Delegates to China's parliament are reproaching Western Internet administrators for blocking e-mails from China in a growing fight over the cross-Pacific flow of junk e-mail.

Academics among the 2,987 provincial deputies attending the annual meeting of the National People's Congress also called for laws punishing the distribution of junk e-mail, or "spam," the Xinhua news service reported on Monday.

Marketing groups, or "spammers," often relay junk e-mail through Chinese Internet service providers, causing much of the junk e-mail filling screens in the United States to appear to come from China.

They can stop their citizens from reading 'evil' publications like the New York Times but they can't seem to stop their relaying of SPAM.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - China Wants Out of Spam Blocks.

Slashdot | Open Source Intelligence.

The Village Voice: Nation: by Nat Hentoff: Big John Wants Your Reading List. Has the Attorney General Been Reading Franz Kafka?

During the congressional debate on John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, an American Civil Liberties Union fact sheet on the bill's assaults on the Bill of Rights revealed that Section 215 of the act "would grant FBI agents across the country breathtaking authority to obtain an order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court . . . requiring any person or business to produce any books, records, documents, or items."

This is now the law, and as I wrote last week, the FBI, armed with a warrant or subpoena from the FISA court, can demand from bookstores and libraries the names of books bought or borrowed by anyone suspected of involvement in "international terrorism" or "clandestine activities."

Once that information is requested by the FBI, a gag order is automatically imposed, prohibiting the bookstore owners or librarians from disclosing to any other person the fact that they have received an order to produce documents.

You can't call a newspaper or a radio or television station or your representatives in Congress. You can call a lawyer, but since you didn't have any advance warning that the judge was issuing the order, your attorney can't have objected to it in court. He or she will be hearing about it for the first time from you.

I have been told that at least three of these court orders have been served, but that's all the information I was given--not the names of the bookstores or the libraries. And I can't tell you my source.

I found the Village Voice link on The Shifted Librarian.

CNET NEWS.COM - Microsoft offers patch for Java software.

A flaw in Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine could allow hackers to hijack a browser and redirect traffic, capturing sensitive data such as the person's passwords, Microsoft has revealed.

The company disclosed the flaw Monday on its Web site and posted a patch intended to rectify the problem.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Net monitoring scheme under fire.

UK Government plans to archive all internet traffic and e-mail has been singled out for a controversial award at this year's Big Brother Award ceremony.

The awards - established in 1998 by Human Rights watchdog Privacy International - are designed to expose the state erosions of privacy as well as honouring those that made an outstanding contribution to preserving privacy.

The plan to store all communication data won in the Most Appalling Project category.

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The Lifetime Menace award went to another government scheme - the plan to introduce nationwide ID cards. The proposal, long mooted in government, is for a comprehensive data-sharing scheme between government agencies and the private sector.

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"During the judging process, it has become clear that government agencies and companies have stooped to an all-time low in the wilful violation of our privacy.

"We have been almost overwhelmed this year by a flood of new entries, many of which involve technologies and techniques that are beyond the control of law, and outside of the comprehension of policy makers."

ZDNet |UK| - Big Brother Awards highlight digital privacy threats.

Government plans to store all Internet traffic in a single warehouse featured highly in the Big Brother Awards in London last night

A proposal by the National Criminal Intelligence Service to store all UK Internet traffic for seven years in a single data warehouse won the Big Brother Award for Most Appalling Project on Monday night.

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Alongside the NCIS as winners of Big Brother Awards were the Norwich Union, which won the Most Invasive Company award for using unapproved genetic tests for potentially fatal diseases when assessing whether to offer life insurance cover to people. The Norwich Union was the only Big Brother winner to have a representative present to collect its award.

Most heinous government organisation was the Department of Education and Skills, for removing anonymity in the 2002 national schools census and for creating a student tracking system.

Worst public servant was Sir Richard Wilson. The judges said he had earned his nominations for "his long standing commitment to opposing freedom of information, data protection and ministerial accountability."

Guardian Unlimited Observer | UK News | Bid to outlaw DNA trophy hunters.

The Human Genetics Commission (HGC) will urge Ministers in a report next month to outlaw obtaining samples by deceit or testing them.

The new law would protect ordinary patients as well as public figures from finding their material used in medical trials without their consent. It would also stop parents secretly testing their own children to check whether a partner has been unfaithful.

CNET NEWS.COM - Free speech or campaign spam?

California gubernatorial candidate Bill Jones is back online after his Web-hosting service shut down his campaign Internet site in protest over a mass e-mail that some outraged recipients compared to spam.

The campaign to elect Jones, California's secretary of state, involved sending hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mails to in- and out-of-state residents last week through a third-party marketer, resulting in a forced closure of the Web site by its Internet service provider on Friday morning. The site was down until Saturday, when Jones' committee hired an alternate company to restore its Internet connection just days before the state's Republican primary on Tuesday.

Newsweek March 11 issue via MS-NBC By Steven Levy - The Customer Is Always Wrong. Music and film moguls, and a few senators, think fans are thieves--and want to cripple technology to stop you from making copies  

There was something decidedly enron-esque about the hearing last week before the Senate Commerce Committee. No potential illegalities, mind you. But you had Disney CEO Michael Eisner and News Corp. president Peter Chernin speaking on behalf of record labels and movies studios to lobby Congress for laws to prop up their beleaguered business model as they cope with the Internet. As with a certain Houston energy company's dealings with friendly government officials, one couldn't help but wonder where the little people stood in all of this. The answer came from Sen. Fritz Hollings, clearly a friend of content holders. "When Congress sits idly by in the face of these [file-sharing] activities, we essentially sanction the Internet as a haven for thievery," said the committee chairman, charging "over 10 million people" with stealing. That's where citizens stand--not as potential consumers, but as candidates for prison denim. 

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The Disney Corp. was once celebrated for its crowd-pleasing recipe: underpromise and overdeliver. But Eisner and his copyright-holding counterparts, drinking deep from the fountain of fear, seem to have adopted a new motto: overcharge and disable. Things won't get better for them until they realize that even for copyright holders, the Internet can be a Magic Kingdom.

Slashdot | The Customer is Always Wrong.

OSopinion - Computer News: Online Privacy Is Dead - Now What?

Seventy percent of surveyed consumers were concerned their transactions might not be secure. Nearly the same percentage worried that hackers could steal their personal data.

Your name, address, phone number and Social Security number all are items found on your driver's license -- and on the Web.

Rapid commercialization of the Internet has fed a demand for more and more personal information about Internet users.

CanadaComputes.com - New Provincial Privacy Legislation: Protecting our Personal Information.

The European Union has just added Canada to its list of countries whose legislation meets the standards of its data privacy directive, over a year after the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act was enacted on Jan. 1 2001. Meanwhile, the provinces have until Jan. 1 2004 to pass their own legislation or they will be required to comply with federal law.

This month, the government of Ontario released its draft of the proposed Privacy of Personal Information Act, a copy of which can be downloaded at http://www.cbs.gov.on.ca

Privacy laws aim to find a balance between protecting personal information and advancing business and government interests in the context of an increasingly global, networked economy. They must also regulate the collection, use and disclosure of personal health information.

boston.internet.com - Briefs: Industry Leaders Promote Privacy Protocol.

Industry leaders, together with the Massachusetts Software & Internet Council, plan a workshop on the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), at IBM's Waltham, Mass. campus March 11.

P3P, intended to build trust between Web users and Web sites, creates transparency in the information collection and use process.

The workshop will focus on P3P and its impact on Web sites and online privacy, with details on how P3P works, where it fits in the broader policy debate over online privacy, and techniques for implementing P3P.