Time and time again it turns out that terrorists have been known to authorities before their attacks.
In the tragic Manchester case, there had been numerous reports on the perpetrator. But these warnings were ignored. (This also happened under PM Theresa Mays watch as UK Secretary of State for the Home Department.)
Dear all,
Please take notice that the G7 meeting just decided to beef up censorship and control of the Internet.
If you make censorship possible at all – sooner or later it will be used by sinister minds.
Please – do not limit the freedom of speech. We cannot silence or put people in prison, simply because we do not agree with whatever they are saying. (Unless they are a direct threat to other people’s immediate security. And if so, only after a fair trial respecting fundamental human rights.)
In the EU, member states are pressing on for censorship of online video:
European Union ministers have approved proposals to make social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube tackle videos with hate speech on their platforms.
The proposals, which would be the first legislation at EU level on the issue, still need to be agreed with the European Parliament before becoming law.
And, under the same scheme, there is a totally unrelated proposal for cultural protectionism:
This bill asks social media companies to take down content, including perfectly legal material, that social media companies like Facebook can arbitrarily label as “hate speech”, “fake news”, “pornographic content”, among other categories. In addition, the draft law de facto imposes filtering of content, despite the fact that such technology cannot understand context and will, therefore, inevitably lead to still more legal content being deleted. The basic aim of the bill is, of course, well-intentioned.
“Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet,” it states. “We disagree.”
The Independent: Theresa May to Crete New Internet that would be Controlled and Regulated by Government »
UK Prime Minister and noted authoritarian Theresa May has promised that if she wins the upcoming general election, her party will abolish internet access in the UK, replacing it with a government-monitored internet where privacy tools are banned and online services will be required to vet all user-supplied content for compliance with rules about pornography, political speech, copyright compliance and so on — and search engines will have to employ special British rules to exclude banned material from their search results.
The President of the European Commission said in 2010: “The oath of independence and respect for the EU Treaties is more than a symbolic act”. As it turned out, it was not even a symbolic act.
Joe McNamee, EDRi: Commissioners’ oath – a broken promise on fundamental rights »
Something remarkable happened in Sweden this week: a list of 15,000 people with the wrong political opinions was used to block those people from the @Sweden account, and thereby preventing these people from communicating over Twitter with that part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The government tried defending the block as only concerning neo-nazi right-wing extremists, which was a narrative that held water in legacy media until somebody pointed out that the Ambassador of Israel (!) was among the blocked.
The Swedish special prosecutor has decided to close the investigation into sexual misconduct against Wikileaks editor in chief Julian Assange.
First of all, the case in itself was remarkably thin. Second, Assange has never been charged with any crime. The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) was issued to question him. Such an interview was conducted last November. So, reasonably, the EAW have lost its function.
So, now… what?
The annual German Big Brother Awards were bestowed by EDRi member Digitalcourage on 5 May 2017 in Bielefeld, Germany. The event drew much media attention, as one of the awardees threatened the organiser with legal action. (…)
The awardee in the “Politics” category was the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB). Imams at DİTİB – with ties to the Turkish government and its secret service MİT – are said to have conducted political espionage on DİTİB members and visitors, exposing them to persecution by the Turkish state.
