John Le Carre: Britons Stripped Of Civil Liberties  

The Telegraph reports that John Le Carre has a new book out and is still speaking up against the endless stream of encroachments against individual freedom - John le Carré: Britons have been 'stripped' of civil liberties.

In a rare public intervention, the spy author criticised ministers for voting to extend the time limit that terror suspects can be held without charge to 42 days. His comments come only weeks ahead of a key vote in the House of Lords that could see peers throw out the Government's controversial 42-day proposals.

The writer, who admitted he has a reputation as "an angry old man", said he was furious that the Government had been allowed to get away with a sustained attack on civil liberties.

"Partly, I'm angry that there is so little anger around me at what is being done to our society, supposedly in order to protect it," said the 76-year-old in an interview in Waterstone's magazine.

"We have been taken to war under false pretences, and stripped of our civil rights in an atmosphere of panic. Our lawyers don't take to the streets as they have done in Pakistan. "Our MPs allow themselves to be deluded by their own spin doctors, and end up believing their own propaganda."

He added: "We haul our Foreign Secretary back from a mission to the Middle East so he can vote for 42 days' detention. People call me an angry old man. Screw them. You don't have to be old to be angry about that. We've sacrificed our sovereignty to a so-called 'special relationship' which has nothing special about it except to ourselves."

The writer has been an outspoken critic of Labour's erosion of civil liberties

Moving across from Oceania to EastAsia, Technology Review has an article on a rather amateurish Chinese mass surveillance technique - China's Eye on Web Chatter.

That Chinese Internet companies censor communications is well known, but a new report from a Canadian computer scientist reveals a new front in their efforts to monitor users online. The study shows that users of TOM-Skype, a Chinese voice and chat service that is compatible with the popular Internet phone system Skype, have been subject to extensive surveillance. To make matters worse, the records of their chat conversations, as well as detailed personal information, were stored insecurely on the Web.

Skype has previously acknowledged that its Chinese partner, TOM Online, blocks chat messages containing certain politically sensitive keywords. The new findings, however, reveal a level of surveillance that goes far beyond this.

Nart Villeneuve, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, uncovered the surveillance scheme by examining the behavior of the TOM-Skype client application. He used an application called Wireshark, which analyzes traffic sent over a computer network, to see what happens when different words are sent via chat using the software. Villeneuve discovered that an encrypted message was automatically sent by the client over the Internet when some words were entered. Following this encrypted packet across the Net, Villeneuve uncovered a directory of files on an open Web server. Not only was the directory publicly accessible, but the data within it could be unlocked using a password found in the same folder. Within these files were more than a million chat messages dating from August and September 2008.

Villeneuve used machine translation to convert the files he found from Chinese into English, and he analyzed the contents to determine likely trigger words. The list he came up with includes obscenities and politically sensitive words and phrases such as "Falun Gong," "democracy," and "Tibet." But Villeneuve also found evidence that completely innocuous messages--one, for example, contained nothing more than a smiley face--were logged. This suggests that certain users were targeted for monitoring, he says. ...

Anderson says users concerned about their privacy should be aware that companies often cooperate with governments. In the case of companies with enormous market share, he says, those governments that get access to their data could unlock huge amounts of intelligence and personal information.

The SMH reports that WorldNetDaily's resident loony Jerome Corsi has been booted out of Kenya for criticising the government (as well as planning a propaganda stunt featuring Barack Obama's unwilling half brother) - Conspiracy theorist and political meddler deported.

A CONTROVERSIAL American author and conspiracy theorist was arrested in Nairobi and deported on Tuesday after trying to plug his bestselling book attacking Barack Obama, whose late father was Kenyan.

Jerome Corsi arrived in the country last week to promote The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics And The Cult Of Personality, an error-riddled book that is a bestseller in the US. It falsely claims that Senator Obama, who is revered in Kenya, was raised as a Muslim, and smears the Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, the country's most popular politician.

Corsi had said that he planned to deliver a $US1000 ($1467) cheque from a conservative website owner to George Obama, the presidential candidate's half-brother who lives in the Kenyan capital's Huruma slum.

However, by widely publicising his itinerary, Corsi, whether intentionally or not, attracted government attention. Immigration police detained him at a luxury hotel that was due to host the book launch yesterday.

Ministry officials, denying the book had anything to do with the arrest, said Corsi had failed to obtain a temporary work permit. He was taken to Jomo Kenyatta international airport, where he was expected to fly to Europe.

As I'm one of those people who believes in free speech (and freedom of information) for everyone - including Mr Corsi - I'll also quote Crikey even though I don't much like the person involved - Crikey Says. This is one of those slippery slope things - first you let people grab holocaust deniers off planes and put them into prison, next its "Free Tibet" types getting dragged away to China and before you know it, everyone who criticises the likes of Dick Cheney will be finding themselves an unwilling resident of Guantanmo Bay. So its best to just poor scorn upon people who say things you don't like and not let people make speaking your mind (however addled) a crime.

An Australian citizen currently languishes in jail in a foreign country, having been seized from an aircraft on the basis of an arrest warrant issued in a third country. The crime alleged to have been committed by the man relates only to the fact that he has repeatedly expressed views deemed unacceptable by that country.

Yet to date no one, not even the usual conservative suspects, has spoken out about the treatment of Frederick Toben, arrested at Heathrow while en route from the US to Dubai on a German warrant for Holocaust denial. Toben’s only supporters have been the appalling David Irving and the grotesque Lady Michele Renouf, a sort of Mitford-style far-right socialite.

Toben’s views are nauseating. Moreover, he doesn’t even have the courage to stick to them consistently, denying his views in Australia but happily boasting of them to the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose anti-semitic conference Toben (and Renouf) attended in 2006. But his views are irrelevant. He has a right to express them as long as he does not urge violence or deliberately cause harm in expressing them. He has been the subject of a legalised form of extraordinary rendition in order to be tried simply for expressing himself. His treatment is an offence against the basic concept of free speech. The Australian Government should be protesting long and loud to the Germans and the British about his treatment and demanding his release, however abhorrent we may find what he has to say.