Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson says the controversial Bill C-30, known as the online surveillance or warrantless wiretapping bill, won't go ahead due to opposition from the public.
The bill, which was known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, was designed to help police combat child pornography. But civil liberties and privacy groups — even the federal privacy commissioner — said the bill violated the rights of Canadians.
Opponents lobbied strenuously against C-30, saying it was an overly broad, "Big Brother" piece of legislation that would strip all Canadians of the right to privacy.
The bill would have required internet service providers to maintain systems to allow police to intercept and track online communications without a warrant.
Canadian Public Deafeats US Style Warrantless Wiretapping Bill
While many among the US public appear to be glad that the federal government is illegally wiretapping their electronic communications, the same cannot be said of the Canadians. From the CBC:
Business and Government Collude Against the Consumer
Why is internet access more expensive and why are connections slower in the US than elsewhere? The answer is the same as for virtually every conceivable industry: because of collusion between big business and big government. From Gizmodo:
Here, Bill Moyers interviews Susan Crawford—former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation . . . During the interview, she explains how the US government has allowed media organizations to put profit ahead of public interest—through price hikes, rigged rules and stifling competition. As she explains, "the rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we're creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality."
CISPA: Lawmakers Plan to Reintroduce Anti-Privacy Bill
Many Republicans and Democrats are avowed enemies of the US Constitution, and of basic rights and liberties. From The Hill:
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he plans to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) with Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) this year . . .
CISPA aimed to thwart cyberattacks by making it easier for private companies to share information about cyberthreats and malicious source code with the intelligence community and the Department of Homeland Security. The bill enjoyed support from a broad swath of companies, including Facebook and AT&T, because they said legal hurdles slowed down information sharing about cyber threats between industry and government.
Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates launched online protests against the bill because they argued that it lacked sufficient privacy protections and would increase the pool of people's electronic communications flowing to the intelligence community and the secretive National Security Agency (NSA).
LibreOffice 4.0 Released
From Ars Technica:
LibreOffice version 4.0 came out today, with project organizers boasting a "cleaner and leaner code base" along with various new features and greater interoperability with business systems and document formats.
LibreOffice was launched in 2010 to overtake OpenOffice as the preeminent open source office suite. Google Docs may still be the biggest threat to Microsoft Office, but LibreOffice has carved out a niche for itself, becoming the default productivity software on many popular Linux distributions.
Cleaning up the code has been a major focus. "The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty-five thousand lines of comments from German to English," the Document Foundation said in its LibreOffice 4.0 announcement.
"All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community."
New App Protects Users from Prying Eyes
From Slate:
Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.
“This has never been done before,” boasts Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s CEO. “It’s going to revolutionize the ease of privacy and security.”
Public Wifi Coming to a Town Near You?
From the Washington Post:
The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.
The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google, Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.
US Government Seen as Threat to Data Security
From Slashdot:
Leading privacy expert Caspar Bowden warned European citizens not to use cloud services hosted in the U.S. over spying fears. Bowden, former privacy adviser to Microsoft Europe, explained at a panel discussion hosted at the recent Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels, that a section in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act 2008 (FISAAA) permits U.S. intelligence agencies to access data owned by non-U.S. citizens on cloud storage hosed by U.S. companies, if their activity is deemed to affect U.S. foreign policy. Bowden claimed the Act allows for purely political spying of activists, protesters and political groups . . .
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