Big Brother 2009: Has the rebellion started?

A lot of legislation and surveillance measures have appeared these last years that endanger the civil rights and liberties of the people. Measure like the EU Dataretention, internet filtering or the three strike law (for example in France: HADOPI) are all measures that are starting to make me shiver.

Are we slowly evolving to a censorship system akin to the Chinese Great Firewall? A lot of these measures are implemented either to combat child pornography or terrorism. But is it the right way? What are we sacrificing?

More and more awareness about this issue is being raised and more projects have started to circumvent censorship of any kind. The CCC already had Tor on a stick called the Freedom stick for the people in China and other repressive states.

Some of the internet filters are based on DNS filters which can easily be bypassed by setting up your own DNS server or using OpenDNS, a freely available DNS service.

Two recent projects have arisen as a protest against Dataretention and the three strike law respectively: Smallsister.org and the HADOPI router firmware (boingboing.net).

Smallsister is aimed at anonymizing email:

At this point one issue has caught our immediate attention and that is data retention. This legal tools forces Telephony and Internet Service Providers to store information on their users. For instance who is behind an Internet-address or a telephone number. Not only that it also requires to register who tried to call whom and who has been e-mail whom. For users that would mean that certain things can’t be secret anymore. For instance: a whistle blower should go through a great pain to reach a journalist to break a story that would correct wrong. Or what about a company that tries to do a deal and fears to be frustrated by a foreign government that would pass information on to a local, competing company (as happened with Airbus and Boeing for instance). We intend to do something about that. So we look at anomizing e-mail. (source: smallsister.org)

The HADOPI router is aimed at proving that an IP address is not a good identifier to link to people. Law cases of the RIAA suing people that didn't even own a computer proved that case quite well. Although I'm a bit divided by the method that the HADOPI firmware uses (cracking wireless keys) and re-routing packets through the routers of neighbours. (update here) It does prove a point that laws shouldn't be used to fix broken business models.

So are governments starting an uphill battle about control of the internet? I know only one thing, if kids can bypass school filters by using DNS VPNs and anonymous proxies, people will find a way to bypass this as well.

How can we educate governments that this is the wrong way?

(sarcasm) Yes, we are living in a world where people using linux are found to be suspicous! (/sarcasm) Click the link, it's a real story!

Related posts:

• Privacy matters: A movie by XS4ALL to raise user awareness to data surveillance
• ENISA's New Paper: "Inside the matrix: Privacy & data protection challenges".
• Dress good! Google Streetview driving around in Belgium.
• ENISA releases paper on Security and Privacy in online games and social and corporate virtual worlds
• Skype backdoor speculation and Data surveillance of today
• FBI Wiretapping: Just point and click
• China's golden shield, a citizen mass surveillance system
• The dangers of social networking and some countermeasures
• German ID card won't include fingerprints
• Billion pound UK CCTV solves 3% of crimes. Efficient?
• When technology takes over our life
• Airport Security: All your data are belong to us
• Dutch government wants fingerprints of every dutchman in national database
• Wikileaks releases details on German police Trojan
• EU might decide that an IP is personal information

(Photo under creative commons from dolescum's photostream)