Britain's failure to protect its citizens from secret surveillance on the internet is to be investigated by the European Commission.

The move will fuel claims that Britain is sliding towards a Big Brother state and could end with the Government being forced to defend its policy on internet privacy in front of judges in Europe.

The legal action is being brought over the use of controversial behavioural advertising services which were tested on BT's internet customers without their consent.

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see toon at top and read more at The Independent

South Australia's Attorney-General Michael Atkinson admits he misjudged public opinion on the state's attempt to curb political comment on the internet.

Mr Atkinson says he will repeal a law which would have meant that anyone posting comment or blogs during an election period would have had to give their real name and postcode.

Opponents had branded the law an attack on freedom of speech, and Mr Atkinson says he listened to community concerns in his decision to overturn it.

"I now understand that bloggers demand the right to publish, on the net, political commentary in the election period anonymously or under an assumed name," he said.

"I miscalculated the strength of feeling among teenagers and people in their 20s who have grown up with the internet and blogging and I underestimated their desire to have as a right the ability to make political commentary in the election period anonymously or under an assumed name.

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Gus: expressing political opinions about politicians on the net is akin to swatting flies with a matchstick... But, thank godot, we can still do it... So, don't try to stop us, or we might start doing it with baseball bats..

By Ashley Hall for PM

If you know the details of someone's online reading and viewing habits you can learn a great deal about them; their politics, their interests, their sexual inclinations, even the state of their marriage.

So the news that the Government is considering making internet providers retain their customers' web browsing history has internet freedom advocates fuming.

It's part of the Government's move to join up to a European Convention on Cybercrime, in an effort to help law enforcement agencies track down and prosecute cyber criminals.

Supporters of the plan say data retention policies have had little or no negative consequence in Europe. But critics say it would treat all internet users as criminals and undermine the values of freedom and individual liberty.

The Federal Government has just begun talking to internet service providers, or ISPs, about how they might retain records of what websites users visit, but already there's alarm.

Director of the Communications Law Centre at the University of Technology in Sydney, Michael Fraser, says keeping the private web browsing data of all internet users is a step too far.

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Gus: and the government slams google for breach of privacy!! The two-faced punks!!... See toon at top.

Atlanta entrepreneur Mike Mondelli has access to more than a billion records detailing consumers’ personal finances — and there is little they can do about it.

The information collected by his company, L2C, comes from thousands of everyday transactions that many people do not realize are being tracked: auto warranties, cellphone bills and magazine subscriptions. It includes purchases of prepaid cards and visits to payday lenders and rent-to-own furniture stores. It knows whether your checks have cleared and scours public records for mentions of your name.

Pulled together, the data follow the life of your wallet far beyond what exists in the country’s three main credit bureaus. Mondelli sells that information for a profit to lenders, landlords and even health-care providers trying to solve one of the most fundamental questions of personal finance: Who is worthy of credit?

The answer increasingly lies in the “fourth bureau” — companies such as L2C that deal in personal data once deemed unreliable. Although these dossiers cover consumers in all walks of life, they carry particular weight for the estimated 30 million people who live on the margins of the banking system. Yet almost no one realizes these files exist until something goes wrong.

Federal regulations do not always require companies to disclose when they share your financial history or with whom, and there is no way to opt out when they do. No standard exists for what types of data should be included in the fourth bureau or how it should be used. No one is even tracking the accuracy of these reports. That has created a virtually impenetrable system in which consumers, particularly the most vulnerable, have little insight into the forces shaping their financial futures.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/little-known-firms-tracking-data-used-in-credit-scores/2011/05/24/gIQAXHcWII_print.html

see toon at top... and by the way, my social security number is XXXXXXXXXXX.... and my credit card balance is hovering close to the maximum debt possible... (not by choice but by income).

According to the Post: "From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt."
 
Analysis from the centre "almost always" goes into President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing.
 
OSC director Doug Naquin believes his methods deliver accurate results, although he acknowledges: "We may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite." The agency is currently testing accuracy by comparing their results with those of polling organisations.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/technology/twitter/42089/cia-admits-monitoring-twitter-and-facebook

Wikipedia plans to take its English-language site offline on Wednesday as part of protests against proposed anti-piracy laws in the US.

The user-generated news site Reddit and the blog Boing Boing have also said they will take part in the "blackout".

The sites' webmasters are opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) being debated by Congress.

However, Twitter has declined to take part in the shutdown.

Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, told the BBC: "Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy.

"But that's not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16590585

Washington was struggling to contain one of the most explosive national security leaks in US history on Monday, as public criticism grew of the sweeping surveillance state revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Political opinion was split, with some members of Congress calling for the immediate extradition of a man they consider a "defector" but other senior politicians from both parties questioning whether US surveillance practices had gone too far.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden's leak as even more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history.

In London, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, was forced to defend the UK's use of intelligence gathered by the US. Other European leaders also voiced concern.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is expected to grill Obama next week, during a much-awaited summit in Berlin. Peter Schaar, Germany's federal data protection commissioner, told the Guardian it was unacceptable for the US authorities to have access to EU citizens' data, and that the level of protection is lower than that guaranteed to US citizens.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/10/white-house-nsa-leaks-edward-snowden

Slowly, cooking us like geese... Se toon at top — FOUR YEARS AGO...