To protect Internet freedom

Birgitta Jónsdóttir
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 18 April 2012 10.00 BST
Political consultant Naomi Wolf speaks at a news
conference in New York last month announcing a lawsuit against indefinite
detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act. Photograph:
viewpress Vp/Demotix/Corbis
Freedom for most people is something sacred, and
many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another
word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom.
We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of
information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it.
Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is
dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.
When the world wide web came into being, it was an
unrestricted, free flowing world of creativity, connectivity and close
encounters of the internet kind. It was as if the collective consciousness had
taken on material (yet virtual!) form and people soon learned to use it to
work, play and gather. Today's social and democratic reform is born and bred
online where people can freely exchange views and knowledge. Some of us
old-school internet freedom fighters understood this value way before the web
became such a part of our daily lives. One of them is John Perry Barlow, who in
1996 wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in a response to an
attempt to legalise restrictions on this brand new world. In it he declares:
"Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask
you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no
sovereignty where we gather."
Barlow inspired me and others to create the
Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI),
a parliamentary proposal unanimously approved by the Icelandic parliament in
2010, tasking the government to make Iceland a safe haven for freedom of
information and expression, where privacy online would be as sacred and guarded
as it is in the real world. The spirit of IMMI is in stark contrast with the
serious attacks we are currently faced with. We have legal monsters like Acta, Sopa, Pipa and
now Cispa; we
have anti-terrorist acts abused to tear these liberties apart; we have armies
of corporate lawyers scrutinising every bit of news prior to it getting out to
us before we ever get to know the real stories that should remain in the public
domain.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The US
government legally hacks into other nations' parliamentary
private social media data because it is stored on servers originating in the
US, as in my Twitter case. The infamous EU data retention law is making us all
into terrorist subjects by default, and now we have the newest addition in a
dangerous cocktail of erosion of civil liberties online with the offline
reality: meet the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known
as the Homeland Battlefield Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
describes it thus:
"For the first time in American history, we
have a law authorising the worldwide and indefinite military detention of
people captured far from any battlefield. The NDAA has no temporal or
geographic limitations. It is completely at odds with our values, violates the
constitution, and corrodes our nation's commitment to the rule of law."
Since the US department of justice is ploughing my private data and WikiLeaks (whom I volunteered for in
2010 by co-producing Collateral Murder) are defined by the US vice-president as
cyberterrorists, I felt under direct threat when NDAA was passed. I have not
been able to travel to the US for more than a year under advice from the
Icelandic state department. The only way for me to go is on a UN visa (the same
kind as Gaddafi and Hussein got when going to the UN) when I plan to attend the
UN assembly later this year. Basically what NDAA means is that the US military
can put anyone, anywhere under the suspicion of being a terror threat or an
associate and detain you for ever, without you having access to a lawyer or a
court. So I joined Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and other
activists in suing the United States government to stop the implementation of
the NDAA. Naomi Wolf was kind enough to read my testimony
at a US court last month, since I could not be there in person.
The good news is that cyberspace is full of hacktivists and our
offline world has a growing Occupy movement,
inspiring all of us into action, co-creating a different reality in the spirit
of a true online and offline freedom.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its
affiliated companies.



Guardian News link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/18/suing-us-government-protect-internet-freedom

How Internet firms are reading your texts and emails and even looking at your pictures by spying through downloaded smartphone apps

By Damien Gayle
The small print included with many mobile phone apps is
giving their developers the right to rifle through users' phone books, text
messages and emails.

By agreeing to little-read terms and conditions documents,
phone users are giving developers the right to inspect their personal
information and even find out who they are talking to.

In many shocking cases, users are even giving apps the right
to collect whatever images the camera happens to be seeing, as well as the
phone's location.
Privacy risk: Smartphone
app developers have the right to access incredible amounts of users' personal
data thanks to provisions in little-read terms and conditions documents
Facebook, Yahoo!, Flickr and Badoo all admitted to reading
users' text messages through their Android smartphone apps, the Sunday Times
reported.
And many other apps from less well-known developers, many of
them available for free, are also including the rights to access your personal
data in their terms and conditions.
More...
Think before you
text: Divorce lawyers warn of the powerful evidence of a simple SMS message or
Facebook post
Smartphones replace
newspapers as choice of reading material... for men in the toilet
Android leaps over
iPhone in UK with 2.5million more users as majority now own a smartphone

Academics are now warning the many apps are little more than
'fronts' to allow companies to hoover up personal data and pass them on to
advertisers for a fee.

But the revelations also make clear that the wealth of data
collected by the new generation of smartphones could pose a serious risk to
users' privacy.

HOOVERING UP YOUR DATA: WHAT THE APPS CAN ACCESS


Location data
Internet history Text messages Contact book Online account IDs Who you are
calling May intercept calls Can access camera
Twitter: The site admitted that its smartphone application
transmitted data from users' private address books
Daniel Rosenfield, director of Sun Products, a successful
app business whose products are downloaded at a rate of 5,000 a day, said the
information was requested by advertisers.

'You can sell your app but the revenue you get from selling
your apps doesn't touch the revenue you get from giving your apps away for free
and just loading them with advertisements,' he told the Sunday Times.

Unlike Android apps, Apple iPhone apps are covered by a
general terms and conditions policy, which runs to astonishing 17,000 words.

However, the company also faced embarrassment earlier this
month when it emerged some companies with iPhone apps were harvesting contact
lists from customers mobile phone address books without telling them.

Twitter admitted that it copied lists of email addresses and
phone numbers from those who used its smartphone application and stored them on
its servers without asking users' permission.

Steve Jobs, Apple's late founder and the mastermind behind
the iPhone, himself spoke of the dangers of instrusive apps in 2007, warning
that many 'want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up.'

Chris Brauer, co-director of the centre for Creative and
Social Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, echoed the concerns.

He warned that the ubiquitous smartphones have become 'a
source for incredibly rich information about people's lives.

'A lot of apps are fronts for various companies who are now
capturing this data.'
"Someone need to develop an app that avoids the leaking
of information" Yes the app is called stop using open to all Android and
use a windows phone or an iphone. Apple, Microsoft and Blackberry have more strict
controls of what apps go to their store.

HOOVERING UP YOUR DATA: WHAT THE APPS CAN ACCESS



Location data


Internet history


Text messages


Contact book


Online account IDs


Who you are calling


May intercept calls


Can access camera




Flickr


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Flixster


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YouTube






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Foursquare


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TweetDeck


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Netflix



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Facebook


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Ancestry.co.uk


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Badoo


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Angry Birds


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Yahoo! Messenger




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Shazam


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My Fitness Pal





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My Remote Lock





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