http://www.creative-capital.org/index2.html.)

The Department of Justice brought the charges in spite of the fact that
the alleged “victims of fraud”—American Type Culture Collection and the
University of Pittsburgh—never filed any charges or complained of any
wrongdoing, and the fact that in bringing the charges the Department of
Justice was acting completely outside its own Prosecution Policy
Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud
(http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/
43mcrm.htm).

For more information and extensive documentation, including the Judge’s
dismissal, please visit:
http://caedefensefund.org

===

Dr Mathieu O’Neil
Adjunct Research Fellow
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
College of Arts and Social Science
The Australian National University

E-mail: mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au

Dear Aryan!

You must know that Sweden was earlier than Germany with a such law, and all these about the “racial hygiene” is a Swedish speciality and was exported to other countries, for example Deutschland.

FRA.

Here is the official statement: http://www.fra.se/english.shtml

In fact ALL papers, magazines, the associations for Publishers of books, papers, magaznes etc, the Swedish association for lawyers, the associaton for journalists and so on and so on and so on, said NO,

but ALL the members of the Parliament (all the Riksdagsmännen i Riksdagen) said YES

(only 1 women said NO…)

It was consensus (99,99%).

What says the law: that the FRA can/shall watch over ALL msm, mail, telephone calls and so on and so on from Sweden to other countries, and from other countries to Sweden.

For to stop the terrorists!!!!!!!!

Rubbish… You never stop terrorism that way BUT you get an absolute control over the swedish citizens. It is the mot effective control ANY country has get… more effective than the USa or any other european country.

My opinion is that ALL the members of the Parliament (Riksdagen) has written their own “death-sentence” - in the history books, because they have in a democratic way murdered the democratic system (Weimar and Hitler 1933?!). Suicide.

And all these gay people in Riksdagen… Did they not understand that this FRA-law in some years will be a weapon against them?

Bo

here is the official statement about the fra

FRA, brief presentation

Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA), or the National Defence Radio Establishment as it is officially rendered in English, is the Swedish national authority for signals intelligence.

FRA is also engaged in information assurance. On demand, we support government authorities and state owned companies regarding current IT threats as well as general advice to improve security.

FRA is a civilian organisation, subordinated to the Ministry of Defence. Funds for 2008 are SEK 562 million. Oversight is provided by the Defence Intelligence Commission.

FRA is led by a Director General assisted by a Deputy Director General and central functions for coordination and planning. The line organisation consists of seven divisions: COMINT, ELINT, Information Assurance, Systems Development, Systems Maintenance, Personnel and Administration.

FRA main customers are the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Defence, the Military Intelligence And Security Directorate (MUST) and the Security Police.

Fixed sites on Swedish territory are complemented with a SIGINT ship (Orion) operating in the Baltic, and two Gulfstream IV aircraft capable of extended missions. The ship is run by the Swedish Navy and the aircraft by the Air Force, both on behalf of FRA, whose operators are doing the collection.

Charles Bremner in Paris

Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy.

“There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told his Cabinet yesterday as it endorsed the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” scheme that from next January will hit illegal downloaders where it hurts.

Under a cross-industry agreement, internet service providers (ISPs) must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders.
France’s anti-piracy law is unworkable

Using heavy-handed tactics with ISPs is only latest in a line of tactics to defeat online piracy - and it won’t work

* Mobile music downloads take on iTunes

* How online extremists evade capture

Related Links

* France’s anti-piracy law is unworkable

* Court delivers blow to record companies

* Has France cracked the piracy problem?

In a classical French approach the scheme will be enforced by a new £15 million a year state agency, to be called Hadopi (high authority for copyright protection and dissemination of works on the internet).

The law has strong backing from Mr Sarkozy, who has taken a close interest in artists’ rights since marrying Carla Bruni, a model and folk singer. However, it has run into opposition from a range of bodies including the state data protection agency, consumer and civil liberties groups and the European Parliament. Big web companies, including Google, and Dailymotion, the video-sharing firm, refused to sign up to the 40-member industry accord last November.

Mocking the scheme yesterday Libération newspaper gave warning that families could be stripped of their internet and broadband telephone and television if a neighbour’s teenager uses their wireless router to load his iPod.

Christine Albanel, the Culture Minister, who is responsible for the creation- and-internet law, said that it will replace criminal action with dissuasion. “It takes a preventive and educational approach,” she said. Over the past two years French courts have convicted 300 people for piracy, most of them professionals and none of them minors. The prosecutions have had little impact on the sales of a recording industry in steep decline.

Under the accord, the entertainment industry will also drop existing copyright protection on French material so that music or videos bought legally online can be played on any sort of device. The industry has hailed the French scheme as a model for the EU, which is losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year to illicit sharing of films and music. “This is the most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen,” John Kennedy, head of the IFPI, the worldwide recording industry body, said.

this article originally appeared on the times online

By Jonathan M. Gitlin |

No matter what you think of blogging, Internet-based citizen journalism is a real threat, not just to traditional media business models but to totalitarian governments. How do we know that bloggers are drawing blood? Because some governments are hitting back harder and harder; last year saw a tripling in the number of bloggers arrested around the world compared to 2006, according to a report from the University of Washington.
Related Stories

* Chinese government wants real names of bloggers
* China backs off mandatory blogger identity registration
* China says “no” to Internet rumormongering
* Blogosphere growth slowing considerably

“Last year, 2007, was a record year for blogger arrests, with three times as many as in 2006. Egypt, Iran and China are the most dangerous places to blog about political life, accounting for more than half of all arrests since blogging became big,” said Assistant Professor Phil Howard, lead author of the World Information Access Report. Howard also suggests that the real number of arrests may be much higher, as not every arrest makes it into the media.

The report separates the reason for arrests into six categories: violation of cultural norms, blogging involved with social protest, blogging about public policy, blogging about political figures, exposing corruption or human rights violations, and finally “other.” In addition to Iran, Egypt and China, Middle Eastern regimes in Syria and Saudi Arabia, and South East Asian nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand also figure in the report. 2007 saw 36 bloggers arrested around the world, and since 2003 at least 64 have been arrested, with a total of 940 months of prison time served.

Even liberal democracies are not immune; France, Canada, the USA, and UK have all arrested people following their blogging activity since 2004. However, some of these cases might not seem so egregious; last year a blogger was arrested in Los Angeles following his postings about his attraction to young girls, and the beginning of 2008 saw an arrest in the UK after one Gavin Best used his blog to threaten a police officer’s family following his arrest for a large number of thefts.

Another troubling trend has been the complicity of western Internet firms such as Yahoo and Google, both of whom have handed over details of bloggers to the Chinese government, despite publicly condemning such policies.

The Internet isn’t just landing people in prison; occasionally it helps get them out too. Earlier this year there was the widely publicized case in Egypt where US blogger James Buck used Twitter, the microblogging platform, to alert his friends and colleagues to the fact that he’d been arrested following his efforts to cover an anti-government protest.

Meanwhile, the worldwide blogging community shows no signs of going away, although fear of persecution may drive more of them to do so anonymously. But long may they continue to show that the pen (or, in this case, the keyboard) is mightier than the sword.

this article originally appeared on arstechnica

by Graeme Philipson
June 10, 2008

A draft treaty proposes draconian measures to protect copyright.

THE forces of reaction are fighting back. As they often do, they are carrying out their planning in secret, in the knowledge that if more people knew of their activities they would not be allowed to get away with it.

The US (surprise, surprise) has circulated a draft “Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) for the next G8 meeting, in Tokyo in July. The full text of the document has been published on Wikileaks (wikileaks.org).

The ACTA draft is a scary document. If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion.

They would be able to seize any device - laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc - and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

The draft contains other draconian measures. It proposes a governing body for copyright protection that would operate outside organisations such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the UN. In short, it proposes a global police force, answerable to no one, with intrusive powers that vastly exceed those currently available to adherents of the concept of intellectual property.

The proposed treaty is being sponsored by a small group of US Congress members, all of whom Wikileaks says have received significant contributions from major record companies and film studios. As they say, “follow the money”.

The first newspaper to break the story was Canada’s The Ottawa Citizen, which in a story by Vito Pilieci on May 24 picked up on the Wikileaks posting. Since then the blogosphere has been rife with stories about the move. Most commentators are outraged that such a proposal is even being considered.

For 10 years in this column and elsewhere I have been arguing that the concept of copyright, and by extension most forms of so-called “intellectual property”, are irrelevant in the digital era. I was once, with just a few others, a voice in the wilderness. Now most people I talk with agree.

The copyright mafia have tried all sorts of things, including the absurdity of Digital Rights Management (DRM), which attempts to use technology to hobble technology. They have maliciously prosecuted individuals for the “crime” of copying music from one medium to another.

DRM is struggling, but we still see stupidity everywhere. Apple doesn’t let you copy stuff off your iPod - you have to use third-party software to perform what should be a simple task. Foxtel’s iQ and Austar’s MyStar don’t let you copy stuff off those boxes to other media.

Downloaded movies self-destruct after a limited time. It is still illegal in Australia to copy a CD to another CD (only “format shifting” is allowed), or to record a TV show for any other purpose than watching it once.

Whether this absurd treaty becomes reality or not, it indicates the lengths to which some are prepared to go. They will use any means to fight a technology that threatens their anachronistic monopoly of the distribution of digital content.

Clever people are taking advantage of the technology to develop new business models and reach new audiences. Bands are bypassing record companies and going direct to consumers. Authors are publishing online. Small moviemakers are finding new outlets through the wonders of the internet.

The big record companies and film studios have a clever answer - turn everybody into criminals. Use treaties and laws to try to prevent people doing what comes naturally and, in the digital age, easily.

The most that can be hoped of the proposed ACTA treaty is that, if it comes into being, it will further expose the futility of legislating against the key advantage of digital technology - the ease with which content can be stored, copied and transmitted. Where the technology is liberating people and content, the powers of reaction are attempting to stifle it.

Fortunately they are on the wrong side of history. When the full details and consequences of this treaty become widely known, I believe the effect will be the opposite of what its authors intend. It contains so little understanding of the way the digital world works that the backlash against it will be massive, accelerating the inevitable death of the out-of-date business models it is vainly trying to protect.

graeme@philipson.info

this article originally appeared on the sydney morning herald

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 4th June 2008 20:27 GMT

Sweden is on the verge of passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government’s spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country.

So far, hacks from the mainstream Swedish press seem to be on holiday, so news about the proposed law is woefully hard to come by. That leaves us turning to this summary from the decidedly left-leaning Swedish Pirate Party for details. We’d prefer to rely on a more neutral group, but that wasn’t possible this time. According to them, here’s a broad outline:

The En anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet bill (which loosely translates to “a better adapted military intelligence gathering”) gives Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) direct access to the traffic passing through its borders. Now remember, we’re talking about the internet, which frequently routes packets though multiple geographically dispersed hops before they reach their final destination.

This all but guarantees that emails and voice over IP (VoIP) calls between Swedes will routinely be siphoned into a massive monitoring machine. And we wouldn’t be surprised if traffic between parties with no tie to the country regularly passes through Sweden’s border as well, and that too would be fair game. (For example, email sent from a BT address in London to Finland is likely to pass through Sweden first.)

Once intercepted, the data will be searched for certain keywords, and those that contain the words will be pulled aside for additional scrutiny. A broad array of organizations will have use of the system, including the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the police, secret service and customs, and in some cases major businesses. The bill allows Swedes to be singled out, as well.

When the bill was introduced in early 2007, Google was reportedly so concerned about its consequences for privacy that it threatened to limit its ties to the country if the measure passed.

“We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden’s borders if the proposal goes through,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, said last year, according to this article. “We simply cannot compromise our users’ integrity by allowing Swedish authorities access to data that may not even concern Swedish activity.”

But so far, few outside of the pro-privacy universe have bothered to discuss the bill this time around. There have been no similar pronouncements from Google and representatives there didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has likewise been reticent about the bill.

“Surprisingly enough, there hasn’t been that much written about it, even in the Swedish media,” said Patrik Runald, a Swedish national and a security response manager for F-Secure who works in San Jose, California.

“The funny thing is when asked what do you want to look for, [backers of the bill] don’t really specify what they’re interested in,” he continued. “It’s a very broad bill. They basically can interpret whatever they like.”

One of the few recent press mentions of the bill came from a publication called Cellular News in London. According to this story, Nordic and Baltic telecommunications p