 From my perspective, it was a relatively quiet year, but it couldn't have been more hectic from the next politic view. There were so many news. And I'm sure that this year wasn't as quiet as I had it this year. And Marco Speckadal will now talk to you about what it was like and about anything that was important. I'm happy to announce the weather report by netpolitik.org. Hi, welcome to the weather report by netpolitik.org. It's a bit uncommon for me to speak to so few people in front of the camera. But we'll have to get through it. I hope that we'll be seeing in person next year and have many fascinating moments together. One of the top topics this year was EU ministers want to create backdoors in digital communications. The German Interior Ministry used the German EU Council presidency to get some resolutions ahead. The problem with that, we either have trustable, secure communication or we don't. We'll have to keep our eyes open because this is a debate that is very relevant to our communication. But there's a new debate. Matthias Monroy wrote on netpolitik that this was like a medium peak within a five-year campaign that took place behind closed door. A related topic, the State Trojan. State Trojans are available for everyone nowadays or mostly everyone. This year the federal government had a resolution that it is also legal for the German federal office for the protection of the constitution to use them. So the problem remains, our security authorities are buying State Trojans from tax money to hack people. So our devices are all vulnerable and IT insecurity is being created. But there are good news. The Finfisher headquarters in Munich have been raided by the police because we filed a complaint together with other organizations and NGOs because Finfisher exported bad software to bad countries. In 2020, home devices gave testimonies before the court because Alexa witnessed a murder. This year the Interior Ministry or the Homeland Ministry as Hossein Hofer likes to call it had a new law proposal, a slap in the face to anyone who wanted to join the debate, any NGOs or citizens who would have liked to have a look at the law before it's published. So there's a lot of criticism on the IT security law 2.0. There are severe extensions of surveillance warrants and the German Ministry for IT Security could extend their power. They would be allowed to hack, to look into your data traffic. On one hand, the Ministry's task is to build trust, but on the other hand they weren't very successful. Then we had the BND, the German Secret Service Law. Of course we also sued them before the Constitutional Court, but the government was able to make that law official anyway. Next year we have elections, so they are in quite a hurry and we will have to wait for the process before the Constitutional Court. In 2020 we had a good year for good news and traditional transport media. At least if you're in the German Sauerland, you are faster with a voice if you want to transport data than with the public internet. That has to do with the failure of establishing a broadband infrastructure apt to its purpose. They managed to have to extend their powers in so many ways, but they didn't manage to create a viable infrastructure. We are expecting to have progress in 2025, so there's hope for anyone who still has to use their landline phone. There's no right to the internet just yet, but in 2025 they want to have gigabit internet. We trust in the market, in the free market economy. Here surveillance would make more sense for a change. Police officers were able to access contact data of journalists. There's a podcast by Idil Baida together with Constanze Kurz, because she's been affected by the NSU National Socialist Underground 2.0 males, where police officers accessed personal data from activists and forwarded them to right-wing extremist chat groups. That were then threatening the activists. And our government is still busy counting the lone wolves. Another very dominating topic this year, the extradition of Julian Assange to the U.S. because of his WikiLeaks 2010 revelations. On 4 January 2021, we are expecting a decision and this is still a political process. There will not be a fair process in the U.S. They are stating and they are making an example out of him. So the lesson is going to be, don't mess with the U.S. Therefore solidarity with Assange, solidarity with WikiLeaks and hoping it's not going to be as bad is what we need to do. Then we still used the opportunity to protest against the EU copyright law reform and everything is getting worse and worse, but that's what we expected. Upload filters are going to come, even though they said they wouldn't. But we can trust in our EU government to make a good deal. So some forms of copyrighted information can still be distributed, such as memes for example, but it looks like that is going to stop next year. But we have a project called Control-C that deals with the topics. But we will have problems here because we can't protest the way we would want to. Talking about the music industry. Music industry is using open source products and tools, but they are using copyrighted material from YouTube and this is why they had to stop their services. The source code is back off YouTube DL and it has effects on Germany because many hosters and other projects were affected. So this is a dangerous development we're seeing here. We thought that the age of copyright laws was over but the industry is rearing its ugly head again. A very bad topic last year was the EU resolution against terror propaganda where we have established, where a trial log was established and a resolution was found and it's not as apocalyptically bad. So there will not be mandatory upload filters. But the general problem remains. We have no democratic control of what is in those terror propaganda databases and we still don't know what terror propaganda is supposed to be because it isn't clearly defined and it's being interpreted in different ways. In different ways. For example what is considered by Hungary as terror propaganda could also be called human rights activism and now countries are having it easier to declare that terror propaganda and also in North Windwist failure in Germany activists are being affected because they're labeled as terrorists and that gives politicians and institutions the opportunity to cancel protests to bar people from protesting. Even though the law says freedom of expression is not up for debate but still we'll see what's coming. Well the network barrier is back. There's a couple of sub-federal level media institutions that want to basically basically restrict porn some porn sites and they want to require them to actually have a required registration to make sure that youth people can't actually use it and a couple of years ago we actually we as a society actually developed ideas which was deleting instead of blocking access but this time we don't really have a debate and we don't really have good alternatives that we can show them to make sure that we will not have these barriers otherwise we might have these barriers they might not even be included within a law but instead just a basically a directive from the administration 2020 there was also a cool against demonstrations there was a little bit of a reveal against the global security operation center which is basically a surveillance apparatus within amazon that looked at climate activists whether they want to start boycotts against amazon but they're also looking at labor unions and protesting unions and they know for example that in leipzig there were quite a few amazon workers that actually did participate in this strike but no people on the higher levels of the ladder and we asked amazon and there was a there's a nice quote of them it's never watching the there was never actually an observation of the activity through operative that is people that are actually working there right now so we are quite sure that they didn't actually have workers work there but they definitely know who was on strike so 2020 and was the year where we decided that 2021 we needed to have fingerprints on german national ids so if you don't have a new national id if you don't want your fingerprint in databases that you probably can't delete it at any point you can do that until december so get your own personal id until december in germany and someone called philand said it's quite expensive it might be a little bit expensive so if you want to keep your fingerprints you have to spend some money basically now let's go to sort of mix whether this year the conservative elite showed who showed what kind of competencies many important people had there was teodor guttenberg he was he basically chose the right horse augustus intelligence and also wire card and he basically was very well and he really understands innovative business models that help our business or at least burn a lot of money of other people obviously and 2020 was also the year where we first tested whether our catastrophe alarm systems work and it's good that we tested it didn't work obviously sometimes we use the wrong technology sometimes processes didn't work because some alarms were kind of blocking each other we're overlapping so if we had the zombie a couple x we all be dead basically maybe next time it'll be better 2020 was also the year where we thought that at least one positive thing would be coming from corona which would be that masks protect from surveillance that's what we hoped anyway in summer but by now all of these machine learning algorithms have been trained and your mask still helps against recognition against facial recognition but it's not very clear whether all the systems aren't able to recognize people with masks or whether or you should probably think that some systems will recognize you so maybe put in some makeup 2020 was also the year where a polish firm a polish company had a facial recognition facial recognition database that you could basically search through PIM eyes show that every picture anyone leaves on the internet can basically be used by all of these companies and these companies won't even ask you for your pictures to basically have their databases and there were some positive developments there's a moratorium that is some firms like IBM Amazon Microsoft will not be selling facial recognition data to security services like the police IBM seems to be seems to go further in terms of talk at least we need to see what the reality is but of course we need to see what the reality will show whether people will act what the what these firms will actually do this but we can see that at least there's a debate in the us right now around facial recognition systems and the bias problems that these systems are inherently what we're still missing missing within the EU is a is to prohibit automatic is to ban automatic facial recognition systems in public spaces in the EU but we actually seeing that these public that these automatic facial recognition systems are being rolled out more and more 2020 also saw that through sort of being persistent you might be able to get rid of a data data protection law so basically privacy shield was forbidden by the european court and it's still not allowed because the us cannot or will not will not make sure that their security services do not use our data so we cannot send our data to the us of course the problem is still kind of there because our rights still aren't used within still aren't protected within the EU so the the decision was kind of well strange but that's something that still needs to be changed but the advertisement industry has managed to make sure that there will not be better protection of user data and privacy so all of these dark patterns that we see where you have to go to all of these websites and basically say well i don't want these cookies i don't want these cookies and all of this is like due due to a regulation from five years ago but the implementation is kind of lacking so we still haven't done this and that's why you could call it the BER which is the german airport that has been delayed for years and years of net's politic of internet politics okay and we were more like ambiguous whether we think that this law is good or bad because we there should be a putback possibility so users should have a better chance of making sure that you can't be deleted completely that your content can't be deleted completely if you don't want to but the federal government decided that all of the everything that might be against the law will be sent over to the federal government or the police so there might have been a huge database but yeah the federal the german federal president has refused to sign it we will see how the reform looks the reform is also related to there's a couple of laws at different levels especially at the EU level there is the digital services package that had its first peak in december 2020 the digital services package and the digital market law no less than sort of like a huge new law does the EU commission want to make and on the one side this is about controlling the market power of large platforms like facebook and google but it's also about content moderation and all of these debates that we currently that we've had for years and years there's the questions of the identity how can we of interoperability can we can we transmit messages from signal to whatsapp should we have backdoors in there how about researchers and regulation administrations that want to actually get this data how can they get data because currently all of these big firms have access have exclusive access to their data and all of these research and they have their own research departments that can basically in real time see what will happen and what is good and what is bad and no one can actually control what they're doing and all of these things are part of this law it's about algorithmic transparency and control it's about what rules should there be within the internet in the next 20 25 years because that's supposed to be a reform of e-commerce of an e-commerce law of 2001 back then google was very very small facebook hasn't really existed anymore and amazon only sold books now the world is really different and this is not only about platforms but it's about almost half of the internet it's also about who the only thing that isn't really in there is who is responsible in a legal sense and 2020 there was also a renaissance of something that we hoped was dead already the comeback of the year the fax machine unfortunately that's that shows how the german health system works and this is not very good in a pandemic but let's be true let's be honest without fax devices we would basically be screwed in germany let's see whether we have an improvement there one thing that the digital civil society actually did was the corona warn app you can criticize it back and forth but there's no other country where more people use it most of the critique is a little bit is not very qualified we were able to make sure that we do not have a surveillance apparatus that we built for contact tracing which actually wouldn't have helped most likely but which would have made more surveillance for all of us even today there's no day where old white men are talking about data security as the reason for the pandemic but i actually know many different reasons that are much much more logical and much more true that's one there's a couple more problems they didn't really understand open source for example it's nice that we have an app that's open source but open source also use means that an app is developed more and more with the community but we have this feeling in spring the app was presented well in summer everyone thought well we don't have the pandemic is over we don't need to develop it further and then suddenly we had this second wave and there's lots of updates and lots of things happening but we're still missing some stuff like cluster recognition we don't really have a contact diary and we still need to make sure that they don't include more surveillance and there's problems that not all of the labs are part of this system sometimes your test results need a week to get from a to b to go to the system and then it's also difficult to make sure that it was also very difficult to make sure that we get to the latest version of the google and apple appies and this bad communication leads to less trust and less acceptance of this app and these are all problems that we might be able to that we might be able to solve but we wouldn't even need this app if we actually had made if we actually had prepared in the right way covid has also led to covid lists so you know in the past when we could go to bars and restaurants if you wanted to you basically put down your names and your addresses but you obviously didn't put your real names because there was no there was not much data privacy there and one of the big problems was and is that the police actually use this these lists to for whatever crimes they thought might be used there might be solved with this and here the laws and here the government could have made more accept could have made more acceptance and then something else what was kind of sweet last year was really really very a lot more serious this year because some people basically used these mechanisms of the platforms by people that we would have explained well you crazy so we had to explain to our families and to our parents that you shouldn't trust everything you can see on whatsapp or on facebook that was forward to you 2020 was also the year that we found that we had to find out and research a lot more about conspiracy theories we still don't know how much money some conspiracy theorists have gotten but we understood the system and now we're hoping to become rich this time around and it's unbelievable what kind of people there are around and there are many people who are basically taking money from people that are currently feeling unsafe there's also a franchise system michael balbig from querdenkens 711 which is the german covet covet deniers and zdf magazine royale has basically found found that out this time around 2020 was the year that we basically looked that we saw what really happened in digitalization of the education system in germany where did all of the money go many parents and students are still traumatized from the experiences during the first lockdown where basically had to had to print out pdf documents and then scan them back and really didn't hear anything after printing and scanning and there's and they're all really excited for the next lockdown at the beginning of january maybe at the end of the pandemic we will actually have real digitalization within the within our schools let's come to more positive topics even though the digitalization of the year education system isn't working out quite as we expected because our students need the appropriate devices and formats we have still seen that many people really put themselves out there to make platforms available that aren't zoom or microsoft teams so thank you very much for those who built platforms universities schools cyber for edu and other organizations you saved us all and you helped us find alternatives against the data capitalist monopolies it's very nice to see that there are alternatives but it was also nice to see that the digital civil society was very helpful at a point where politics wasn't and where it became apparent that we don't have enough protection equipment such as masks and face shields so people took it into their own hands shared um knitting um templates i love it but they're available now we also have direct twitter messages on e of g requests on information freedom act requests and you have um charitability so um donations can be deducted from the tax and we also fought for um illegal security and um losing charitability which means losing donation advantages there are some funny aspects the demonstration or protest seen for the it has been nominated as a candidate for world cultural heritage that is well deserved in 2020 our um our public broadcasters id and more open towards creative commons licenses zf did a better job admittedly but there's still a lot of room for improvement but and we hope that we will be seeing more progress and more open licenses because after all we paid for it in 2020 um system of sturz created a new single they didn't have concerts unfortunately i'm hoping for more content i don't know if they're in the if they can match the um congress program but still system of sturz worth a listen that was it for the the net politic weather report our motto never give up we we've never done so in the past 20 30 years and we won't in the next 20 30 years if we stick together and fight for our rights we have the opportunity to make for a better digital society so fight for your digital rights thank you for listening and i wish you a happy new year and a healthy new year thank you bye okay okay i hope i'm back we had a bit of technical technical difficulties at the beginning of the presentation sorry for that for anyone who's still watching i heard that it wasn't because of bots but because of a ddos attack i don't know if that's too but people are trying to fix this so until then we still have a few minutes until the next talk to have um q and a session macros becadal is here in the stream and he's ready for your questions we don't have that many questions yet maybe because it was difficult to follow the presentation but no worries it will be uploaded to our media dot ccc dot de where you can listen to it later please leave your questions and comments on irc and on twitter using the corresponding hashtag and the signal angels will gather your questions and i will be able to read them out macros would you give us a short look ahead at the coming month yes one big thing in the next couple of years is of course that the covet pandemic will still continue like on the side the federal government has made a couple of laws in the last couple of weeks the telecommunications law the it security law the bnd law that will in the next couple of months be discussed within the parliament and before to hopefully be actually enacted before the election and exactly in april may june everyone can everyone can go meet people and go inside and stuff and they probably won't be interested in all of these digital issues anymore i don't really believe that we'll be able to change something on a big scale because all of these surveillance stuff is in these laws but we're still trying to change something to mobilize people to get involved to make sure that all of these topics will be even relevant for the election and then we're hoping that after this election we will have no large coalition because in the past the large coalitions based on cdu csu and spd have really not made very good decisions with regards to surveillance thank you for that answer especially looking at the it security law what are is the criticism that we need to be pay special attention to what we need to contact members of the parliament about maybe one or two or three key points so for me i really bse overall is i have i'm i'm not really sure how i think i think the bse is very good which is the information security office in germany and i think it's good that we actually have this and there's technical people in there but the problem in there it's not it's not independent so the minister of interior can tell it what to do and it actually is within all of these security security administration it really wants to be in this security administration and this kind of makes the acceptance of the bse not as easy so i want it to be independent i want to make sure i want to know that if they find a loophole they will actually close it but because the ministry of that the ministry of interior cannot just tell it well no please don't close this loophole we need one to use it yeah and we actually have a passage in the law that you need to make sure to contact security authorities before he can fix security gaps another question in the german constitution the it right to it what's it looking like the problem is that we have this basic law that basically one of two basic laws that the constitution that the constitutional court has actually made but the federal government actually ignores this basic law and the federal government doesn't really protect it even though many people talk about sovereignty the basic law of integrity and privacy isn't really should have should be defended and currently that's not the case and as long as this is not the case it's just a sad state of affairs yeah i can agree more anyway we want to stay with that topic the right to integrity is not just threatened by it security laws but also the telecommunication act and there is a very large amendment to that telecommunications act what impact do you see from that well the telecommunications law is really something difficult there's lots of lobbyists that are looking at this very intensively but there's not really a lot of independent people actually reading this and that are willing to read this and at netspolitik.org we're really happy that we have thomas wudde who actually enjoys reading this at least sometimes and he basically finds all of the parts that no one finds because there's like um something where like you can actually get data like you can ask for data and no one talks about this um actually collecting and storing data just for the future no one talks about this so we're really hoping that the constitutional court will make this illegal and it's also about messenger services like telegram that really want and we're hoping that this will be and they are hoping that they can regulate them to make backdoors in there and it's a really big hurdle for us to have these messengers like telegram that are sometimes somewhere between platform and sms and that we can find a new form of regulation in there and they might actually be able they might actually destroy this current system and just include much more surveillance right the state of affairs is bad in 2019 i was slightly looking forward to the constitutional court prohibiting a sequence services act but sadly the new act was introduced with more surveillance and control mechanisms and also changes in the future of the parliamentary control program how do you view that and the changes the bnd law enacted by the ministers right now is i think it's actually not constitutional but the problem is that even that we won't find this out until five to eight years when the constitutional court is actually up to date because there's still laws from the last government that they're still debating on and one of the big problems with the bnd law is that with that we as germans are really a developing country in this terms in terms of having control of our secret service and this is what we want officially they have like all of these controls don't have enough people and the secret service has actually gotten more budget and they have the allowance to they're allowed to hack some telecommunications networks and the federal government strangely thinks that the thinks that they basically did what the constitutional court wanted if the bnd can only do very little but you can only do 10 or 20 percent of the of the networks worldwide so what we're actually obviously they won't be able to hack 30 percent of worldwide traffic but actually they that means they can hack whatever they want of course it would be great if they could hack and survey everything but that's one of those sort of like cheap wrappers well it's really limited their surveillance capabilities to 30 but in actuality they can survey whatever they want i have another statement which i can only agree to thank you very much for your efforts your continuous efforts to document everything going on in network politics i think i can say that on behalf of everyone who is listening thank you for listening and if you're still listening you still have the opportunity to ask questions on twitter and other channels paste it to rc2 which is the room we're in and i'll be able to read them out until then marcus i would like to know i'm a eu law noob what do you think about the service act so the digital services act the package will most likely be the biggest lobby war of the internet policy history which is basically about making the rules and conditions for all of these platforms within the eu and to basically reform all of these rules and to find ways to curb the market power of large tech giants i think what we've seen at the beginning of right before christmas is interesting but there's not enough focus on basic laws on human rights there's more of a of an economic liberal economic approach that we don't actually want to make these we don't actually want to destroy these large firms but it's that we want to ensure that there's some competition so it would be nice if we were able to have clear rules to have clear rules to basically destroy these large conglomerates like facebook google what and stuff if you look at facebook facebook they actually bought whatsapp instagram with basically saying well we're not actually bringing all of these data together but obviously they're doing it right now just to make sure that they are not destroyed at a further point and we i think the eu commission should just destroy them because they did not keep their promises they were only allowed to make these murders because they promised not to collect all this data and there's all of these google google is a similar example that is permeating a lot of different markets and basically bringing all of it together and has of these market power and because of this market power it can actually discover new markets and we need clear rules for that or against that and we need regulation agencies that are able to that have enough personnel that have enough personal that is actually technically qualified that can actually talk with these tech giants at their level thank you just one quick note to our spectators i don't know if you can see me or hear me if this stream is still on or if there are difficulties there's a there's rumors of a ddo s attack against our infrastructure so if you can hear me if you can't hear me don't worry it's recorded it will be uploaded to media dot ccc dot org including the presentation and i've just uh been notified that recording has worked out perfectly so you can listen to the talk again one of the last questions for today would you tell us in december we were very angry about how the interior ministry uh hardly contributed what would be your vision of how could how could we get more participation there laughing the ministry for interior basically has had four needed four tries to get this law through parliament and so one thing that would be helpful would be to have all of these law drop out of these drafts of laws published in the on the internet because they're already out there to lobbyists and currently it's us doing it so it would be nice if the interior ministry would actually pay someone to do this and then it would be good if we had longer deliberation times longer times to reply to um to deliberate there and then so that we know and then to have a more transparent process so we know which lobbyists had what effect and when did when did the lobbyists when were the lobbyists involved at which point i think the um large coalition the current term government had this in their coalition agreement but actually we haven't seen it at all it's possible and it would be very it would be easy to have this um it security law which is also which is only about Huawei 5g where we found a sort of compromise that makes it very very unimportant whether it's Huawei but the topic is a lot more relevant a lot more important and we should have more and we should have more media coverage of all of these other aspects as well because our system is very broken so we'll have a lot more problems in the future most likely and these are problems that we need to solve all of these security laws in it security and other it security policies are very important and necessary but with this government it's not possible thank you let's come to our last question um you filed a complaint against the saxon police act could you give us um information on that if it's possible in two minutes or is it too much i would need to read up on that because there's some a lot of it has happened in the last couple of days what i can say is that we are currently in court with many of them and then you need to wait whether the court actually accepts your lawsuit and then it takes a long time until it's actually decided now as you've said we have a number of um laws in the past um that are still where we actually have filed a suit and there's still not just discussed despite them being five years older and within this pandemic obviously there's even more problems and i don't think it's possible to actually file this quickly okay thank you very much we'll take that impetus would be a good project looking at the year different police laws and lawsuits against it to document that if you have spare time i would understand if you hadn't anything you still want to say thank you for listening you can donate to us if you want the more money or donations we receive the more actions we can carry out because the growing digital society is being um not treated with the apt attention by politics in all of the um parliamentary groups we still need representation and eyes on that thank you very much marcos for your good presentation and the q and a if you're on the way out please take out your trash please bring your bottles okay do that next year still we have a herald news show still coming up where heralds tell you what is going on at rc3 and we will continue with that show and after that at 19 20 7 20 p.m we have a site channel attack presentation have fun and see you bye