New Laws Target Wikileaks

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28 March 2012
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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

For Pennsylvania’s Doctors, a Gag Order on Fracking Chemicals

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28 March 2012
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Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction — but they won’t be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will “gag” doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Brazilian schools microchip T-shirts to cut truancy

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23 March 2012
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Schools in Brazil have started to place computer chips in school uniforms to keep track of pupils and reduce truancy.

Some 20,000 pupils in the north-eastern city of Vitoria da Conquista will have microchips embedded in their school T-shirts.

The parents will get a text message when their children arrive at school, or if they are late for classes.

The authorities say the measure will help teacher-parent relations — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hobbit pub copyright row: Stephen Fry and Ian McKellen to pay licence

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23 March 2012
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Stephen Fry has confirmed he and Sir Ian McKellen will pay a copyright licence fee so a Southampton pub can carry on trading as The Hobbit.

The pub was threatened with legal action by Hollywood film firm the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) which accused it of copyright infringement.

It later offered to resolve the dispute over the pub’s name and decor by licensing it to use JRR Tolkien brands.

Landlady Stella Roberts said she had been shocked by the actors’ offer — via BBC News

Dutch Roman Catholic church ‘castrated’ boys in 1950s

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22 March 2012
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Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said.

A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported.

The justice minister is investigating the role of the government at the time.

Last year, an inquiry found thousands of children had been sexually abused in Dutch Catholic institutions since 1945.

Dutch MPs called for an inquiry after the report was published in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper at the weekend — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Student arrested for filming buildings wins police payout

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20 March 2012
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An Italian student has won an out-of-court settlement with police after she was stopped under anti-terrorist legislation while filming buildings in London, and later arrested, held in a cell for five hours and then fined.

Simona Bonomo filmed the moment she was approached by two police community support officers (PCSOs) in Paddington, west London, and later gave the footage to the Guardian.

The video, which went viral, showed one of the officers — PSCO Thomas Cooke — question the art student about why she was filming buildings iconic to us and demand to see images on her camera. In doing so he claimed to have powers that he did not have.

He and another PCSO then departed, only to return with other police officers who accused Bonomo, 34, of being aggressive. She was bundled to the ground and arrested — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Nazi looted poster art must be returned to Peter Sachs

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17 March 2012
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A Jewish man has won his fight against a German museum for the return of thousands of rare posters stolen from his father by the Nazis in 1938.

Berlin’s Federal Court of Justice ruled Peter Sachs, who now lives in the US, is the rightful owner of the posters.

The judges said that not returning the posters would perpetuate Nazi injustice.

I can’t describe what this means to me on a personal level, Peter Sachs said — via BBC News

Council bans daughter contact over child images

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8 March 2012
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A man who informed police when he found child abuse images on his computer has not been allowed to be alone with his daughter for four months.

Nigel Robinson from Hull said he called police after trying to download music but instead finding pornographic images on his laptop last November.

As a result social services said he should not have unsupervised access with his own or other children.

He said he was totally innocent. No arrests or charges have been made — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hollywood will regret the Dotcom trial

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7 March 2012
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Big Hollywood and the US government may think that by closing down Megaupload, they will have thwarted the alleged piracy problem.

But as Kim Dotcom says in his interview, much demand stems from people wanting the latest US movies or TV programs now, as opposed to typically waiting months for it.

Furthermore, there are similar sites offering the same or related content that Megaupload.com did, including sites in the US that are unmolested by the FBI.

Like a many-headed hydra, if you cut off one head, others will take its place.

The US authorities are fighting a losing battle, especially since digital downloads seem the way of the entertainment future — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Pet industry collars dodgy puppy farms

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7 March 2012
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Australia’s pet industry is vowing to clean up its act and stamp out puppy farms which do not guarantee the welfare of their animals.

From today, accredited pet stores will only sell puppies from approved breeders.

Pet Industry Association of Australia chief executive Roger Perkins says it is hard to know how many unapproved puppy breeders are operating in Australia — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Man From Degban, He Say, ‘Um… it wasn’t us, honest!’

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6 March 2012
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Unfortunately, on February 17th this year, Flickr — who are owned by Yahoo! — deleted the image from their servers. The page it was on disappeared… and with it, all the comments, favourites, and the record of its views disappeared too. That stuff matters only because I’m vain… but every blog that linked to it now has a broken link that goes nowhere and that matters because links are what make the internet the internet. With all those links broken, 6 years worth of photo-sharing has been undone.

I don’t have a beef with Flickr for deleting the image. They didn’t do so because they wanted to or because they were being bloody minded. They did it because they had to. By law. It’s down to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Sites like flickr — and yahoo, twitpic, youtube, yfrog, facebook, blogger, wordpress etc etc — allow their users to upload content. If they were held responsible for every bit of content on their sites the way a print publisher is responsible for the content of their magazines/newspapers etc then they simply couldn’t function. To avoid being sued for breach of copyright they would have to check each bit of content before publishing it. Which is impossible. (There are more than 6 billion pictures on flickr already… who’d look through them all and how would they check who owned the copyright?)

So instead of being responsible for them they abide by the terms of the DMCA. Which means that when someone else sends them a legal notice saying that their copyright has been breached they have to take it at face value and remove the content. No questions asked. It gets deleted. They don’t have to check to see if it makes sense — in many cases it would be impossible to know anyway – they just have to delete the content — via redwolf.newsvine.com

State court system grants bloggers same courtroom photography access as MSM

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5 March 2012
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The Supreme Judicial Court this week approved a new rule that for the first time will let citizen journalists photograph trials and other court proceedings on a routine basis.

The new rule, which takes effect 1 July, will let people who fall under a new, broader definition of news media to register with the court system for photography access to courtrooms. They’ll have to sign a statement agreeing to certain conditions (for example, no photographs of jurors) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Judge rules eavesdropping law unconstitutional

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5 March 2012
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A Cook County judge today ruled the state’s controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional.

The law makes it a felony offence to make audio recordings of police officers without their consent even when they’re performing their public duties.

Judge Stanley Sacks, who is assigned to the Criminal Courts Building, found the eavesdropping law unconstitutional because it potentially criminalises wholly innocent conduct –via redwolf.newsvine.com

Conroy misleads public on Internet filter

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29 February 2012
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Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today appeared to consciously tell a factual inaccuracy with respect to the current implementation status of Labor’s controversial Internet filtering project, stating that Telstra and Optus had implemented the mandatory filtering system, when they have only implemented a drastically reduced voluntary version.

In a press conference this afternoon with Prime Minister Julia Gillard televised live nationally, Conroy was asked whether he was still philosophically committed to the Internet filter project, and whether it would be implemented during the current term of government, or the next. The full transcript is available online here.

Well, two companies, in fact three companies have already introduced it, he said. It may come as a great surprise to you that the internet hasn’t slowed down or collapsed. Telstra and Optus and a small — apologies to the third company — have introduced the filter.

However, as Conroy is aware, no Australian Internet service provider has implemented the Internet filtering system which remains the current policy of the Federal Government — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Employee had ‘mental capacity of 13-year-old’ says guilty manager

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28 February 2012
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A retail manager who deliberately underpaid an adult employee $30,000 — saying he had the mental capacity of a 13-year-old and didn’t deserve the full amount — has been fined $11,500.

The Fair Work Ombudsman took action against Maria Doherty, who formerly managed and part-owned the Garfield Berry Farm Store in Gippsland, after she underpaid the casual employee by $31,040 between December 2006 and June 2009.

The male staff member, in his 20s, was paid $10.79 to $12.78 an hour, but entitled to almost twice that rate.
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When inspectors raised the problem with Doherty, they were told he had the mental capacity of a 13-year-old and was not worth $17 or $18 an hour,‘ Federal Magistrate Heather Riley said during the court judgment last Friday — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Social worker tells of forced adoptions

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27 February 2012
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A former social worker has told how she was instructed to actively encourage young unmarried mothers to give up their babies for adoption at a Sydney hospital in the 1970s.

The woman, who wishes to be known only as Jan, was a trainee social worker at Sydney’s Royal Hospital For Women when it was run by the Benevolent Society in 1972.

She has told ABC1’s Four Corners she has always felt awful about her part in pressuring young unmarried women 40 years ago.

Basically my job was to shut them up, stop them crying, get them to realise that giving up their baby was the best thing that they could do and get on with it, she said.

Jan says it was made clear to her by her superiors that adoption was the only message to be delivered to unmarried mothers.

I was one of the people who was involved with telling the girls that if they kept their baby they were being selfish. They were being selfish to the baby and selfish to the adopting parents who really wanted to have a child, she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lucy Lawless in Greenpeace arrest

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27 February 2012
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Actress Lucy Lawless has been arrested, along with five other Greenpeace activists in Port Taranaki, New Zealand.

The arrests end a 77-hour protest at the top of a 53m drilling tower on Shell oil exploration ship the Noble Discoverer.

Protesters boarded the Arctic-bound ship and scaled the drilling tower on Friday morning, locking the access ladder to barricade themselves.

The protesters hung banners from the drilling derrick reading Stop Shell and #SaveTheArctic.

This chapter has ended, but the story of the battle to save the Arctic has just begun, said Lawless, before being arrested.

Seven of us climbed up that drillship to stop Arctic drilling, but 133,000 of us came down — via redwolf.newsvine.com

HR 1981: SOPA Author Lamar Smith’s New Internet Surveillance Bill Intensifies Threats to Online Privacy

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22 February 2012
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Following the massive world-wide protests over the Internet in January, the infamous SOPA and PIPA are mostly dead with the author Lamar Smith saying he won’t take the bill up in committee until a wider agreement on a solution is reached.

While people have been celebrating the victory over SOPA and PIPA, here’s what has managed to slip by relatively unobserved, until now.

A bill, titled HR 1981, Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, is being sponsored by Lamar Smith and is considered to be a wide-ranging Internet surveillance bill with many other domineering attempts by the government to invade privacy and control the Internet.

According to David Seaman, a prominent new media advocate, the bill has been named thus so that politicians in the House and Senate are strong-armed into voting for it, even though it contains utterly insane 1984-style Big Brother surveillance provisions — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Name changes outlawed for NSW criminals

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21 February 2012
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New laws will be introduced to the New South Wales Parliament this week which will prevent serious criminals from changing their names to escape detection.

Attorney-General Greg Smith says the state’s Registry of Births, Death and Marriages will be sent an alert list of serious offenders, such as murderers and rapists.

Mr Smith says under the current laws there is nothing to prevent such criminals from securing a new identity.

If they have a criminal record they’re supposed to indicate that on the form, but a lot of them just ignored that and they got through, he said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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