When the Chinese government is proud of you? it is time to step back and re-evaluate your choices.

Activists? Scholars? Esp. those in the UK? Get on this and get loud.

thedailywhat:

Bigger Brother of the Day: MI5, the British intelligence agency normally tasked with hunting down terrorists, will collaborate with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to assist police in locating individuals suspected of using social networking services to orchestrate looting raids.

The agencies will employ their advanced technologies to track down alleged instigators using intercepted BlackBerry Messenger broadcasts that police were unable to decrypt or trace.

In related news, two men in their early twenties were sentenced today by a court in Cheshire to four years in prison for inciting local “riot events” via Facebook. “You sought to take advantage of crime elsewhere and transpose it to the peaceful streets of Northwich,” Judge Elgan Edwards QC said during sentencing. “No one actually turned up due to the prompt and efficient actions of police in using modern policing.”

Meanwhile, Chinese state media published words of praise for UK PM David Cameron’s proposed banning of social network users for appearing to plot criminal behavior, saying “Britain’s new attitude will help appease the quarrels between East and West over the future management of the Internet.”

[guardian: 1,2 / slashdot / image: techdirt.]

thedailywhat:

This Won’t End Well of the Day: Speaking before parliament, UK PM David Cameron said he has ordered an inquiry into the possibility of banning users from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook if it is determined that they are planning to engage in criminal behavior.

“Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill,” Cameron said. “And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Cameron added that he asked the police “if they need any other new powers.”

Home Secretary Theresa May will hold meetings with representatives from Facebbok, Twitter, and RIM to discuss their role in preventing future riots. “All of them should think about their responsibility and about taking down those images,” Cameron said in reference to Facebook and Twitter posts he believes could incite further unrest.

[guardian / photo: emilyjackett.]

Are persons in positions of power this hell-bent on pretending that they’re not part of the system that bears some responsibility for what’s happened in London? Does David Cameron honestly believe that stopping people from communicating on Facebook and Twitter is going to do anything at all? Is he and anyone who agrees with him truly this ignorant about how people interact online? Do they realize how many heads this hydra has?

Source.

It’s Sunday and it’s August, so I don’t really want to go down the reading-my-research-interests-into-everything rabbit hole right now, but note this quote. Note that the Pentagon wants to track and even shape social networking trends and that the government in my state eventually began monitoring the activity of anti-Walker protestors on the #wiunion Twitter hashtag. We’d be foolish not to expect this (or even to suggest that there’s something inherently wrong with it), but those who wish to engage in online activism or gather information from demonstrators and citizens on the ground should be aware of this trend. Persons who have an interest in information policy and/or literacies should be responding to and commenting upon our government’s apparent increased interest in the online political lives of its citizens.