The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data was opened for signature on 28 January 1981 and is still today the only binding international treaty in this field. It is open to any country, and has the potential to become a global standard. The 47 member states of the Council of Europe and Mauritius, Senegal, Tunisia, Uruguay are Parties to it, while Argentina, Burkina Faso, Cap Verde, Mexico and Morocco have been invited to accede to the Convention.
The treaty establishes a number of principles for states to transpose into their domestic legislation to ensure notably that data are processed through procedures set for by law, for a specific purpose, that data are stored for no longer than is necessary for the intended purpose, and that are not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are stored.
An additional protocol requires each party to establish an independent authority to ensure compliance with data protection principles, and lays down rules on transborder data flows to non Parties.
in a syllabus from June 2017, The Supreme Court of the USA underlines the importance of the internet in relation to the first amendment to the US constitution. The internet's forums are decribed as "what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge."
Review of Yasha Levine's book Surveillance Valley. The secret military history of the Internet. " It tells a story about Silicon Valley that really isn’t told enough, and it points out some really unpleasant – but, alas, all too true – aspects of the technology that we have all come to depend on. Google, the “cool” and “progressive” do-good-company, in fact a military contractor that helps American drones kill children in Yemen and Afghanistan? As well as a partner in predictive policing and a collector of surveillance data that the NSA may yet try to use to control enemy populations in a Cybernetics War 2.0? The Tor Project as paid shills of the belligerent US foreign policy? And the Internet itself, that supposedly liberating tool, was originally conceived as a surveillance and control mechanism?"
2018
Amazon is the leading cloud provider for the United States intelligence community. In 2013, Amazon entered into a $600 million contract with the CIA to build a cloud for use by intelligence agencies working with information classified as Top Secret. Then, in 2017, Amazon announced the AWS Secret Region, which allows storage of data classified up to the Secret level by a broader range of agencies and companies. Amazon also operates a special GovCloud region for US Government agencies hosting unclassified information.
Ethan Zuckerman: My friends at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia have just published a new paper from me on the topic of digital public infrastructures. This is an idea I started talking about in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review late last year, and presented at a terrific conference called “The Tech Giants, Monopoly Power, and Public Discourse”.
Petra Sorge, Cicero Weltbühne 15 Maj 2014: "Indeed, Edward Snowden would not have been able to escape his Russian asylum in order to go to Stockholm. However, his invitation would have been a symbol. With a little imagination the hosts could have included him anyway. The German NSA parliamentary committee is currently discussing a video interrogation. Snowden has already answered questions posed by the European Council via a live broadcast; that was also the way he chose to spoke to participants of a tech festival in Texas. Sweden could also have allowed Snowden’s confidantes to speak for him. That’s what other hosts of large computer and internet conferences have recently done. The Net Mundial in São Paulo, Brazil, chose a live broadcast with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, hacker Jacop Appelbaum was there personally. The Chaos Communication Congress had Glenn Greenwald speaking via video. Appelbaum and Harrison spoke there too, as well as at Berlin’s re:publica."
By Jeremy Hsu, Posted 14 Mar 2014 "We should be more concerned about bullets than bytes at this time," Bumgarner says" "Hacker groups will do what they will outside of government control. But the Georgia incident and the more recent Ukrainian incident suggest that Russia has shown great restraint in its strategic use of cyber attacks, Bumgarner says."
Cognitive Design 2005 @mprove Technological Dreams & Nightmares – An Outlook To The (Near) Future Hermann Maurer, Professor at the Technical University of Graz, Director IICM & Chairman Hyperwave Inc. Memory, Plato etc ca 23 min into the video "what we really have to think about is not how we learn but whnhat we should learn" "we are on very shake grounds
Sweden will soon hold the Stockholm Internet Forum to discuss global development and global surveillance. The forum will open on 26 May and will be held in the famed Stadshuset, site of the annual Nobel banquet. The motto of the conference will be 'Internet Freedom for Global Development'.
Netnod manages i.root-servers.net, one of the 13 logical Internet DNS root name servers. i.root-servers.net was the first DNS root server to be established outside the USA. (Today there are also DNS root servers operating from Amsterdam and Tokyo.) It has changed configurations a number of times during the years from its humble beginnings as a Sun 3/60 with 4MB RAM.
Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda Jeff Jarvis: Washington shows the morals of a clumsy spammer Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain The Guardian, Thursday 17 March 2011 "The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East."