Australia has passed the controversial Assistance and Access Bill, designed to compel technology companies to allow law enforcement agencies access to encrypted messages. According to the Guardian, the law intends to ‘co-opt technology companies, device manufacturers and service providers into building the functionality needed for police to do their spying’ and ‘give to Australian agencies the [...]

The Spanish Senate recently approved a draft law in order to implement at the national level certain provisions of the EU’s GDPR. Certain provisions have triggered strong reactions from civil society groups, in particular regarding an amendment giving the possibility to political groups to "use personal data obtained from web pages and other publicly accessible [...]

Nine international organisations sent an open letter to the European delegation engaged in a high-level political dialogue with Turkey, urging them to address the freedom of expression crisis in the country. The letter refers to the clampdown on journalists and media outlets through the introduction of new legislation, widespread closures of media outlets, prosecutions of journalists, [...]

Two new resolutions on cybersecurity issues have been adopted by the UN First Committee of the General Assembly (GA): one proposed by Russia by a vote of 109 in favour to 45 against, and the other by the USA with 139 in favour to 11 against. The resolution proposed by Russia (A/C.1/73/L.27.Rev.1), which has undergone number of changes since [...]

The Citizen Lab reported that a Canadian permanent resident and Saudi Arabian human rights activist was targeted by the NSO Groups’s Pegasus spyware technology in Quebec. Pegasus is a mobile phone spyware which is capable of reading passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and live voice calls. The Citizen Lab suspected that this attack [...]

Facilitated by the International Telecommunication Union, twelve partners from intergovernmental and international organisations, private sector, academia and civil society - including Deloitte, Microsoft, the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre Of Excellence and the World Bank among others - developed the ‘Guide to developing a national cybersecurity strategy - Strategic engagement in cybersecurity’. The guide is [...]

The Tehran Revolutionary Court ruled against six journalists and editors for Majzooban Noor; a website for the Sufi religious community of Gonabadi dervishes in Iran. Members of the editorial committee alongside citizen journalists were issued sentences from seven years up to 26 years in prison and 74 lashes for each. After completing their jail terms, [...]

The UN High-Level Political Forum took place in New York earlier this month. DiploFoundation and the Geneva Internet Platform covered all sessions related to data and digital policy. Certain sessions also addressed the issue of capacity building, noting that it requires financial resources and knowledge sharing. While the additional amount of money needed to fund [...]

From 29 July to 2 August 2, Buenos Aires was the stage of several meetings on Internet governance. On 29 July 29, a forum for youth discussions on the evolutions of Internet governance was organised by the Youth Latin America and the Caribbean for the Internet Governance Forum (LACIGF) and the Youth Internet Governance Forum [...]

The governments, the private sector and the civil society in the Dominican Republic and in Guatemala have worked together for almost two years, with the support from Organization of American States (OAS), through the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism (CICTE) and the Cyber Security Program, and have now joined eight other Latin American countries in putting [...]