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NEW DISSENT IN JAPAN IS LOUDLY ANTI-FOREIGN

28/8/2010- The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies. Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry. The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean Elementary School that shocked conflict-adverse Japan, where even political protesters on the radical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of the protesters this month on charges of damaging the school’s reputation. More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations. Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

Local news media have dubbed these groups the Net far right, because they are loosely organized via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are a virtual community that maintains its own Web sites to announce the times and places of protests, swap information and post video recordings of their demonstrations. While these groups remain a small if noisy fringe element here, they have won growing attention as an alarming side effect of Japan’s long economic and political decline. Most of their members appear to be young men, many of whom hold the low-paying part-time or contract jobs that have proliferated in Japan in recent years. Though some here compare these groups to neo-Nazis, sociologists say that they are different because they lack an aggressive ideology of racial supremacy, and have so far been careful to draw the line at violence. There have been no reports of injuries, or violence beyond pushing and shouting. Rather, the Net right’s main purpose seems to be venting frustration, both about Japan’s diminished stature and in their own personal economic difficulties.

“These are men who feel disenfranchised in their own society,” said Kensuke Suzuki, a sociology professor at Kwansei Gakuin University. “They are looking for someone to blame, and foreigners are the most obvious target.” They are also different from Japan’s existing ultranationalist groups, which are a common sight even today in Tokyo, wearing paramilitary uniforms and riding around in ominous black trucks with loudspeakers that blare martial music. This traditional far right, which has roots going back to at least the 1930s rise of militarism in Japan, is now a tacitly accepted part of the conservative political establishment here. Sociologists describe them as serving as a sort of unofficial mechanism for enforcing conformity in postwar Japan, singling out Japanese who were seen as straying too far to the left, or other groups that anger them, such as embassies of countries with whom Japan has territorial disputes. Members of these old-line rightist groups have been quick to distance themselves from the Net right, which they dismiss as amateurish rabble-rousers. “These new groups are not patriots but attention-seekers,” said Kunio Suzuki, a senior adviser of the Issuikai, a well-known far-right group with 100 members and a fleet of sound trucks. But in a sign of changing times here, Mr. Suzuki also admitted that the Net right has grown at a time when traditional ultranationalist groups like his own have been shrinking. Mr. Suzuki said the number of old-style rightists has fallen to about 12,000, one-tenth the size of their 1960s’ peak. No such estimates exist for the size of the new Net right. However, the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has some 9,000 members.

The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, demanding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More recently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing “The Cove,” an American documentary about dolphin hunting here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese. In interviews, members of the Zaitokukai and other groups blamed foreigners, particularly Koreans and Chinese, for Japan’s growing crime and unemployment, and also for what they called their nation’s lack of respect on the world stage. Many seemed to embrace conspiracy theories taken from the Internet that China or the United States were plotting to undermine Japan. “Japan has a shrinking pie,” said Masaru Ota, 37, a medical equipment salesman who headed the local chapter of the Zaitokukai in Omiya, a Tokyo suburb. “Should we be sharing it with foreigners at a time when Japanese are suffering?”

While the Zaitokukai has grown rapidly since it was started three and a half years ago with just 25 members, it is still largely run by its founder and president, a 38-year-old tax accountant who goes by the assumed name of Makoto Sakurai. Mr. Sakurai leads the group from his tiny office in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district, where he taps out announcements and other postings on his personal computer. Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners. “They have made Japan powerless to stand up to China and Korea,” said Mr. Sakurai, who refused to give his real name. Mr. Sakurai admitted that the group’s tactics had shocked many Japanese, but said they needed to win attention. He also defended the protests at the Korean school in Kyoto as justified to oppose the school’s use of a nearby public park, which he said rightfully belonged to Japanese children. Teachers and parents at the school called that a flimsy excuse to vent what amounted to racist rage. They said the protests had left them and their children fearful. “If Japan doesn’t do something to stop this hate language,” said Park Chung-ha, 43, who heads the school’s mothers association, “where will it lead to next?”
© The New York Times

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Headlines August 2010

CAMPAIGN WARNS ABOUR CYBER BULLYING (Czech Rep.)

25/8/2010- Some 1.5 million flyers will be distributed at Czech schools at the beginning of the school year, warning of harassment through SMS messages and the Internet, Ivana Satrova, from the Foundation O2 that organises the project along with the civic group Aisis, told journalists yesterday. Children, parents and teachers have poor knowledge of cyber bullying and the campaign Minimise Harassment will tell them how to seek help, Satrova said. "Offensive SMSs, placing humiliating video recordings at the web page and insults at Facebook may not be funny. This is called cyber bullying," the 750,000 flyers, to be distributed to all children from the third to the nighth grades, say. The brochure includes contacts to the Safety Line and an Internet advisory center. The flyer is mainly to encourage them not to keep secret their problems with cyber bullying, Satrova said. "Children move in the virtual world in an all too careless way. Many adults are unable to tell them how to protect themselves against the existing risks," Satrova said. As a result, another 750,000 flyers are for the parents who will be told what cyber bullying is and how they can help their children. "Schools often feel that cyber bullying does not concern them as it takes place outside their confines. However, research has disclosed that the phenomenon is closely related with the school environment. Some 78 percent of aggressors attend the same class or school as the victims," organiser Jana Udatna said. According to a survey conducted in February, perhaps 10 percent of schoolchildren from the third to ninth grades have come across some form of harassment.
© The Prague Daily Monitor

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NEO-NAZIS AT AN ALL TIME HIGH ON THE INTERNET (Germany)

The number of websites with right-wing extremist content has reached a record high. In the course of the last year, 1,872 Neo-Nazi websites were logged in Germany, over 800 more than five years previously.

24/8/2010- Right-wing extremism on the Internet is on the rise. The number of neo-Nazi networks has tripled within a year to 90, according to the German youth protection organization, jugendschutz.net. The number of websites from the NPD (the right-wing German National Democratic Party) rose 30 percent to 242. The extremists are even spreading their message via social networking communities like Facebook, and video sharing platforms such as YouTube. The content is invariably xenophobic, anti-Semitic and racist. The form it takes varies: some sites rewrite children's songs into neo-Nazi anthems, others call openly for violence. Often it can be hard at first glance to tell the ideology behind the content.

How to tackle the problem?
Up to 10,000 internet users access neo-Nazi blogs and platforms every day according to jugendschutz.net. The organization is now working to combat the problem by raising awareness among young internet surfers. Jugendschutz.net also targets the sites themselves, and has succeeded in banning four out of five cases of offensive content. Stefan Glaser is head researcher for right-wing activities at the organization. He is pleased with the success of this strategy, which relies on international partners to ban content. "If we in Germany have a case that is based in Hungary or Romania, or has a provider that we cannot access, where there may also be language barriers, then we will contact our local partners," Glaser explained. "They contact the operator or try to get the content removed from the network via other means."

Parents often need advice
Another resource in the struggle against online neo-Nazism is an online advice forum led by graduate teacher Martin Ziegenhagen. He encourages people to seek advice over problems with neo-Nazis at school, in the workplace or at home. There is a closed chat room for parents worried about their children. Ziegenhagen says online consultation can be an important factor in a successful turn-around:
"After over two years, a son left the NPD. The fact that the boy's mother survived the two years and has repeatedly dealt with the topic while remaining in contact with her son, that's largely thanks to the online consultation."  The President of the Federal Center for Political Education, Thomas Krueger hopes that the fight against neo-Nazis on the internet will be more focused in the future. "I would like to see a bit more strength and creativity from the Internet community. The sort of demonstrations against the NPD which take place in the real world must also take place in the virtual world."
© The Deutsche Welle

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NEW LAW TO STOP COMPANIES FROM CHECKING FACEBOOK PAGES IN GERMANY

Good news for jobseekers who like to brag about their drinking exploits on Facebook: A new law in Germany will stop bosses from checking out potential hires on social networking sites. They will, however, still be allowed to google applicants.

23/8/2010- Lying about qualifications. Alcohol and drug use. Racist comments. These are just some of the reasons why potential bosses reject job applicants after looking at their Facebook profiles. According to a 2009 survey commissioned by the website CareerBuilder, some 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. And some 35 percent of those employers had rejected candidates based on what they found there, such as inappropriate photos, insulting comments about previous employers or boasts about their drug use. But those Facebook users hoping to apply for a job in Germany should pause for a moment before they hit the "deactivate account" button. The government has drafted a new law which will prevent employers from looking at a job applicant's pages on social networking sites during the hiring process. According to reports in the Monday editions of the Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspapers, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has drafted a new law on data privacy for employees which will radically restrict the information bosses can legally collect. The draft law, which is the result of months of negotiations between the different parties in Germany's coalition government, is set to be approved by the German cabinet on Wednesday, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Although the new law will reportedly prevent potential bosses from checking out a candidate's Facebook page, it will allow them to look at sites that are expressly intended to help people sell themselves to future employers, such as the business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn. Information about the candidate that is generally available on the Internet is also fair game. In other words, employers are allowed to google potential hires. Companies may not be allowed to use information if it is too old or if the candidate has no control over it, however.

Toilets to Be Off-Limits
The draft legislation also covers the issue of companies spying on employees. According to Die Welt, the law will expressly forbid firms from video surveillance of workers in "personal" locations such as bathrooms, changing rooms and break rooms. Video cameras will only be permitted in certain places where they are justified, such as entrance areas, and staff will have to be made aware of their presence. Similarly, companies will only be able to monitor employees' telephone calls and e-mails under certain conditions, and firms will be obliged to inform their staff about such eavesdropping. The new law is partially a reaction to a number of recent scandals in Germany involving management spying on staff. In 2008, it was revealed that the discount retail chain Lidl had spied on employees in the toilet and had collected information on their private lives. National railway Deutsche Bahn and telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom were also involved in cases relating to surveillance of workers. Online data privacy is increasingly becoming a hot-button issue in Germany. The government is currently also working on legislation to deal with issues relating to Google's Street View service, which is highly controversial in the country because of concerns it could violate individuals' privacy.
© The Spiegel

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BIGOTRY BLOSSOMS ONLINE (usa)

20/8/2010- The Internet has opened a portal for discussions on various matters. People from around the world discuss various issues on message boards and through comment sections on news stories. It's a wonderful thing when people have the opportunity to discuss world events in an open forum almost instantly regardless of their location. Websites like Facebook and CNN streamed the inauguration of Barack Obama instantly allowing people to express their feelings on that historic day. The opportunity to express opinions openly has not however been entirely positive. Many users take advantage of the anonymity that the Internet allows to spew hatred in comments an on various blogs. If you scroll to the comments section of a Yahoo News story concerning Barack Obama or any issue concerning race, it's not uncommon to see the dreaded 'n-word' thrown into posts as well as claims of "white power". Its freedom of speech, right? Ironically enough, when it was discovered that the internet had such opportunity for discussion it was thought that it would make everyone seem equal, since no one could see each others' faces, how could you judge by the color of one's skin? On the contrary it seems that since everyone's face is concealed, that's even more reason to post disparaging remarks. No one is present to scold or punch you in the face for your racist remarks.

A 'troll' is someone who posts inflammatory messages with the primary intent to invoke an emotional response. It's common that when confronted with the complaint that the message is racist or offensive, that it was just a joke. It's unclear whether trolls are actually sincere with the messages they post, since it's usually case specific but is claiming "niggers, spics and Jews should die" ever a matter to wonder the sincerity of? And yes if you look at the right story on Yahoo News, it is not uncommon to see something like that. Internet forums, which are specifically intended to be places for discussion, are primary targets for trolls who will even take a subject unrelated to race and turn it into one. A gardening forum can potentially become a place for racist jokes and remarks. There are those however who use the Internet to express their beliefs without anonymity. Facebook is a known site for college racism. Lest we forget about the infamous event back in February where UCSD fraternity students mocked black history month by hosting a Compton Cookout through Facebook. In the Facebook message students were informed they would be serving watermelon, fried chicken, and malt liquor. Another event took place at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where two white students began a racist wall-to-wall conversation on Facebook when a black student entered their room. In their conversation they made comments such as "she already has her nigger instinct to kill us and use us to her pleasure". They immediately deleted the messages after their friends responded negatively to them and the university punished them accordingly. Facebook recently garnered negative attention for allowing holocaust denier groups to form.

Those who play online videogames through Xbox Live or Playstation Network, experience similar problems. When playing games such a Call of Duty or Halo online, it's not uncommon for players to freely use racial, homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs. These racist gamers take advantage of the anonymity that the internet allows to show their true side, as most usually make up names for their ID, some of which are offensive as they make plays on ethnic slurs. Online gaming services have however tried to curb the online hate speech by offering players the option to report players who use offensive terms. The online services will then review the player in question, temporarily or permanently ban them. One could (in theory of course) create a KKK endorsing site in pure anonymity. There are groups that try to curb hate speech such as HateWatch who buy racist domain names so that real racists cannot buy these domain for themselves. Hate groups however do find way to post their views on the Internet. In 1995 the former Grand Wizard or national director of the KKK, Don Black created Stormfront.org a white supremacist neo-Nazi Internet forum which has been described as the internet's first and largest hate site. It features links to other hate and white supremacist sites, a merchandise store and even an online dating service (for heterosexual white gentiles only). Stormfront has gone so far as creating a website called Martinlutherking.org which is full of information to discredit the civil rights activist. Whatever your beliefs are on King it's interesting to note that if the words Martin Luther King are typed into Google it's the third site listed.

What can be done to curb hate speech on the Internet? The answer as of now is nothing. How do you stop Internet hate speech when actual hate speech cannot be regulated? The United States cannot and will not support any law that regulates or encroaches upon freedom of speech. Therefore Internet hate speech will only end when racism is ended or somehow regulated.
© New American Media

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EX-MODEL SUES YOUTUBE: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF ANONYMOUS COMMENTS? (usa)

18/8/2010- YouTube is notorious for its permissive comments policy -- allowing people to post whatever vile messages they'd like under the blanket of anonymity, removing them only after moderators have had a chance to go through them. But now, one young woman is putting that "anything goes" approach to the legal test. Carla Franklin, a former model and graduate of Columbia Business School, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday against YouTube's parent company, Google, to force it to turn over the real identities of those who posted a video of her online without her permission, as well as the author of several sexual offensive comments. Though the comments have since been taken down. Franklin's attorney, David Fish, explained what his client hoped to accomplish by the filing to the New York Daily News: "People hide behind these shields and think they can just post anything. Hopefully, we can put a stop to this."

But that may prove much easier said than done. Though Google has turned over the identity of its anonymous users before under court order -- namely, in a 2008 case involving, coincidentally, another model by the name of Liskula Cohen, who successfully sued to expose the blogger that defamed her -- the company is generally very protective of its users' privacy. Google resisted turning over YouTube user data to Viacom in the midst of their messy, $100 million copyright lawsuit, even when ordered to by the court. After Web users revolted against Viacom for making the demand in the first place, the latter company eventually agreed that identifying data wasn't necessary and that Google could hand over masked data and still satisfy the terms of the court order.

And earlier this year, Google created a whole new page, "Government Requests," for disclosing the specific number and originating point of requests for user information it has received from law enforcement agencies the world over. As the introduction states:
The statistics here reflect the number of law enforcement agency requests for information we receive at Google and YouTube. They don't indicate whether we complied with a request in any way. We didn't necessarily include requests that were addressed to the wrong Google company. We review each request to make sure that it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law. We may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases.

At a time when increasing numbers of governments are trying to regulate the free flow of information on the Internet, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests to censor information or obtain user data around the globe – and we welcome external debates about these issues that we grapple with internally on a daily basis. In fact, federal legislation in the U.S. is actually quite sympathetic to companies that provide anonymous online commenting services. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 explicitly states that in order to authorize the "interception of wire, oral or electronic communications," a lengthy application must first be filed, in which several strict criteria must be met. Then the judge is not supposed to authorize such interception unless there is "probable cause" to believe that the person behind the communications has broken federal law and that there is no other way to get the person's relevant information.

In addition, as the IP Law Blog noted just a few weeks ago when evaluating the outcome of a case between two former online business associates (Anonymous Online):
Protection for anonymous speech is not new. First Amendment protection for anonymous speech was first articulated fifty years ago in Talley v. California in 1960. More recently a United States Supreme Court case in 1995, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, reminded us that the United States has had a respected tradition of anonymity in the advocacy of political causes since the birth of America. The Federalist Papers, for example, by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, some of the most famous publications in American history, were published under the pseudonym "Publius."

Today, the new medium for anonymous speech is the Internet, which, according to the Anonymous Online court, "stands on the same footing as other speech." The Ninth Circuit stated that speaking anonymously on the Internet "promotes the robust exchange of ideas and allows individuals to express themselves freely without 'fear of economic or official retaliation ... [or] concern about social ostracism.'" However, the larger point of the blog post was a cautionary one, warning "anonymous online blog and video posters" that "if your comments are potentially harmful to a business, it's likely that a court will not be sympathetic to your First Amendment claims." And indeed, several previous, high-profile court cases directly concerning anonymous online comments have tended to rule in favor of the filers, forcing the disclosure of the anonymous posters' identities.

Still, no matter how the court rules in Franklin's case against YouTube, it won't be the first time the issue of online anonymity has been put before the courts, and it certainly won't be the last. As John Verdi, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center told Surge Desk in an exclusive interview today, "Technically speaking, whatever decision is reached, it won't be precedent setting. But it will be a harbinger of things to come."
© AOL News

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ADL: IRANIAN WEB SITE A CESSPOOL OF ANTI-SEMITISM AND HOLOCAUST DENIAL

10/8/2010- Calling it a "virtual cesspool of anti-Semitism," the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned an Iranian Web site dedicated to Holocaust denial and called on the United States to publicly denounce the Iranian regime's blatant anti-Semitism. The "HoloCartoon" Web site purports to offer a historical narrative of events occurring before, during and after World War II. Instead, it is rife with anti-Semitic imagery, Jewish conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and factual inaccuracies. "HoloCartoon is a pernicious Web site replete with vicious anti-Semitism and caricatures of Jews fabricating the Holocaust story to advance their goals, and depictions of Jews as murderers and manipulative money worshippers," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. "Its pseudo-history makes a mockery of the Holocaust and the site is little more than a virtual cesspool of anti-Semitism."

The Web site is hosted on an Iranian server and, according to media reports, is sponsored by a non-governmental cultural foundation. The material is reportedly based on a cartoon book on the Holocaust published in Iran in 2008. "This type of anti-Semitism is the calling card of the Iranian regime and a reflection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who continues a drumbeat of Holocaust denial and Jew-bashing," Mr. Foxman added. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ADL called on the United States to publicly denounce the blatant anti-Semitism which the Iranian regime fosters and permits to be disseminated throughout the world. "That this Web site is live demonstrates the approval of the Iranian government," the letter stated. "With this easily accessible Web site, the hatred which first appeared in book form for Iranian domestic consumption now has global reach."

HoloCartoon says it is "Dedicated to all those who were killed under the pretext of the Holocaust." In a preface, the creators state, "This book tends to denounce the conspicuous lies of the 'planned murder of 6 million Jews during the Second World War' allegedly called 'Holocaust.'"
© The Anti-Defamation League

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MAYOR DEFENDS MIDLETON AFTER FACEBOOK PAGE LINKS TOWN TO ANTI-SEMITISM (Ireland)

6/8/20120- The mayor of Midleton has defended the east Cork town in the wake of a Facebook page linking it to anti-Semitic sentiment. The page, titled “the Invasion of Jews in Midleton”, was created after the arrival of a number of Orthodox Satmar Jews in the town for a two-week holiday. The existence of the page and comments posted on it were noted in the Jerusalem Post , among other Jewish newspapers worldwide, before the page was removed from the online social networking site. The page attracted more than 380 “Likes” from members of the social networking site before it was taken down amid accusations of anti-Semitism from Jewish community representatives. Mayor of Midleton Niall O’Neill said the comments posted on the page were in no way representative of the local people. “Facebook is a forum for discussion for individuals to post individual opinions; it is no more and no less than that. The people of Midleton would certainly not be considered a community that would not extend a warm welcome to people of all shades, colours and creeds,” he said. Mr O’Neill said at no point during his lifetime had any visitors to the town been treated with anything other than courteous hospitality. He added: “There’s been no case in point where there have been issues with any people, from any background, coming to the town.”
© The Irish Times

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FACEBOOK TAKES DOWN IRISH ANTI-SEMITIC SITE

The site took down 'The Invasion of Jews in Midleton' page due to its anti-Semitic nature

5/8/2010- Facebook have taken down a page entitled “The Invasion of Jews in Midleton” because of its anti-Semitic nature. Midleton is a small town in County Cork. The existence of the site was first revealed on IrishCentral.com yesterday. Since then the Jerusalem Post and many other world wide Jewish newspapers have followed up. The site, with anti-Semitism comments and stereotypes of Jews was related to the visit on vacation of a group of orthodox Jews to Midleton in County Cork. The creator invited people to join “if you have escaped being captured by the Jews in Midleton in the last few days. :)” and warned readers to “be carful [sic] of their teeth! :O.” In what is seen as a reference to the Nazi gas chambers, one respondent wrote: “Apparently they were originally meant to stay in Killarney…but they refused to go through Ovens”. Ovens is also the name of a nearby town. A key representative of Ireland’s Jewish community said the creation of the page, titled the invasion of Jews in Midleton, was “horrific” and “very sad”. Fred Rosehill, the chairman of the trustees of Cork’s Jewish community, said he was deeply upset. “The strictly Orthodox dress brings attention of course, but it doesn’t warrant this. “There is no reason to accept any form of anti-Semitism.” He added: “The reference to Ovens is quite startling Rosehill stated that such an incident was very unusual in Cork and said that a visit by a separate Israeli group this week to the area had prompted no problems. He said the site was most likely “teenagers being a bit stupid” he said: “It does worry me for the community in Cork”. The Cork Jewish community was founded in 1880 but only a few families remain, although regular services are still held.
© Irish Central

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SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGES OLD WEB HABITS (usa)

2/8/2010- Social media now consume 23 percent of our time online, stealing time away from e-mail, reading news, and spending time at portals such as Yahoo.com, according a recent Nielsen study. The study tracked the online activity of 200,000 American users from June 2009 to June 2010. Time invested on social networking sites grew nearly 50 percent -- from 16 percent to 23 percent -- and that social gaming surpassed e-mail to take the number two position. Americans now log an average of six hours per month twiddling thumbs on social networks.  Though e-mail usage dropped on desktops -- declining to 8.3 percent from 12 percent -- it remains dominant on mobile devices, occupying 42 percent of our smartphone time in comparison to 37 percent last year.  Use of Web portals such as Yahoo and Google dropped from 5.5 percent to 4.4 percent of online time. This could be due to the fact that Facebook status updates often contain direct links to articles and videos, no longer requiring individual search.

Online streaming video also experienced a slight surge to 3.9 percent from 3.5 percent. On average, Americans spent three hours and fifteen minutes watching videos online, courtesy of sites like YouTube and Netflix Instant Watch. Social networkers aren't just teenyboppers anymore, either. Nielsen discovered that twice as many Americans over 50 visited social networks than kids under 18. That means your mom and dad aren't the only "hip" parents out there with Facebook pages. But for those who fear that social networking isn't really socialization at all (I mean, is FarmVille really a dialogue?) there was some heartening data about the lasting power of conversation: Americans spend 36 percent of online time communicating across social networks, blogs, personal e-mail and instant messaging. Let's just hope we're actually saying something.
© PC World

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TEEN INTERNET ADDICTS MORE LIKELY TO GET THE BLUES: STUDY

2/8/2010- Teenagers who are "addicted" to the Internet are more than twice as likely to become depressed than those who surf the Web in a more controlled manner, a study published Monday found. For the study, published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 1,041 teens from Guangzhou in southeastern China completed a questionnaire to identify whether they used the Internet in a pathological way, and were assessed for anxiety and depression. The vast majority of the teens -- more than 940 -- used the Internet normally, but 62 (6.2 percent) were classified as being moderately pathological Internet users and two (0.2 percent) were "severely pathological" users. Nine months later, the teens' psychological states were reassessed, and the researchers found that students who used the Internet uncontrollably or unreasonably were around two-and-a-half times as likely as normal Web users to develop depression. Even when the stress of the teens' studies was factored into the equation, the Web-addicted teens were still one and a half times more likely to feel depressed at the nine-month follow-up than kids who used the Internet in a controlled way.

"This result suggests that young people who are initially free of mental health problems but use the Internet pathologically could develop depression as a consequence," study authors Lawrence Lam of the School of Medicine in Sydney, Australia, and Zi Wen-Peng of the Chinese Education Ministry said. Pathological Internet use has been identified as a problematic behavior with signs and symptoms similar to those of other addictions, according to background information in the study. Other studies have found that it is usually teenage boys who pathologically use the Internet, but the authors caution that the numbers of girls who show addictive Internet behavior is on the rise. One warning sign of pathological Internet use: teens who were found in the study to be addicted to the Internet were more likely to use it for entertainment than for studying or gathering information, Lam and Zi found. Then again, entertainment was the most common use of the Internet among the teens in the study, whose average age was 15. The researchers suggest screening teens in their high schools to identify youngsters who are at-risk for becoming Internet addicts and possibly depressed because of their pathological behavior.
© AFP

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Headlines July 2010

RUSSIAN COURT BANS YOUTUBE OVER EXTREMIST VIDEOS

29/7/2010- A court banned access to popular video site YouTube in Russia's Far East because it contained a video that the Justice Ministry declared extremist, Russian newspapers reported Thursday. The court in the city of Komsomolsk-Na-Amure ruled that a local provider should block YouTube because it included a video called "Russia for the Russians" that was declared extremist in 2009. It also told the provider to block access to three web sites that it said gave access to Hitler's "Mein Kampf," which is also on the extremist literature list. The Justice Ministry did not give details of the video, whose title is listed in English, except that it was banned by a court in the central Russian city of Samara. A video of that title featuring the emblem of banned ultra-nationalist group the Slavic Union shows its members making Nazi salutes, wearing swastika armbands and kneeling beside a photograph of Hitler. The decision was widely derided on Thursday. "The global YouTube has been closed by the protocol of a district court," wrote business daily Kommersant.

The Internet is a vital forum for political debate in Russia, as almost all newspapers and television channels present bland pro-Kremlin coverage, and most prominent analysts and liberal politicians contribute to blogs and news sites. The court in Komsomolsk-na-Amure, a city best known for making Sukhoi planes, also told the provider to block access to three web sites that it said gave access to Hitler's "Mein Kampf," also banned in Russia as extremist. The provider said Wednesday that it had launched an appeal to the decision, which was issued on July 16 but widely publicised this week. A spokesman for the Russian branch of Google, which owns YouTube, called the ban unconstitutional. "We consider that the decision of the Central district court in Komsomolsk-na-Amure, breaches the Russian Constitution," told the RIA Novosti news agency on Wednesday. She cited the Constitution's clause on freedom of information and pointed out that the ban on YouTube would also block the Kremlin's official channel on the website.
© AFP

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ITALIAN GAG LAW THREATENS BLOGGERS WITH €25,000 FINES FOR ‘INCORRECT' FACTS

29/7/2010- Bloggers, podcasters and even anyone who posts updates on social networks such as Facebook all face being slapped with fines of up to €25,000 for publishing incorrect facts, if a bill that journalists' organisations are calling "authoritarian" currently before the Italian parliament is passed. A provision within the government's Media and Wiretapping Bill will extend Italy's "obbligo di rettifica", or rectification obligation - a law dating back to 1948 that requires newspapers to publish corrections - to the internet and indeed anyone "responsible for information websites".

According to the draft law, bloggers and other online publishers - which lawyers believe includes users of Facebook and Myspace - will be obliged to post corrections within 48 hours of any complaint regarding their content. If authors do not comply, they face fines of up to €25,000. European digital rights campaigners and Italian journalists warn that the move could darken much of Italian cyberspace as for small-scale bloggers, website owners and even those who comment on discussion pages, it would be a near impossibility to deal with a complaint within the alloted time span.

Furthermore, warns the European Digital Rights (EDRI), a pan-European coalition of online civil liberties advocacy organisations, the law implies that bloggers must register with a legal domicile with some authority, facing the same bureaucratic formalities as the written press and that they will have to connect to the internet every single day in order to check whether there is a request for correction and place the correction in due time. Attempts to soften the law by extending the correction period and reducing the fine to €2500 were rejected last week by the head of the chamber's justice committee.

EDRI warned on Wednesday in a statement that the law "will add new barriers to freedom of expression on the internet," and "would discourage bloggers who will hesitate to write on economical or political issues that might bother certain personalities."  The bill as a whole, whose main purpose is to restrict the use of wiretapping and the ability of publications to quote wiretap transcripts, has provoked an outcry by journalists. The law proposes to prohibit the publication of transcripts of wiretap recordings, leaks of which in recent years have become something of a staple in the Italian press, particularly in cases of alleged government corruption and organised crime - and indeed Prime Minister Berlusconi. Journalists or editors that publish such transcripts would face fines of up to €464,700.

The government defends the bill as a necessary to protect the privacy of individuals that are the targets of judicial investigations. "In Italy, we are all spied on. There are 150,000 telephones that are tapped and it is intolerable," Mr Berlusconi recently said, explaining why the law was required. On 8 July, the FNSI press union led a publication strike in which most of the country's newspapers apart from a handful of conservative papers and ones published by Prime Minister Berlusconi's media empire. The press "black-out" was intended to "show the kind of silence that the law would impose," according to the union.

Reporters Without Borders told EUobserver the law was "authoritarian". "This is not just an attempt to gag bloggers and actually all journalists, but more widely it is about stopping the investigation of corruption and organised crime," said Olivier Basille, the head of the group's Brussels office. "Privacy is important, but in these sort of cases, the public interest in knowing this information outweighs such concerns," he continued. He said the bill should be seen as an embarrassment by the whole of the European Union: "This is an important issue for Italy, but it is crucial for the EU. Italy is sending a signal to countries beyond the EU that it is okay to severely restrict press freedoms."

"When the EU speaks to China or Syria or whoever about press freedoms, they will say, ‘Ah, but the EU is already doing the same thing.'" "It's not just Italy though. There are problems with Ireland, Bulgaria and Romania as well. In January last year, Ireland passed an anti-blasphemy law under which you can be fined €20,000. When our organisation raised concerns about a journalist being jailed for blasphemy in the Yemen, they said right back to us: ‘But Ireland does the same thing,' and to some extent they're right." Reporters Without Borders has complained to the commission about the Italian law "several times", but the commission "cannot oppose this because it is not related to commerce, the single market, these sorts of things."

Commission fundamental rights spokesman Matthew Newman told this website that Brussels will wait until the final law is passed before commenting on whether any aspect contravenes EU law. "It's a moving target at the moment, with all sorts of amendments. It's too early to comment." In response, the Reporters Without Borders has written to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, hoping that at the member-state level some pressure could be brought to bear on Rome. While Brussels is keeping quite on the legislation, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in June condemned the bill in June, saying it ""could seriously hinder investigative journalism in Italy."

Mr Berlusconi's arch-rival in his conservative People of Freedom party, Gianfranco Fini, has also sharply criticised the draft law. The bill was due to be discussed by Italian MPs on Thursday, as the government had hoped to have it passed before the summer recess at the end of the month. Due to agenda problems, it is now expected to be considered some time in early September. In 2007, the country's then centre-left government of Romano Prodi proposed a similar bill that was subsequently abandoned. Journalists went on strike to protest that legisation as well.
© The EUobserver

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HACKERS REPLACE BUCHENWALD BOOK OF THE DEAD WITH NEO-NAZI SLOGANS (Germany)

Neo-Nazis hack into Buchenwald foundation website dedicated to memory of victims and Holocaust research

28/7/2010- Hackers replaced a Book of the Dead with neo-Nazi slogans and symbols on the website for second world war concentration camp Buchenwald today . One slogan read: "Brown is beautiful", referring to the colour of the shirts worn by Hitler's SA stormtroopers. Another threatened in German: "We'll be back." The hackers also completely erased the Mittelbau-Dora camp's website. Volkhard Knigge, head of Buchenwald, said: "By damaging the documentation we offer, such as the Book of the Dead, the perpetrators were trying to efface the memory of victims of the Nazis' crimes." The foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the camp's remains in commemoration of the victims and promoting public knowledge and historical research into the Holocaust, said the hacker attack had been reported to police. In Buchenwald the Nazis incarcerated nearly a quarter of a million people, many of them Jews, who were forced to work in arms factories. An estimated 56,000 of them died of exhaustion, starvation or illness, or were executed. Mittelbau Dora nearby also provided forced labor for a Nazi weapons factory and it is estimated that one third of the 60,000 prisoners held there died.
© Reuters

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REPORTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM INCH UP IN BAY STATE (usa)

28/7/2010- The number of reported anti-Semitic incidents has grown slightly in Massachusetts, bucking the trend of a national decline, according to data released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League. In the organization’s annual audit, Massachusetts ranked sixth in the country for most anti-Semitic incidents reported. Rabbi Yekusiel Alperowitz of the Chabad Center in Hyannis, which was vandalized in 2009, described the statistics as disturbing. “I think to hate is a part of human nature, but it’s something that we have to work on correcting,’’ Alperowitz said. “It’s not just Massachusetts’ problem; it’s a world problem, and something that we have to confront all over.’’ In November 2009, three local teenagers were charged with breaking in the Chabad Center’s doors, vandalizing and destroying its property, and downloading hateful images, including some of Adolf Hitler that were left displayed on a computer screen. The message was clear, Alperowitz said, and it deeply affected community members. “There was a lot of hurt, and possibly fear as well,’’ he said. “It brings back a lot of memories to certain people. It took a while for the congregation to recover.’’

In 2009, the League logged 1,211 anti-Semitic acts committed throughout the United States. This marked a slight decline from 2008, when the organization counted 1,352 incidents. But Massachusetts saw a slight rise in the number of anti-Semitic acts throughout the year: The Anti-Defamation League recorded 55 incidents in the state, up from 52 in 2008. The number of incidents in Massachusetts had been declining since 2004. Although the increase was not big, the League’s New England regional director, Derrek L. Shulman, said the numbers show that anti-Semitism, like racism, sexism, and homophobia, still exists. The audit “shows anti-Semitism is very much a part of the fabric of America, be it urban or suburban or rural,’’ Shulman said. “The important thing is not that it went up by three incidents in Massachusetts, it’s that we still have it, and it still requires us to be steadfast in our response to it and in confronting it.’’

Among the most disturbing patterns the audit revealed, Shulman said, was a sharp increase in anti-Semitic activity on the Internet. “The Web makes it much easier to get anti-Semitic filth out into the mainstream,’’ he said. “It gives people the ability to sit behind the cover of their keyboard and send out things that they would be uncomfortable sharing in the light of day.’’ Extremists have begun using Facebook and MySpace, blogs, or other websites, such as YouTube, to espouse hateful messages, Shulman said. “Just because it’s generated on the Web makes it no less destructive,’’ Shulman said. “Ten years ago, how could anyone get something like that into perfectly reputable newspapers, for example? But now, message boards of well-known organizations can be taken over by people generating and spreading anti-Semitic hate.’’ Alperowitz, who has worked in the Hyannis synagogue for 15 years, said education is the best way to combat the prejudice that leads to acts of hate. “We need to strengthen education and make it clear what is acceptable and that certain things are unacceptable,’’ he said. “I feel these acts come from a marginal group of the population, however, these people are out there and we can’t ignore them.’’ Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all saw reductions in the number of reported cases. California and New York reported the most anti-Semitic incidents, while Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, and Nevada had only one reported incident apiece.
© The Boston Globe

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THE GOP'S FACEBOOK ANTI-SEMITES (usa, blog)

After MoJo inquiries, the Republican Party promises to take down a Facebook page with offensive comments.

29/7/2010- Israel is responsible for 9/11, Al Qaeda is "100% state sponsored by Zionist Jews," and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is actually an agent for Mossad, the Israeli spy agency—at least according to posts on the Republican National Committee's Facebook page. Several avowedly anti-Semitic commenters regularly posted on the national GOP's Facebook wall, encouraging tea partiers and "White, Black, Spanish, [and] Asian" people to "arm yourselves" and rise up against the "Zionist Jews" who, they claim, control the country and the media. They linked to a site that hosts purported versions of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and promoted 9/11 "truth" theories that allege "Israeli agents carried out the attacks."

The RNC could easily have deleted these comments—it's as easy as clicking "remove" if an administrator is signed in to the account—or blocked the users who were posting them. Even if the RNC decided it didn't have the resources to monitor its Facebook wall, it could have simply disabled the ability to comment on its wall. When Mother Jones contacted the committee for comment Thursday morning, the RNC disabled its Facebook discussion board, but not its wall containing the anti-Semitic comment. When a Mother Jones reporter explained the difference between a Facebook discussion board and a wall, RNC spokesman Doug Heye promised the wall "will be down shortly." "We're interested in a civil debate, and any rhetoric or language that is out of bounds is not something we're interested in hosting and not something we're interested in hearing," Heye said. "We have decided we are better off closing down our discussion page." That's what Organizing for America has done with Barack Obama's Facebook page. (The White House's wall, however, is still live.) But until it was contacted by Mother Jones, the RNC allowed commenting to continue unabated—and apparently unmoderated.

The various comments—which came from Facebook users calling themselves "Jennifer Grey" and "Shelly Adams"—also included attacks on "Jew-controlled" politicians. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.), Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) are among those targeted. (All except Sensenbrenner are Jewish). Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are criticized as "Zionist Puppets." Kevin Anderson, a Californian Facebook user who describes himself as a "staunch Republican," alerted Mother Jones to the comments. Anderson says he was banned from commenting on the RNC's Facebook page after he complained about the anti-Semitic comments to committee officials. He claims that "hooked nose" style photos initially accompanied the posts. Those photos were removed when he first threatened to contact the press, he says.

At Mother Jones, interns review every comment that comes through the system, and delete the most offensive ones, along with a whole bunch of spam. Mother Jones also has an intern who monitors the magazine's Facebook wall. Some media organizations have taken different tacks—ignoring comments entirely. But Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, says that's not an option for politicians and political organizations. "I don't think that's acceptable," he says. "If they have comments open, then they're inviting reasonable people to comment. To allow a free-for-all means you are not respecting the reasonable commenters."

A review of the Democratic National Committee's Facebook wall during the past month reveals one commenter warning his "fellow Africa-Americans" to "be on the watch for jews with anti-black behavior." The DNC page also shows many posts from Anderson pushing Republican talking points—and trying to draw attention to the anti-Semitism on the GOP page. "While I don't think this indicates anti-Semitism among the GOP leadership," Anderson writes. "I feel it indicates that there is a certain laxity among GOP workers in removing anti-Semitic screeds from GOP sounding boards. However, as this is an OFFICIAL GOP sounding board sponsored by the Republican National Committee and moderated by GOP employees. I think you might have room to indicate certain biases among the workers at the GOP and indicate an ethical climate of its official party organs." This isn't the first time the RNC has gotten in trouble for the content of its Facebook page. Last October, it kept a number of racist pictures of Obama (including one saying "miscegenation is a crime against American values") on its page for nearly a week before removing them.

You can look at a large (11.7 MB) PDF of the posts from the month of July.
© Mother Jones

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FACEBOOK FACES THE THREAT OF PERMANENT BAN IN PAKISTAN

27/7/2010- Pakistan's war with social networking site Facebook reached a new level today, as the Lahore High Court (LHC) sought the stance of Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) on a permanent ban on Facebook. The petition filed by Judicial Activism Panel prayed that Facebook might be permanently blocked in Pakistan for placing objectionable and blasphemous caricatures. It was based on this petition that justice Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the Lahore high sought the stance of the PTA to the demand for a permanent ban on Facebook, said a PTI report. In his petition, Judicial Activism Panel chairman Muhammad Azhar Siddique sought a permanent ban on the website as it was hosting a page with a contest named 'Everybody Burn Quran Day'. Siddique said in his petition that Facebook was also displaying blasphemous pictures of 'Khana-e-Kaaba'. Facebook was recently banned in Pakistan following a competition to draw caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. However, the ban was later lifted. The site has been facing serious problem sin the country, and there was even demands that death sentence should be pronounced on its CEO. Islamic group Jamaat-ud-Dawah is mounting pressure on Pakistani authorities to ban Facebook. However, there are reports that pages carrying 'blasphemous content' are still accessible in Pakistan.
© Cyber Media News

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FACEBOOK CONTAINING SACRILEGIOUS MATERIAL STILL ACCESSIBLE IN PAKISTAN

27/7/2010- Pakistan's inter-ministerial committee is analysing all possible measures to block new links to the social networking site Facebook, which contains sacrilegious material. Information Technology Ministry sources pointed that pages carrying 'blasphemous content' are still accessible in the country. Sources said the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) discovered the pages a few days ago and later informed the IT Ministry to decide on the issue. "The ministry is going to block all such material containing blasphemous material as soon as it receives recommendations on the modus operandi," said Nagibullah Malik, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication Secretary. He added that the ministry had approached the management of Facebook over the issue, and had directed it to take "prompt action" against the page, the Daily Times reports.

"The ministry had raised the same issue with the Facebook management in May 2010, when the website was blocked in Pakistan. It was directed to stop all such activities hurting the sentiments of Pakistani subscribers," he said. "The ministry and its subordinate authorities will not tolerate websites that have blasphemous content", Malik said. The latest page carrying blasphemous content appeared on Facebook recently, urging subscribers to mark the September 11 attack anniversary. So far the page has 1,726 fans from across the world, but its wall also contains messages on religious tolerance and harmony particularly from Muslims. A couple of pages have also been launched on Facebook to condemn it. Pakistani authorities earlier blocked Facebook from May 19 to 30, following the directives of Lahore High Court (LHC).
© The Economic Times

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ANTI-SEMITISM VS. FACEBOOK

13/7/2010- Following the “Kick a Ginger Day” violence targeting redheads at a Calabasas middle school last November and the subsequent unease it inspired, “Kill a Jew Day” Facebook events have been popping up on the social networking site in rapid succession over the past month despite efforts to counteract the threats and hateful sentiments. While the majority of these pages have been deactivated by Facebook within 24 hours of their creation, their repeated appearance and the ease with which users can post such events calls into question the distinction between free speech and hate speech, as well as Facebook’s response to the content. According to Facebook representative Simon Axten, the site is “highly self-regulating, and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive.” Although Axten would not comment on the specifics of any of the pages, many of these events were deactivated only after counter-campaigns urged users to report the events to the Facebook administration. Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities requires users to “not bully, intimidate or harass any user” and “not post content that is hateful, threatening or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” These “Kill a Jew Day” events have featured directives such as “you must kill at least one Jew” or “you know the drill, guys.” Nearly all have used swastikas as their avatars.

“They’re horrible and disgusting,” said Lila Mendelsohn, 16, of the events. After seeing one while browsing Facebook last week, the Los Angeles resident, a rising senior at Hamilton High School and n’siah — president — of her local B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO) chapter, reported the event to the Facebook administration but decided more needed to be done. With help from fellow BBYO member Elise Jackson, 17, Mendelsohn created an event titled “One Million Strong Against Kill a Jew Day.” Both girls invited all their Facebook friends to take action against the event and posted a link so that others could report it to Facebook. Within hours, hundreds of Facebook users had clicked that they were “attending” the “One Million Strong” event. By the next morning, the “Kill a Jew Day” event had been deactivated. In contrast, “One Million Strong” currently has over 10,000 listed as “confirmed guests.” Although Mendelsohn and Jackson acknowledge that they have already succeeded at their original goal, they believe that the sentiment behind their event still holds value. “Even though one has been taken down, many more pages and groups have been made,” Mendelsohn said. The “One Million Strong” event is just one of a number of Internet campaigns urging the removal of anti-Semitic content from the Internet or Facebook.

For the past two years, the Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF), a pro-Israel advocacy organization that cites a network of over 250,000 supporters, has worked to expose and remove anti-Semitic material online. “Our approach has always been to expose the material, get our network to report it, and call out the companies like Facebook and YouTube for their negligence in dealing with these issues effectively,” wrote JIDF founder David Appletree in an e-mail. The JIDF Web site features “Action Alerts” for various “Kill a Jew Day” events on Facebook and urges visitors to the page to report any existing events as well. Appletree believes that Facebook has failed to take a forceful enough approach toward these matters. “Their ‘enforcement’ of their own rules is inconsistent,” Appletree wrote. “Sometimes, they seem to react quickly; other times, they don’t react at all.” According to Axten, Facebook has a large team of professional investigators who review and respond “as quickly as possible” to reports from the over 400 million people who use Facebook. “The team prioritizes reports for the most serious violations, including those for nudity, pornography and harassment, which are typically handled within 24 hours.” Additionally, Axten said, Facebook disables the accounts of people who “routinely violate our policies.” Appletree believes Facebook should take a more proactive approach and immediately remove offensive material, instead of waiting for reports from users.

Other Facebook events that have sprung up include “Thrill a Jew Day,” as well as the group “We Are Disgusted by the Facebook Event ‘Kill a Jew Day.’ ” Although both the “One Million Strong Against Kill a Jew Day” event and the JIDF urge nonviolent action, other events list suggestions such as “kill a neo-Nazi” or “drown a Flotilla.” Jackson and Mendelsohn have discouraged users from posting counter-threats on their event. “We don’t want people to respond with threats of violence,” Jackson said. “It’s just as bad.” July appears to have marked an increase in Facebook events encouraging anti-Semitic violence. However, as early as last November, Haaretz reported a “Kick a Jew Day” event at a middle school in Naples, Fla., which resulted in the suspension of 10 students who had taken part in the event. “When people aren’t standing up for their rights or what they believe in, it only makes the other people stronger and allows them to step all over them,” Jackson said.
© The Jewish Journal

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SERBIA’S LITTLE BIG ACTIVIST

The unfolding tale of Rastko Pocesta, precocious social networker and activist for progressive causes, illustrates the potential power of the Internet in Serbia – and its dangers.
by Snezana Congradin and Matja Stojanovic

8/7/2010- Rastko Pocesta does not talk like a typical Serbian schoolboy. “The ideology of fascism has many forms, and this is so in Serbia, where fascism is present at a worrying level. On the one hand we have the white nationalist Stormfront, and on the other there is the clerico-fascist militant sect Obraz. The majority in Serbia considers Ratko Mladic a national hero, instead of calling him a war criminal, and it is the majority that is to blame for the proliferation of fascist ideology in the country.” Views like these, aired in public, have earned Pocesta, who turned 12 this January, a degree of local and even international fame. But he has also been the target of online slurs and says there have even been physical threats. On his Facebook page, Pocesta describes himself as an independent human rights activist, a vocation he says came to him after watching other Serbian liberal activists on television. After his own TV appearance earlier this year where he talked of his book on U.S. presidents, and after participation in a public forum on the question of whether Serbia should join NATO, threats began to be posted on his Facebook page by sympathizers of Serbia’s numerous extreme right-wing groups, many of whom, like Pocesta, use the Internet as their prime vehicle of communication . He favors recognizing the independence of Kosovo and punishing the perpetrators of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, and supports Serbia’s membership in the EU and NATO – all positions that are fiercely opposed by various nationalist parties and groups. He says he’s also been verbally attacked at his school and on the streets. Most of his fellow pupils steer clear of him, something that makes him feel even more isolated at times, even as he’s become a minor celebrity on the strength of mentions by Serbia’s B92, the BBC, the Financial Times, and Die Welt. Pocesta’s mother, Suzana, has repeatedly informed the police of the threats but says she can’t “put a lock” on her child’s brain to shield him from the dangers. Despite worries for his safety, Suzana says she fully supports her son’s activism, while stressing that he is capable of making his own judgments. Pocesta attends the St. Sava secondary school in Belgrade’s Vracar district. Even though many of his teachers do not share their excellent pupil’s convictions, some say they are concerned about the boy’s security. At home, he spends most of his time reading or working at his computer, says he doesn’t sleep a lot, and isn’t much interested in playing with other kids. What a person does is a matter of personal choice, Pocesta says, adding he doesn’t understand why everyone in his age group should behave the same.

Fascism and Ageism
“The easiest way to expose youth to fascist ideas is through the Internet, and that is how new promoters of ‘blood and soil’ ideology are actually recruited,” Pocesta said. “However, we should not underestimate the positive effects social networks could have, especially when it comes to young people, who are still in the process of shaping their views, and who use the Internet as a source of information.” He’s worried that the proliferation of violent propaganda via the Internet is seen as a marginal phenomenon in Serbia, because the threat of extremism is far from limited to an inner circle of believers, the boy believes. He accuses “self-styled democrats” of covertly, or perhaps unconsciously, promoting neo-fascist and extreme views, not through “classical forms of fascism” but what he calls “cultural fascism and its various forms, and maybe social Darwinism – which is close to racism – especially in liberal circles.” Pocesta says he was interested in politics from an early age, but his initial inspiration to become an activist came from one of Serbia’s most prominent human rights defenders and former critics of the Slobodan Milosevic regime, Biljana Kovacevic Vuco, who died in April. Her appearance on a TV show more than a year ago “gave me a glimpse into an ugly image of the place I lived in. It was then that I realized that, no matter how small my contribution to society, I wished to do my bit,” he said. That new-found sense of mission only became stronger when he began to follow the TV appearances of prominent activists such as Boris Milicevic (a gay activist), Svetozar Ciplic, and Marko Karadzic of the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights – as well as “those from the other side, like Mladen Obradovic from the Obraz movement. … After searching the Internet and reading a lot on the subject, I began to get more and more focused on human rights issues in my country. “I find it strange that the topic of human rights is pretty low on the scale of things that others my age talk about,” he said. What’s more, he claims that he and other youngsters are often the victims of discrimination themselves on grounds of age, citing the example of his appearance at the public discussion of Serbia’s NATO prospects. “After I finished my speech, in which I explained that Serbia and its political elites incline toward Russia and other totalitarian regimes, a gentleman, who was a respected citizen of Pancevo where the forum took place, said it was extremely inappropriate to bring ‘kids with no elementary school’ in for such a serious debate.” Pocesta says he reminded the man of the career of Hugo Grotius, a 17th-century Dutchman who became an expert in international law after entering university at age 11, and similar cases. Upon which, “the gentleman’s tone went from roughly provocative to quiet and gentle,” he said.

Is the Internet to Blame for Hate Speech?
Pocesta is not alone in being the target of abuses and threats, as the recent experiences of others – including gays and lesbians, talk-show hosts, and Karadzic of the Human Rights Ministry – show. Goran Miletic, a human rights lawyer for the Civil Rights Defenders organization, says the real boom in hard-line nationalist views and hate speech directed against national or other minorities coincided with the rapid growth in Internet use. “The Internet is a good place to find literally anything one could want and, what is even more important, meet like-minded people with whom one can easily exchange ideas, at the same time feeling secure and reaffirming that your attitude is the right one,” Miletic said. “It is there that one makes that unhappy step from reading literature to preparing for ‘action’ against those considered unacceptable for a so-called ‘healthy Serbian society.’ “ Like Pocesta, Miletic believes that declared democrats and liberals can also hold dangerous beliefs, although less openly than people given to extreme or even moderate nationalism. A good example, he said, is the notorious statement by Belgrade Mayor Dragan Djilas, a member of President Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party, against a planned gay-rights march in the city: “Why should the gays march downtown, when they can love each other between four walls?” “That symbolizes a complete negation of human rights for a part of the society,” Miletic said. “The same goes for the idea that the Roma population should be fenced off with wire, or statements that they should go back to where they came from, which irresistibly recall the events of World War II.” The first step in taking hate speech from words to deeds is usually a threat made on a social network or online forum, Miletic said. “Then, in the absence of an official reaction, and when they realize the judicial system is indifferent to punishing threats and hate speech, these people are emboldened to repeat their conduct, this time in real life. Unfortunately, due to poor work by prosecutors and police, we are unable to see how closely these ‘real life’ attacks against minority groups, journalists, and human rights defenders are related to such activities on the Internet. In my opinion, this connection is much bigger than is assumed.”

Serbian society may be unprepared for the unfettered competition of ideas the Internet offers, says Miljenko Dereta, executive director of Civic Initiatives, one of the biggest NGOs in Serbia. “Deciding which views you are going to represent is a matter of a personal choice, but what we have to worry about more is that today’s ‘ideology offer’ is poor, uninspiring, and politically ineffective, and that there is a huge, wide open space for ideas and ideologies rooted in fascism,” Dereta said. “The only reason such ideas thrive in the virtual world, if at all, is a belief that such a space provides anonymity,” Dereta said. Online anonymity offers “a tantalizing ease of showing yourself to be courageous in advocating ideas from the extreme right. On the other hand, I’ve never found myself on such a web page except when I searched for it, which again proves that it is a matter of one’s personal choice.” He too argues that covert support from political elites, lack of judicial action, as well as the attitude of the Serbian Orthodox Church help to prop up extreme groups. Yet, so far, he believes that their online presence is restricted to relatively small circles of like-minded people, significantly limiting such groups’ influence. Pocesta says he is unfazed by the threats against him and will continue his activism and the writing career he began at the age of 9. In addition to political commentary and miscellany such as a message of condolence to the U.S. Senate after the death of veteran Senator Robert Byrd last month, his blog contains several poems in English touching on subjects from the earthquake in Haiti to his sadness over Yulia Tymoshenko’s loss in Ukraine’s presidential election. Hall of Presidents, his book of biographical sketches of American presidents, appeared last winter with financial support from his family. He says he’s now planning a book about “all forms of fascism, chauvinism, and discrimination.” Asked for more details of his early career, Pocesta instead urges the interviewer to wait, saying, “My memoirs will be published this autumn. There you will see everything about how I began as an activist.”

Snezana Congradin is a contributor to the Serbian monthly Republika, the website Pescanik, and a journalist for the daily Danas in Belgrade. Matja Stojanovic is a contributor to Republika and Pescanik.
© Transitions Online

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CANADIAN CHARGED WITH HATE CRIMES

8/7/2010- A Canadian man who has called for the "extermination" of Jews in Canada has been charged under a rarely used hate crimes law. Salman Hossain, 25, accused of "willfully promoting and advocating genocide of the Jewish community," was charged Thursday afternoon by Ontario Provincial Police following an investigation into his website and blog, which feature hundreds of racist comments. Authorities also looked at his racist posts on other websites. Hossain was charged with three counts of willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group and two counts of advocating and promoting genocide against an identifiable group, according to police. It is the first time an advocating genocide charge has been prosecuted in Canada, according to the National Post. "Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms includes the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly," Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino said in a statement. "But we must not stand idly by when these rights are used as a shield to promote hatred against any community." York University suspended Hossain after reports of his Internet postings were made public. He attended classes to modify his behavior. Hossain has been posting for the last year on the Filthy Jewish Terrorists site, a conspiracy theory website, with headlines such as “The Jews and the West must be nuked” and “The destruction of the West is the only way to exterminate the Jews.” He is now living in his birth country of Bangladesh, where he moved in the middle of the police investigation. Canada does not have an extradition treaty with Bangladesh. Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley decided not to prosecute Hossain last year because Hossain had removed many of his posts. Bentley pressed charges when Hossain began posting this year on Filthy Jewish Terrorists. Last week, Hossain wrote that “We must never cease in our efforts to eliminate the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Their permanent liquidation and destruction is the only solution.”
© JTA News

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CANADA’S PROSPERITY WILL SUFFER WITHOUT FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR DIGITAL LITERACY

7/7/2010- Canada’s leading digital literacy organization, Media Awareness Network (MNet), is sounding the alarm that Canada will continue to trail other countries in productivity and innovation unless a national plan for digital literacy is put in place. In its submission to the Government of Canada’s consultation on the digital economy MNet asserts that there is a connection between Canada’s declining performance in the digital economy and its failure to develop a national digital literacy strategy. The paper, Digital Literacy in Canada: From Inclusion to Transformation, calls on the federal government to take a leadership role in supporting solutions that will create citizens who know how to use digital technologies to their fullest and can think critically about digital content. “Canada is at a crossroads”, says Jane Tallim, MNet’s Co-Executive Director, “we can either continue with our traditional ways of doing business and educating our students, workers, and citizens, or we can seize the new economic, social, and cultural opportunities generated by digital technologies. Other countries are recognizing digital literacy as a key cornerstone of their economic plans; Canada must do the same or risk falling behind.” “Digitally literate citizens have the skills to take advantage of e-commerce, e-government and e-health services, and know how to use technology effectively for communication, collaboration and creation. These are skills that all Canadians – from children to seniors – need for active participation in a digital society.” concludes Ms. Tallim.

MNet outlines several action items the government needs to take to support digital literacy in Canada, including the immediate steps of:
§ creating a digital literacy taskforce to develop a blueprint for a National Digital Literacy Strategy;
§ supporting national research on the digital skills needed by Canadian children and youth; and
§ facilitating a summit of key stakeholders to discuss implementation through the education, government, community, and job training sectors.

Read the discussion paper Digital Literacy in Canada: From Inclusion to Transformation.
© Media Awareness Network

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‘KILL A JEW’ PAGE ON FACEBOOK SPARKS FUROR

Detractors claim site not proactive enough in stopping hate-mongers.

5/7/2010- A murderous anti-Semitic theme appeared on Facebook Sunday, when a user named “Alex Cookson” launched an open invitation to an “event” called “Kill a Jew Day.” The page on the popular social networking Web site urged users to violence “anywhere you see a Jew” between July 4 and July 22. A large image of a swastika was placed at the top of the page. Under the heading “description,” Cookson wrote, “You know the drill guys.” It was the fourth time that a call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days. The site attracted a torrent of anti-Semitic responses. “Can’t wait to rape the dead baby Jews,” one user wrote. Another user posted images of corpses piled on one another. A third user posted quotes by Adolf Hitler. Within hours, however, a large number of Israeli users converged on the site and posted comments on the page, with some expressing their disgust, and others mocking Cookson and his supporters. Others still expressed their anger at the page by sending profanities and threatening to track down anti-Semitic users. According to the Jewish Internet Defense Web site (JIDF), the page is one of a number “kill a Jew” Facebook pages that have been launched and subsequently removed following complaints in recent days. David Appletree, founder of JIDF, told The Jerusalem Post that incitement to anti-Semitic murder was a prevalent phenomenon on Facebook, and that not enough was being done to stop it. “I feel it’s very dangerous. This is part of a long-running campaign that we’ve fighting for well over two years,” Appletree said. “They’re taken down but they come back and they’re determined to keep them up. It’s very dangerous,” he added. Appletree said online anti- Semitism has already helped spur violent incidents, such as the 2007 assault on Holocaust author Elie Wiesel in San Francisco by a Holocaust denier, and the gun attack on the Holocaust Museum in Washington by a white supremacist armed with a rifle, which claimed the life of a security guard. “This incitement has been the precursor to violence against Jews,” he said.

On his Web site, Appletree wrote, “This is precisely why Facebook needs to take more proactive measures (ie. deactivating accounts responsible for, and taking part, in, this material). Facebook must implement IP bans on people involved in such material. Finally, law enforcement should get involved, Facebook should be subpoenaed, the IP’s of the people threatening and inciting violence should be obtained, and legal action should be immediately pursued.” Appletree told The Post that Facebook could implement technologies that are sensitive to keywords which could prevent such pages from being loaded. “Facebook is not proactive enough,” he said. Facebook said it would review the event page in question after being alerted to it by the Post. Facebook removed the page from its site on Sunday evening for
violating its terms of use. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes added, “Unfortunately ignorant people exist and we absolutely feel a social responsibility to silence them on Facebook if their statements turn to direct hate. That’s why we have policies that prohibit hateful content and we have built a robust reporting infrastructure and an expansive team to review reports and remove content quickly.” Noyes added, “We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. Specifically, we’re sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and actionable threats of violence. “The goal of these policies is to strike a very delicate balance between giving our more than 400 million users the freedom to express themselves and maintaining a safe and trusted environment. When groups or pages make real threats or statements of hate we remove them. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site.” In 2009, Facebook came under fire for refusing to remove groups that promoted Holocaust denial on the social networking site.
© The Jerusalem Post

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TURKEY GOES INTO BATTLE WITH GOOGLE

Last month Turks found they could not access many Google services. YouTube is already banned. The BBC's Jonathan Head looks at this brewing battle between Turkey and one of the giants of the internet.

2/7/2010- Sitting in an Istanbul cafe Ozan Tuzun taps away furiously on the keyboard of his laptop, trying to break the invisible walls that surround him. "I'm going to DNS.com now to take one of their numbers… I enter it… no that didn't work. Right let's try to get a DNS from Google… no… ok we'll try Ktunnel…" What Ozan is doing - and it takes him about 10 minutes - is something most of us can do in just seconds. He wants to watch YouTube. And he is an expert, a technology buff; most people trying the same thing from Turkey would give up. "It's very frustrating, it makes me feel like I'm living in a third world country," he says. The ban on YouTube was imposed by a court in Ankara on 5 May 2008, after a series of 17 temporary bans the preceding year. The grounds by the courts given each time varied, but they followed a number of complaints from Turkish citizens about videos on YouTube deemed insulting to Kemal Ataturk, the country's revered first president.

Crimes against Ataturk
In 2007 the government passed a sweeping law regulating the internet, known as Law No 5651. It allows a court to block any website where there is "sufficient suspicion" that a crime has occurred. The eight crimes listed include child pornography, gambling, prostitution, and "crimes against Ataturk". Insulting or denigrating Ataturk was already a crime. The Turkish government refuses to publish statistics, but campaigners for internet freedom estimate that more than 4,000 websites are currently blocked, making internet censorship in Turkey amongst the heaviest in the world. "For years I wrote about China and Middle Eastern countries that tried to censor the internet," says Serdar Kuzuloglu, the technology editor for Radikal newspaper, "but I could never imagine that one day I would be writing the same things about my own country." "The blocking process is very unclear. There are eight categories of crimes which allow the courts to block a site, but it can also come from an individual complaint. "It's very difficult to find the responsible person."

No warning
So when, in addition to YouTube, many of Google's other popular services became impossible to access recently, it was difficult to know who had ordered it. A court? The Information Technologies Authority in Ankara, responsible for enforcing bans? There was no warning. Everyday tools like Google Maps and Google Analytics relied on by thousands of small businesses were blocked. Companies like top graphic design house Bravoistanbul suddenly found they could not access their e-mails or their office server. "You can't imagine that something like this could happen," says Ozlem Pekel, one of the company's founders. "We paid for three years so we wouldn't have to worry about our server fees, and it turns out we paid for nothing - we paid for a blocked account. "And it's Google! It just shows you how much respect the government has for us, the taxpayers." It turns out that the Turkish authorities blocked a number of IP addresses they thought were being used to access YouTube, but which had been reconfigured by Google for other services as well. But there is confusion because the government also accuses Google of not registering as a company in Turkey and paying local taxes. Google runs its European operations, which include Turkey, out of Ireland, and pays most of its taxes there. The fact that it does not pay tax in other countries is already a source of criticism, but Turkey is the first country to wield the stick of censorship over the issue.

Two different Turkeys
The government's position gets even more confusing when people recall that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan confessed that he regularly found ways around the YouTube ban, and encouraged others to do the same. President Abdullah Gul put a message on Twitter recently saying he was "definitely against" YouTube and Google services being blocked. There are two different Turkeys talking here. There is Istanbul, buzzing with entrepreneurial activity and cultural life, where people aspire to European levels of wealth and freedom. And there is the capital Ankara, a city of bureaucrats, the centre of military and political power. Ankara is where nearly all the internet restrictions emanate. The city is dominated by the austere, neo-classical mausoleum of the founding father Ataturk, where people line up every day to pay their respects to modern Turkey's founding father. Not far from the mausoleum, in a nondescript residential building, is the office of the Ataturk Thought Association, an organisation dedicated to protecting the secular heritage of the first president. They have been behind many of the complaints against Google, YouTube and other websites. Tansel Colacan is the formidable chairwoman of the association, a retired senior judge. And she is unapologetic about the impact of her complaints. "For us Ataturk is a symbol of democracy and women's emancipation," she says. "This is about respect for him. I am not bothered by the impact of the court decision." At the offices of the Information Technologies Authority, when asked whether blocking sensitive material was more important than the well-being of thousands of small businesses, there was a more nuanced response. "If you ask me as a personal question, my answer would be different," said Osman Nihat, head of the Internet Department. "But as a government person I would say this is a court decision, and there is a law. I have to apply the court decision and the law. Those are insulting videos - they should see this and obey," he added. Google has said in a statement that it pays all the taxes it is legally required to pay, and that the Turkish government is asking it to remove offensive material from all YouTube sites, and not just to restrict access to it from Turkey. Its services have now been blocked or restricted for a month, with no solution in sight.
© BBC

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ANTI-GAY GROUPS RUNNING OUT OF SEARCH ENGINES

by Candace Chellew-Hodge

2/7/2010-  Focus on the Family is accusing Google of giving its gay and lesbian employees special treatment. The information giant announced a new policy that will compensate its gay and lesbian employees for the federal taxes they must pay on when they take advantage of domestic partner health benefits. The perk, however, hasn’t been extended to unmarried heterosexual couples on the payroll, though, for obvious reasons, because heterosexuals “have the option of avoiding the tax by getting married.” Focus cried foul to FoxNews saying: “If Google wants to be truly fair to its employees, it should consider extra compensation to married heterosexuals who are bitten every April 15 by the marriage-penalty tax,” spokesman Gary Schneeberger told FoxNews.com. “How is offering more money to only one group to offset a perceived inequity not a form of discrimination against those groups not fortunate enough to receive such bonuses?”

Fox legal analyst Lisa Wiehl said the law could be challenged on grounds of ‘reverse discrimination’: “because of the equal pay for equal work statute which says that if I’m doing the same job as the person next to me that my marital status or sexual orientation shouldn’t be taken into consideration. It’s my work performance that should be taken into consideration.” Readers commenting on the Fox site are vowing to boycott Google in favor of Bing, Microsoft’s latest venture into the search engine business. They might want to rethink that move, too, since Microsoft was one of the first companies to include sexual orientation in its non-discrimination policies and actually offers “partial coverage for transgender surgery (effective in 2006) to its existing coverage of other transgender-specific health benefits.”
In the words of Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”

Two thoughts come to mind while reading this:
1. Good on Google for doing something Congress should have done when they passed health care reform. Removing the unfair taxation of domestic partner benefits was in the original legislation but was stripped out in the Senate version. (They also announced in the same blog post that they would begin offering family and medical leave to its gay and lesbian employees.)
2. I thought conservative groups like Focus on the Family were champions of business and the free market. If a company wants to give an extra perk one group of its employees so it can attract and retain qualified talent, then what business is it of yours? Or, do you only champion the freedom of businesses to do as they please only when it benefits the people you like?
© Religious Dispatches

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PAKISTAN TO MONITOR WEBSITES FOR 'ANTI-ISLAM CONTENT'

26/6/2010- Pakistan's government ordered the monitoring of websites including Google, Yahoo and YouTube for "anti-Islam content" Friday, an official said, as tensions over the Internet continued. A spokesman for the country's telecommunication authority said the order had been received from the ministry of information technology and was being implemented. It comes after a row over Pakistan's blocking for nearly a fortnight last month of the Facebook website due to content deemed blasphemous. "The major websites which will be monitored for anti-Islam content include Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, Amazon and YouTube," the spokesman told AFP. He added that the government had also ordered the blocking of 17 webpage links containing blasphemous content. The links include pages within YouTube, Islam Exposed and Jehad.org A high court earlier this week ordered the government to block access to nine websites including Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing for showing material against "the fundamental principles of Islam and its preaching". Judge Mazhar Iqbal of Lahore High Court announced the order in the eastern city of Bahawalpur in response to a petition filed by retired civil servant Siddique Mohammad. Pakistan shut off Facebook for nearly two weeks last month in a storm of controversy about a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad and has restricted access to hundreds of online links because of blasphemy. Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and the row sparked comparison with protests across the Muslim world at the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006. When a Facebook user decided to organise an "Everyone Draw Mohammed Day" competition to promote "freedom of expression" it sparked a major backlash among Islamic activists in the South Asian country of 170 million. In the wake of the controversy, Pakistan blocked some 1,200 individual web pages and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)to limit access to "blasphemous" material. Facebook together with YouTube accounts for up to 25 percent of Internet traffic in Pakistan. The country briefly banned YouTube in February 2008 during a similar protest against "blasphemous" cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
© AFP

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Headlines June 2010

CONVICTIONS POINT TO RISE OF FAR RIGHT EXTREMISM (uk)

Today's convictions of a 42-year-old food packer and a 59-year-old builder on inciting racial hatred brings to 16 the number of convictions connected to far right extremism in the past two years, as Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel investigates.

24/6/2010- Trevor Hannington, from South Wales, and Michael Heaton, from Lancashire, ran their own far right organisation which promised street action to help rid the country of minority communities. Their Aryan Strike Force boasted 350 members. Its website had tens of thousands of postings, all messages of hate like urging the destruction of Jews, describing them as treacherous scum. There were references to "chopping n****** legs off" and "kill the jew, burn down a synagogue today". Heaton was found guilty on four charges charges, while Hannington admitted to four terrorism charges including distributing instructions on how to turn a water pistol into a flamethrower. Both were both found not guilty of soliciting to murder. Dr Matthew Feldman, who runs the UK's only research unit on new media and domestic extremism at Northampton University, was the prosecution's key witness in this case. He says "These are neo-Nazis, pure and simple, and consider themselves really the most extreme versions of this ideological neo-Nazism that is new. "We have had some evidence, I believe, of activists from the ASF appearing on videos at the English Defence League marches and so forth."

Rise in extremism
Dr Feldman believes this recent string of convictions of "lone wolf" cases and the creation of the English Defence League point to a resurgence of far right extremism. He said: "In terms of what we might call small cell or lone wolf terrorists cases since 2008, but also other events in 2008 such as the successful election of two British National Party MEPs in the Yorkshire, Humber area, and in 2009 the creation of the English Defence League on the back of those protests by some radical Islamism groups against the return of Anglican soldiers. So I think there is a confluence of factors that do point to a resurgence in the far right." The two convicted today actually turned up at several of the EDL rallies and used their website to praise the EDL's actions. Yet the EDL denies any links to these extremists organisation. We asked for an interview with its organisers so we could put all our evidence to them. They declined. Does that mean EDL is infiltrated with those with a much more extreme agenda intent on more than just glorified football style violence? Police who monitor these events say no.

Assistant Chief Constable Anton Setchell, national coordinator for domestic extremism, told Channel 4 News that "we have seen some individuals from the far right on the margins of EDL organised events but these are only one or two individuals. We have found no strong links between extreme groups like the Aryan Strike Force and the EDL." Yet today's guilty verdicts bring to 16 the total number of far right extremists who have been convicted over the past two years. Among them were father and son Ian and Nicky Davison who were sent to prison last month for possessing the poison Ricin and for making and detonating pipe bombs. They were also co-founders of the Aryan Strike Force. Dr Feldman says: "in groups like the ASF successor organisations we are seeing a group numbering in the few hundreds probably at the maximum. "That's a few hundred too many because these are not people who are far right activists for the BNP and knocking doors. These are people who may very well be considering a future as we saw in the Davison case undertaking terrorists. In fact Heaton stated publically that as part of a "rites of passage" to join, potential recruits had to carry out a serious op, meaning a violent racist attack.

Report on racism
The Institute for Race Relations is about to publish a report, which Channel 4 News has had exclusive access to, mapping out 600 serious racist attacks in the UK last year. Many have taken place in towns which have had influxes of a migrant workforce or asylum seekers. But it also hints at a correlation between attacks and pockets of extremism. We found that of the 16 extremist convictions since 2008, two thirds come from towns which form a corridor across the north of England: Penwortham, south of Preston, to Leigh, west of Manchester, to Batley, to Selby, to Goole, to Grimsby, then further north to Elsdon and Durham. Privately, police sources have confirmed to us that their intelligence suggests the same. They admit there are some dangerous individuals, but overall the threat from right wing extremists has hardly changed since the days of the nail bomber David Copeland, who killed three and seriously injured 79 people in three attacks, the worst at Soho's Admiral Duncan Pub in 1999. It was the last time white supremacists were said to behind a bomb attack in the UK. Those monitoring far right extremists attribute the recent string of convictions to a combination of "good police work", community relations and luck, rather than an increased threat. But they say what has changed is their profile boosted by a combination of the numerous convictions and the tenor of EDL marches.
© Channel 4 News

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MACEDONIA: NGO SLAMS ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS LAW

23/6/2010- The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of the Republic of Macedonia will contest before the Constitutional Court a freshly voted law that will allow the police greater use of wiretapping and monitoring of personal electronic communications. “We are assembling a team that will write the appeal before the court. All the amendments that we believe are against the basic human rights guaranteed by the constitution will be contested,” Keti Jandrijevska Jovanova from the Macedonian branch of the Helsinki Committee told Balkan Insight on Wednesday. Jovanova explained that they will try to file their appeal before the court as soon as possible: “probably during the summer period so that the court be able to put it on the agenda in the fall”. The controversial Law amending the Law on Electronic Communications passed the Parliament last Wednesday with the support of the ruling majority from the VMRO DPMNE party. 55 legislators supported the bill while only nine legislators in the 120 seat assembly voted against. The Helsinki Committee argues that the amendments give too much freedom to the police to perform wiretapping and other forms of monitoring of personal electronic communication, in some cases without even requiring a court order. The human rights watchdog group argues that the loose formulations in the law create space for abuse and for the invasion of citizens’ privacy.

The NGO argues that the law goes against Article 17 of the constitution which guarantees the inviolability of the freedom and secrecy of correspondence and all other forms of communication as well as Article 25 which guarantees the respect and protection of the privacy of personal and family life, dignity and reputation. Before the adoption of the amendments, Transparency Macedonia, the Open Society Institute-Macedonia and the Metamorphosis Foundation also stood against the new provisions. In a joint statement together with the Helsinki Committee they demanded their immediate withdrawal. “The bill allows the Ministry to have “constant and direct access” to the electronic communications networks and facilities of the public communications networks operators and providers of public communications services, as well as “conditions for independent downloading of traffic data”, which would make the Republic of Macedonia one of the few, or probably the only country in the world in which a state authority has such powers, without the possibility for external control,” the joint statement reads.

During the parliament discussion and voting last week ruling party lawmakers argued that the law will simply allow greater efficiency for police work and better results in the fight against crime and corruption. But local human rights activist Mirjana Najcvevska told Balkan Insight that the interpretation of the law as it stands will allow the state to eavesdrop on citizens, tap their phones, and follow their SMS and e-mail correspondence without external control. “I hope that this law will fail before the Constitutional Court because it is definitely against EU standards and directives,” Najcevska said.
© Balkan Insight

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MINISTRY PREPARES INTERNET CRIME PREVENTION STRATEGY (Czech Rep.)

17/6/2010- The Czech Interior Ministry plans a strategy to prevent Internet crime targeting children, Jitka Gjuricova, ministry crime prevention department director, said at a conference held by the National Centre of a Safer Internet in the Senate Thursday. Experts pointed to the need to spread more information on safety on the Internet both among children and their parents and teachers who still lag behind the younger generation in Internet literacy. Gjuricova mentioned a project applied in the Olomouc Region in north Moravia that aims at creating rules reducing the abuse of the Internet and mobile technologies thanks to the early provision of information to their users. She said it mainly targets cyberbullying and cybergrooming.

Gjurovicova said according to a survey, almost 68 percent of about 2000 Czech children polled were ready to share their personal data in the virtual world with people some of whom pretended to be their peers. The survey showed that almost a half of Czech children are the target of a form of cyberbullying, such as abusive language, offences and humiliation through SMS messages, e-mail and publication of ridiculing photographs on social networks. Gjurovicova said children must know that such behaviour is subject to sanctions.

Petr Soukup, from Social Studies Institute, said children should be educated towards safe behaviour on the Internet in kindergartens already.  He said according to a poll by the National Centre for a Safer Internet on its web page, Internet literacy should officially become a theme of education at schools just as financial literacy and ethical education. Centre coordinator Pavel Vichtera mentioned the project Red Button that makes it possible to anonymously report web pages with an illegal content to the contact centre Hot Line whose operators can decide on whether the information should be passed on to the police.

The service is mainly destined for the struggle against child pornography on the Internet. The project is supported by the Office for the Protection of Personal Data. Radim Polcak, from Masaryk University in Brno, and Senate deputy chairwoman Alena Gajduskova pointed to that it is important for the Czech Republic to ratify the Council of Europe's convention on preventing violence through the Internet. The ratification would allow the Czech police better cross-border cooperation in the struggle against operators of child pornography web pages, they said.
© The Prague Daily Monitor

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DUTCH FACEBOOK USERS 'APOLOGISE' FOR GEERT WILDERS VICTORY

11/6/2010- Embarrassed by Dutch populist MP Geert Wilders’ victory in Wednesday’s general elections? You can now join a dedicated Facebook group to say ‘sorry’ to the rest of the world. And no, you’re not the only one. Only two days after its launch, more than 30,000 people have already signed up. “We apologize for the 1.5 million Dutch people that voted for Geert Wilders” is the name of the Facebook group, launched only hours after Wednesday’s election results were in. The far right PVV party got 24 seats in the 150-seat parliament, with around 15 percent of the vote. “The PVV is a right-wing party that promotes fear, hatred and racism," say the founders of the web page. “The majority of Dutch people do not support its ideology and would rather not see it become a part of our government."

Bush
The site was set up by Leonie Heinicke and her brother Michiel, who were inspired by similar initiatives in the United States, where thousands of Americans apologised to the world for the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004. Leonie and Michiel opened the site simply because they were shocked. “The Netherlands always used to be known as this friendly, tolerant country," Leonie told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. “But that’s changed now. We have a lot of international friends and they all asked us how a party like the PVV can be so popular here. That’s why we opened this Facebook group."

Message
Leonie and Michiel want to show the world that, despite the PVV win, there are still millions of people in the Netherlands who did not vote for Mr Wilders. “That’s the only message we want to convey, really," according to Leonie. “We’re simply embarrassed." The founders of the Facebook group hadn’t expected such a rush to their site, with over 30,000 ‘friends’ in less than 48 hours. “It’s very easy to join, of course”, Leonie says. “And apparently news about the site is spreading very fast. But I’m sure most of these subscribers really feel that Mr Wilders’ victory is a worrying trend”.

PVV supporters
Leonie and Michiel have also received many messages from PVV and Geert Wilders supporters, who are quite clear in their comments. “We get quite a lot of negative reactions”, Ms Heinike says. “But that doesn’t surprise us. People are very outspoken about the PVV. Some e-mails do cross a line, however." One message Ms Heinicke received stated that “she should try to walk through Amsterdam and Rotterdam at night and see what would happen if she came across a group of foreign youths." “The thing is, I live in a city near Amsterdam so I visit Amsterdam a lot. And I’ve never had any problems," Ms Heinicke says.

Anti-Wilders?
The Facebook group is not a hardline anti-Wilders site. “We have nothing against Mr Wilders as a person, we object to his ideas," Ms Heinicke says. “We’ve received pictures of Mr Wilders with swastikas, knives and blood, but we won’t publish those. That’s a step too far." Leonie and Michiel Heinicke are not considering taking the website any further. “We’re not organising demonstrations or something," Leonie says. “We're only trying to make people abroad aware about what Mr Wilders’ victory means to many people in the Netherlands. We’re simply worried, that’s all."
© Radio Netherlands Worldwide

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BEATEN TO DEATH FOR USING THE INTERNET(Egypt)

11/6/2010- Activists and supporters of Internet freedom in Egypt have described to Human Rights First different measures the Egyptian authorities take to control the activities of people accessing the Internet, but as of last week, it seems they have reached a whole new level. A young man was dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death after refusing to show his ID card to police. Patrons of Internet cafés are often required to provide identification details before logging on, and then their searches and activities online can be monitored. Police officers carry out random raids on Internet cafés and gather identification information from those present, even though there is no justification in Egyptian law for this kind of demand. On the evening of June 7, 2010 what appeared to be one of these random raids escalated into the horrific brutalization of a young man by two policemen. Reports now reveal that the man may have been targeted for exposing police corruption. He posted a video on the internet depicting officers sharing the profits of a drug bust.

One thing that distinguishes this incident from other incidents of government intimidation of bloggers and activists is that it was carried out in plain view, and other citizens were able to capture and transmit images of police brutality before they could be confiscated. As human rights defenders in Egypt have told us, the government’s usual approach is to brutalize activists/netizens after detaining them and to hold them in custody until the bruises have disappeared. Gamal Eid, lawyer and Executive Director for Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, has said that with respect to bloggers and Internet activists, the government will find reasons to “kidnap them, torture them, take their passport and send them to prison until the hurts on their body become normal so for us there is no evidence of what happened.”

Here are the facts of this tragic case: Khaled Mohamed Saeed, 28, was at an Internet café that he frequented in the Sidi Gaber district of Alexandria when two officers from the local police station entered the café and demanded to see everyone’s ID cards, claiming that they were authorized to do this under the Emergency Law, a law that has been condemned by international human rights organizations and Egyptian activists as allowing security forces to commit abuses with near impunity. Khaled objected to what he saw as a violation of his rights. There are various reports of what happened next. One press report mentions that the police bound Khaled’s hands and started to beat him, others just describe the beating. Police officers knelt over him beating his head against the marble floor tiles of the café. Khaled was then dragged outside the Internet café, covered in blood, and the beating continued in full view of many witnesses, some of whom pleaded with police to stop. Two doctors even tried to help. Eyewitnesses said his head was banged against an iron door, steps and walls of an adjacent building. He was thrown into a police vehicle, and fifteen minutes later, his gruesomely disfigured dead body was deposited in the street.

Police cordoned off the area, barring patrons from the Internet café, and then passed through the crowd reportedly confiscating cellphones on which people had been taking photographs and shooting video of the beating. Some of these images have appeared online. Khaled’s family filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Alexandria. Hundreds of protestors have taken to the streets calling for a prosecution in this case. Security forces have responded with further brutality and arrests and in some cases attempted to ban media and journalists from the scene. Human Rights First is joining with Egyptian human rights activists and bloggers and calling for a prompt, thorough investigation into the brutal killing of Khaled Mohamed Saeed. Those responsible need to be brought to justice. Human Rights First also calls upon the United States government to defend citizen access to the Internet by expressing strong concern regarding this incident to the Egyptian government. Egyptians should be able to access the Internet in cybercafés free from harassment and intimidation—when an online post or a random ID check turns into a murder, it is an entirely different problem, and just can’t stand.

For more information, see:



© Human Rights First
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NET NEUTRALITY -- CAN WE TRUST THE FCC NOT TO CENSOR THE INTERNET? (usa, blog,opinion)

By Rick Carnes, President, Songwriters Guild of America

11/6/2010- The proponents of Net Neutrality have long claimed that the FCC needs to lay down some rules insuring freedom of speech on the internet. As a songwriter I have a problem wrapping my mind around the concept that the FCC is going out of the censorship business and into the protection of free speech. Wasn't it the FCC that banned Billy Holiday's wonderful recording of "Love for Sale" and Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You?" Wasn't it the FCC that agreed with Vice President Spiro Agnew that the recording industry was promoting 'drug culture' with songs like "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "A Little Help From My Friends?" Isn't it the FCC that gave us Janet Jackson's 'Nipple Gate' and drove Howard Stern off the air and onto satellite radio? Didn't they ban Ice-T for Cop Killer? Fine Bono for cursing at an awards show? I could go on, but I hope this short list demonstrates the controversial history of the FCC's role in censoring free expression in music. Here is a video of Chase Fontaine, an enthusiastic, and thoroughly fictitious, supporter of Net Neutrality, attempting to explain the free speech 'benefits' of Net Neutrality (with mixed results)...

The Songwriter's Guild of America is not the only organization that is concerned about the idea of the FCC's protection of free speech on the internet.The EFF, a strong proponent of Net Neutrality, has also expressed concern: "While we're big fans of net neutrality, we worry that the FCC may want to build its net neutrality regulations on a rotten legal foundation,"Title I 'ancillary authority' which is both discredited and unbounded. As we've said before, if ancillary jurisdiction is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, the FCC could just as easily invoke it tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the commission dreams up (including things we won't like, like decency rules and copyright filtering)." So even some of the most fervent Net Neutrality supporters understand that turning over the internet to the FCC may be a problem for people who want free expression to survive and thrive in the wonderful new information medium that is the Internet.

Net Neutrality supporters tell us to distrust the ISP's, who have, with no Net Neutrality rules in place, given us an Internet that is the closet thing in history to a censorship-free zone. Alternatively, they ask us to trust the FCC, which has been banning, bleeping, and blurring everything in sight ever since the 1930's. While the EFF realizes there are problems with the "rotten legal foundation" that underlies attempts to regulate the internet under the "unbounded" Title I ancillary authority, we worry about similar problems under Title II. Under Title I, where the Internet is classified as an information service, the FCC could potentially look directly at content in order to see if all transmitters are being treated equally. But what if the FCC decides to do what it has done so many times in the past; and seeks to apply decency rules to content? Therein lies the very serious problem of Title I regulation of the Internet. Under Title II, if the internet is classified as a telecommunication service, the FCC would purportedly make sure that everyone has equal access to the "on-ramp" of the Internet at the purely data transport level. The FCC promises it would 'forebear' any attempt to control content under Title II. Seriously, they 'promise'.

But can we really trust the FCC to 'forebear' authority to reach any further than the transport level? The history of the FCC is replete with examples of attempts to apply decency rules and censorship to content. Should we believe that 'this time it's different?' We already have groups like Free Press calling for the FCC to reach up into the content level of the Internet and take action against 'hate speech'. Laudable as their underlying objective might be, the effect would be to put the FCC squarely into the internet content censoring business. If other strong Net Neutrality supporters like the Electronic Frontier Foundation realize that FCC regulation might very well have a negative effect on freedom of expression on the Internet, one would hope that a group calling itself 'Free Press' would share those same concerns.
© The Huffington Post

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RABBI THAT FILMED HELEN THOMAS'S ANTI-SEMITISM GETS 25,000 HATE EMAILS

10/6/2010- It's not just members of the media standing up to support disgraced journalist Helen Thomas after her unscheduled retirement caused by anti-Semitic remarks she made on camera last week. The rabbi that caught her disgusting comments on videotape and put them on the Internet has received 25,000 hate-email messages - and counting. Hours after MSNBC's Keith Olbermann actually called Rabbi David Nesenoff one of his "Worst Persons in the World," CBS-TV in New York reported the vicious electronic attacks streaming into the rabbi's inbox like a "ticker tape"

Rob Morrison, CBS2 New York: Four days ago Long Island Rabbi David Nesenoff launched his new website with these now-infamous comments from legendary journalist Helen Thomas. [...]
Morrison: The veteran newswoman apologized and then retired. Since then, Rabbi Nesenoff says the hate mail has been pouring in.
Rabbi David Nesenoff: As we're talking here, right now, the emails on my email are like a ticker tape. It's been this way for a week. It's going, going, going.
Morrison: 25,000 and counting -- messages like:
"The Jews need to go home just like the filthy illegals that plague America, same (expletive)."
"I know your type you gentile hating Jew boy. Come and face me turd. I'll smash u under my boot."
"Hitler was right. Time for you to go back in the oven."
Most of the senders not even bothering to hide their email addresses.
Nesenoff: These are people that feel very mainstream about anti-Semitism and hate. They feel so proud of it. There is an arrogance about it. There is no shame.

There certainly isn't, nor is there any shame from media members likely missing what the real story is here: rampant anti-Semitism in America and how it goes largely over-looked by our press. In this instance, so-called journalists in their zeal to support Thomas are even defending it. By contrast, any incident of possible racism towards minorities will get great attention by the affirmative action supporting press. Take for example the CNN.com report Wednesday that blamed white people for President Obama's pathetic response to the Gulf Coast oil spill. Since Obama threw his name into the ring as a presidential candidate back in February 2007, his adoring press have tried to bring race into the discussion whenever possible. Consider how quickly the Cambridge police department was labeled racist during last July's Henry Louis Gates Jr. episode. Media then conveniently called it a "teachable moment" about race relations in this country. So why isn't the nation's longest living member of the White House press corps making disgustingly anti-Semitic remarks to a rabbi a "teachable moment?"  Far from it, as NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted Tuesday, "[T]he only soundbites came from sympathetic media colleagues, wishing her well."

So what did Americans learn from THIS moment?
If you're a journalist that makes an anti-Semitic remark, your colleagues will support you. Isn't that a nice lesson as anti-Semitic acts of violence around the world continue to rise? Or hadn't you heard that such attacks more than doubled last year? Oh. That's right. You couldn't have known that, for our media chose NOT to report it.

Wasn't that convenient?
Add it all up, and just as our press exploit real or imagined racism to advance their agenda ESPECIALLY if it can help an elected official they support, anti-Semitic acts are not only regularly ignored but also excused if need be. Why this is still the case 65 years after the few surviving Jews were liberated from Nazi death camps after World War II is truly astounding.
© News Busters

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DEALING WITH ONLINE COMMENTS AND CYBER RAGE (Canada, opinion)

By Ms. Communicate

Editor's Note: Ms. Communicate will be writing twice a month columns on various and sundry issues related to advice, guidance and suggestions for living as happily as possible as citizens of various identities in the 21st century. Ms. Communicate's column will be appearing on the second and fourth Thursday of the month. Please send in any topics that you would like her to cover, as well as any letters seeking advice, which she'd love to answer. Her email is mscommunicate(at)rabble.ca.

10/6/2010- Today I'm writing about a problem that plagues many of my friends and loved ones. Reading online comments, especially mainstream media sites such as CBC.ca and the Globe and Mail.  All progressive types know that those places are populated by often misinformed, regularly offensive, and sometimes ghastly folks who occupy, to me, the far right of the political spectrum. Yet their mere presence and volume are starting to sound like the centre. Sort of like what the federal Conservatives have done. And we've seen how well that's worked out haven't we? Many of my friends who read comments online -- and these are people who are media hounds -- the genuinely curious, or the morbidly fascinated, complain bitterly to me about the comments they read, and bemoan the fact that now they have to go about their day with various degree of nonsense taking up space in their brains. Some get to know their most hated nemeses, but can't stop themselves from continually reading comments throughout the day, only to yell at the computer, or say to their friends, "Omg, you have to see what Commenter X said today!"

Enough!

So I've developed a few suggestions, sorted by category. Reduce the time you spend, thereby reducing the volume of comments you read.

1. Set aside a certain amount of time to read them, and a particular time of day in order to limit your exposure to their lethal fumes. If you can't control yourself on your own, try getting all ready for work or for whatever will take you away from the computer for a bit, and then read comments when you only have five minutes before you have to leave. Note to friends and co-workers of the online-comment-readers: do NOT accept persistent tardiness from these people. They need to know the consequences of their comment-reading behaviour.

2. I realize that the first point doesn't take into account that many people are wired and connected and internetted all the time what with ifones, ibrains and iconsciousnesses and central-nervous-systems-connected-directly-to-iservers-and-iISPs. Since the handheld devices are with people at all times, except maybe during bath/shower time, and I'm sure some waterproof covering is in the works even as I write this, I can't really help you unless you want to help yourselves.

3. Find a friend suffering from the same problem. Develop a buddy system in which you call each other and have permission to yell abuse at each other if either of you are reading the comments too much, based on the goals you've set for yourselves. And hey, handy, you can find some great verbatim verbiage in the very comments you are trying so hard to not read as much! Ah, irony. If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em.

4. Become a regular commenter, offering either well thought out comments filled with facts, bolded current references and positivity, or possibly ranging down to similarly incoherent rantings (but from the left! See Keith Olbermann for tips) just for some balance. As you contribute more regularly you may, and this is a strong "may," feel that as you actively engage rather than be a passive reader, you're at least doing your part to dispel the hate and ignorance that is often such an integral part of anonymous online comments. Your feelings of anger and frustration may subside. Hey, let me know how that works out if you try it, okay?

Really tough cases. These are for those of you for whom none of that will work. So for you I have but two possible suggestions.
5. Cold turkey. It hurts me more than it hurts you. Actually, it doesn't but you know what I mean.
6. Shut up already! You know what you're getting into when you go on those sites, fer cripe's sake! Stop complainin'!

Good luck!

related item:
On anonymous posting 
As someone who attaches his name to his writing, I hold a certain amount of scorn for people who post under pseudonyms or anonymously to news sites.
© Rabble

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HATE GROUPS USING SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

9/6/2010- Social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are being used by terrorists and racists to disseminate their messages and recruit members, a new report shows. The study released Tuesday by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group, found there are more than 11,500 terrorist and racist websites, blogs, chat rooms and social networking pages using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube online. That’s up nearly 30% from 20 months ago when the number was 8,000. One can learn how to make a bomb, and receive terrorist tutorials on how to kill people on some of these websites. “There’s definitely a trend towards social networking,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre headquartered in Los Angeles, said. “The hate groups in Canada and the U.S. are using Internet technology to converse. It’s a great marketing tool to get young people involved. “Terrorists and people committing hate crimes use whatever Internet technology they can to support their cause and inspire the lone wolf who doesn’t have to join an organization or group to make history,” Cooper said. Cooper says the social networking on the Internet is playing an important role for users around the globe, as it is the worlds most spectacular marketing tool which people can’t live without. “Every single terrorist threat has an Internet component. You only have to look at the American Jihad Jane charged by the U.S. authorities with conspiring to kill a Swedish cartoonist and the U.S. Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood who killed 13 and wounded 30 others,” Cooper explained. “Facebook has half a billion users. We’ve had meetings with people at Facebook and they’re trying to do the right thing, but it’s a pretty overwhelming job,” Cooper said, adding he’s like to give high marks to Canadian Internet companies who have been good at removing any problematic websites once notified. Cooper says the responsibility lies with parents and law enforcement authorities who need to become involved because you can’t leave all the decision-making to the end-user as they do not have the critical thinking to understand what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate.
© The Toronto Sun

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POLICE PUT DENT IN NEO-NAZI WEBSITES (Germany)

The number of illegal German neo-Nazi homepages on the internet has fallen in the past year, delivering authorities their first victory in combating right-wing extremism on the web, media reported Wednesday.

9/6/2010- According to daily Hamburger Abendblatt, efforts by the police and intelligence services have begun to pay off, with fewer dangerous websites on the internet than a year ago. The figures were revealed by federal government in response to questions put by opposition Social Democrats (SPD). The government said the drop was the result of work by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or Verfassungsschutz, and of tougher searching and controlling of cyberspace by the police. “This drop was enabled by intensive measures of German security services,” the parliamentary state secretary for the Family Ministry, Hermann Kues, said. The Verfassungsschutz puts the present number of neo-Nazi homepages at about 1,000. Although the report did not specify how many there had been a year ago, it said the controlling body website, jugendschutz.net, which investigates breaches of youth protection laws, managed to shut down 40 websites with illegal content. According to the government, neo-Nazi communities across Germany are relying more heavily on the internet. The government’s response to the SPD showed that authorities had no new information on the online activities of far-right groups such as the Kameradschaft Aachener Land, which encourages visitors to name groups or individuals with an “anti-German, left-wing extremist or communist viewpoint.'' “The significance of these internet sites is – with a few grave exceptions – fairly low.”
© The Local - Germany

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GOOGLE ACCUSED OF CRIMINAL INTENT OVER STREETVIEW DATA

9/6/2010- Google is "almost certain" to face prosecution for collecting data from unsecured wi-fi networks, according to Privacy International (PI). The search giant has been under scrutiny for collecting wi-fi data as part of its StreetView project. Google has released an independent audit of the rogue code, which it has claimed was included in the StreetView software by mistake. But PI is convinced the audit proves "criminal intent". "The independent audit of the Google system shows that the system used for the wi-fi collection intentionally separated out unencrypted content (payload data) of communications and systematically wrote this data to hard drives. This is equivalent to placing a hard tap and a digital recorder onto a phone wire without consent or authorisation," said PI in a statement. This would put Google at odds with the interception laws of the 30 countries that the system was used in, it added.

Scotland Yard
"The Germans are almost certain to prosecute. Because there was intent, they have no choice but to prosecute," said Simon Davies, head of PI. In the UK the ICO has said it is reviewing the audit but that for the time being it had no plans to pursue the matter. PI however does intend to take the case to the police. "I don't see any alternative but for us to go to Scotland Yard," said Mr Davies. The revelation that Google had collected such data led the German Information Commissioner to demand it handed over a hard-disk so it could examine exactly what it had collected. It has not yet received the data and has extended the original deadline for it to be handed over. The Australian police have also been ordered to investigate Google for possible breach of privacy.

'Systematic failure'
According to Google, the code which allowed data to be collected was part of an experimental wi-fi project undertaken by an unnamed engineer to improve location-based services and was never intended to be incorporated in the software for StreetView. "As we have said before, this was a mistake. The report today confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted wi-fi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns," said a Google spokesman. "This was a failure of communication between and within teams," he added. But PI disputes this explanation. "The idea that this was a work of a lone engineer doesn't add up. This is complex code and it must have been given a budget and been overseen. Google has asserted that all its projects are rigorously checked," said Mr Davies. "It goes to the heart of a systematic failure of management and of duty of care," he added.
© BBC

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WORLD CUP 2010: HOLLAND PLAYERS TOLD TO STOP TWEETING AFTER RACISM ROW

The Guardian• Eljero Elia 'anti Moroccan' comment forces Twitter ban • Player claims comments were not intended to offend

10/6/2010- Holland's World Cup squad has been banned from using Twitter during the tournament after the winger Eljero Elia sparked a racism row with comments on a live streaming video. Viewers reacted angrily to the video – in which Elia appears to insult Moroccans – forcing him to apologise and prompting the Dutch coach, Bert van Marwijk, to impose the ban. The defender Gregory van der Wiel said on his Twitter account the squad were no longer allowed to use it, and this was confirmed by Ryan Babel and Elia who both went offline. On the video Elia and Babel are seen playing a computer game in their room in front of a webcam, with several other team members visiting them. Elia apologised for his comments but insisted he had not intended to insult a group of people. "I want to apologise to the Moroccan community but I am not a racist," he told Dutch media. "I grew up in The Hague in a neighbourhood with 75 percent Moroccans and have a lot of friends among them. "What I said was meant for a friend of mine, Reduan, who always calls me 'negro' ... it sounds odd, but it is some slang." Van der Wiel last year learnt the hard way that Twitter comments can land you in hot water. The defender pulled out of the Dutch squad for a friendly against Australia with concussion but said on Twitter that he had visited a concert the night the team travelled to Australia. Holland start their World Cup campaign on Monday against Denmark.
© The Guardian

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CALL FOR ACTION OVER FAR-RIGHT WEBSITE (uk)

8/6/2010- A teaching union has called on education chiefs to act after a 16-year-old Welsh schoolboy was found running an extreme right-wing website. A report by the Western Mail’s sister paper Wales on Sunday revealed a website called The Carmarthenshire Front has been written and run by a GCSE pupil in the county. His school, Queen Elizabeth High, and the local education authority have sought to distance themselves from the website. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said the revelations were “deeply disturbing” and urged the authorities to take responsibility. “It is clear that there is still much more to be done to protect young people from having their attitudes poisoned in this way,” she said. “Families, schools, communities and government all have a responsibility to combat and challenge these unacceptable views. “It is not acceptable for either the school or local authority to claim to have no responsibility in this matter. They clearly do and the NASUWT will be seeking to ensure that this issue is taken seriously.” On Saturday, the country’s largest teaching union spoke out in support of the Unite Against Fascism group, who were marching against the far-right English Defence League’s anti-Muslim protest in Cardiff. NASUWT Wales organiser Rex Phillips said: “Given that schools are cited as one of the places to ‘hit’ in the spread of this extremist propaganda, the local authority must work with the Carmarthenshire schools to ensure this cannot happen.
© Wales Online

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HATE EMBOLDENED BY ANONYMITY OF INTERNET (usa)

“I want to kill Jews!!!” “Beat a Jew with a fork.” “National Punch a Jew Day.” Those are just a few of the anti-Semitic groups The Desert Sun found on a search of the popular Internet social networking site Facebook, with many of the groups started by teens.

6/6/2010- The various ways young people can communicate electronically today has a darker side, according to experts — the ease with which hatred and intolerance can be spread. “One of the most important things we at the Anti-Defamation League ever did was stop the Ku Klux Klan from being able to use masks at protests,” said Amanda Susskind, director of the league's Pacific Southwest region. “The KKK couldn't operate. If they had to show their faces they lost their power. “What we face now is a new form of masking. There are so many ways in which hatred can be promulgated through the Internet that is either kept anonymous or forwarded so many times the impact upon who started it is lost.” On another popular social networking site, Twitter, The Desert Sun found a quote attributed to Adolf Hitler “re-tweeted” — copied and reposted — by more than 100 different people in a 10-hour period. The quote: “I could kill all the Jews in the world, but I kept some alive so you can see why I was killing them.” On YouTube, two young men demonstrate in a video how to “beat the Jew,” as one swings an aluminum baseball bat against a human-sized punching bag. “Beat the Jew! Beat the Jew!” they shout with each swing. “This is not just in your neck of the woods in California; it's everywhere,” said David Appletree, founder of the Jewish Internet Defense Force, which works to expose and eradicate anti-Semitism and terrorism online. Ten middle school students were suspended in November for participating in “Kick a Jew Day” in Naples, Fla., a reference to a skit from the animated comedy television show “South Park.”

n “International Punch a Jew in the Face Day” group was formed on Facebook by Australian students in December, but was taken down within hours after protests by the Jewish Internet Defense Force. “I got a letter from a teacher in Australia who downplayed the page, who made us feel like we're the cruel ones for pointing it out — ‘It's just a joke,'” Appletree said. Facebook spokesman Simon Axten, in a statement e-mailed to The Desert Sun, said the site is continually reviewing content and removing objectionable material. “Unfortunately, ignorant people exist in the world,” he said. “We absolutely feel a responsibility to silence these people on Facebook if their statements turn to direct hate.” Axten said the site reacts quickly to reports of hateful or threatening conduct, and is “highly self-regulating,” with other Facebook users reporting content they find offensive. Shows like “South Park” and the Sacha Baron Cohen movie “Borat” use anti-Semitism in their comedy, but younger people don't appear to pick up on the satire, Appletree said. “It shows how contagious, even in a joking form, Jew-hatred can become,” he said. Life has gotten much more complex for parents, said Marcia Stein, women's philanthropy president for the Jewish Federation of Palm Springs and Desert Area, and desert chairwoman for the Anti-Defamation League. Many parents work longer hours than ever in a difficult economy, Stein said. Their children have time on their hands and many different means of communication, for good and for bad, she said. “Parents need to be much more aware of what their kids are doing,” she said. “They need to be more aware of what they are doing on Facebook, on the Internet. There are so many hate sites on the Internet, it's frightening.

“The kids are getting these hate messages and without even realizing it, it becomes part of who they are.” A 2007 study by Pew Research Center found that teens and twenty-somethings were the most tolerant of any generation on social issues. While discouraged by the volume of hateful messages on the Internet, Susskind said she's upbeat. “I'm encouraged that just as there are new ways to communicate hate, there are new ways to communicate togetherness and unity,” she said. “We're rapidly using the same tools to get to the same audience and redirect all of this energy to the good.”
© The Desert Sun

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INACH - International Network Against CyberHate

The object of INACH, the International Network Against Cyberhate is to combat discrimination on the Internet. INACH is a foundation under Dutch Law and is seated in Amsterdam. INACH was founded on October 4, 2002 by Jugendschutz.net and Magenta Foundation, Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet.