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Yesterday we visited the Information Wants To Be Free day of the Weerwoord Festival in the Melkweg in Amsterdam. I already blogged about the European Archive and the Big Brother Awards 2005. Here are now some more impressions of the interesting afternoon.

Professor E. Dommering of the University of Amsterdam opened with a review of the current situation of censorship on the internet, with the most recent example of Google’s decision to launch a special google.cn service in China. Next the Tibet Support Groep Nederland explained how the Chinese regime uses internet censorship to block access to information about the situation and history of Tibet, its ongoing occupation and the Dalai Lama. In December Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the European Commission had already criticized Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in her weblog and hoped that these companies one day will understand that to endorse democracy and corporate responsibility is a prerequisite for “smart” growth.

That internet control and censorship also happens in eastern Europe was the subject of the next presentation. Aleksander Parfentsov, director of the Informational Development Promotion Foundation (IDOF) and of the TV-production Studio 42 in Minsk, Belarus, gave an overview of the current social and political situation in Belarus and the creative ways in which young people exercise their right to free opinion.

As a positive example for free information and communication, the videoletters project was presented next by Katarina Rejger. In Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Monte Negro and Kosovo Videoletters reconnects former friends who stopped talking to one another since the war.

The video webcast of this even will soon be online on Fabchannel.

Technorati Tags: google, belarus, videoletters

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The winners of the Dutch Big Brother Awards 2005 have been announced today at the Informantion wants to be free event at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

The winners are:

• Minister Rita Verdonk
• Sony BMG
• Flevo hospital
• the proposal for central data biometric retention

Minister Verdonk is awarded the price because she handed-over the status of asylum seeker of rejected applicants to their country of origin, denied it repeatedly in parliament and later minimised the impact of this information. Though much media attention was devoted to the credibility of the minister, the gravity of the privacy violation remained underexposed, according to the jury. The information about their attempt to seek asylum might very well cause life threatening situations for the applicants in their country of origin. Thus the case provides a perfect illustration how important privacy is for the security of people.

Sony BMG has won the award in the category Companies. The company installed spyware on 2.6 million audio cds, intended as copyright protection. When the rootkit was discovered, the company issued a patch. But that made matters even worse. People interested in the patch had to provide many personal details and after the installation the patch secretly set up encrypted communication with Sony BMG.

In the category government institutions, the Flevo hospital earned an award with very poor security of personal data about patients. Subsidised amongst others by the European Commission, the hospital embarked on a project to disclose appointments with patients via the Internet, but failed to put adequate access control into place.

In the category ‘proposals’, the government idea is crowned to put a central database into place with biometric data, data every Dutchman will have to provide soon to obtain a new passport. From August 2006 a picture will be included on the chip, later on fingerprints of both index fingers will be added. The jury is deeply concerned about the surveillance possibilities of such a central database, for example when facial recognition tools are linked to the omnipresent camera surveillance.

As a special price Prof. Mr. Hans Franken, professor in Law and Information Science at the University of Leiden and member of the Senate for the christian-democrat party received the newly created Winston Award to honor his consistent resistance in the Senate against mandatory data retention.

These images are published under a Creative Commons License.

Technorati Tags: bof, big brother, verdonk, sony, root kit

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