British Spy Chief Calls For Crackdown On Internet Freedom
The outgoing head of the GCHQ, the NSA’s UK equivalent, has slammed proponents of a free internet as ‘dreamers’, and defended those who spy on the communications of everyday people, saying they do “an extraordinary job.” In a farewell speech at the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall, Sir Iain Lobban demanded that GCHQ needs the power to “access the Internet at scale” and “dissect it with surgical precision”. He said that the internet has become home to the “worst aspects of human nature,” and that spies need to be given unfettered power to govern the internet, to weed out “plotters, proliferators and paedophiles.”
Itar-Tass: Russian speaker against tighter rules on Internet access || The speaker of the Federation Council upper house of the Russian parliament, Valentina Matviyenko, said on Wednesday she was against tighter rules on Internet access and government control over the Internet. “We are against restrictions on access to the Internet or a total control over it, against restrictions on legitimate interests and possibilities of the citizens,” Matviyenko said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily on Wednesday.