Circumventing Twitter’s censorship

Twitter’s announcement that it will start censoring tweets where required by the law of the country concerned has upset many people. It is, however, difficult to know what else the company can do: the law is the law; and surely some twitter is better than no Twitter at all.

But maybe Twitter is better than we thought: The Next Web has pointed out that its own help files explain how to circumvent the censorship. Tweets will be censored on a country basis. Twitter understands the user’s country by the user’s IP address. But since this isn’t foolproof, especially on mobile devices, Twitter allows the user to manually change his or her country settings via a simple drop-down box.

The implication is that if you start finding ‘Withheld’ tweets in your timeline, simply telling Twitter that you are really in a different country with a less censorious regime will reveal them. It is, according to The Next Web, as simple as that.

What happens next will be telling. If this is just a loop-hole, we can expect Twitter to try to close it. But it’s difficult to imagine that Twitter doesn’t know its own system, and even more difficult to see what it can do about it. Purely relying on IP addresses will leave open the possibility of censoring tweets in or from countries that believe in freedom of expression.

The EU and the UK cannot have signed ACTA: neither the BBC nor the Europa press service know anything about it

Isn’t it strange that the BBC reports that “Thousands of protesters have taken to Poland’s streets over the signing of an international treaty activists say amounts to internet censorship”? And then goes on to say that “Poland was one of several European Union countries, including Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Greece, to sign the treaty on Thursday but it appeared to be the only place where it caused protest.”

Very strange since the BBC is probably the UK’s leading news service and certainly the UK’s national news service paid for by the UK people – and it omits to mention that the UK also signed this document at the same time in the same place in Tokyo.

Isn’t it strange that the EU’s news service says nothing about it also signing the ACTA agreement at the same time in the same place in Tokyo?

And that neither news service seems to be aware that Kader Arif, the appointed rapporteur for ACTA in the European Parliament, has resigned in protest, saying he will not take part in this masquerade?

Conspiracy of silence? Too damn right.

UPDATE
And finally the BBC catches up – 24 hours after the news breaks. The BBC is supposed to let the cat out of the bag, not chase after it when it escapes.

Is this the new national DNA identity database?

You have to look long and hard, but eventually you find it. There, on page 51 of ‘Building on our inheritance – Genomic technology in healthcare’ is the one and only mention of the national whole genome sequence database. From the beginning you know it must exist. The report talks throughout about the benefits that will accrue to mankind from the widespread use whole genome sequence research; but it only makes sense if the data is complete and freely available. But not until page 51, and only on page 51, is the national genome database mentioned.

This would not necessarily require data stored locally: patient sequence data could be stored securely in a national database, making it accessible to the centres but also to the patient’s physician or GP.

let’s be clear: this is a national DNA database. But it’s OK, because this is for health rather than law enforcement. And it will, yeah right, only be available to health officials, and health researchers, and pharmaceutical companies and academics and probably anyone who pays for it – internationally. The report makes very clear that if national research is good, international research is very much better.

It is, in effect, a national DNA database writ large. It has all the worst elements of the police DNA database combined with the NHS central records database and will undoubtedly cost a great deal more than both and be more dangerous and insecure than either.

And for what? “Government should not be duped by hype about genomics: some useful applications will exist but most diseases in most people and many adverse drug reactions are not predictable from people’s genes,” said Dr Helen Wallace, Director of GeneWatch UK. “Storing personal genomes for no reason would lead to a massive marketing scam, based on selling drugs to healthy people who are told they are at risk of getting diseases in the future.”

My concern is that government is quite relaxed about a new national DNA database from which it will gain all the benefits with none of the blame; that, in effect, a national genome database is already a conspiracy between government and the pharmaceutical companies in just the way that ACTA and DEA and SOPA and PIPA and others are a conspiracy between governments and the entertainment industry.