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I'd welcome everybody for the next talk,
the title of the talk is Avoiding Colonel
Panic Europe's Biggest Fails
in digital policy making.
The talk will roughly cover the question
of why the European Union is failing
as an institution and what we can
do about it.
Our lovely speakers are standing right
here next to me.
We have kids and Fiedler, she's the
managing director of European Digital
Rights in Brussels and she's also
connected to Netz Politics dot
org and to digitize, which many of
you know, I guess the second speaker is
Vitaphone Hulst.
He's a city law practitioner by day
and digital rights activist by night, he
says. And now they will answer
for you the question, what we can do
about the European Union's failure.
Thank you very much. Please give them a
warm round of applause and welcome our
two speakers. Thank you so much.
Hired my microphone.
OK, all your angels, can you check the
headsets? I think it was on, but it was
not a cry for power.
Thank you.
OK, yes. Hello, everyone.
Well, my name is Kurson.
This is Walter.
Yeah. Do you want to start?
No.
OK, so, yeah, basically beyond
our day jobs and beyond our activism,
we are also both European
citizens or Europeans
and well, we are trying
to actively participate in
Europe's policy-making processes.
So we here at the
started to see we care really
a lot about the resilience of our
technical infrastructures, but
pretty much in the same way.
We also don't want our political
infrastructures that we depend on to
be broken.
And basically, in the last year in
Brussels, we have been on one hand quite
successful, on the other hand, are
completely overwhelmed and outgunned
in that arena.
And in this talk, we want to explore
both the failures on the institutional
side and also on the activism side,
because there's room for improvement on
both sides of the equation.
So before we start to
delve into the reasons for the failures,
we just wanted to give you quickly
a summary of our top four
top for you fails.
So the first one is that privacy
protections will weaken
the second one, mass surveillance
measures.
Third one, policy based
evidence making instead of
evidence based policy making.
And the last one, well,
our dear commissioner for
the Digital Society and Economy.
So for the first Speigel,
instead of ensuring that Europe's
population can really benefit from
real privacy protections, Europe's
governments have been really
trying very hard to delay the
data protection reform process in the
last two years and to water down
the protections for the citizens.
And Germany was pretty much leading
these efforts in the European Council.
And in the meantime, European
parliamentarians were happily copy
pasting from
while texts suggested by the online
industry into the
data protection regulation.
The second big fail is, well,
instead of proposing real solutions
to the migration crisis,
the EU pursues a very shortsighted
vision that focuses on border
and travel surveillance, which
is massively in breach of our privacy
rights instead of, well,
yeah, just
finding real solutions
to how we can handle
migration here with laws
also that remain in force
for years and years until finally a court
may or may not declare them
illegal.
A third big fail is well,
instead of proposing
evidence based policies, the EU has
been really moving more and more
to an approach where it is justifying
proposals with made up evidence
created by service
surveys or even worse.
It is completely getting rid of evidence
or impact assessments like
you can see here for
a new directive that has been proposed
in order to fast track some
EU anti-terrorism measures.
And of course, the last one.
Yeah, they have been released so many
sales in the EU that we almost forgot
to put in the really most obvious
one.
So.
Well, instead of putting experts
in charge of the digital agenda,
we now have a rather mediocre
regional politician who
knows nothing about digital policy
making.
So basically, if you start looking
into the reasons for all
these failures, you run into
elements like
the European Union has a rather poor
architecture. If you want to put it in
software and terms,
the legislative processes
are also very buggy
and.
There's a complete or almost complete
lack of institutional memory,
and we will give some examples later
for this.
There are also a lot of poor,
poorly functioning actors, especially
the influence of lobbyists or special
interests can be pretty
bad.
And then there is also this phenomenon
which you could kind of translate into
denial of service attacks.
The same bad proposals come
back and back and back again until
they pass.
And similarly to the
policy based evidence creation, as also
happens in a similar fashion.
Um, but, yeah, let me
first expand a little on the on the
architecture
effectively, and I'm assuming everyone
knows the political concept, the idea of
separation of the executive, the
legislative and the judiciary powers and
which is supposed to be part of a normal
functioning democracy.
And there's no such thing at the European
level.
Basically, um, this
is supposed to be a legislative Jarmo.
The European Parliament cannot initiate
legislation on its own.
And even though in all member states, the
vast majority of national legislation is
initiated by the executive, parliaments
still do have to write in each state
legislative initiative on their own.
You can't do that at the European level.
We have a very poor substitute
for that, quote, normal legislative
reports.
But it's sort of nonsensical
in a way.
Um, then there's this problem of
having the executive
twice in the in the legislative
process.
Um, first you have the commission, which
is supposedly the executive body of the
European Union.
But then there's this something called
the Council of Ministers, which I
sometimes call the Council of Misery,
which is made up out of the executives
of the member states.
And
basically, you have the executives of the
member states of the European executive
initiating legislation and having a
very unbalanced influence on the
legislative process.
And both the members of the
European Commission and of the Council
of Ministers cannot be sent
home by the European Parliament,
of course, members of the Council of
Ministers can be sent home by the
national parliaments, but not by the
European electorate as
a whole.
And on the judiciary side, which
is probably the least problematic
institution at the European level, that's
actually fairly limited access to the
European Court of Justice.
For all its successes, I
don't think the European Union
can become a genuinely
genuine democracy
if we either just
involve the European Union back to the
member states with parties like UKIP
are promoting.
Or we change the
locks. Now, the council minister into our
council parliament, this will be my
personal preference.
But as it is now, it's kind of stuck
in between a bunch of
democratic nations working together to do
something or a
and or a generally
democratic Europe functioning properly.
And then there's also the failure
of this in English speaking
countries called the Fourth Estate as an
addition to the Trius, um,
the media can be considered an important
element in balancing, uh,
the the various powers in a democracy.
And basically, if you look at the
national media coverage of the Brussels
process quite
often.
Legislative dossiers are only mentioned
in national media after there
has been an important vote, no prior to
that. So the citizens of Europe and only
informed about major legislative
initiatives that have a major impact on
their lives after the process
has more or less finished.
And if you realize that roughly
80 percent of legislation at your
national level is initiated from
Brussels by the director for regulations,
and if you're talking about digital
policymaking, it's over 90 percent
of all legislation, more or less
is decided in Brussels.
This is a massive failure and.
It's mainly caused by.
The most national media outlets have
little to no permanent presence in
Brussels, and if there are any
journalists in the room, please
ask your editors why that is the case,
because they should feel ashamed of that.
And this and, uh,
another thing, um, that
most everything in Brussels seems to be
designed to bore you to death, and that
is not helpful for the media side
of things.
And personally, I believe that the
fact that commissioners cannot
be sent home is part of the problem
because then you have sufficient drama
to get the media involved.
But right now, well, there is
a lot of drama in Brussels, but it's kind
of a sideshow compared to what you can
have at the national level.
Yeah, right. So this basically brings
us to the first big failure of our
community to come because
we haven't been really able to
run a proper analysis of the
architecture.
So despite the fact that,
as we also said, 80 percent of our
90 percent of tech laws are designed in
Brussels, many of us still don't know
how the EU institutions function.
But we really need to have an
understanding how everything works
if we want to be able to effectively
address their flaws
and then repair them.
So I don't want to go into detail
now and bore you to death even more
of the processes
and everything.
But you can read all that
in Adris booklet,
how the EU Works, or while
the title is, I think the activist
guides through the Brussels maze, you can
find it online.
So once we do understand
how everything works, we can actually
we could start step by step
to repair it.
So since the
Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament
has gained more power.
For example, it can say yes or no to
international agreements,
which is one of the reasons why we
won against ACTA.
But as Walter said, the European
Parliament still is not able
to propose legislation itself.
It can only modify texts
that were written by the European
Commission or ask the commission to
propose law.
So maybe what we need is
a constitutional crisis or
maybe a revolt by the European
Parliament, so why
can it not just grab the
legislative initiative?
I can not just say, fuck it, we're just
going to propose a law now.
So but I think giving power to
the parliament is also up to us.
And so far, we have been failing to
support the European Parliament as
the only institution that represents
us directly.
If you take, for example, the
2014 elections,
it was really the worst turnout
in the entire European history.
So I think last year we had
a participation rate of forty two
point six percent.
Whereas in nineteen ninety four, it was
fifty six point six and in
the Netherlands last year,
only 30 percent or 37
percent of people went to vote.
So, yeah, the
second reason for the failure of the EU
are also the legislative processes,
because many things are still
decided behind closed doors.
To give you just two examples of this.
The first thing is the
first point is the thing called
trialogues and the second
the way in which trade agreements are
negotiated.
So trialogues are
something that's not defined
in the European treaties, but it's
actually nowadays the way in
order to finalize laws in the EU.
So the normal legislative
process of the U.S., the commission
tables the proposal, the council, and if
you work on the text and then pass them
in the first reading, if none of the
institutions adopts the text of the
other, it goes to second reading and then
ultimately to conciliation,
if not adopted before.
What actually happens
are so-called trialogues,
and this sounds like a great and fun
thing to participate in, but actually
in reality it's a
lot less crunchy.
So any time after the publication
of the commission proposal, the
institutions can meet behind closed doors
in order to try to negotiate an agreement
on the text.
So this is completely and transparent.
There are no meeting minutes and there
are no clear rules for this so-called
trialogue meeting.
And it's well, it's completely
undemocratic because new text is
negotiated without anybody
voting on this.
And then there's the issue of the
international agreements, which
aren't especially for the digital sphere.
A lot of relevant policymaking actually
happens, and
the roles of the European Commission is
to represent Europe towards, uh,
non European counterparts
when it comes to trade agreements, for
example, to it's an ongoing
process.
But other examples are the swift
agreement with the United States, which
basically has a lot to say
about it, enshrined in law
the fact that most interbank
transfers in Europe are basically
the information is willingly shared with
the US and the end of the swift
agreements for the purpose of
antiterrorism
or counter-terrorism
operations.
And the problem starts already.
It's a process that's quite often,
especially in the so-called trade
agreements, the negotiation
mandate of the commission itself is
secret to begin this.
A tip had been negotiated for about
two and half years already before the
mandate given to the commission was made
public.
And if you do realize.
And that's one of the other problems with
the European Union, if you couch
everything in terms of its just the
economic things and therefore not
relevant for policy, ultimately
economic convergence,
both within the union and across,
for example, the Atlantic results and
changes in legislation, and it does
touch upon fundamental rights.
At some point you could especially see
with ActiveX, thankfully we managed
to shoot down, but ACTTAB
would have impacted our freedom of speech
greatly and.
Likewise, with
treaties like to see TAA and
TTIP, there are topics on the
negotiation table that are not just
economic anymore, it is about privacy.
It's about freedom of speech
and.
And and also, this is less
of our primary interest in matters of
labor interest and the environment,
and by kind of putting it away in
this notion of trade agreements,
I think the European institutions
are doing democracy a disservice.
Especially when you realize that
business interests quite often do have
access to these documents, while civil
society does not.
And.
So far, I think a lot of the
failures of activism is
to push hard on transparency
in these issues.
Um.
The few times we succeeded, actually
was quite often because we were abusing
loopholes or.
Say, abusing using them properly,
actually using differences in
transparency legislation, for example,
both sides of the Atlantic, and
it has been proven in the past, quite
useful to send Freedom of Information
Act request on the other side, used
the results from that to
do similar request to you
to the European Commission.
And any mismatch can turn out
to be rather interesting.
But this is also one of the things that
normal citizen can quite easily
participate in just sent.
Request to the commission or to a
national member states for information.
And, um,
and it becomes more powerful as soon as
you start sharing the results of that.
Yes, so basically the
slide is just to show that you could
really do three little things in
order to try to improve transparency
at the EU level. First thing is to make
access to documents request.
There's a platform called Ask the E.U.
dot org, which is really easy to use.
So you could ask for, for
example, communications between industry
and the commission on
any topic that's interesting for you
or ask for
trialogue documents or whatever.
Or you could complain to the ombudswoman
whose job it is to
investigate maladministration in the EU
and violations of rights.
Or you could build or
contribute or just use the
awesome tools that are out there,
for example, like Patrick Poltrack
has been built in order to scrape
data from the European Parliament's
website. And it gives a super nice
overview of all of the dossiers.
You can have alerts on your dossiers
and even link to directly
to amendments and that sort of stuff.
And there's also the issue
that, um, by
the nature of politics, politicians
tend to forget things they've said in the
past.
And especially in the digital
age, it's.
Actually, quite easy to remind them of
what they said in the past.
This has never been as
much recorded.
What politicians say and do
and a very useful tool in
this regard in the past has been
a poor political memory, which basically
was keeping track which
MEPs have been voting, which based on
this policy dossiers, and
actually gave a ranking to
the parties in the European Parliament
and the MEPs on how
to what extent they had been voting for
the for the citizens interest.
And politicians that know that
they will be reminded of their past
actions. They'll think their current
actions through much more than they
otherwise would because it
will affect their chance to be reelected.
And then you get to the denial
of service attacks on our
freedoms, and I'm an
example to the production
of passenger name records,
and this was already proposed
by the United Kingdom in 2005
to have databases of,
especially for air travel that mean
that the member states would share with
each other who was traveling where
we was paying for the tickets, what their
meal preferences would be.
Likewise, the US has been pushing for
having that information exchange.
The U.K. proposal was ultimately
shot down in parliament.
We still don't really know how that
happened because there was little
activism on it simply because
civil society is kind of overburdened
back then already and even more so
nowadays.
But Parliament did its job and
voted against it, saying this is too much
of an infringement upon fundamental
rights in a democratic society.
That initiative was first
proposed in 2005 after the London and
Madrid bombings.
Now we've had Paris same
similar proposals push forward
and surprise.
And then through now.
And the proposal was actually worse
than the previous one, as far as I know,
but everyone has forgotten the very good
reasons why the previous proposal didn't
get didn't make it, you know,
kind of short of memory in this respect.
Yes, so ideally, we really
need to be the political
memory of our parliamentarians,
we need to be there all the time to
remind them of the duties
and responsibilities as
the elected representatives
of the European people.
So this year, we lost the European
our file, and we now have
the massive and targeted surveillance
of of all our
passengers coming out and
flying out of the EU and inside
of the EU.
So, yeah, so
I think this was due to the fact that
there was simply not enough pressure from
civil society.
So we have just not been able to
constantly remind the AP that is
it is really there to represent us.
But being there all the time is
also a really huge challenge
for digital activism at the EU level
because, well, firstly, people
who care about what's going on in the EU
simply don't have the time
or the luxury to be engaged
over a long period of time
or to find ways to transmit their
knowledge of Europe's history
and policy making.
Or secondly, while secondly,
our digital rights activists are still
too few to point out
every single time to policymakers
when they're about to adopt a really
crazy proposal.
I think an entire
Europe that's not even 50
people active on these sort of
questions from civil
rights organizations to defend
your rights and freedoms.
And this is just simply a scandal.
So, yeah, as Walter said,
even if we're not in Brussels
physically all the time, we would
theoretically have the means to engage
in a decentralized manner and
policymaking.
In the past years, we had minimal pool
and unfortunately, due to
lack of human resources, I think
mostly the tool has not been
updated after the 2014 elections.
And so if I think
somebody is just now starting to
work on this again and if you want to
help out with this, go to the
end of the quarter to the net and
ask how you can help out.
Yes, and we have to they their
devices.
I would say, um,
in a way, especially the civil service
and the European Commission do not
have the problems of shortage of memory.
They do have the problem that actually
had a few. Relatively speaking, the
European Commission is a fairly small
executive body compared to, let's say,
the central governments of the
member states.
To give an idea, there are about twenty
four thousand civil servants
working within the European Commission.
And if you compare that to, let's say,
the federal government of Germany, that's
less than a tenth of the civil servants.
And they tend to compensate for that by
relying heavily on
expert experts from the fields,
a.k.a. lobbying firms.
And, uh, and lobbyists
by themselves are not being paid
to represent the general interest being
paid to represent a special interest.
They're just just doing their job.
But their job is a bit of a nasty one
in the sense that they are
it's the main purpose to
make sure that any legislation that comes
through or is initiated is beneficial
to the people who are paying the.
To give you an idea, just a little
anecdote, three years
ago, we sat down with an MP
from, uh, from Ireland
about the general data protection
regulation, which is now finally in its
finishing stages.
That Irish MEP told us
you guys are the first people
from civil society I've been meeting on
this dossier. I have met between 40 and
50 different industry lobby
groups on this topic,
but none of them claiming to represent
the citizens.
And that gives you an idea
to what extent the within the
Brussels bubble, it's kind of a cacophony
of voices from industry interests and
much less of citizens' interests.
And because industry lobbyists
are mostly just doing their jobs,
this also often than it is very
ridiculous lobbying
attempts.
So we have a couple of examples.
One example, for example, was last
two years ago, there was last year the
American, um, the
corporate consultation.
Last Christmas, the European Commission
asked, um,
should it be considered a copyright
infringement if someone were to have a
hyperlink towards infringing content
on the Internet?
And Bertelsmann, Ainsworth's before
long, experts say it was obvious
that a hyperlink to
content on a different website
that happens to be infringing should
be considered infringing itself.
And you can be sure that of
all these thousands of answers to that
particular consultation, which thankfully
answers a lot of times by normal
citizens, but the older ones, by the
the publishers would kind of echoed that
sentiment.
I think you have other good examples
of ridiculous lobbying.
Yeah, well, we have a shot video to
show you.
Um, made
by the advertising industry
on the data protection regulation
and that really you have to see this
because it was just so hilarious.
Yeah, because, yeah, Evilenko
has kidnaped thousands of slaves and
strip them of their identities so they
can be found and saved.
And I didn't look at all those poor
slaves. We must do something to help
them.
Let's ask the genie.
Yes, let's go.
Jeannie, we need your help.
We have to get the slaves, their
identities back and break even let go
to justice. If we find out as much as we
can about him, we can predict his next
moves and put a stop to this.
So do you realize anonymity
is slavery?
War is peace.
Well, that's a good idea,
but the point of collapsing this is
profiling.
We have to get explicit consent from
everyone which what
what the law is a makes
no sense.
This is for the victims and the greater
good.
Wait, it doesn't have to be this way.
If we find out as much as we can about
him, we can predict his next moves and
put a stop to this.
No problem.
Give me one second, I can gather
the relevant information I'm already
have. So this should be.
Thanks, Jeanne.
You've really helped us.
We'll take it from here.
And do realize that this particular
lobbying firm has emissions about
five or six of these rather expensive
animations to show to MEPs
and how beneficial data mining will be to
the general population.
What could possibly go wrong?
Other examples are that in the process
of the negotiations, industry was pushing
very hard and got
their way in the actual documents,
um, to set damages
for copyright infringement based on the
actual number of copies
multiplied by the retail value of
the copies.
Which is what basically
mean, I would assume that any copy made
was basically a lost sale to them.
Yeah, and another example from
last year, only just before the European
Parliament voted for the first
time for really strong net neutrality
protections, there was a last minute
effort by the child
protection lobbyists in order to kill
net neutrality amendments.
You have to yeah, it's really
crazy logic.
But one UK MEP
argued in an email to her colleagues
that net neutrality would actually lead
to child abuse.
And oh, my God, if Edri is like what
actually nets and access amendments
went through, then all the children would
be lost, basically.
So this attempt was really so ridiculous
that it failed epically.
And the net neutrality amendments
went through.
Yeah.
Discuss this, you can skip this one.
Yeah, so Walter already mentioned
the last one, those attacks, those
same proposals are being
just tabled over and over again.
Another example for these DOS attacks,
the U.S. fights while measures
to fight terrorism, because
every once in a while, the European
Commission launches talks with
industry in order to encourage companies
to just take voluntary actions
in order to find responses
to all sorts of illegal or possibly
just unwanted online activity.
So in 2012,
I don't know if some of you remember
there was a project that was called Clean
It that was
financed by the European Commission
and it aimed at reducing the terrorist
use of the Internet.
They never said what the terrorists
use might be,
but the project produced basically
a very long list, a
wish list for law enforcement.
So among the really bad proposals
was that Internet companies must
allow only real common names.
Governments must disseminate
lists of illegal terrorist websites.
And social media companies must
allow on the real pictures
of users.
So this project was then a really
big failure because it was substandard
quality and just produce no
meaningful outcome at all.
And yeah, I think the project's website
today cleaned it out.
You even links to some some porn
at the very bottom, I don't know.
You can check it out if you want.
But anyway, so this year the commission
took this approach and
just rebranded it.
And so what they are doing now is
launching an EU Internet
forum in order to
talk with online industry
in order to.
Yeah. To tackle terrorism and
prevent radicalization.
So in the past months, we've been really
battling with the commission to get some
documents because, of course, everything
is being discussed behind closed doors
with industry.
But all we received were
heavily redacted documents.
So but everything we know
is that the
participants are Google, Twitter,
Facebook, Microsoft and ask
of them.
And, um, yeah, the goal
is to, uh, to discuss
the reducing of
accessibility of content and
the development of counter
narratives and also,
well, to discuss the problem of
encryption that law enforcement
might have.
We don't know more.
Yes, another example
of these DOS attacks is
the tabling of the ACTA
approach, because we might
have one on paper against ACTA,
but the institutions have really been
taking bits and pieces in order to
introduce them into various
initiatives and their.
For example, they rebranded the voluntary
cooperation, if
you remember, and act, the part that was
most criticized was the suggestion
that the business sector should cooperate
between themselves in order to
censor communications whenever
a company thought they might
have detected copyright infringements.
So now in the new digital
single market proposals
of the commission, it was suggested
in a league, for instance, follow the
money approaches have been put in place
in order to reduce advertising
revenues.
Actions aside from advertising companies
or payment processors.
And if you want to know what that means
in practice, then you can go and ask
WikiLeaks because they have their
donations blocked by PayPal,
Visa and MasterCard on
the basis of zero legal
basis. And they have never been
proven guilty and there was no court
order.
So this is basically the approach that
the commission now wants to do as well
for fighting alleged
copyright infringements.
Yes, so this
was not the only time that the
approach was re tabled,
if you take the net neutrality
regulation that was concluded this year.
So in the original proposal of the
commission, there were a couple of
exceptions where access providers
were allowed to take measures in
order to manage their traffic, for
example, to comply with a court order.
But the commission or, well, DG
Home added a
note that said that access
providers should also be able to manage
their traffic in order to prevent serious
crimes.
So the commission gave no definition at
all what crimes that might be talking
about, and while, yeah, this
was clearly, clearly an attempt
to introduce lawless blocking
and filtering and even
the Council of the European Union raised
in one document, the concern that this
might actually be contrary
to the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
So in the end, this bit of text
was deleted by the European Parliament
and it's not in the regulation.
Well, basically,
by and large, it's not a
recent call to Brussels bubble,
and that has not been enough involvement
from the European citizenship.
It was basically I mean, if you want
to change this and of course we cannot
change the treaties, but a lot of other
things are going wrong, you must get
involved more.
And, um,
yeah, that's, uh,
very eloquently put it is
if people were to exercise their
citizenship, more should be
by and large, it would be better for
the effectiveness of terrorism in general
or what is often called activism
as an extreme thing should be
considered more normal.
You could endlessly discuss that
and you can get an ID.
But we also are failing as activists.
Um, is
this is a quote I heard from someone in
Brussels, but I forgot who said it was
basically boiled down.
We have civil society.
We don't have to be civil.
A lot of civil society involvement,
especially when people initially coming
into this arena.
Um.
Tends to be very, very impolite,
um, you really don't want and you
know what what kind of messages and
MEPs often get from the very few people
that actually do get involved in those
shows?
Um.
And of course, people are angry about,
let's say, a very bad legislative
proposal, but
if you are angry about something,
it may be worthwhile to sit down
and realize the person was
pushing this because he or she has
been told by corporate lobbyists that
this will be good and they may not
actually be aware to begin with
of the negative impact of this proposal
to someone else.
And if you
start by calling them idiots or sellouts
or corporate stooges,
that's not very helpful in convincing
people.
Um, yeah.
And in terms of.
Uh, atavism, being
polite and, uh, sometimes gets you a
lot further than Dunfee, be very blunt.
Um, but
please do get involved, and as
far as we are concerned, the first
stage of being more actively
involved is just make sure that you are
getting informed.
Like I said earlier on
the national media, our miserable
failure in reporting on Brussels, but
that is not necessarily a problem from
the Internet. And the Internet has been
about bypassing gatekeepers for
the better part of three or four decades.
Now, um, subscribe
to newsletters from NGOs
like Edri or others in whatever
policy area interested.
We happen to be interested in this policy
making.
But, um, social media can
also be interested in just following the
right Twitter feeds.
But especially in this area,
if you happen to be in theater, you can
actually be know a lot of the news
that may be in the newspapers one or two
weeks in advance.
I'm also the NSA
is more than about pictures of cats,
as much as I love cats and
people may disagree with me.
You can use it for use in a useful
way for activism and.
For example.
But just asking just sending emails
or engaged with your enemy by merely
asking questions about the show, it's not
even saying that he or she is doing the
wrong thing, but.
Actively citizens actively asking
MEPs what their position is on a certain
stage, on certain Duchaine is in itself
a strong political signal that there
may be electoral price to be paid
to the men doing the wrong thing
on a certain topic.
Of course, you have to know a little bit
about what's going on.
Another thing you can get if if you don't
want, if you don't feel comfortable
with.
Following the case very much in depth
and will probably be much happier
in the technical things, the.
The creation and maintenance of tools
like political memory, like Poltrack,
Pippi Longstocking, slobby plan,
you name it.
It's only very few people are doing that
right now and, um,
political memory, if we could rebuild
that again and get the wonderful people
of color to more
programing capacity, because that's what
it's like for the two of us running
political memory, that will be incredibly
helpful to others.
And that is much more than just coding.
That is pretty much political activism in
my book.
Yes, also, as a third stage,
you could use other tools in order
to get more involved, for example, by
responding to public consultations, the
European Commission launches every once
in a while, once in a while.
So at the moment, there are a couple of
very important ones open
here on our
picture. It says the twenty first, but
the one on platforms is
actually open until the twenty eighth.
So this consultation will really
be crucial for new rules
on important issues like
online privacy, like open data,
copyright, or even the right
not to have your uploaded
to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter
or whatever to have them
deleted again.
So and these are just some of the issues
at stake.
You can respond to this
one online on the European
Commission's website.
The second consultation, which is also
still open until the 20th, is
on geo blocking,
you know, this annoying thing
which prevents you to access
videos across borders.
So this is your chance really to
tell the commission that we need to get
rid of blocked videos
and barriers in the digital space.
A third consultation, a very
important one as well, that is open
until March, is on the transparency
of trialogues by the ombuds
woman.
I think later today there will also
be a work workshop here happening
at 32 33 as self
organize session.
Where will we meet up in order to
collectively respond to the
consultations? So go check out the
wiki if you want to come.
We can do well, we
can do it life.
And yeah.
So
in sum and we're going to come to an end
now, we're still
too few to battle on all fronts
in order to be a true counterweight
to industry lobbying.
I heard recently that there is
approximately ten times more funding
available for US NGOs
from foundations in the United States
than there is in Europe.
So but among the many reasons
why we have been failing
with the defense of human rights at the
EU level is also the political
indifference and resignation in
our communities.
We while we tend to stay
still too much in our own filter bubble
and in our own comfort zone, so
we really should go out more
and talk to people because
otherwise we end up where we are now
with a super distorted impression
of the importance of our
own issues.
And well, so far, we have
simply been failing to invest more
efforts into
making digital policy making
better, maybe by putting it in a
bigger context in order to reach
a broader audience.
Yeah, basically, we're seeing that the
European project is under tremendous
pressure,
there's the refugee crisis, there's the
Greek crisis in the background.
France is in a state of emergency
and there are clean noises that the state
of emergency will be permanent.
Poland and Hungary are borderline fascist
states already
and at the same time.
Uh.
We are still European citizens, and
if we leave this to the institutions
themselves, this will not necessarily,
uh, well, we
can continue to blame it on the
politicians, but the politicians are only
as good as the people that support them.
Yeah, and unfortunately, this
year we have been losing some
of the important battles on mass
surveillance, for example.
Yeah, like data retention or espionage
in some member states.
But we also had enormous successes
in the past, like ACTA, like net
neutrality, or we fought
successfully against mandatory web
blocking.
So if we if only
a couple of people are able to do
all this to to have such an impact,
imagine what we could do if we were more.
So I think we just need to stop blaming
the EU for all its failings, which
it clearly is,
but we cannot credibly criticize
the institutions if we don't also look
at our own failures, if we don't
try to change something and if we don't
try to get involved.
So, yeah, I think we
refuse to believe that this
well resonated and pessimistic
vision of digital rights
at the EU level is really the best
we can do.
And this is more or less so you had to
bring in.
Thank you very much for this inspiring
talk. We still have around 10 to 15
minutes for questions and answers.
If you have questions, please move to
one of the four microphones
we have on here.
Just move to one of the microphones if
you want to ask a question.
And if you're already leaving the room,
please do so very quietly
so you don't disturb the people who still
have questions for our speakers.
We will start with a question from the
Internet.
Hello. Somebody on Iasi asks,
How can we mobilize more people to get
active against bad legislation?
And how can we educate politicians that
seem to be resistance against better
knowledge?
Well, for starters, mobilizing the kids
of informing other people,
and it also means
not only talking to your Facebook friends
or because that, again, is
what Kirsten was talking about, being in
our own little bubbles.
It's also talking to people that may not
necessarily politically agree with you
or are entirely different spheres.
Yeah, I think you can just
follow us our three stages that
we just presented.
Firstly, get informed
or try to read as much as possible.
Secondly, try to contact
your politicians.
And thirdly, communicate about
what you are doing to your friends.
All right. Thank you. Again, if you have
a question, just move to one of our four
microphones. We will start with a
question from up there.
Um, two remarks about
your talk. You first said that
the citizens should
fulfill their citizenship.
Yeah, but in my personal
opinion, there is the big
missing link that you only can fulfill
the citizenship if you know what
it's all about.
So I think we need to remind ourselves
that the normal user
of a phone or a PC
or whatever is already overwhelmed
by Conficker writing his email
or her email program.
Yeah, um, at
a birthday party, I met some acquaintance
of mine and I told all about the
US and the agency and what we know
from Edward Snowden.
And he called me nuts and said, no,
this is happening. This is happening
right now. And I tried to
boil it down for them, but they
didn't believe me.
So I think it's our responsibility
to not educate, but give the information
to the people in a more
simplistic way.
Yeah.
And the second thing I want to add, um,
the we need also as a more
positive way of attacking this problem,
uh, strengthen the European Parliament
parliamentarians by reminding
them how important they are and
that they are doing an important job.
If you're looking at the crisis that we
had the last couple of years, like the
Greece, a Greek finance crisis and so on,
I would be rather pissed if it would be
a parliamentarian because what
the commission did back then and
the state heads were just nuts
and I would be sitting here and have no
power over the political agenda.
So if it would also remind them how
important their work is, I think this
would also give a positive spin.
Thank you.
Thank you. Do you want to comment on that
or.
Well, no, really.
OK, so let's go further with the next
question from over here, please.
Yes. Thank you one.
And you also have an overview or an idea
about how the actual
I'd call it half legal and illegal, uh,
corruption from the lobbyists towards
the parliamentarians is how many benefits
that actually give them to make
some kind of that, uh, more public,
because now I'd also be a big deal
breaker for reasonable
suggestions.
No, I don't have an idea
about that.
Every parliamentarian is required
to fill out a paper that's called, uh,
what's it called, uh, conflict
of interest paper where they
stayed on which boards they are
on or in which companies they've been
engaged. And, uh, that's you can
look up on the European Parliament
website, but it's not really
known how much corruption there is
because, uh, parliamentarians well,
apart from the green group who just
started recently to make all their
meetings public, we don't really know
who who they are meeting, if they are
invited to dinners.
Ah, yeah.
But are there any more initiative
initiatives to actually cover that to
make it public?
Well, in a way,
it's a positive development.
This as much more skepticism because at
least the euro skeptic presses a national
and international level, tend to
have, for example, to have some
parliamentarians were called by British
tabloids that wanted to expose the
corruption of the European institutions.
But the few European parliamentarians
that are stupid enough to get caught in
this, the typical the typical figures
are actually not that high.
And the amounts of money involved, it
makes more sense to me.
But like you said, there's now a complete
overview of how much happens.
But it would be very interesting to look
at your own map, and, for example, I
know this, a Dutch MP that has a
foundation called Friends of MEPs, such
and such. So this foundation
is not run by himself, run by his
friends.
And obviously any money that
goes that does not end up with him and
does not influence him at all.
No, sir, not at all.
And there's only a few hundred thousand
euros going on in that foundation.
Do you happen to know that from public
filings? But not not there's
not a complete picture of that.
All right, let's proceed, because we
still have a bunch of questions from over
here, please.
Yes, yes.
It seems difficult to estimate the impact
that it can have to, for example,
write an email to an MP or
to fill out these long and tedious
consultation forms.
Can you give an estimation
how much impact is it going to make if
some person actually takes the effort
to put all their thoughts into a mail
or into a consultation?
So always depends how you do it.
If you just take a mass e-mail template
and send it to hundreds of MEPs,
then it will most certainly
have not a lot of impact.
On the other hand,
filling out really long
online consultations by the commission.
I think it's really worthwhile doing that
because the commission sometimes well,
they just tend to take
all of the answers and then shamelessly
exploit them and say,
well, justify their proposals.
If 90 percent of the answers
are only coming from industry, then
of course, the commission is
free to follow whatever
it wants.
And it's also very much depends on
whether the MP you're writing to is
actually, for example, an operator or
a shadow rapporteur on a particular
dossier or actively involved with that.
And the way to make an impact,
sometimes more effective, is engaging
with staff members of the committee
because a lot of people rely heavily on
the staff, on their assistance
and sometimes on assistance.
Having an assistant on your side can be
more important than having an MEP on your
side because the MEPs merely
didn't have the assistance.
Thank you. Next question from the
microphone, please.
Hi, um, it's not really a question, but
you talked a lot about claimable, and
we have a group that is currently trying
to update the project, but we need help.
So if some of you are available,
you can come to the House on the top
floor and ask how you can help on
ablazing.
Thank you. Next question from all of you.
Is it open?
Have you ever thought of using
the tools the Khaliq before has said,
OK, you need to move to bring your
message in a little bit more
usable form to the people on the floor?
There were about roughly 800
people over here.
If you can arrange
to have whatever this manifold
by one thousand and you can do
this by vital
tools.
Have you ever heard about Airbus?
Avers is a tool where you can set the
petition, which is sent to somebody
and this can be replicated using Twitter,
using Facebook, etc., and
the person who is in here who
has a value of saying, I trust
this person, this will be replicated,
and this makes your your task
much easier as well as makes it
ours. The next thing is
for the news.
Only bad news or good news
that the standard in the news industry.
So what you need to do, for instance,
and I'm trying to do something
as well, like, for instance, net
neutrality.
If you take the list
of who actually supported net neutrality,
bring this in a simple chart
and publish this.
Then the media will go on to it and
also the people will go on to it and then
their MEPs will listen to you.
OK, send us your
tool that you were talking about,
Abess, OK?
All right, thank you. Next question,
please, from this microphone.
Hi, thanks very much for your talk.
I wanted to add the information you
mentioned that we're going to fill out
these, uh, open service
at a self organization.
So for everyone, that session is at three
p.m. in room C three.
Very easy to remember at C three,
room C, three at three p.m.
So please be there 20 minutes of your
time can really have an impact on how the
EU legislates every platform from
Facebook to Airbnb to Wikipedia.
We need you there. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks for the reminder.
And before do we have another question
from the Internet?
Um, there is somebody from
Switzerland asking how he or she can
help.
Actually,
Switzerland is a fairly unique
position in the sense that it's mostly
through bilateral agreements, which
merely have to execute whatever is cooked
up in Brussels and has no
say in it whatsoever.
Um, I would say a Swiss person
would be most helpful in helping
infrastructures for people within
the union to be politically active,
things like political memory and
all the other tools
or being active at the Swiss national
stage. But there is no Swiss MEPs
you could lobby to.
Switzerland, like Norway, Iceland
and Liechtenstein, basically does
whatever Russell says tells them to do
without having a vote.
So I was actually worse off than we are.
And support your local NGO,
I guess, would be the answer.
Thank you. Next question from the
microphone, please.
Yes, hello, um, I just
want to say I really enjoyed your talk,
but something that bothered me and I'm
hearing here as well is very much an us
and them mentality between politicians
and activists and just citizens.
Um, I'm a politician in Switzerland,
and I can tell you it's very lonely
because people don't talk to you either.
They are angry with you and they just
give you a list of complaints.
So I enjoyed what you said about the
approach. If you approach a politician,
don't wait until you're really
fuming mad.
Try and talk to them with information.
And the other thing is, I don't know why,
but for me, it's very hard to digest
all the information I'm supposed to
absorb as a politician.
I'm supposed to be informed about
everything.
And generally speaking, people get into
politics because they have a pet
project they want to fulfill and
then they don't know nothing about all
the other things and they rely on
other people to inform them.
This is why lobbyists are so powerful.
But we can all be lobbyists.
We can all write a powerful letter
explaining in a factual and informative
and also concise way
how the technology works, how
this policy will affect different
factors of what.
And I maintain that most politicians
are quite innocent when they vote on
something, they're just informed
they don't know what they're doing.
So please write letters.
Yeah.
Edri has actually written a couple
of very nice booklets
on the different topics from data
protection, property rights to net
neutrality where.
While we try to put everything in
a very neat format on
a very short in a very short
booklet with every subchapter
just on one page, in order to
allow politicians to read this very
quickly and just grasp
the main ideas of the topics.
So this is maybe something as well to do.
Thank you very much. As we're running out
of time, I will be closing the question
and answer session right now.
I'm sorry, but maybe you can catch the
speakers after the talk.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you for your questions.
And please give another warm round of
applause to our fabulous speakers.
Thank you very much.