Zimbabwe to snoop on citizens’ mobile communications

Zimbabwe’s government has enacted a controversial law that could enable it to spy on any citizen’s cellphone call records as well as text messages. The government gazetted ‘Statutory Instrument 142 of 2013 on Postal and Telecommunications (Subscriber Registration) Regulations, 2013’ on Friday as the country’s new communications minister Webster Shamu – a loyalist of President …

Correlation between country governance regimes and the reputation of their Internet (IP) address allocations

We recently analyzed the reputation of a country’s Internet (IPv4) addresses by examining the number of blacklisted IPv4 addresses that geolocate to a given country. We compared this indicator with two qualitative measures of each country’s governance. We hypothesized that countries with more transparent, democratic govermental institutions would harbor a smaller fraction of misbehaving (blacklisted) …

Ex-White House Official Joins Group Fighting “Excessive” Online Privacy Laws

As the Obama administration and tech company lobbyists chip away at the European Union’s attempts to protect online privacy, a new pro-industry coalition has popped up to join the fray. Not quite two weeks ago, the Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade announced its existence. The group’s senior academic adviser is Daniel Weitzner, who, less than …