Politics

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to push for tougher European laws to protect personal information on the internet.

In a TV interview with the public broadcaster ARD, she said Germany wanted internet companies to tell us in Europe who they are giving data to.

Her comments follow revelations about a US spying operation that collects users’ data from internet companies.

Mrs Merkel also said she expected the US to abide by German law.

Tensions have been running high between the two countries following reports that the US has been eavesdropping on EU and German officials.

I expect a clear commitment from the US government that in future they will stick to German law, she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In Australia now, the anti-Islamic Australian Defence League is trying to expand its support base, particularly through social media.

A group against Islam and Islamic immigration. We are against those who worship a so-called Prophet (who) in his own words, raped, murdered, enslaved people and worse. He was a coward and a paedophile.

That is how the Australian Defence League describes itself on its Facebook page.

The League goes on to say it is motivated by what it calls a love of country, promoting democracy and the rule of law, which it says it does by opposing sharia law.

And it says a central part of its mission is to ensure the public gets a balanced picture of Islam, claiming the political and media establishment offers a sanitised and inaccurate view.

Almost by default, because its name stems from the better-known English Defence League that has led anti-Islam rallies in Britain, the Australian Defence League is the face of Australian ultranationalism.

But is the Australian Defence League merely a Facebook presence?

Or is it a body that, like the English Defence League, could mount a presence on the streets?

Professor Greg Barton, from Monash University’s Global Terrorism Research Centre, suggests the answer lies somewhere in between — via redwolf.newsvine.com

France and Germany are urging the United States to come clean over claims that its intelligence services have been spying on key EU offices.

A report in Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said European Union offices in the US and Europe had been bugged.

Other targets included the French, Italian and Greek embassies in the US, according to leaked documents later mentioned by the Guardian newspaper.

Fugitive ex-CIA analyst Edward Snowden is said to be the source of the leaks.

Mr Snowden — who was also a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) — has since requested asylum in Ecuador. He is currently believed to be staying at Moscow’s airport — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Yesterday it was widely reported that the Federal Government had shelved its data retention plans, walking away from the controversial proposal to monitor all Australians’ communications. But the reality is the complete opposite: Data retention is still being actively considered as a policy and will shortly return to plague Australia once again.

If you believe most of Australia’s media outlets, yesterday the great multi-headed monster that is data retention was slayed by a cadre of victorious knights. Government shelves controversial data retention scheme, proclaimed The Age. Australian Government shelves data retention plans, wrote ZDNet. Govt shelves telco data retention scheme, added iTNews. Yup, there were plenty of footsoldiers waving flags in the air, their feet squarely planted on what they thought was the corpse of this long-reviled comprehensive surveillance project.

The only problem is, when you go back to the source material behind yesterday’s glorious proclamation and put it into context in terms of data retention’s wider history in Australia, it becomes clear that the project as a whole has only suffered a temporary setback in its progression at best, and that at worst, this week’s events have actually played right into its proponents’ hands. Things, if you’re a bureaucrat at the Attorney-General’s Department, are pretty much right on track.

The source of yesterday’s jubilation was two-fold. Firstly, the parliamentary committee which had been examining the data retention proposal as part of a much wider package of surveillance reforms, in a process known as the National Security Inquiry, had finally — at the last possible moment, in the last sitting week of the current Parliament — delivered a report into the proposed reforms, severely criticising the Attorney-General’s Department for its lack of transparency in developing the data retention policy, and recommending a wide range of transparency and accountability measures, as well as hard limits on its power, on the data retention idea — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The government has shelved a controversial plan to force Australian telecommunications companies, internet service providers and sites such as Facebook to collect metadata from Australian users and store it for two years.

The government had run out of time to push the plan through before the election, but, after a powerful parliamentary committee raised concerns about it, the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, confirmed more work was needed.

The government will not pursue a mandatory data retention regime at this time and will await further advice from the departments and relevant agencies and comprehensive consultation, he said in a statement.

As international debate rages about revelations in the Guardian regarding access by US and UK security agencies to the metadata of internet users, the joint intelligence and security committee report has urged any Australian government to exercise caution about plans to force metadata retention for potential use by security agencies — via redwolf.newsvine.com

This isn’t a huge surprise, but the Washington Post is reporting that US federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Edward Snowden charging him with espionage under the Espionage Act, along with theft and conversion of government property — and have asked Hong Kong authorities to detain him. Just this morning, we were discussing the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, prosecuting six different whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, twice the number of all other presidential administrations combined. Now we’re up to number seven apparently. Update: The complaint has been unsealed.

Did Snowden break the law? Possibly — but charging him with espionage is ridiculous, just as it has been ridiculous in many of these cases. Snowden wasn’t doing this to “aid the enemy” but to alert the American public to the things that the administration itself had been publicly misleading to downright untruthful about. His actions have kicked off an important discussion and debate over surveillance society and how far it has gone today. That’s not espionage. If he was doing espionage, he would have sold those secrets off to a foreign power and lived a nice life somewhere else. To charge him with espionage is insane — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The US National Security Agency (NSA) can retain communications of US citizens or residents potentially indefinitely if those communications are encrypted, according to a newly leaked secret government document.

The document describes the procedures used by the NSA to minimize data collection from US persons and is one of two documents published Thursday by UK-based newspaper The Guardian. The documents date from July 2009, were signed by US Attorney General Eric Holder and were approved by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the newspaper reported.

The documents state that the NSA is not allowed to intentionally target persons known to be located in the US, but describe several provisions under which the agency is allowed to retain, or share with other US agencies, communications of US persons that were acquired inadvertently. These include cases when the data is likely to contain foreign intelligence, information on criminal activity or is encrypted.

According to the document describing data collection minimisation procedures, foreign communications between a US person and a party located outside of the US that was collected during data acquisitions authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can be retained for cryptanalytic, traffic analysis, or signal exploitation purposes.

The retention of such communications is permitted for a period sufficient to allow a thorough exploitation and to permit access to data reasonably believed to be or become relevant to current or future foreign intelligence requirements — via redwolf.newsvine.com