2 links on proposed new legislations

[Andrew Simmons]

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Xavier Drudis Ferran <xdrudis at 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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