Fines for online hate speech can run into €1,000s

“Insults and incitement to hatred are almost normality in many public comment sections,” Stiftung Warentest wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

In an attached image, the consumer organization – more usually known as the gold standard of reviewing for everything from cars to bank accounts – illustrates a number of examples, along with the fines their authors eventually received.

Someone who wrote that “these vermin deserve to be stoned and shot up against the wall” was fined €1,380 by a German court.

Another user who wrote “I would be for re-opening the gas chambers and shoving the whole brood in there” had to cough up €4,800.

A comment directed at Jews came in for a €5,000 fine, while someone calling for Chancellor Angela Merkel to be “publicly stoned” had to pay €2,000”.

All of the fines outlined by Stiftung Warentest fall short of that handed out to anti-Islam group Pegida’s founder Lutz Bachmann, who was ordered to pay €9,600 for describing refugees as ‘cattle’ and ‘scum’ in Facebook posts.

“Victims of internet hate aren’t powerless,” Stiftung Warentest explained in their post, which contains links to websites for 11 German state police forces where victims of hate can report abusers.

http://www.thelocal.de/20160518/fines-for-online-hate-speech-can-run-into-1000s

 

UNITED NATIONS ANNOUNCES MASSIVE PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA “FRAMEWORK”

The UN had the UNODC recommendations and other recipes on the back burner for a couple years, but earlier this month we learned they are ready to float another control scheme.

On May 17, a Security Council presidential statement asked for a proposal from the organization’s counter-terrorism committee to devise a “comprehensive international framework” to “curb incitement, recruitment” of terrorism on the internet.

http://www.infowars.com/united-nations-announces-massive-pro-war-propaganda-framework/

 

FORMER TOP OBAMA OFFICIAL SAYS OPERATION CHOKE POINT HAD ‘COLLATERAL’ CONSEQUENCES

Unfortunately, as the investigations continue, so too have one of the unintended but collateral consequences of such vigilance: mass de-risking,”wrote Michael J. Bresnick, who previously served as executive director of Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, under which Operation Choke Point was created. “Members of the industry have raised their hands in frustration and simply avoided lines of business typically associated with higher risk. This reaction to [the Justice Department’s] enforcement initiative, and similar matters brought by the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is certainly understandable.”

Bresnick addressed the issue in an op-ed for American Banker.

According to government documents, Operation Choke Point was designed by the Justice Department in 2012 to “attack Internet, telemarketing, mail, and other mass market fraud against consumers, by choking fraudsters’ access to the banking system.”

http://www.infowars.com/former-top-obama-official-says-operation-choke-point-had-collateral-consequences/

SOROS BOARD MEMBER CHAIRS FIRM RUNNING ONLINE VOTING FOR TUESDAY’S UTAH CAUCUSES

The chairman of Smartmatic’s board, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, currently serves on the board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and has close ties to the billionaire.

The Wall Street Journal dubbed the Republican party’s online adventure on Tuesday as “one of the biggest online votes conducted so far in the U.S.” and the “largest experiment with online presidential voting since 2004, when Michigan allowed Democrats to vote in a party caucus via the Internet.”

http://www.infowars.com/soros-board-member-chairs-firm-running-online-voting-for-tuesdays-utah-caucuses/

 

CENSORSHIP SUMMIT: FACEBOOK MEETS WITH CHINA’S PROPAGANDA CHIEF…

Mark Zuckerberg has held a rare meeting with China’s propaganda chief amid a crackdown by the Beijing authorities on the use of the internet.

Liu Yunshan told Zuckerberg that he hopes FB can share its experience with Chinese companies to help “internet development better benefit the people of all countries”, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Zuckerberg was in Beijing to attend an economic forum.

China has called for the creation of a global internet “governance system” and cooperation between countries to regulate internet use, stepping up efforts to promote controls that activists complain stifle free expression.

Facebook and other western social media companies including Twitter are banned in China. Zuckerberg has long been courting China’s leaders in a so far futile attempt to access the country with the world’s largest number of Internet users — 668 million as of last year.

http://www.infowars.com/censorship-summit-facebook-meets-with-chinas-propaganda-chief/

Young people prefer an Internet connection to daylight

I know this because I’ve just read the results of a survey that asked young British people to name the five most important things that ensured their quality of life.

As The Huffington Post reported, their first choice was freedom of speech.

This is odd, as in Britain it’s far easier for rich people to sue people who say things they don’t like than it is in, say, the US.

What you might find most moving, however, is that 69 percent of these 2,465 youths picked an Internet connection as an essential, whereas only 64 percent chose daylight.

http://www.cnet.com/news/young-people-prefer-an-internet-connection-to-daylight/

UK READIES POLICE STATE BILL TO END INTERNET PRIVACY

The proposed legislation targets popular chat and message services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and FaceTime, outlaws end-to-end encryption and will force Apple to rewrite its iOS from the ground up to accommodate surveillance by the state. It would also force tech companies to provide backdoors accessible to government.

Additionally, the law requires ISPs to keep records of all internet activity of its customers. The data would be available to the government for a year.

In 2015 the British home secretary Theresa May admitted that a 1983 telecom act permitted bulk retention of data by MI5 and the agency had done so since September 2001.

UK Readies Police State Bill to End Internet Privacy

Internet domain handoff takes major step forward

A major step was taken Thursday in the U.S. government’s plan to hand off oversight of the Internet domain name system.

A nonprofit international

group approved a plan and forwarded it to the Obama administration Thursday for review and approval.

The group, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has historically been contracted out to manage the behind-the-scenes workings of the Internet that pair up numerical IP addresses with their familiar Web addresses.

A few years ago, the group was tasked with transitioning fully from U.S. government oversight to an international multistakeholder model.

The Commerce Department will have to sign off on the transition plan before it is allowed to go forward. But the Obama administration and Congress have been “watching closely,” said Steve Crocker, who leads ICANN’s board of directors.

“This proposal does not come as a surprise that requires a fresh start or a cold start and we fully expect that this will be viewed as 100 percent consistent with the criteria that was set out in advance and that which has been tracked all the way throughout the process,” Crocker said.

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/272568-internet-domain-handoff-takes-major-step-forward

Tags: Ted Cruz, ICANN, Commerce Department, Internet domain

Internet by light promises to leave Wi-Fi eating dust

Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp—that is the promise of Li-Fi, featuring Internet access 100 times faster than Wi-Fi with revolutionary wireless technology.

French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video.

The big advantage of Li-Fi, short for “light fidelity”, is its lightning speed.

Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps—fast enough to “download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second”, the founder and head of Oledcomm, Suat Topsu, told AFP.

“Li-Fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi” which uses radio waves to transmit data, he added.

The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs—which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second—to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the “digital equivalent of Morse Code”.

It started making its way out of laboratories in 2015 to be tested in everyday settings in France, a Li-Fi pioneer, such as a museums and shopping malls. It has also seen test runs in Belgium, Estonia and India.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-internet-wi-fi.html#jCp

UK READIES POLICE STATE BILL TO END INTERNET PRIVACY

The proposed legislation targets popular chat and message services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and FaceTime, outlaws end-to-end encryption and will force Apple to rewrite its iOS from the ground up to accommodate surveillance by the state. It would also force tech companies to provide backdoors accessible to government.

Additionally, the law requires ISPs to keep records of all internet activity of its customers. The data would be available to the government for a year.

In 2015 the British home secretary Theresa May admitted that a 1983 telecom act permitted bulk retention of data by MI5 and the agency had done so since September 2001.

http://www.infowars.com/uk-readies-police-state-bill-to-end-internet-privacy/