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After getting the short end of the Twitter stick, Venezuela president, Hugo Chávez, called it " terrorism ," " a battle trench" and a "current of conspiracy. "The Internet cannot be free!" he proclaimed. Since he has taken six television channels he didn't like off the air and imprisoned reporters , who knew what he would do? Well, it turns out he intends "to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online," according to Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela's chief telecommunications regulator. Sponsor With Venezuela's once invincible-seeming oil-economy now in the toilet and his approval rating diving below 50% perhaps El Jefe feels he has no choice. Since mass media in Venezuela is under constant threat from its strongman head of state, his opponents and critics have monopolized the microblogging platform and that platform is becoming popular. Reuters outlined its recent growth. "The microblogging site has seen an explosive rise in usage in Venezuela to more than 200,000 active accounts. With growth of over 1,000 percent in 2009, Venezuela now has one of the highest rates per capita of Twitter users in Latin America." The moment you shut people up, you no longer speak for them. This has started to dawn on some of Chávez's once-vocal partisans. It may take longer for those whose solidarity is limited to their Che t-shirts. May I suggest you Sharpie #FreeVenezuela across yours? Top photo from Open Democracy Bottom photo by Corey Harmon Discuss
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Hugo Chávez to Make Terrorist Threats, er, Join Twitter
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According to German law, Germany's ISPs and phone services had to retain data about every citizen's phone calls and emails for six months. Today, however, Germany's Federal Constitution Court suspended this law and ordered that all the data stored to date must be deleted immediately. According to German news magazine Der Spiegel , the court said that it wasn't sufficiently clear that the data storage was secure enough and what exactly the data would be used for. Sponsor Suspended, But Not Dead It's important to note that this isn't necessarily the end of this law and that the court hasn't ruled the law unconstitutional - the court only ruled that the implementation of the law was severely flawed. The German constitution, according to the judges, doesn't disallow saving this information. The European Union issued guidelines for data retention in 2006 that requires all E.U. member states to implement national data retention laws. According to the guidelines, all ISPs and phone carriers have to keep a record of all their customers' phone calls and emails on a rolling six-month basis. The actual implementation of these guidelines remains up to the E.U. members, however. For now, the court has suspended the law until it has been amended and its scope has been limited by the German government. The court recommends that the data will be stored by the ISPs and phone companies, but argues that there shouldn't be a central, government-controlled repository for this data. In addition, the court also recommends that the data should be encrypted. For ISPs, keeping all these records is a significant burden and many ISPs and phone companies had hoped that the court would rule the law unconstitutional so that they wouldn't have to store this data anymore. The next stop for the opponents of this law is the E.U., though it remains to be seen if there is enough support among E.U. countries to fight these guidelines. Discuss
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Germany's Supreme Court Suspends Controversial Data Retention Law
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