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Xavier Drudis Ferran xdrudis@tinet.org wrote:
1.- Hague convention. http://www.cptech.org/ecom/jurisdiction/whatyoushouldknow.html I've been sent this. It seems that they are planning an agreement among 49 countries so that the jurisdictions are blurred and software patents, reverse engineering prohibitions, etc. legal in one country may be inforced in another.
2.- Spanish LSSI / European directive 2000/31 A proposed law in Spain (Ley de los Servicios de la Sociedad de la Información, LSSI) would allow the goverment to censor content in Internet (without asking a judge) and require registration prior to publication, forcing ISPs to keep historical logs and police the net.
This is also possibly off-topic; my apologies if so. Along similar lines, I just read this report on the proposed Council of Europe `Treaty on Cybercrime':
http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.html?id=213
The report suggests that the draft will make it illegal even to link to so-called "hacking tools" - presumably[1] this would include port scanners, packet sniffers, vulnerability scanners and the like which have perfectly legitimate uses for network administrators and programmers.
Whilst many security tools are Free software, perhaps this issue doesn't directly come under the remit of FSFE? Or will the FSFE concern itself with more general issues of Freedom, such as the freedom to write, run, link to or distribute any software one wishes? (Of course, if you break the law by breaking into systems, you are still a criminal.)
I'm also wondering about an idea to do a web page linking to all the Bad Laws related to computers and networking, that are being rushed through all over the world.
\a
[1] Unless by `hacking tools' they mean emacs, Perl, and gcc ;)
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