EDRi on EU public consultations on Internet and Big Brother issues:
Public consultations are an opportunity to influence policy-making at an early stage, and to help to shape a brighter future for your digital rights.
Below you can find the public consultations which EDRi finds relevant in 2017. (…) We will update the list on an ongoing basis, adding our responses to the consultations and other information that can help you get engaged.
Want to see a politician clearly? Remove emotional words from their statements.
"If human rights laws get in the way, we will change them." https://t.co/Ci9yt7I9d6
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 5, 2017
I’m clear: if human rights laws get in the way of tackling extremism and terrorism, we will change those laws to keep British people safe. pic.twitter.com/8EfUJYUDMK
— Theresa May (@theresa_may) 6 juni 2017
As Europe moves towards a cash free society there are worrying signals from the EU…
European Union states are considering measures which would allow them to temporarily stop people withdrawing money from their accounts to prevent bank runs, an EU document reviewed by Reuters revealed.
This is a practice used e.g. in Greece and Cyprus in times of financial turbulence. (In Cyprus the government also confiscated parts of the peoples’ bank deposits, a so called »haircut«.)
The official reason – to prevent bank runs – might be logical. But so far the reasons have rather been national financial difficulties, stemming from local economies being linked to the single European currency, the Euro.
And the Euro-crisis is far from over. The idea of fixing totally disparate economies to one exchange rate and one interest rate is still very problematic. And the European Central Bank, the ECB, is still trying to save the Euro by various stimulus packages and by indirectly printing more money. Without a doubt, more problems lie ahead.
This leaves the average citizen powerless. Your money is no longer yours – but the governments to be used as a financial tool. (Or to be confiscated.)
Thus reducing the independent citizen to a serf.
/ HAX
Reuters: EU explores account freezes to prevent runs at failing banks »
It’s going to be much harder to view the full web in Russia before the year is out. President Putin has signed a law that, as of November 1st, bans technology which lets you access banned websites, including virtual private networks and proxies. Internet providers will have to block websites hosting these tools. The measure is ostensibly meant to curb extremist content, but that’s just pretext — this is really about preventing Russians from seeing content that might be critical of Putin, not to mention communicating in secret.
• Engadget: Russian censorship law bans proxies and VPNs »
• TorrentFreak: Russia Bans ‘Uncensored’ VPNs, Proxies and TOR »
The Swedish leak where classified data and networks were outsourced outside the European Union was not an isolated incident, but a pervasive pattern where things are kept safe mostly by good luck and the occasional person who knows their stuff fixing things properly out of pure subordination.
Falkvinge: This is how absolutely headdeskingly clueless politicians are at anything IT security related «
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg today ruled in favour
of the German civil liberties activist and pirate party member Patrick
Breyer (Commission vs. Breyer, C-213/15 P): It ordered the Commission
to give the press and the public access to the pleadings exchanged in
completed court proceedings. In the present case Breyer successfully
demanded the Commission disclose Austrian pleadings concerning the
non-transposition of the controversial EU Data Retention Directive.
However the Court fined Breyer for publishing the written submissions in
his own case on his homepage.
Pirate Times: EU Court rules on transparency of EU justice »
On 11 July, two Committees in the European Parliament voted on their Opinions on European Commission’s proposal for a Copyright Directive: the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) and the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE).
CULT decided to abandon all reason and propose measures that contradict existing law on monitoring of online content. They also contradict clear rulings from the highest court in the EU on internet filtering. And for the sake of being consistently bad, the Committee also supported ancillary copyright, a “link tax” that would make linking and quotation almost impossible on social media.
ITRE made a brave effort to fix the unfixable “censorship machine”, the upload filter proposed by the Commission. On the one hand, this demonstrates a willingness in the Parliament to resist the fundamentalism of the Commission’s proposal. On the other, it shows how impossible this task really is. Despite deleting the reference to “content recognition technologies”, ITRE has decided to keep the possibility of measures to prevent the availability of copyrighted works or “other subject matter” which may or may not be understood as supporting preventive filtering.
And there is more bad news in the linked text, below.
EDRi » Latest copyright votes: Filtering, blocking & half-baked compromises »
The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government.
Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Tom Clancy
I just read an interesting piece at Bloomberg: The Hackers Russia-Proofing Germany’s Elections »
It’s about the German Chaos Computer Club – CCC – and its fight for a free, open democratic society with a free flow of information. At the end, member Jan Krissler is quoted saying…
»All the stuff will happen in the end.«
He then adds »Maybe I’m too skeptical about our influence.«
The looming questions. Are they winning? Are we losing? If so, what will the consequences be? Is it already too late to fight Big Brother?
For decades I have in one way or another been into politics and communication. One thing that I have learned is that you must be ridiculously persistent. You will be fed up repeating the same arguments over and over again – to people who are not interested or do not want to understand. They will ignore you, they will laugh at you and they will fight you.
Then you win. It has been done before. When the Internet stopped ACTA is one of a number of very real victories in the EU. It’s all about leaving your comfort zone – and give what it takes to win. Again. And again.
Because we must! A modern, slightly superstitious, politicized, high-tech Big Brother state will be insufferable. Orwell, meet Kafka.
This is about the power balance between citizens and the state. This is about upholding fundamental human rights. This is – ultimately – about democracy. And it is for real.
Bigbrotherism tends to be irreversible. When mass surveillance is in place, it is very hard to undo and will inevitably be followed by more. When civil rights are restricted, they might be lost forever. And we have absolutely no idea about who will be in power in the future. But it’s highly likely that – sooner or later – it will be some pretty nasty people. (As if today’s politicians aren’t scary enough.) Please, do not leave them tools of oppression and total control.
So, losing is not an option.
To win, I believe that we must stand on strong and unrestrainable principles. The UN, EU, and Council of Europe declarations on human rights. The fundamental pillars and the deeper values of liberal democracy. What the Germans (who learned the hard way, twice) call »Rechtstaat«. Division of power. Openness.
It must be commonly known that there is an ongoing battle, where peaceful activists passionately are defending democracy – and politicians and bureaucrats are trying to restrict it. This image must be reflected in the media and in the public mind.
Remember that action is the most powerful way to communicate – and necessary for anything to happen at all.
Trying to repress Democracy must come at an extremely high political price. If we don’t draw a red line, our overlords will find that there are, actually, no real limits to their power. (And having power over others does unfortunate things to people.)
Fight fair, endure, stand on a few exceptionally strong principles – and you will eventually win.
Finally, we cannot have all these different fights over and over again. This must come to some sort of horizontal, binding resurrection of privacy, civil rights and freedom of information.
(And whatever you do, do not allow politicians to »modernize« our existing human rights conventions. These should be very imposing and inconvenient obstacles – to prevent governments from doing whatever they want.)
Take this fight to national politics. Confront politicians and their functionaries. Give the media a wake-up-call. And let’s make all of this an Issue at the European elections – as much of today’s Bigbroterism originates in the EU.
May the Force be with you.
/ HAX
Britain’s largest ever warship is not “vulnerable” to cyber-attacks despite running on Microsoft Windows XP, a 20 year-old operating system, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said.
Huffington Post: Britain’s Largest Warship Uses Windows XP And It’s Totally Fine, Says Michael Fallon »
