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It’s the 5th of July 2016 today, and it’s been four years since the UN Human Rights Council adopted the “Resolution on the Promotion, Protection, and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet”.

The 5th of July Foundation took its name from the day that bore those great aspirations:

Let’s promote, protect and enjoy human rights on the internet!

New podcast on internet politics

Our latest project to do this is a podcast, which covers internet politics in a broad sense. It’s in Swedish (so far) and we call it “5 juli-podden”. You can listen on for example Itunes, Soundcloud or Youtube.

Blog anniversary

Today also marks the two year anniversary for our resident blogger HAX, who is also co-host of the podcast. We’re celebrating by giving hax.5july.org a little facelift. As always, it’s somewhat of a challenge to make a blog work smoothly and look tasty without letting third party companies (read: Google) put their code on your pages.

Expanding our services

So far the “promotion” of human rights on the internet. What about the “protection” and the “enjoyment”?

It’s for those purposes that we run our privacy services: A free disposable email service (still beta), a free encrypted Jabber chat server, and our paid VPN service Integrity VPN, which we are now expanding, so that customers of more internet providers will have the choice to enhance the security, privacy and liberty of their everyday communication.

So that’s a brief update on our doings. We look forward to many interesting developments in the coming year. Cheers!

There is an important legal battle going on between the oldest independent ISP in Sweden, Bahnhof (which has always stood up for privacy on the internet) and The Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS).

Our sponsored blogger, writer and thinker HAX comments the latest installment in this battle: Bahnhof won a temporary injunction which allows them to refuse to hand over certain data to authorities. Read about it here.

5th of July Foundation is happy that its board member Wilhelm Dahlborn wrote the appeal that the court now listened to.

There is also a legal case going on between Swedish telecom/internet provider Tele2 and that same authority, PTS, about data retention. The second highest administrative court in Sweden has sent that case to the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in Luxemburg. On April 12, there will be an oral hearing in this case.

5th of July Foundation firmly supports the right to use encryption technology without backdoors or interference. Ideally all communication via the Internet should be encrypted.

We are therefore happy to announce that we have just started using Let´s Encrypt to issue the certificates that we use on our https web servers. Let us cite from their own presentation:

“Let’s Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority:  It’s free, automated, and open.”

Let’s encrypt is supported by Electronic Frontier Foundation and many major Internet corporations and organisations.

P.S. Our resident blogger HAX often comments on the politics of encryption and questions relating to freedom of communications. Read him! And yes, “he” uses a certificate from Let’s Encrypt since today also!

Our resident blogger HAX claims that Bitcoin may be a currency for Greece. Well, he didn’t link to any support for this but maybe he is right? CNN Money writes that Greeks are rushing to Bitcoin.

At 5july.org we note that we received our first Bitcoin donation to support a free Internet on June 12, 2015. Thank you, anonymous donator for you 0.2 BTC!

There is a very readable, informative and well-researched newsletter that the chairman of this foundation always reads when it appears in the mailbox: The EDRi-gram. It is a round-up of news from all over Europe from European Digital Rights, an organization based in Brussels. EDRi defends civil rights in the information society.

5th of July Foundation made a donation to their crowdsourcing campaign today, albeit small since our economy is very limited so far. We believe it is a worthy cause so do not hesitate to give something.

5th of July Foundation considers whistleblowers and independent voices and journalists to be important catalysts for building a free society.

There is now a Kickstarter project to bring Glenn Greenwald to Sweden for an important media conference, together with Peter Sunde of the Pirate Bay and Julia Reda, Member of European Parliament for the Pirate Party (Germany). The topic is internet freedom. Greenwald is, as you may know, the journalist that was chosen by Edward Snowden to be his confidante and messenger.

Today this foundation has pledged 15.000 SEK (Swedish kronor) to bring Glenn Greenwald here. We believe that the media focus this would bring to these issues is exactly what this foundation wishes to promote.

We would urge other actors to contribute in order to make this event possible!