Sure, privacy and civil liberties advocates have had a few good news in the U.S., such as California's law requiring warrants for online data, or Apple telling a court the company cannot unlock new iPhones. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies even backed off - for the moment - off clamoring for backdoors in encryption.
But all in all, 2015 has been a great year for surveillance folks across the planet. France got itself a super snooper bill, Australia goes deep into the digital down undies, Canada has its explosive C-51, Germany re-introduced data retention with a widely under reported anti-whistleblowing hook, even little Austria wants its alpine data retention back.
We won't elaborate on the UK, because, as they say don't mention the war on privacy.
But on top of surveillance, there is censorship, and that's where things have been heating up and will likely get a lot worse.
The UK has experimented with some serious protection of its population from what seems to be the greatest threat to the country: pictures of nekid people doing "it". They added blocking of islamist web sites for good measure and, it seems, movie pirate sites and streaming sites. These measures are ever so cute because the famous 13 year old kid can bypass them in a minute.
So, blocking is, as we would like to point out in the strongest condemnation available to a classy UK person, not nice.
The country to watch, though, is Germany.
Yes, good old Germany, which everybody thinks has freedom of speech in its constitution, simply because translators and politicians take "Meinungsfreiheit" (freedom of opinion) to mean freedom of speech. Okay, it is somewhat true because expressing an opinion is sort of freedom of speech.
But this is about the limits of either, and here is a flat out prediction: Germany will push hard for enforceable censorship of social media.
Criticism of hate speech on social media is, of course, justified and necessary. Smarter minds than ours have talked and written about the problem for many years. The K-Landnews has dabbled in it with posts like the recent A ranking of German tweets that attack people as a***hole. The two biggest Western companies in that space, Twitter and Facebook, have made efforts to get some degree of control over hate speech but are attacked for not doing "enough".
What we have not seen so far is a sustained nation-state attack by a powerful "enough" Western country. Terrorism provided some leverage but not enough. And your Turkeys, Irans, and Chinas don't cut it.
But the Germans are coming, it's gonna get ugly.
The German justice minister had some talks, probably "frank" in diplo-speak. Someone filed a criminal complaint against the German office of Facebook for "facilitating hate speech", and German pillar of righteous journalism Bild Zeitung has launched a campaign to name and shame what they decided are haters of refugees.
German prosecutors have launched investigations of some of the outed folks, but not all.
The "not all" points to the possibility that BILD may well have ruined some lives, but hey, if you want to make omelets ...
What the blogster is trying to say is: the refugess crisis may very well provide the foundation for a sustained attack on social media.
That's because the refugee issue unites the German political mainstream plus whatever is left of their "left".
More importantly, going after "right wing" xenophobic hate on social media is a next to perfect alibi, the best possible means for a motley collection of middle of the road and traditional conservatives to hide their very own role in promoting xenophobic and racist attitudes over decades. Again, the blogster is not the first to point at the historical continuity of xenophobic attitude that reaches well into the German middle and upper class, and has been a staple of papers like Bild Zeitung, as illustrated in the post German political kindergarten: you are the hater, no - you are.
We are not claiming that Twitter and Facebook will become as bland as British mashed potatoes soon, but if the German government has its way, there may soon be room for a more interesting corner of social media in some nook and cranny of the internet.
[Update 2/1/2016]
Austria is making it easier to spy on people with a new law that extends surveillance.
Several states in Eastern Germany, incidentally covering the area of the old GDR plus Berlin, are in the process of establishing a joint surveillance center as a "Competence and Service Center".
Oh, and the UK snooper charter is doing great. France is still living under a state of emergency after the November Paris attacks and shows no signs of ending it.
[Update 6/7/2016] Germany is following suite with two new laws, one regulating the exchange of information regarding terrorism, the other a so-called "reform" of the country's foreign intelligence agency BND.
The view of reasonable experts, including lawyers and Reporters without Borders is easily summarized: everything that has been in a legal gray zone or outright illegal is simply going to be legalized.
The blogster hates to say told you so, but the last paragraph of the 2013 post The Spin Doctor is in still holds true.
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