Politics

File-sharing was firmly on the agenda when the head of the US Department of Homeland Security touched down in the Australian capital last week. The four new agreements — promptly signed before Secretary Janet Napolitano flew back out of Canberra — were less about sharing season two of Game of Thrones and more about sharing the private, government held information of Australian citizens with US authorities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Now that The Pirate Bay is being blocked by ISPs in the UK, millions of people have a new interest in accessing the site, even if they didn’t before. The reasons for this are simple. Not only do people hate being told what they can and can’t do, people — especially geeks — love solving problems and puzzles. Unlocking The Pirate Bay with a straightforward proxy is just too boring, so just for fun let’s go the hard way round — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.

Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.

The timeline of the activity tracks USA TODAY’s reporting on the military’s information operations program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticised even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Maryland on Monday became the first state in the nation to ban employers from requesting access to the social media accounts of employees and job applicants.

The state’s General Assembly passed legislation that would prohibit employers from requiring or seeking user names, passwords or any other means of accessing personal Internet sites such as Facebook as a condition of employment — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An outspoken supporter of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning has won the right to sue the federal government over a border search-and-seizure that agents conducted in 2010 after his return to the US from a Mexico vacation.

David Maurice House, an MIT researcher, was granted the right to pursue a case against the government on Wednesday after a federal judge denied the government’s motion to dismiss.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit in May 2011 on House’s behalf, charging that he had been targeted solely for his lawful association with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

This ruling affirms that the Constitution is still alive at the US border, ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump said in a statement. Despite the government’s broad assertions that it can take and search any laptop, diary or smartphone without any reasonable suspicion, the court said the government cannot use that power to target political speech — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Labor Government is tightening up Australian law in areas that will have a direct impact on organisations such as WikiLeaks. Only the Greens are challenging the new bills in parliament, and they are receiving scant media attention.

There’s a new extradition law that will make it easier for foreign governments to request extradition of Australians and a new spying law that broadens ASIO’s reach, which has been dubbed the WikiLeaks Amendment.

And finally there’s a bill that will make it easier to retain digital data for Australians, and easier also to pass that information to overseas law enforcement agencies. Senator Scott Ludlam, the Greens’ spokesperson for communications, told New Matilda that the Attorney-General wants all digital records for all people for all time to be trapped and recorded so that intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and welfare agencies can mine the data.

The new extradition law contains elements that make it easier for foreign governments to request that people be extradited from Australia. The new federal law also enables people to be prosecuted in Australia for alleged crimes overseas — via redwolf.newsvine.com