By James Kilner, Central Asia correspondent

3:20PM BST 29 Aug 2011

The potential new regulations are part of a wider attempt by the Kazakh authorities to cut the flow of videos and literature produced by militant Islamists which they blame for fueling extremist violence.

This month a court in Kazakhstan blocked access to the popular Russian blogging platform LiveJournal and other sites because Islamic extremists had been using them. Earlier this year a court also stopped access to the WordPress blogging site for several weeks for similar reasons.

The head of the Kazakh Interior Ministry’s department to combat information technology crime, Erseri Utegaliyev, told the Express-K newspaper that internet cafes in Kazakhstan are favoured by fraudsters and extremists.

‘Basically these things are committed in internet cafes and that is why we are now looking at the idea of monitoring clients using a number of records to show the time of their work and the IP address used,’ he said in an interview published last Thursday.

The Express-K article also described how under the proposed regulations, internet cafes may have to install cameras to video their customers.
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In May, a suicide bomber attacked a security services office in western Kazakhstan. This was the first suicide bomb in Kazakhstan’s 20-year post-Soviet history and the authorities quickly blamed militant Islamists for the attack.

Since then there have been a handful of shootouts between police and gunmen in the west of the country but the authorities, perhaps wary of the potential damage to Kazakhstan’s reputation as the most stable of the five Central Asian states, have been blamed these attacks on criminal gangs rather than militant Islamists.

Cutting militant Islamists’ communication channels is considered vital in defeating extremism but rights groups say internet cenorship in Kazakhstan has gone too far.

On Friday, the Paris-based media lobby group Reporters Without Borders said it was becoming increasingly concerned with Kazakhstan’s heavy-handed internet censorship.

‘It is legitimate to combat terrorism, but this should not result in the closure of independent news websites,’ Reporters without Borders said in a statement.

Western Kazakhstan is particularly vulnerable to militant Islam. It is the focus of Kazakhstan’s important oil and gas industry which has generated much wealth but also created a large income gap.

The region is also only a relatively short boat ride across the Caspian Sea from the North Caucasus where Russia has been fighting militant Islamists for two decades. Recently a number of Kazakhs have been killed fighting alongside militants in the North Caucasus.

ECHR rules sneaky RIPA peeking perfectly proper

The European Court of Human Rights has rejected a claim that the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) violates the human right to a private life. The UK’s rules and safeguards on covert surveillance are proportionate, said the court.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and JAMES RISEN
Published: March 31, 2010

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been ‘subjected to unlawful surveillance,’ the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to ‘unfettered executive-branch discretion’ that had ‘obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.’

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it ‘specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.’

Because the government merely sought to block the suit under the state-secrets privilege, it never mounted a direct legal defense of the N.S.A. program in the Haramain case.

Judge Walker did not directly address the legal arguments made by the Bush administration in defense of the N.S.A. program after The New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005: that the president’s wartime powers enabled him to override the FISA statute. But lawyers for Al Haramain were quick to argue that the ruling undermined the legal underpinnings of the war against terrorism.

One of them, Jon Eisenberg, said Judge Walker’s ruling was an ‘implicit repudiation of the Bush-Cheney theory of executive power.’

‘Judge Walker is saying that FISA and federal statutes like it are not optional,’ Mr. Eisenberg said. ‘The president, just like any other citizen of the United States, is bound by the law. Obeying Congressional legislation shouldn’t be optional with the president of the U.S.’

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, noted that the Obama administration had overhauled the department’s procedures for invoking the state-secrets privilege, requiring senior officials to personally approve any assertion before lawyers could make it in court. She said that approach would ensure that the privilege was invoked only when ‘absolutely necessary to protect national security.’

The ruling is the second time a federal judge has declared the program of wiretapping without warrants to be illegal. But a 2006 decision by a federal judge in Detroit, Anna Diggs Taylor, was reversed on the grounds that those plaintiffs could not prove that they had been wiretapped and so lacked legal standing to sue.

Several other lawsuits filed over the program have faltered because of similar concerns over standing or because of immunity granted by Congress to telecommunications companies that participated in the N.S.A. program.

By contrast, the Haramain case was closely watched because the government inadvertently disclosed a classified document that made clear that the charity had been subjected to surveillance without warrants.

Although the plaintiffs in the Haramain case were not allowed to use the document to prove that they had standing, Mr. Eisenberg and six other lawyers working on the case were able to use public information — including a 2007 speech by an F.B.I. official who acknowledged that Al Haramain had been placed under surveillance — to prove it had been wiretapped.

Judge Walker’s opinion cataloged other such evidence and declared that the plaintiffs had shown they were wiretapped in a manner that required a warrant. He said the government had failed to produce a warrant, so he granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs.

But Judge Walker limited liability in the case to the government as an institution, rejecting the lawsuit’s effort to hold Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, personally liable.

Mr. Eisenberg said that he would seek compensatory damages of $20,200 for each of the three plaintiffs in the case — or $100 for each of the 202 days he said they had shown they were subjected to the surveillance. He said he would ask the judge to decide how much to award in punitive damages, a figure that could be up to 10 times as high. And he said he and his colleagues would seek to be reimbursed for their legal fees over the past five years.

The 2005 disclosure of the existence of the program set off a national debate over the limits of executive power and the balance between national security and civil liberties. The arguments continued over the next three years, as Congress sought to forge a new legal framework for domestic surveillance.

In the midst of the presidential campaign in 2008, Congress overhauled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to bring federal statutes into closer alignment with what the Bush administration had been secretly doing. The legislation essentially legalized certain aspects of the program. As a senator then, Barack Obama voted in favor of the new law, despite objections from many of his supporters. President Obama’s administration now relies heavily on such surveillance in its fight against Al Qaeda.

The overhauled law, however, still requires the government to obtain a warrant if it is focusing on an American citizen or an organization inside the United States. The surveillance of Al Haramain would still be unlawful today if no court had approved it, current and former Justice Department officials said.

But since Mr. Obama took office, the N.S.A. has sometimes violated the limits imposed on spying on Americans by the new FISA law. The administration has acknowledged the lapses but said they had been corrected.

The issue is tapping of telephones and other electronic communications between the citizens of Turkey. The problem reached scandal proportions with revelations that judges, prosecutors and even Turkey’s Supreme Court was being bugged.

It all began in July 2005 when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan passed amendments to the laws governing the functioning of the police, intelligence services and the gendarmerie allowing them to tap telephone conversations without a court order. The same amendment also set up a unit called Telecommunications Directorate (TIB) that was given the task of overseeing the wire tapping both in telephone and internet connections.

“

(Via SantralHaber Haberleri.)

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Deep packet inspection bonanza

The security minister has confirmed officials are considering installing technology that could enable on-demand wiretapping of all communications passing over the internet by the intelligence services and law enforcement.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

US hawks not amused

The New York Times has broken the latest news in the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping odyssey: that the NSA has been routinely scanning American communications at a rate far beyond what had been envisioned by Congress when the telecoms immunity and FISA wiretapping revisions passed last summer.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Eurojust coordinates internet telephony investigations

Ms Carmen Manfredda, acting National Member for Italy, will take the lead in coordinating a Europe-wide investigation on internet telephony (VoIP).

At the request of Direzione Nazionale Antimafia in Rome, the Italian Desk at Eurojust will play a key role in the coordination and cooperation of the investigations on the use of internet telephony systems (VoIP), such as ‘Skype’. Eurojust will be available to assist all European law enforcement and prosecution authorities in the Member States. The purpose of Eurojust’s coordination role is to overcome the technical and judicial obstacles to the interception of internet telephony systems, taking into account the various data protection rules and civil rights.
Background
Criminals in Italy are increasingly making phone calls over the internet in order to avoid getting caught through mobile phone intercepts. Police officers in Milan say organised crime, arms and drugs traffickers, and prostitution rings are turning to Skype and other systems of VoIP in order to frustrate investigators. Skype’s encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities. Investigators have become increasingly reliant on wiretaps in recent years. Customs and tax police in Milan have highlighted the Skype issue. They overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an accomplice to switch to Skype in order to get details of a 2kg drug consignment. Investigators are convinced that the interception of telephone calls have become an essential tool of the police, who spend millions of Euros each year tracking down crime through wiretaps of landlines and mobile phones.

Following a meeting with the judicial authorities in Milan, Italy, Ms Manfredda commented: ‘The possibility of intercepting internet telephony will be an essential tool in the fight against international organised crime within Europe and beyond. Our aim is not to stop users from taking advantage of internet telephony, but to prevent criminals from using Skype and other systems to plan and organise their unlawful actions. Eurojust will make all possible efforts to coordinate and assist in the cooperation between Member States’.

Joannes THUY
Press Officer & Spokesperson
EUROJUST
Maanweg 174, NL-2516 AB The Hague
The Netherlands
Tel +31 70 412 5508 – Fax +31 70 412 5005
E-mail: jthuy@eurojust.europa.eu”

(Via .)

(Via Macworld.)