Joris van Hoboken

Chris Soghoian’s research about law enforcement access to customer records in the United States, made it to the Cobert Report:

This is a really great lecture! Julie Cohen manages to touch upon almost everything I am interested in, in about half an hour.

A few weeks ago I gave a short interview on RFID, privacy and the Big Brother Award for the Dutch citizen in 2007. The video is posted here (the third video, titled ‘Le citoyen européen sous surveillance’ (by Florence Morice).

In 2006, the AOL data release sparked the debate about search user privacy. Now two Dutch artists have made a movie inspired by the search queries of one of the users. The public broadcasting agency VPRO is funding a sequel, in which they hope to find user 711391.

You are about to access a Department of Homeland Security computer system. This computer system and data therein are property of the U.S. Government and provided for official U.S. Government information and use.  There is no expectation of privacy when you use this computer system.

Opening lines of pop up from ESTA.

And yeah sure, it’s all great

Yes, the term extension is moving forward… The JURI Committee approved the term extension today (and extended its scope it seems). From its report:

“The extended term would also benefit the record producers.”

The Open Rights Group is trying to bring some sense into the discussion:

In half an hour, the Berkman Center is hosting a talk on Child Safety Online. There is a live webcast and the video will be made available on their website. The Berkman Center has recently finished a big study on Online Child Safety (It participated in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force). The speakers include John Palfrey, danah boyd and Dena T. Sacco.

Earlier today, the European Parliament adopted a recommendation to the Council (here is the report), in the context of child abuse, exploitation and pornography. The recommendation calls for new measures that would affect criminal liability on the Internet and of online services. It asks for the:

criminalisation of providers of paedophile chat rooms or Internet paedophile fora

measures to ensure that the Member States, in the context of a comprehensive strategy of international diplomatic, administrative and law enforcement cooperation, take appropriate steps to have illegal child abuse materials taken offline at source, thereby giving victims maximum protection, and work with Internet providers to disable websites which are used to commit, or to advertise the possibility of committing, offences established in accordance with the Framework Decision;

allowing the national enforcement agencies to require Internet providers to block access to websites which are used to commit, or to advertise the possibility of committing, offences established in accordance with the Framework Decision and, if they fail to do so, to require the deletion of the registered domain names which are used for those purposes;

And finally, IAPP reports about the real life implications of (alleged) criminal liability of online service providers. Peter Fleisscher, Google’s global privacy council, will appear in Italian court this week on criminal charges of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data.

My passport expires next week. I will have to get a new one, unfortunately a new Dutch passport with an RFID chip. Maybe the people responsible for that decision should have the information on the chip tattooed on their forehead. RFID chips in identity documents were, are and will remain a very bad idea.

Here is Chris Paget explaining some of his concerns:

I found this video quite enjoyable. Towards the end, in the Q&A, he is asked to address Google’s “do no evil” motto.

In his piece for Google 10 year anniversary Google watcher Danny Sullivan says: “Google is a habit, a good habit that no one feels a need to kick.”

I was interviewed for a 10 year Google piece (in Dutch) by Vrij Nederland’s Maurits Martijn, in which Jos de Mul asserts: “Google sucks. Google sucks life.”

This recent article on Google by Geert Lovink is also worth a read. He describes the rise of Google in this way:

“The World Wide Web, which should have realized the infinite library Borges described in his short story The Library of Babel (1941), is seen by many of its critics as nothing but a variation of Orwell’s Big Brother (1948). The ruler, in this case, has turned from an evil monster into a collection of cool youngsters whose corporate responsibility slogan is “Don’t be evil”. Guided by a much older and experienced generation of IT gurus (Eric Schmidt), Internet pioneers (Vint Cerf) and economists (Hal Varian), Google has expanded so fast, and in such a wide variety of fields, that there is virtually no critic, academic or business journalist who has been able to keep up with the scope and speed with which Google developed in recent years.”

To help us see he bright side of that expansion, Google itself made a nice cute website.