Politics

British computer hacker Gary McKinnon will not be extradited to the US, Home Secretary Theresa May has announced.

Mr McKinnon, 46, who admits accessing US government computers but claims he was looking for evidence of UFOs, has been fighting extradition since 2002.

The home secretary told MPs there was no doubt Mr McKinnon was seriously ill and the extradition warrant against him should be withdrawn.

Mrs May said the sole issue she had to consider was his human rights.

She said it was now for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, to decide whether he should face trial in the UK — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Back in August, I urged people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft Communications Bill, aka Snooper’s Charter. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in doing that: many organisations concerned about the impact on civil liberties in this country have done the same. For example, both 38 Degrees and Open Rights Group (ORG) provided suggested texts and asked people to contact the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been considering the Bill – and doing rather a good job of it, I must say.

Out of 19,000 emails received by the Committee on the subject of the proposed Draft Communications Bill, not a single one was in favour of it, or even agreed with its premise. Has there ever been a bill so universally rejected by the public in a consultation? Clearly, it must be thrown out completely — via redwolf.newsvine.com

It is the most important meeting you’ve never heard of — a behind-closed-doors battle for control of the internet that one of the web’s founders fears may put government handcuffs on the net.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations organisation representing 193 countries, is reviewing international agreements governing telecommunications with a view to expanding its regulatory authority over the internet.

The ITU will hold a summit in Dubai in December where member countries will negotiate a treaty (last updated 24 years ago in Melbourne) that sets out regulations on how international voice, data and video traffic is handled — via redwolf.newsvine.com

One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we’ve (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society — one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. his is a hugely valuable thing, and it’s why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don’t upset the apple cart of copyright, before they’re allowed to exist. I’m not joking. Mr Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case (pdf).

As you hopefully recall, Aereo is the online TV service, backed by Barry Diller, that sets you up with your very own physical TV antenna on a rooftop in Brooklyn, connected to a device that will then stream to you online what that antenna picks up. This ridiculously convoluted setup is an attempt to route around the ridiculous setup of today’s copyright law — something that Oman was intimately involved in creating with the 1976 Copyright Act. The TV networks sued Aereo, but were unable to get an injunction blocking the service. Oman’s amicus brief seeks to have that ruling overturned, and argues that an injunction is proper.

But he goes much further than that in his argument, even to the point of claiming that with the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress specifically intended new technologies to first apply to Congress for permission, before releasing new products on the market that might upset existing business models — via redwolf.newsvine.com

When Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Tony Negus told a parliamentary hearing yesterday that he would ideally like telecommunications customer data kept indefinitely, it was clear that he was engaged in bargaining with the government.

We would like to have it indefinitely, and if we had [our way], we would definitely like to see this held indefinitely, and then we can go back and reconstruct issues or crime scene events that happened many, many years ago. But we understand that is not practical in the context of costs associated with that, he told the committee.

He revealed that the AFP and other law enforcement agencies had asked the Attorney-General’s Department to keep so-called telecommunications metadata for longer — between five and seven years — but the department said that two years was more appropriate, given the privacy concerns and costs associated with implementing the changes. When the government released its discussion paper on the telecommunications reform proposals earlier this year, the backlash to even two years was strong.

Since then, telecommunications companies have flagged that — based on the European experience with data retention — six months is a more appropriate length of time to retain the data — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hoping to curb the ever-increasing piracy figures in Portugal, local anti-piracy outfit ACAPOR reported the IP-addresses of 2,000 alleged file-sharers to the Attorney General last year. This week the Portuguese prosecutor came back with a ruling and decided not to go after the individuals connected to the IP-addresses. According to the prosecutor it is not against the law to share copyrighted works for personal use, and an IP-address is not enough evidence to identify a person — via TorrentFreak

New Zealand authorities have informed the nation’s High Court that individuals at the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrantsin the case of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload service.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key issued a statement saying, in part, that “The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.” That information is said to have led to the arrests of some involved in the case.

Key has also announced an inquiry into the GCSB’s role. The statement says the inquiry will be conducted by New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Paul Neazor, whose role is spelled out here — via redwolf.newsvine.com

One of Australia’s most prominent conservative and free market-focused think tanks has published a strongly worded critique damning the Federal Government’s planned telecommunications surveillance and data retention reform package as excessive and systematically breaching Australians’ right to privacy.

The Institute of Public Affairs is an independent, non-profit organisation which describes itself as supporting the traditional ideals of liberalism, being the free flow of ideas, free markets and capital flows, small government, representative democracy and so on. It is usually referred to by commentators as being associated with the conservative side of politics in Australia, but also often espouses more traditional liberal ideals which neither major side of Australian politics openly supports.

The Federal Attorney-General’s Department is currently promulgating a package of reforms which would see a number of wide-ranging changes made to make it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor what Australians are doing on the Internet. For example, one new power is a data retention protocol which would require ISPs to retain data on their customers’ Internet and telephone activities for up to two years, and changes which would empower agencies to source data on users’ activities on social networking sites — via redwolf.newsvine.com