HAX

Today the European Parliament has adopted yet another resolution on child abuse online. And as usual it is written in a very sweeping language.

4. Recognises the different roles, duties and responsibilities of the state and private industry including in respect of investigation, prosecution, the right to privacy and data protection; calls for an effective working relationship and, subject to proper legal and judicial oversight and in respect of what is lawful and necessary in the best interests of the child and for the protection of children from child sex abuse online, information exchange between law enforcement agencies, other appropriate state duty bearers, judicial authorities, and when appropriate and necessary and in compliance with the law, the ICT industry, internet service providers (ISPs), the banking sector and non-governmental organisations, including youth and children’s organisations, with a view to ensuring the rights and protection of children online and regarding them as vulnerable persons under the law; calls on the Commission to take the initiative of asking all the Member States to take action to tackle all forms of cyber predation and cyber bullying;

Is this a way of saying that ISP:s should police the Internet? Maybe. Some people, for certain, will read it that way and use it to promote their agenda.

And what about this one..?

5. Stresses that measures limiting fundamental rights on the internet need to be necessary and proportionate, in line with Member State and European legislation and in compliance with the child’s rights under the UNCRC; recalls that illegal online content should be deleted immediately on the basis of due legal process; recalls that removal of illegal online content, in which the ICT industry plays a certain role, can only take place after judicial authorisation; emphasises the importance of respecting the principles of the due processes of law and the separation of powers;

So, the European Parliament just said that it’s OK to limit fundamental rights on the Internet? I think it did. If so, naturally it’s a good thing that it’s going to be done under rule of law and after due process. But is it at all acceptable to limit our fundamental rights? The reason they are called “fundamental” is that they should not be limited. At all. Ever.

And then we have this one…

8. Calls on the Commission to further assess commercial distribution business models in hidden services, including a monitoring of the Deep Web and the Darknet criminal markets in order to determine proliferation of commercial sexual exploitation of children online as a potential consequence of further migration from a traditional payment system to a new, largely unregulated digital economy;

It would be interesting to know how.

It’s also worth noticing that the European Parliament opens up for playing the child porn card to regulate and control digital currencies. (Yes, they think they can.)

I understand that the European Parliament would like to be seen to do something about child abuse. But I fear that it — once again — only will open up for Internet regulation. Without helping a single abused child.

Even though this not is legislation, parliamentary resolutions are often used by people who want to control information, regulate the Internet and limit our civil rights.

Link: Motion for a resolution to wind up the debate on the statement by the Commission pursuant to Rule 123(2) of the Rules of Procedure on child sex abuse images online (2015/2564(RSP)) »

/ HAX

From the Snowden files, people know for sure. There is mass surveillance.

It is conducted on a global scale by various NSA schemes. In most countries there are national surveillance programmes. And in the EU, data retention means logging all our phone calls, text messages, e-mails, net connections and mobile positions. (This is done in most EU countries, despite the European Court of Justice having invalidated the EU data retention directive for breaching human rights.)

Then we have the things we do not know. Obviously the Russians and the Chinese have their own global mass surveillance systems. And in the western world there are many surveillance programmes still unknown for the public. (Sometimes outsourced to private contractors.)

It’s massive. It’s overwhelming. It’s more or less uncontrollable.

There are some signs of reform of mass surveillance in western democracies. But in essence, it’s just window dressing. Our governments have no intention giving up their instruments of control.

We need reform. We need whistleblowers. We need democratic oversight.

But, basically, mass surveillance seems to be a permanent state.

So, what to do?

People ought to use encryption by default. But they don’t. It’s to complicated for most people. (PGP/GPG encryption is just used by four million people in the world. Ever.)

This is what must change. We need default mode, no hustle, easy to use encryption working in the background when it comes to e-mails, phone calls, text messages and chats. Encryption must be a no-brainer for all.

And on another level we continuously need to protect and strengthen all communications protocols running in the background on the internet and in our telecommunications systems.

For now, this seems to be a never ending armes race between civil society and governments (and other bad guys).

On a political level, the fight for peoples right to privacy will continue. And it will be furious. But we must recognise that this is a two front war — where political and technical activism must go hand in hand. To be successful, the two arms of the privacy movement need more and better platforms to coordinate.

/ HAX

We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where—if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen—we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new—and permanent—basis.

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

Read more: Edward Snowden’s Libertarian Moment: We “will remove from governments the ability to interfere with [our] rights” »