Amnesty: Microsoft helped Israeli Police in Vanunu probe

[Scurrilous]

Human rights group says company complied with request by Israel police to hand over information on nuclear whistleblower

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3256136,00.html

<snip>

"Amnesty International's British branch chief, Keith Allen, said Microsoft helped Israeli Police interrogate Mordechai Vanunu, who leaked nuclear secrets to the foreign press.

Allen, writing in the British Sunday newspaper, the Observer, wrote: "Amnesty is concerned about its co-operation with the Israeli authorities in prosecuting nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu for communicating with foreign journalists. Vanunu was imprisoned for more than 18 years after disclosing Israel's nuclear capabilities to the UK media, and only released on condition he stays in Israel and does not talk to foreigners. Microsoft is reported to have complied with government demands for his computer records, which could lead to him being sent back to prison."


Link to Observer article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/humanrights/story/0,,1784719,00.html

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Some selective editing

This is about the security of your Browser, your e-mail, your Outlook, your search engine. It is about the easiest stuff that Gen. Michael Hayden's NSA was doing - e-mails and search engines.

Want to be angered and frighetened - read Michal Zalewski's "Silence On The Wire."

<<<snip>>>
The internet is big business, but in the search for profits some companies have encroached on their own principles and those on which the internet was founded: free access to information. The results of searches using China-based search engines run by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and local firms are censored, limiting the information users can access. Microsoft pulled down the work of one of China's most popular bloggers who had made politically sensitive comments. Yahoo gave information to the authorities that led to people being jailed for sending emails with political content. We do not accept these firms' arguments that it is better to have a censored Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in China than none at all.

So Amnesty International is again calling on Observer readers to join with us to take a stand for basic human freedoms. The internet has the potential to transcend national borders and allow the free flow of ideas around the world. Of course there is a need for limits to free expression to protect other rights - promoting violence or child pornography are never acceptable - but the internet still has immense power and potential.

Just by logging on to my computer I can exchange views with someone in Beijing or Washington. I can read what bloggers in Baghdad think of the situation in Iraq. I can find a million viewpoints that differ from my own on any topic. It is the greatest medium for free expression since the printing press, a meeting of technology and the social, inquisitive nature of human beings and the irrepressible force of the human voice. This is the new frontier in the battle between those who want to speak out, and those who want to stop them. We must not allow it to be suppressed.

We are asking people to show their support for internet freedom by backing a simple pledge calling on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of online freedom of expression and on companies to stop helping them do it.

We will use these pledges to urge the release of the growing number of 'cyber-dissidents' imprisoned for sending emails and posting their views on websites. They will be taken to the United Nations when it meets in November to discuss the future of the internet, and used to show companies that internet users - their customers - will not stand for a web that for some is massively restricted.
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Read the whole article

[Tom Joad]

2. The thing that has always surprised me is why hasn't

Vanunu been given the heroes welcome he so deserves... at least among peace groups in the United States. He is the one who has paid such a high price, a fate nearly worse than death -twelve years in solitary confinement!- for telling the world about a very real nuclear threat.
Daniel Ellsberg, who also told the truth about official secrets, calls him the "is the preeminent hero of the nuclear era." With so much talk of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, Israel's vast arsenal should be front page news.
Maybe soon.