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När politiker i Sverige och andra västländer stiftar övervakningslagar skapas en marknad för teknik som sedan blir farliga vapen i händerna på diktatorer. Det menar Evgeny Morozov, ett av de tyngsta namnen i den internationella debatten om politiken kring internet. DN.se har träffat honom.

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– Varför finns det en marknad för de här teknikerna? Jo för att USA och Europa anser att man behöver dem och beställer dem till sina underrättelsetjänster och polis. Diktaturerna är en slags andrahandsmarknad för verktyg som kommit till i väst, säger Evgeny Morozov till DN.se.

Ahead of the anniversary of Iran’s revolution Saturday, the country’s government has locked down its already-censored Internet, blocking access to many services and in some cases cutting off all encrypted traffic on the Web of the kind used by secure email, social networking and banking sites. In response, the information-freedom-focused Tor Project is testing a new idea: Encrypted connections that don’t look encrypted. To skirt the so called “deep packet inspection” filters Iran’s government has deployed to block all Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL and TLS) encryption that protesters might use to communicate privately, Tor is trying a new kind of bridge to the Web, one the group is calling “obfsproxy,” or obfuscated proxy.

Last week, Google announced a new, simplified privacy policy. They did a great job of informing users that the privacy policy had been changed through emails and notifications, and several experts (including Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian) have praised the shift toward a simpler, more unified policy. Unfortunately, while the policy might be easier to understand, Google did a less impressive job of publicly explaining what in the policy had actually been changed.

In fact, it took a letter from eight Representatives to persuade them to provide straightforward answers to the public about their new policy.

Here’s what you need to know about the substantive changes in the new policy:

Serval enables mobile communications no matter what your circumstance: mobile communications in the face of disaster, in the face of poverty, in the face of isolation, in the face of civil unrest, or in the face of network black-spots. In short, Serval provides resilient mobile communications for all people, anywhere in the universe.

Serval technology bridges the digital divide. We have proved that it is possible, using open source technology to create a mobile communications platform that benefits everyone, for all time, and changes the nature of telecommunications forever.

There’s a big difference in how activists and bureaucrats view the world. In the view of bureaucrats, anything lawful is right by definition. In contrast, activists don’t care whether something is lawful, they care whether it’s good and just. Bureaucrats generally do not understand the difference.

In other words, Bitcoin’s alleged privacy benefits mostly reflect the fact that the government isn’t really trying to spy on Bitcoin users. It hasn’t built the kind of surveillance infrastructure the government has for tracking dollar-denominated transactions. And to be clear, I would rather that infrastructure not exist. But if Bitcoin becomes popular, the government will build precisely the same infrastructure for spying on the Bitcoin network. And when they do, it will become clear that for ordinary users, Bitcoin is, if anything, less surveillance-resistent than traditional cash.

Security researchers presenting at the Where 2.0 conference have revealed a hidden, secret iOS file that keeps a record of everywhere you've been. The record is synched to your PC and subsequently resynched to your other mobile devices. The file is not transmitted to Apple, but constitutes a substantial privacy breach if your PC or mobile device are lost or seized. The researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, have released a free/open application called "iPhone Tracker" that allows you to retrieve the location data on your iOS device and examine it. They did not discover a comparable file on Android devices.

Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.

"They know how fast you read because you have to click to turn the page," says Cindy Cohn, legal director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It knows if you skip to the end to read how it turns out."

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Cohn says this kind of page-view tracking may seem innocuous, but if the company keeps the data long-term, the information could be subpoenaed to check someone's alibi, or as evidence in a lawsuit.

And it's not just what pages you read; it may also monitor where you read them. Kindles, iPads and other e-readers have geo-location abilities; using GPS or data from Wi-Fi and cell phone towers, it wouldn't be difficult for the devices to track their own locations in the physical world.