Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data
Jonathan Penney, the Cyberlaw Fellow at Victoria University gave a public talk about the idea of "internet as a right" and whether there is any basis for this in current New Zealand law.
He started by looking at s14 of the 1990 Bill of Rights Act. This is about freedom of expression:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.
Internet filtering update
Update on internet filtering including which ISPs will filter, more information from the DIA, and links to the Australian anti-filtering campaign.
A Week of ACTA
It's going to be a week of ACTA in Wellington, New Zealand.
- On Saturday (April 10th) we have PublicACTA organised by InternetNZ. It's a chance for people who oppose ACTA to get together and discuss how to stop it. Guest speakers include Canadian law professor Michael Geist and Australian academic Kim Weatherall.
- Then, the following week (April 12-16th) there's the latest round of the official ACTA negotiations.
Why we oppose ACTA
- We oppose the attempt to take away people's rights (due process, freedom of speech, right to own and use property) in an attempt to protect the business models of the big media and pharmaceutical industries.
- We oppose the secrecy around the ACTA negotiations. Democratic societies should debate their laws in public.
- We oppose the way that the ACTA treaty is an attempt to legislate by treaty, avoiding the normal democratic process in each of the participating countries.
Tech Liberty articles about ACTA
- ACTA and the New Copyright Deal
- ACTA - The NZ Official Information Act Requests
- Media Release: New Zealand has no place in anti-democratic ACTA negotiations
- IP: Singing from the Same Songbook
- Tech Liberty's submission to the Ministry of Economic Development about digital enforcement in ACTA.
Submission about Digital Enforcement Provisions in ACTA
The Ministry of Economic Development asked for submissions about the Digital Enforcement Provisions in the ACTA treaty.
While we object to New Zealand's participation in the treaty, we still thought it was worthwhile to respond. The full text follows (headings correspond to those in the request for submissions), but the 8 recommendations we made are:
- The ACTA treaty should note that ISPs are not liable for the actions of their users.
- That ACTA includes a "notice and counter-notice" regime where complainants can pay ISPs to deliver a notice to the account holder for an IP address at a particular time, and the ISP can pass responses back to the complainant.
- That ACTA specifies that complainants should be able to obtain the identity of a user from the ISP only after a court order has been obtained.
- That ACTA makes no attempt to encourage mutually supportive relationships between ISPs and rights holders.
- That ACTA should recognise that anti-TPM measures have a useful and lawful purpose.
- That ACTA should insist that participating countries allow consumer rights-holders the right to create, buy and use anti-TPM software and devices if these are used for lawful purposes.
- That ACTA should forbid the use of TPMs that limit the reasonable and customary rights of people to enjoy the use of the rights that they have purchased or otherwise legally obtained, unless the supplier also undertakes to provide unprotected versions when required.
- That ACTA should not include enforcement measures concerning the removal or modification of copyright management information.
Five New Things About ACTA
With the leak of the full text of ACTA, complete with every nuance of positions by the various countries involved, we have the first full and complete picture of what our government is up to.
Here's five things we learnt from reading the treaty.
Department of Internal Affairs failing on open government
Last week we announced that the New Zealand internet filter had "gone live" and was now being used to filter the connections for users of two ISPs (Watchdog and Maxnet), with more expected to follow.
The obvious question has to be, why was Tech Liberty announcing something that the Department of Internal Affairs had done? Where was their announcement that the filter had gone live on the 1st of February? Don't civil servants have a duty to communicate to the people that they serve?
Guest article: Security risks of centralised filtering
We'd like to welcome our first guest author, Gerard Creamer. He's written an article that explains some of the security risks inherent in implementing a centralised filtering system. It's a little more technical than most of the articles we publish; we hope you find it interesting.
Media release: NZ government now filtering internet
The Department of Internal Affairs has admitted that the internet filter is now operational and is already being used by ISPs Maxnet and Watchdog. It appears that Maxnet have not told their customers that they are diverting some of their internet traffic to the government system to be filtered.
Thomas Beagle, spokesperson for Tech Liberty, "We're very disappointed that the filter is now running, it's a sad day for the New Zealand internet."
New Zealand’s government internet filter is already running
One of the big questions about the implementation of internet filtering in New Zealand has been ... when? We've made a number of Official Information Act requests to the Department of Internal Affairs and the answer has always been "in the next couple of months".
In a letter written on January the 20th, the DIA told us that they will be making an announcement regarding the implementation of the filter "in the near future". Well over a month later there has been no announcement.
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Recent Posts
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- Report on public talk: Open Connectivity, Open Data
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Dissent, the internet and freedom
Tech Liberty was formed because a group of us were concerned that governments were ignoring traditional civil liberties when it came to new technology. The New Zealand government had recently passed a digital copyright law that would see people punished without due process and were secretly introducing a new internet censorship regime. We decided that we needed to stick up for the civil liberties that underpin our democracy and keep our society healthy.
A recent article by Rob Weir does a good job of articulating what drives us. In How to Crush Dissent, he compares distributing information on the internet to the samizdat underground presses in the Eastern Bloc. He fears that our current anarchic level of information freedom could be temporary: