So far, the most serious report to arise from the NSA files has been the revelation that US authorities have been involved in a systematic program to defeat Internet encryption. By any objective measure, the revelations are astounding: intelligence agencies have been building backdoors into cryptographic technology by tampering with Read more
New issue of SCRIPTed is now live: Issue DOI: 10.2966/scrip.100213 Cover Matrix Code David.Asch Playing with long exposure zoom. CC-BY-SA on Flickr. Editorial Copyright Management for Open Collaborative Projects –Inbound Licensing Models for Open Innovation Catharina Maracke, pp.140-148 | HTML | PDF | Dedicated Section on Open Collaborative Projects Drafting Read more
The Guardian has reported that on July 20th 2013, “shadowy” government officials destroyed several hard drives in their offices, under threat of legal action that would make it impossible to continue publishing stories about the NSA surveillance scandal. These devices contained copies of the files from Edward Snowden, obtained by Read more
On Sunday morning, David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained and interrogated during his transit stop at Heathrow airport on his way to Brazil. He was detained for 9 hours under the Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows border police and immigration officers to Read more
The registration for the next edition of Gikii, the Geek Law conference, is now open. This is shaping up to be a very strong programme! I’m loving some of the papers, and I predict a showdown with Judith Rauhofer (mwahahahaha). Some of the papers that I’m looking forward to the Read more
Does anyone else get the feeling that Internet regulation is starting to resemble a dystopian novel? Widespread surveillance (both public and private). Censorship. Lack of transparency. Prosecution of whistle-blowers. Secret courts. Governments intent on hard-wiring morality into the network. Open standards under attack. Excessive IP enforcement. Centralised architectures. We are Read more
The latest NSA revelations appear to have done something quite interesting. More and more people are looking at the level of surveillance, and they are beginning to wonder how it is possible for one government organisation to have such access to information. The Internet is open and free, how is Read more
Yours Truly is writing a report on voluntary copyright relinquishment and public domain dedications for WIPO. The terms of reference of the report can be found here. As part of the work, I thought that it would be a good idea to have an informal web survey to ask people Read more
The Internet is great. Except when it isn’t. Unfortunately, the Web is also home to racists, misogynists, homophobes, fraudsters, malicious hackers, and unsavoury characters of all sorts. It is also filled with trolls, Internet users who gain pleasure from purposefully upsetting other users by expounding views that they may or Read more
One of the most interesting stories that has emerged from the NSA surveillance scandal is, in my opinion, the revelation that the intelligence agency has been using some of the data collected to conduct social network analysis (SNA) on the general population. This is a topic that is discussed in Read more