Index on Censorship tracked websites blocked by the Russian government under a law intended to combat child pornography. He is the second person to be tried under the Cybercrimes Decree since its passage last November.įree Expression: Russia blocks Pussy Riot, Mein Kampf under child porn law Waleed al-Shehhi, an activist in the United Arab Emirates, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 500,000 dirhams ($137,000) for Tweeting his misgivings about the “UAE 94″ trial, which has been condemned as “manifestly unfair” by the International Commission of Jurists. Evidently keen to protect international surveillance capabilities, they are pushing to shift the resolution’s focus to illegal surveillance, rather than simply “extraterritorial surveillance.” But US diplomats have been working behind the scenes to block a provision that would make the interception of personal information and communication a violation of human rights. The UN is expected to pass a resolution that will extend the right to privacy to online communications. South China Morning Post reports that a new system will allow Han officials in areas like Tibet and Xinjiang (a Uyghur region) to track and translate Internet voice calls, text, and messages embedded in images. Activists fearing the agency will usher in a new era of censorship and surveillance have started a “Stop #A2T” campaign.Ĭhinese authorities are expanding their surveillance capabilities to monitor online communications in ethnic minority languages. Established by decree, the agency will be comprised by members of various ministries but some have suggested that the agency lacks a sufficiently robust oversight mechanism. Tunisia will soon have a new telecommunications agency dedicated to investigating “ICT-related” crimes. In a hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament Nils Torvalds, father of Linux architect Linus Torvalds, revealed that the National Security Agency asked GNU/Linux to build covert backdoors into the open source operating system. Critics fear the bill will stifle online expression. Baba Jibrin Adamu, senior ICT advisor to the President, says the administration is “hell-bent on curtailing the activities of criminals who have found a safe haven in ICT.” Though much of the law intends to address online financial fraud and phishing scams, it incorporates broad surveillance provisions, allowing police to engage in warrantless wiretapping of both telephone and Internet communications. In Nigeria, a proposed Internet and telephone surveillance law passed its second reading in both chambers of the country’s National Assembly. Surveillance: Wire-Tap Law Leaves Nigerian Activists Wary A blog post about the blocking reminded users that Cryptocat is “experimental software” that is “not guaranteed to protect you from excessively serious situations, such as government targeting, physical spying, or computer backdoors.” Heed that, kitty cats. This report begins in Iran, where Cryptocat, a user-friendly browser-based chat encryption tool envisioned as “ cryptography for the masses,” was blocked last week. Global Voices Advocacy's Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world. Hae-in Lim, Lisa Ferguson, Ellery Biddle, Juan Arellano, Bojan Perkov, Richard Teverson, Katherine MacNamara, and Sarah Myers contributed to this report. Photo by ChimpLearnGood via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Don't wait a month to thank people who report vulnerabilities in your code.Cryptocat graphic. It looks (from the pull request) like much of this was reported over a month ago. But you should also err on the side of quickly adding people's names to it when they report things. I bring this up because it's a valuable lesson for startups. I'm also a little confused: if the team put Steve Thomas on their thank-you page, why did Steve Thomas write a blog post linking directly to that page saying he wasn't on it? Vulnerabilities that devastate the security of Cryptocat earn a blog post. Vulnerabilities in TLS that are far less critical than this one are career-making. But there's a key difference between TLS and Cryptocat: the whole world is working on TLS security. Vulnerabilities are found semi-routinely in TLS, which was designed by several of the smartest crypto people in the world. When was the last cryptographic vulnerability discovered in any mainstream implementation of PGP? I feel bad for the team that worked on this (although I stand by my belief that they shouldn't be working on it), but this is an extremely aggravating statement. Cryptocat is not any different from any of the other notable privacy, encryption and security projects, in which vulnerabilities get pointed out on a regular basis and are fixed.
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