 So just to introduce Amelia, Amelia used to be a member of the European Parliament. She doesn't look like an idiot but she was. She was the best MP ever, so far. So I was interviewing the Pirate Party, which is actually called the Pirate Party. It's not a talk. The Pirate Party is able to move it that is over for three years or now. It's a building of overtime and essentially represents an unique, internet-centric set of items around how it should work. The Pirate Party is also one of the most majority seats in, rather than the largest shadow seats in the Icelandic Parliament. And now they've been invited from the government there. But between Europe and the European Union, every country has its own parliament. And there's a European parliament, which is a representation of all the countries. So Amelia wasn't a European parliament. She's here in my room for about a month. So thank you for this very kind introduction. And also in this email conversation, I kind of got the gift, I think, of what people might be interested in hearing from me and my experience. I became a member of the Swedish Pirate Party in the founding year 2006. Because I was a free and open source software at the time. And one of my friends told me that I needed to join the party, which was a which wanted to have more free open source software development in the public sector. Actually, I left my membership in the party last spring of 2016 for a number of different reasons that I will not go into that in this presentation, but they're welcome to ask me about it. So I've made my presentation Piracy Politics and Power. I hope to cover some of the founding story of the Pirate Party. Why was there at all a political party? Why was there a political party in Sweden? And how come it spread to such a lot of different countries after it was founded? And what happened in those countries like Germany, Iceland, the Czech Republic? Also success story, which is thus well known. It's about politics because of course, if you're in a political party and you aim to get elected into representative institutions, somehow you want to be involved in politics that affect change, not only on the way that technology is developed, but also on the legislative framework which governs technology and the economic circumstances in which the power is put. I talked about power because part of my experiences from the European Parliament was that being powerful is very terrifying. And it's something that you have a lot of respect for and also when you consider politicians that are in the position that they can wield that amount of power, it's useful to be aware of the fact that often they know that they are very powerful and that both the consul must look good. But so first of all, who am I? Well, I was a member of the European Parliament between 2011 and 2014. If any of you have studied European politics and I know what these quality people in the audience ask, you will know this is not a full legislature. And I will get into the reasons for this later. Since 2015, I run a non-profit organization in Sweden that focuses on data protection and information security for consumers because after I came back from Brussels in 2014, I realized that a lot of Swedish public disputes and institutions and companies and individuals are roomfully unprepared to deal with the consequences of the new European data protection laws that entered in 2018. So we aim to fill some of the gaps that we need of the data protection authority for formal reasons will not be able to do it. About three months, I've been with the Centre for Infinite and Society at their cyber security program. But I also feel free to impose on them all of my experiences of EU telecommunications competition law whenever they ask me for it or whenever they don't ask me for it because I also thoroughly enjoy competition law at the telecommunications center. And as a side note, I also have actually completed my bachelor in mathematics finally. So you may tell me a mathematician now that I'm no longer an honorable member. So the reason for why we had a parent party in Sweden is actually kind of complicated and a long story. It goes all the way back to the 1990s. I put in two organizations here that you may be familiar with. It was a very early adopter of internet technologies. We had the government very involved in holding out broadband and fiber infrastructures and having good institutions in place for remaining names and internet exchanges all the way back in the 1990s. In the end of the 1990s, a lot of Swedish municipalities were actively involved in helping children become accustomed to computers and learning how to operate computer interfaces, having high speed broadband connections in their houses even though over 80 or so. But all the same, connectivity in Sweden was fairly ubiquitous. And it was also combined with the liberalization of the telecommunications sector that made it very easy for new market entrants and competitors to be former state monopolists to enter into the market and provide services. So this created fertile grounds for lots of kids with powerful computers that also had good connectivity. And as you might expect, a lot of them started using them for file sharing and sharing of culture and computer games or films or photographic images if that were the case. But I think mostly quite harmful stuff and definitely game file sharing was at Wehr. The Wehr site was at Wehr. For this reason, the movie industry and the music industry decided to form an organization called the Antipyrus of Europe because they wanted to teach the kids not to copy that copy and how to behave properly online but naps for his evil and destroying culture and that artists are starting on the streets. Because we had such a large internet culture by that time, a group of very engaged netizens and internet activists formed this artistic group called the Pirate Bureau. The Pirate Bureau was formed as an antithesis of the Antipyrus of Europe to discover what happens if actually you don't condone our Antipyrus, what happens if you accept it and you say, this is a cool thing that helps people develop culture and what can people do with it. The Pirate Bureau are also the people who are responsible in the first place for forming the Pirate Bay. What happens when you put the torrent tracker out there on the internet and you don't impose any ratios and you allow the network of the seeds and bleachers to self-regulate what kind of morality you get in the space what kind of culture do you end up having shared and so forth. And of course the Pirate Bureau and also the Pirate Bay were extremely important to our Swedish online culture and creative form. The Pirate Bay became an internationally famous site, one of the most trafficked sites on the planet, people all over the world know with and have some form of personal experience if they had access to internet connection and it was kind of a pride of the nation that we could have these three young men who formed such an internationally renowned and still controversial service. So because we had that service in Sweden, in 2005 when the Swedish government decided to implement a European copyright act which was originally written in 2001 but the illegal to do file sharing that created a lot of bad feelings. So the founder of the Pirate Party, Yurich Valkyria, in January of 2006 thought well you know if only showing politicians and people with power that you can create such amazing things as the Pirate Bay with just an internet connection and a few basic computers isn't enough to make them understand that the copyright framework is wrong then surely the only way to have these laws changed is by going into the legislature and affecting them directly. It turned out that this was a very popular idea. The party formed fairly easily so you need in Sweden 2000 signatures before you can form the Canada signatures in a paper before you can form a political party. He acquired it overnight. In about a month there have been pirate parties popping up in lots of different countries like Austria and Germany Belgium and the Netherlands so lots of people felt inspired and compelled by this idea that we need to go into the legislature in order to implement laws. We also had in the beginning a lot of people coming in that cared about other aspects of online culture so early cryptocurrency fans this was made before Bitcoin but you still had in the digital sphere at that time a lot of people were thinking about the sustainability of the financial system what does this mean? Of course there were a lot of people in Europe at this time that cared about the software like software patents and what implications of software patents would be on European entrepreneurship and they also came into the party somehow and that's where the pirate party really began. The founder of the pirate party does not have anything to do with the pirate bureau he was never a member of the pirate bureau he's not even very I guess somebody you would consider an artist he's more of a businessy person like a startup entrepreneurial type of person not somebody who thinks in colors and comes with being others. We founded the party in 2006 because of the first elections we're in September of 2006 so the idea was if you could flash the party run an excellent campaign in nine months and conquer the legislature then everything would be fine we also had the strategy that we would be a wedge between the two big blocks as we wish policy so we have a conservative party block and a left wing party block and the pirate party's idea was if we could be right in the middle of those so that we would decide whoever gets to form the government we could be able to make demands that would actually carry weight because we would be the arbitrator if we don't have the 1% of the vote then you need at least 4% to end up in the parliament so even though the pirate party was able to gather a lot of enthusiasm it wasn't enough to convince voters at that time that only copyright issues were important enough for the percentage of vote press so that set up a bit of a crisis in the party that if this doesn't work then how should we do but we fortunately had some members that were extremely talented so we formed the youth movement in order to get grants from the government so youth organizations in Sweden typically can get a lot of funding from the government to create a meaningful free time for young persons because the member base of the pirate party was anyway very young we deduced if we could get 6000 of our members to join the youth movement and then form their own local grouping of young pirates we would be able to get millions of full amount of the government which is something like hundreds of thousands of euros and we were quite successful with that I ended up on the first board of the youth movement because they needed in order to get the funding from the government you need to have equal representation of men and women on the board so I was called to help the youth organization rise in financial problems and to this day I think the youth movement of the pirate party is the more wealthy organization being the pirate party of the youth movement it's very easy in Sweden to get funding for youth activities especially if you help young people decide for themselves how to spend their free time so the youth movement worked and called money for a few years and the next big event in the party's history is not until 2009 when this requires some background work also for me to explain to you which is I was working in the youth organization in the board mostly by accident because they needed a girl to show that they had girls but I took a liking to international issues and I started following the affairs of the world intellectual property organization in the European Union what about document transparency in these organizations how do we think about things like the secure standards project at the world customs organization which is the president of the anti counterfeiting trade agreement that some of you may have heard about does anyone here not know what the anti counterfeiting trade agreement is mostly all of you so the anti counterfeiting trade agreement was a big trade agreement negotiated between 13 governments in the world explicitly to exclude countries such as India and Brazil from dictating what the global best standards of intellectual property rights enforcement would be online and otherwise the secure standards at the world customs organization was the preceded so the United States and the European Union and a bunch of other states like Japan in support they had realized that India was quite well represented in the world intellectual property organization and Brazil as well that meant whenever they tried to push crazy stuff through the United Nations WIFO organization they couldn't because the Indians would be there and say hey listen this is not in our interest but they identified in the world customs organization the Indians, Brazilians and Russians would not mobilize so they had no intellectual property rights experts there and therefore could not make adequate resistance against pushing about ideas and it took I think the Indian government from the Brazilian government a few years to catch up with this but as soon as they did also the secure standards of the world customs organization was dead and I worked a lot with this in the global organization and I remember this because I was so happy that the Indians were able to squash a project, I thought it was very cool and then came act as and reanimated but more equal version of this because I was such a prominent voice of international issues in the youth movement I'm not a fortune ahead of the European elections but they again needed a program because they had sort of decided already who was going to be the top of the list in the party and it was this older guy who was a former software patent activist from Stockholm he'd been very active in the anti software patent campaign in Brussels between 2002 and 2006 and he'd been keeping a dog and keeping you know the members interested in these issues for a long time but because he was kind of an old man from Stockholm he wasn't very demographical to live in Sweden even if Stockholm is the largest city most people in Sweden actually don't live there and also most people you know a significant part of the population is not an old white man so I was then kind of a good choice for the party to put on place two on the list because there was a young woman who lived in the south of Sweden at the time so I ended up on the second place of the list and that was very exciting because it's a big responsibility already to be at the second place of the list but it returned out even worse for me at least personally because the pirate bay people by this time had managed to get themselves exposed to a raid by the police in 2006 which was seen as wildly unjust by most of the Swedish population and it had taken the prosecutors two years to prepare the trial which began in spring of 2009 just a few months before the elections on the 28th I think of April which is one and a half months before the European elections of 2009 these three young men who built the world with popular pirate bay service were convicted to several years to be in jail and millions of euros in fines and lots of people were terribly angry with the government to allow them that to happen also the legal case against them was a bit arbitrary because since copyright law mostly places liability on the person that actually infringes on the copyright and these people have really only provided a search engine to bits and pieces of copyrighted materials they had to really tweak the law to make them viable for some things so one of the people went down for clicking the switch at server at one point in 2005 and these kind of really fishy things and it created a huge interest of the pirate party and we soared up to I think 9% of the opinion polls ahead of the elections at which time it became very obvious to me that I might become a lot of parliament which I had more expected than I said yes to being on the second place of the list because being in a position of power is a terrifying thing and even if we ended up getting only 7.2% of the vote this happened to be just enough for me to actually kind of be sort of elected and return to the current where they decide meanwhile when the pirate party was gaining a lot of success in speed and because of the spec 12 we also had the German pirate party going very strong the German pirate party was founded in 2006 also at the same time as the Swedish pirate party but they were taking different routes from the Swedish pirate party in terms of how they were in terms of their internal organization and also in terms of what policies they were pushing the one big difference between the German pirates and the Swedish pirates is that the Swedish pirates were always very well prepared for participating in any representative democracy the German pirates more acquired disappointed members of I think the Green Party that wanted direct democracy to a larger extent they built their own software systems for direct voting for enabling more participation in policymaking in real time they also built accountability systems where you could easily get rid of parliamentarians or political leaders that you felt were not up to the task of responsibly managing the power that you had given to them the Icelandic pirate party was sort of foreign in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 but William and I think a lot of you may be familiar with the things that they rose to political prominence first only with the these collateral damage videos we showed the American troops treating some people in Iraq very very badly and now also in the last few years they've been extremely successful in the way that I think other parties in Europe have not so far yet at this time we also have a lot of clenched in kind of international cooperation movements which mostly took the form of email lists and most of them at this time basically there is an international pirate party or pirate parties international I think the organization is formed it's based in Belgium there is also a European pirate party or a party of European pirates I think they call themselves the PEP not to be confused with the European conservative bloc which is also called otherwise the PEP and we have lots more youth movements especially in Europe because the Swedish youth funding schemes have the nice advantage of you can disseminate them to other youth movements if you have formal collaborations so Sweden is always kind of active for any type of youth movement Europe is kind of a monopop the government gives lots of money which is disseminated into youth movements all over Europe for political cooperation and so I became the MEP in 2009 because we had 7.2% of the pope but there was a kind of treaty technicality in the European Union which was the pirate party could only have two seats in the European parliament we have our top guy and we could only have my seat if the European parliament being union's treaties and the European union is an organization of governments so all of the governments need to agree to update these things about time the very controversial process they had sort of been working on it since 2003 and they thought they had an agreement but then there was a referendum in Ireland and the Irish people were not in agreement with the political people in Ireland so there was no treaty and my seat was kind of profiting so what would happen when the Lisbon treaty eventually entered into effect was that Sweden would have instead of 18 seats 20 seats and the two extra seats would go to Social Democrat but we needed for all of the member states to re-ratify what is called the Lisbon treaty the treaty that updates the older treaties and rewards Sweden these two seats so I spent about two and a half years in the limbo where I was unsure was I elected or was I not elected I was not really listed on the parliament website I had contact with all of the other people in Europe that would also become MEDs when the Lisbon treaty entered into effect and we were keeping track of when the member states were signing also and sending letters asking whether you acted on this issue and it turned out in the end that the member states that dragged out the longest was Belgium so we were sitting for I think six months waiting for the Bologna parliament to sign off on the Lisbon treaty and if it pleases anyone to know but maybe it doesn't the Canadian Cooperation Agreement the SATA which is a free trade agreement that European Union negotiated with Canada it was also held up recently in the Bologna parliament so the Bologna parliament is kind of the starler of the European Union they ensured that they had proper procedure and after that before we rush into things but they also kept me from my position for a few years so I would say this in their defence that had I entered into the parliament directly in 2009 I would have been considerably worse than we could two and a half years that I got to stay outside of the parliament and see the processes and talk to lobbyists and people in the commission while being sort of in power but not formally in power was extremely helpful to me and it helped me understand how you maneuver Brussels how do you find out who to talk to how do you address those people to not seriously anger them and why it is important always to Google whether a German has finished a doctoral degree so all of these days that when I was 21 and young I would not have realised by 2011 when I actually assumed my position in the parliament I was very well equipped to deal with and I was also equipped to deal with how to fix my policy priorities I had the time to read out from what the parliament had done in the past what its feelings had been and how you can play out how you play out the political process in as an effective way as possible and while I was waiting to become an MEP in Brussels there were some crucial developments that I thought I should include because I gave my talking more general notion of just the party party which is, first of all, my colleague and I am entered into this load of the follow-up so that is quite significant because it was the first pirate MEP he was immediately responsible for he took charge of internal market issues which include patents, trademarks copyrights, really core issues of the pirate party I think he was also in the legal affairs committee which you might not expect but copyright in many European countries is seen as a moral right a human right rather than an economic right so its often dealt with as a constitutional issue a matter of governments having a duty to protect the intellectual works of others rather than as an economic right as in how can I how can I ensure that I have enough money for what's up so he was doing that but perhaps an even more significant development in Brussels in 2009 was that a European umbrella group of digital rights organizations called the European Digital Rights or EDRI for short called their first professional policy person in Brussels and what the EDRI was able to do in Brussels at that time was give a credible and non policy partisan voice to some of the concerns that faces the digital environment because this was a professional policy person they were also able to provide briefings they had a lot of experience in how to maneuver Brussels to ask questions to the commission and they were asked to curate them and so the EDRI has done I think more good work in Brussels over the last few years than any elected representative could have done on their own and it could happen many times that I would consider my actions of the European Parliament in relation to EDRIs if you think in policy wise you're often talking about the rubber band the fact which is if you stretch the extremes of it the middle also ends up further to where you want to go so my idea was if I'm a bit more extreme in the parliament that EDRI is going to be the sensible people in the middle they will be able to more easily than me argue that the Christian democrats or the social democrats should listen to them because they represent somehow the voice of human rights of human rights and citizen concerns online yes with me as the inexplicably the bad cop but it worked quite well and the EDRI people are still they're much larger now so they have 5 people I think permanently based in Brussels and this is still not enough to cover the entirety of all the policy processes that are there because as you know in India digital topics as a way of just spreading out across all different sectors so many different sectors by now are implicated by privacy or digital rights or even how do we construct liability and security in these environments in a way that is for individuals it's very complicated they're vastly underfunded but they do a lot of good work and 2009 was the starting year and you can see how the parliament becomes more susceptible to digital rights arguments before I became the MVP in 2011 formally the pirate bureau which is the artistic collective that started the pirate fate decided to close down either temporarily or permanently this was in 2010 because they got kind of bored with the pirate party they also got bored with the pirate fate the graphical user interface wasn't really updating they felt it wasn't contributing to the discussion of online cultures and they announced that they had closed down they didn't say that they had closed down permanently but because in 2016 they're still closed I think for all intents and purposes the members of the pirate bureau went on to do a lot of different things in Swedish policy debates that have become academics some of them now work in the government one I know became a medical doctor or they work in different types of academic or artistic projects still but that related to online cultures in different ways than I'll share because the digital sphere after all we did do a lot of things to the internet that are not filing uprights and so that was the kind of end of the era where the media in particular reacted very strongly to how the pirate movement had died and for various reasons this was also very harmful to the pirate party because the pirate party did not have at this time the intellectual capacity to develop their own understanding of what online culture should or what it should or could be so it was a significant event for us I became the MEP on December 1st in 2011 this was an extremely terrifying experience to me I had moved to Belgium in 2011 in 2010 for some personal reasons in my life that made it convenient for me to relocate from Sweden at that time even though I was an MEP but I discovered in Belgium Belgium has nothing of the sort of telecommunications infrastructure that Sweden has so while in Sweden in the 90s the technologies in the government had been very deliberately investing in infrastructure for telecommunications and ensuring that people could have personal computers in their homes and that they were familiar with these computers to use them thereby creating a fertile ground for all of these small child sharing copyright julians in Belgium they had done no such thing Belgium has terrible competition on the telecommunications market still even though they are a western European country at this time in Belgium there are no fibre-to-be-home connections there are no consumers in Belgium that have fibre and the fibre connectivity delivered to the home they have telecommunications duopoly in most of the country which is dominated by the former state monopolist that owns the upper cables and that's ADSL and some of you may be aware of the ADSL about being supremely quick to have a cable monopoly which was formed in the 1980s by some Dutch guy coming in just buying municipal cable networks for television and instead of utilizing the fantastic opportunities of coaxial cable what they did was impose downloading coolers or traffic coolers so I've been sitting in my university apartment in Sweden with a 10 megabit symmetric connection which I had bought very cheaply for 5 euros a month because I thought I didn't need the 100 megabit symmetric connection surely for 10 euros per month because that would be overdoing it and when I came to Belgium my landlord asked me if I could start downloading YouTube films instead of watching the same film over and over because I was eating in Tuakota and it did not compute with me that Belgium could be so terrible that you have only 4 gigabytes of infinite traffic in an apartment in a month like how can they have in 2010 not developed past this stage so what happened in 2011 after the initial shock of discovering the third world country amongst the western European states was I thought I need to go to Eastern Europe because if Belgium can be so surprising to me and effectively so much in how I view so this has a lot of consequences for Belgium you must imagine also but they don't have a file share culture especially in Belgium that was ever able to use the pirate bay in an unfettered way because it would need to be eaten in Tuakota you have no downloads I have been given this membership at the torrent tracker which was for novelty films and as soon as I moved to Belgium I was shut out because whenever I tried to upload any of the stuff that I had downloaded or even with my own stuff on the server there was always some Romanian or Swedish person or somebody with much better upload speeds that would take all of the leeches and I wouldn't get any because I only had 0.3, you know, negative per second and I would see all of my ratio disappear and then finally kind of got decided on an automated basis that I would not be able to participate in in their community it was extremely frustrating so I decided to go to Romania to see if Romania was equally surprising to Belgium under the hypothesis that if you're going to be the MEP for all of these 500 million people in the European Union and also represent online cultures and the cross-border nature of such cultures you should at least have the decency to explore what are the different challenges facing people in Europe and Romania turned out to be very surprising, Romania has action under a lot of different cultures even if you go on the countryside I mean I know we consider Romania in the European Union probably before if you know Romania it causes a lot of controversy because they have corruption and they have lots of demographic problems and otherwise but the internet infrastructure there's nothing wrong with it, it's very good if you go in the middle of the countryside it's a small city with just 5,000 people you will easily have 75 megabits symmetric and they have lots of coincidental people in terms of Romania had a lucky break in the 1990s because the old regime the communist regime that was in place until 1989 did not prioritise aliphony so only about 20% of all Ukrainians had a phone in 1989 so in the 90s when they built their infrastructure they didn't build copper they built directly fiber and they benefited from that they also had very good mathematics education in the 60s, 70s and 80s and apparently they in the 60s they were working with us to see how it works yeah, sure but also in 1990 there was this guy who had gone into exile in the US from Romania defective from the regime and he came back to Romania with 30,000 Unix models that the Romanians read partly and so the country began in the 1990s with no state that excellent infrastructure and lots of Unix administrators so for this reason Romania is still actually a prominent IT country in the European Union since they're one successful industry let's say if they have now and also where are we going now Moldova the Republic of Moldova which is the poorest country in Europe they're not a member of the European Union not, they have the vastest problem it's true and in fact the two people who formed HALF-SNEPT which is a local ISD capital the capital of Moldova is called Pishinau and then there's this other smaller city close to Pishinau the name of which escapes me at this time and there they have an internet service that I come up with and the people that found it up with also find them out so they used to come to some of the European counterpart conferences so they're super nice people but Moldova faces a lot of problems that are on the right but their primary problem is I think the public institutions are basically unpredictable they have a lot of production and this is not doing very well to them so that was an issue but when I received the announcement of my sudden ascension into one of the 751 most powerful people in Europe I was in Romania cheering out going to the gym talking to the outcome officials which is the kind of trial of Romania and also speaking with their free software community so it was kind of unsettling to me because I was discovering a country that I had not been in before and then suddenly I had to go to Strasbourg which was a terrible place to be at I was terrified to be in the parliament I had suddenly an office in lots of different countries it was very scary I also could not find a canteen in Strasbourg so the first week I was back asleep and I couldn't find the food so that was not the best start to the parliamentary career but they have a canteen in Strasbourg so you can actually eat there I thought you would kind of reduce some of the things and it was a gas experience I was actually with this media interview where they would ask me about the internal machinations of the Green Group and I wasn't sure how much I could talk about them and also the other NMPs can be really scary because you don't know how to address them and the problem of the NMP all of the people who work there serve you, your king whenever you walk people will go home it's an extremely daunting experience that I had not been prepared for before that time even though I had been in Brussels to see all of these things happening there for a long time it was nothing that really helped me understand what it means to be an ultimate kind of power over other people and have them all happy to serve you because I'd already been in Brussels for two and a half years at this time I had some friends inside the Parliament Administration who were not only there to kind of suck up because this is by far the biggest problem when you become an NMP that you're so enthralled by all of the people complimenting you and telling you how great you are because they need your favors that you become full of yourself and believe that you're actually great because I had spent two and a half years chatting with commissioned people and lobbyists about how down the NMPs are I felt extremely humbled by the experience of being down there but one of the policy advisers of the Green Group who thought it was interesting and nice there was a young girl working on tech issues coming into the Parliament had decided that I would be given the opinion in the Industry Committee or the Anti-Calculatory Treaty Agreement that I spoke about earlier and so what you will understand about this agreement was because this had already been a process that was maneuvered in international organizations for about ten years before I came into the Parliament and the European governments and the US government and Japan and all of these governments had been trying to escape dealing with such standards at a global level by forming this agreement when I entered into the Parliament it looked quite clear that the agreement would pass so my cynical understanding of what happened is the policy advisor wanted to give me a chance in the Green Group where I was a member thought why not if it fails she's not agreeing and you know this is bound to fail as it turned out one month or two months after I entered the Parliament on the 17th of January in 2012 about two million British people decided that after I was affiliated with that agreement that they would riot until it went away and this caused a lot of political evil in Europe because it meant something that nobody had a question for ten years that this would come to pass suddenly it wasn't obvious that this would be the way to go forward so for instance the Polish Christian Democrats which is a big delegation of the Christian Democrats of the European Parliament had to kind of listen to the people so my opinion then became much more a question of instead of getting the Parliament not to approve the agreement at this time see how can we make this into rejecting the agreement I was fortunate also to be on the International Traits Committee which meant that I could be the what you call the Shadow Rapporteur or somebody following the main report in the International Traits Committee so I was working on two different sides in the Parliament in this past and to cut the long story short I can talk about this for a long time but we won and the Parliament rejected the agreement on the 4th of July 2012 it was a great victory and even when I won in my committee the industry committee was the first committee whose opinions had to reject so that was also a massive victory for me as a kind of new MVP that I just won and there are too many Polish people to protest in my favour and I think I got a lot of respect from my colleagues for that unfortunately because I was dealing very well with the active opinion in the industry committee another policy advisor in the community gave me an opinion in the International Traits Committee on some form of digital rights strategy for the United Nations and that didn't go as well I was completely outnumbered by the British Tories but why to speak about failures when we need to open that I also quickly have to learn as a parliamentarian that you're not alone in your office and you cannot be your staff or extremely important in your life they tell you when to meet things they help you make travelling arrangements and even can help you answer emails I have huge difficulties with this at first because I wanted to have control over my own email account since it's my identity it says my name in it and if somebody sends an email from this account which would be me I thought naively and I quickly have to back down from this because we have lots of problems with the administration because you need to build lots of papers and somebody needs to track when the administration is contacting you so after a while everyone in my office will access to my email account and I try to tell them that you can't send emails from my email account but then it turns out when voters write to you they become very unhappy if you're not the one responding so at some time they also got the right emails in my name and that was so extremely frustrating and scary so we launched the concept of the extended me and there was this kind of me the individual and my office was the extended me and everyone in my office had to make peace with the fact that they were somehow me also we decided to make the kind of infotainment in a video series about an office called XR16 unfortunately I'm a terrible media person so most of the episodes are probably quite boring but they're still on YouTube so we're interested in seeing what my different staff members are like we still keep in touch and I'm very happy to say that we had a good working environment which I've heard from other in the peace office, it's not always the case and I believe that we also accomplished miracles that for instance having the actor leave the projector we held a small celebration in my office afterwards when I presented my fellow in the peace with lots of different exciting bouquets that I had found in bathrooms with them which added to my eccentricity with my problem of fears and I put also that in 2011-2012 what happened when the actor leave the projector is also another organization NGO that's founded in Brussels, AccessNow well they're an American organization and they work there with kind of access issues, some of you would know that they're very active in you know, non-European countries but they've also now started contributing a lot to the European policy debates on encryption and important European legislatures about data protection in countries outside of Europe and I thought this would be interesting to know when you're on your way Pirate Bay, in spite of the pirate hero closing down somehow lived on during these years and the pirate party assumed ownership of the pirate bay because a lot of people internationally were anyway confusing us with the pirate bay or the pirate Europe and the pirate party felt that the pirate bay was an important symbol of their policy and what we wanted to achieve but the pirate bay has always been in a complicated relationship with the party because it's first of all not our project and it's also not clear exactly what we can do with it except keep it you know up and it's kind of true that it's not a very interesting project because it's not being developed without full use of it, it's the same now as it was in 2004 and normally we would hope that people move on to other technologies and trackers after some time our final cut for the pirate bay was after the Trump thing is left down as a party leader in 2010 and the new party leader received a letter from the anti-piracy bureau which helped to find out changing the rights lines that unless you sever your ties with the pirate bay it will sue you and your partner out of your houses and then the new this would have been in 2013 because I remember I was very upset with the party leader in 2013 because I thought it was a kind of betrayal that you give up from the support of the symbol but the fact of the matter is also that she was received from her house and lots of other very nasty things that the rights lobby was not easy to mess with for a number of different reasons they use underhanded tactics and they're also very scary and so when she decided to quit the pirate bay kind of affiliation of the party the pirate bay still lived on but I know we may be in the same problem with this kind of project Would the rights organization have support from other trade corporations? Well the rights organizations there's also rights organizations but normally the ones that sound flat about this they would be from either the movie Ficious Association of America or the MTA or the RIA and then you have various European installments of these organizations also so there will be European MTA that represents kind of all the interests in Europe but then in Europe also because we have 28 different member states and all of them are different film industries and recording industries we have a bunch of other actors as well and one very important player in the European policy landscape is called two very important years I should say three the German Collecting Society Do you know Collecting Societies in India or do you know What is it? Yeah it's a CMO Collective Rights Management Organization they kind of they allow for artists for filmmakers we know these types of people from members of their collective and then they collect licenses from companies like Google or the radio station or the television and they distribute it to their members and they have I think we have something similar most venues meet a lot of these big licenses and some communities in Europe Yeah so it's like Gama is the German one and Susanne is the French one and PRS is the British one and they're very important for users of copyright content because they create a single point of litigation also for artists that instead of you know a TV station kind of having to have a lawsuit with every individual artist that has made piece of music ever they can argue it out for the collective rights management organization and then the artist instead of arguing with the TV station can go to the CMO and that's where it comes from I think we have a deal about that I think it's going to end there because it's in the music industry that's what it's called I think it's going to end there I mean I don't think it's going to end Bro that's what I'm saying it's the license fee it's reasonably negotiated No these people collect all the documents that they don't have rights on they collect or pay Basically they're a collection agency They're literally mafia So in the US and probably in India as well for Japanese artists can join if they want to and also radio stations or TV stations can sign a contract with these organizations if they want to and the way that it's done in European governments that I've often been your friend from collective tendencies is that you have to sign a contract to the CMO and as an author you have to be a member because otherwise we're screwed So these organizations can be very powerful PRS at one point in time was advocating that all internet users should be given audio visual signals for when they stumble across copyrighted on time so that they could know not to fire it When you screwed up it was probably in 1926 it's the second oldest collector rights organization For India as well we have the administration expires a few years ago what happened to that What if they let the situation last and they were still collecting money even though they were not actually registered anymore but that happens so the collecting rights management organizations are a bit of a problem politically they're also very strong because they're normally tied to the entirely creative community of their member state since everyone has to join them and well for various reasons they're very important even though sometimes they have extremely rough ideas such as when the French collecting society wanted everyone to pay a broadband tax to compensate rights holders for piracy without making piracy legal so you would pay for doing something that if you get caught you would then get sued for it's like paying for nothing at all and this proposal unsurprisingly gained a lot of traction in France we also had a tax on every CD and recordable CD and CD if there was a piracy tax they wanted to have it in a broadband tax but they had to have it on CD so we have that also and in Belgium the collecting agency that I forget what they're called Sajemi or Samaic something also beginning with SA they managed to make it so that SAVAM that truck drivers that listen to the radio while shifting stuff have to pay remuneration to SAVAM because they're listening to music during work hours but if they keep the radio on while they're on the train that's it the radio stations are all the same but the truck drivers are also paying if they are in motion transporting goods but not for instance if the truck is empty so work versus not work so it means that they're collecting double grants on the broadcasting of their music and they're getting away with it because they're as I said very political powerful so it's a big problem in Europe as I guess in India as well and part five so anyways for those people that have all these basic ideas and also lots of words so I think I think I think I had for a few years because I'll get back to some of the important policy peaks that we did in the problem later in 2014 and you will have known this if you already looked at the first slide in my presentation where I showed that I stopped being in 2014 we lost both of our seats that was a big defeat for the pirate party I think one of the reasons that we lost these two seats was that the defeat over the pirate party so giving up on an important symbol for the party while at the same time realizing that the digital issues are indeed quite complex and especially in Europe they're really very very difficult caused the party to diverge into other areas of policy where we just were not competitive and so we ended up losing to other political parties that were better able to capitalize on the public mood while also claiming expertise in those areas where people were most concerned the German pirate party did conquer one seat of the European Parliament and the current member of the European Parliament for the pirates is called Yulia Rida she is working on the copyright reform that the Commission initiated in September of this year but she's just one person and as far as they understand the copyright so the copyright reform in Brussels is actually going terrible because we also have a very strong library about it the Czech pirates in the EU elections in 2014 they narrowly missed one seat they're often overlooked because in the Czech Republic apparently English is not that much and they're not very strong English speakers but the Czech pirate party is actually very active they have municipal seats all over the country and their big gig is kind of anti-corruption because in the Czech Republic and many other Eastern European states they have the problem of the weak institutional framework that isn't able to function regularly so in most of the Eastern European states in every election you have at least one party that is able to conquer seats because they say that they will be able to solve the difficulties that arise from corruption Iceland is not part of the European Union so they don't run for the European Parliament elections but I think in Iceland I'll see you in Iceland it's the same thing as in the Czech Republic but they've been able to capitalize very well in Iceland on kind of anti-establishment moves but what happened in Iceland after the financial crisis was essentially the Icelandic people understood that the bankers were corrupt the politicians were in on it and they have some of these prominent political people like Viktor Julsböcker also made a big corruption in large Icelandic cooperation partners Iceland was labeled the terrorist government or the British government in 2009 or 2010 which is a quite strong combination of the government and so Icelandic people have had frustrations that their politicians can't deal with banking regulations and the finances of the government are the same which means effectively also that the Icelandic pirates may not have rose so much to prominence because of the crowdsourced constitution or because of any direct democratic application or because of the copyright issues or file sharing issues or even infinite issues but just a general fatigue in the population but also in the summer when the prime minister had to resign because he was hiding lots of assets in Panama it's just not the type of thing that you want to find out about the prime minister I don't know if in India the tolerance would maybe be higher for this but in some countries the tolerance at least people would not be as surprised but in Iceland I think they reacted Scandinavian outrage and also extreme awareness of this so the Icelandic pirates for this reason have turned into quite a political phenomenon at one point holding it 42% now I think in the elections they got 14% of the votes and 10 seats out of 68 in the Icelandic parliament and they were about to negotiate for government last week but the negotiations broke down and now it's again not looking as like and this is also kind of difficult for a political party that first of all the delegation from the UN party rose a lot from three NEPs or three members of parliament maybe are getting along with each other quite well and getting along between 10 people is much more difficult than getting along with 3 people but then if in addition you need to go into a government coalition and get along with all of these different people from different parties that have their own ideas that is easily quite a challenge and so it does not look as if they will be pulling up a speech in this election I think in the next one I'm following them with great interest of Iceland like their political problems generally are likely to prevail or they can't old dogs don't learn how to sift and I think this holds also for some of the political parties in Iceland the Czech pirates could also actually continue to go I don't follow them much because I know they check but I know that the people that they have elected at the local level in their constituencies debase issues against corruption and also some of the IT policy issues that the pirate parties in general to build so while I was in the European parliament I worked on a host of different issues these are some of the things I put them all in one slide so I can speak clearly about them if ever you want to ask me a question on any particular topic of course you would like to erase it but the internet policy issues are the same thing all over the world so if in India you discuss copyright issues and international organizations with government, with nationality or online blocking and filtering then the same thing is going on here internet policy I have always found is the great transnational policy complex because wherever you go everyone who deals with it from the digital rights perspective is facing approximately the same types of challenges and it's very easy to find friends in every country or every forum the one time yes smart borders does that refer to technology able to transport yes I think it's kind of the next stage smart borders we understand that this is a big new focus of you and it's what you're talking about no no no I have really made a very scanner than the airport I have the regular ones but you just walk like this and then there's also the ones we have to stand like this and we get x-rayed so that we don't hide this is that border you know have you made it to the United States yes so this is like the airport and there is a guy in my room looking at the stand border I don't know airport is the border no so I think you also collect your finger prints or your irises and then they cross from it to the database basically it's lots of computers with data and then they cross-reference normally smart border investments and what kind of smart border investments are chosen by any particular country is most easily mapped by looking at what kind of domestic industry exists in that country and so you see here that I have bundled smart borders with passwords and smart cards the European Union was the first I think large-scale organization that went over environmental passports because we happened to be home country with smart cards so the European smart card industry is the only successful European electronic industry basically the one where the board comes from making all the public transport to RFID cards and using run learning in Hong Kong and what have you and also one of the passports and you know private licenses to solve the European when you walk into a company in the morning you just have to report for the work that's also probably your game company so Europe is very proud over these industries and we were so proud over them that we wanted to give them the helpful subsidy of forcing 500 million people to buy two of their products for five years which is effectively what it means to have standardized environmental passports in Europe this is the same with a lot of different telecommunications policy like net neutrality and competition why I put them there because the vast majority of my time in the European Parliament was spent on telecommunications policy why is Belgium such a shitty place basically and it turns out the reason why in Germany to this day there are people our age who are stuck on 156 kilometers per second home house that's obvious in today, 2016 and you wonder how the can still be something that people have to listen to before they get online report for the like this Germany is such an interesting place so it turns out so it turns out what happens in these large countries like Germany, France, Spain and Italy is because they used to have government-owned monopolies telecommunications that covered 100% of the territory of the country so not like in India I heard that DSNL they covered about 20% of the people so you didn't have a 100% coverage of the economy but in all of these countries they did and because they were government-owned companies the government would use them to regulate on the program before Europe would go over on communication control so they have huge a modern telecommunications operator with digital switches and maybe more fiber connections and so forth does not need the best example that I have of this is really like in France where they had a brief period of competitive glory between 2012 and 2014 after an operator called Free launched high quality broadband services in Paris and they were cheap and they were fast and the consumers adopted everyone was deserting orange the France telecom to go to free because free was the superior every possible way and the French government thought oh this is excellent competition and the consumers would like us if we continue to push for this development until in 2014 the French legislated to realize that orange employs France telecom and employs 100,000 people about 3 employs 7,000 only so what do you do with all of those 3,000 surplus employs that are going to allow France telecom slash orange to continue operating the Buoy and Beku now the same problem in Germany and in kind of in the UK as well the British telecom and often all the state monopolist companies they also have pension funds that are liable for so it's not only that they have a large amount of employees now that they don't need it's also that they're responsible for financing the retirement of the people that they used to employ and this is feeding people in this system to keep unemployment on the society overall and so that makes some of the competition issues and the mentality issues in Europe extremely difficult because if you expose the telcos to a greater amount of competition they might have to sack people and the politicians don't like that and it's even at the stage where I heard once in Austria Austria telecom which is the former monopolist there they have about 3,000 employees that are formerly employees of the Ministry of Finance only the Ministry of Finance will not pay for them and also will not discuss how to recuperate them from the operators the operator is forced to be competitive while being responsible for people that they didn't sign the contract with in mobile telephony it's kind of it's not really the same problem but it's sort of the same problem that you have some areas where it's very efficient to build up mobile infrastructure like cities and then you have the countryside where it's not so efficient and different member states have chosen different ways of incentivizing telcos to grow in the countryside the most common way of doing this is because in order to be a mobile operator you need to have a spectrum license from the government this is the same in India and by the way if anyone knows I would be interested to know if you have per state spectrum licenses in India because you have domestic roaming so this makes sense because I am known for Australia you have domestic roaming which is of course in Europe where you can end your problem but what mostly happens is that the government would say that you get the spectrum license only if you want to build infrastructure in this area and what they did in Germany was they gave a joint license T-Mobile and Vodafone to build infrastructure in the countryside but then the problem is in the countryside of course you have to build your own infrastructure and you have to share it with the other operators because in the countryside this mobile product in Germany has been quite locked down in this state also Europe was an early adopter of VG technologies unlike the United States so the United States had 2G investments in the 1990s and then they went straight to 4G whereas in Europe we first go to 2G and then the 3G and then the switch to 4G has been kind of slow because actually big industries like the mobile operators they can't afford to replace the infrastructure in 5 years it would be prohibitively expensive then to provide services to consumers and I am not quite sure but the EU legislature is now thinking pushing 5G really quickly but that seems to me also something that is a lot of money while adding very little benefit to consumers because actually 4G is sufficient if also you make sure that you have to provide infrastructure it does so data protection became a big issue in the European Union in 2005 because we had an accident commissioner from human rights at the time she is a Luxembourgian Christian Democrat and somebody that if you are looking for a good female role model she is definitely there is some stuff that I think was maybe not too well conceived but introducing the booming regulation which has also been always coming up with really cool policies like in 2006 she proposed that all the calculus in Europe is structural disability so that you have one layer for only the infrastructure and another layer for providing access services and that there can be no economic map in between these layers and normally this is good but the type of rules things are very different if you want to be an access provider you work on a financial cycle for 10 years but if you are digging a fiber cable into the ground then surely you are digging it there or it could be there for 100 years so the type of loans and mortgages if you look at the legal fiber into the ground from the one you look at for setting up switches by you know household in 2012 and that became a really big issue but it turns out in fact the right to be forgotten which was given a lot of attention kind of around the Google screen case it's already been in the UK box since 1995 so even though a lot of noise has to be about that it's actually not a lot of stuff so what the European court did it just kind of you know has been criticized is that we said Google is responsible for the information in the legal system which it is which it is, right so some of the reasons that you know about some of the censorship what if you don't know how the issue escapes you mentioned Google is it true I think that most Google has a great set of privacy laws and that would be a good set of laws for the now normally Google operates for international services out of Ireland and then they have separate services for the US so Indian people that use Google would normally be covered by our visual and it also turns out that the European data protection rules the way that we have structured our IP laws are the international rule so I think Google was kind of counterproductive making a lot of noise about the right to be forgotten because it was already in the law at the time when we were when we have the new data protection laws in place now that they haven't entered into effect and I would argue that the proposal from 2012 which is now a law and is about to enter into effect it will have a more clear procedure for the right to be forgotten which will also help us to make the right balance and the freedom of speech which will just help you remove because I could personally at least when I know that in some countries there is really no public accountability or politicians or so forth but I think that there is a sense in allowing people to move on from past mistakes that there are many things that we do in our lives that we don't want to be continuously committed for our entire lives so the principle behind this is good you can screw up we can forget and then you move on and you can be new yourself there is no reason for you to be held to account that you were once bankrupt in 1987 because once you stole cash you should not have won even in 2005 or once at university you were very wrong this should not stop you from fully enjoying the opportunities that I bring you and that's what I think is important to you these are all things you can't do that anymore you can't help it imagine it now so this is also not a bad idea right so if you look at whatever Australia which was a place where people came because they were committed crimes and then they were able to make this country which we now all enjoy because of their volunteers that's not a bad thing being able to move on it's not a bad thing to say so this is my somebody who is addicted to prophetic volumes and then they want to be able to do it and you know I am not with you I am not with them you wouldn't be able to do that anyway but normally the right way to go there is that if you are a girl and you are together with a guy who beats you what I am saying is for getting threshold to be different so suppose I want my history as a domestic of the one who is a traitor of domestic violence to be elite then you know that's also problematic because then they have access to that information and they can't question all the people for that they have been convicted for it for so early a time but I am definitely punishing them for the children and it's basically something like there should be the official records in a way that people should know that you have his history so there are no very different things being biographed is not important in all spheres being biographed is very different from learning to be domestic so even in the court he keeps records of his case part of the court because this employer who wrote his name and this name came up in those court records however the court pronounced him because he was in the court because he was in fact there was a case I don't like somebody asked if they can or not remove their case so there is a procedure for getting the court because seal and whether they are open or not so the seal because it shouldn't end I think that's the reason why these are and I understand that you can see more of the issues and there are some legitimate cases for being able to look up people's background history my personal opinion this is only my personal opinion of what I think should be the case and other people are very free to read this script if you want to if you've been convicted and if you've served your time then you have already served your views this is what society has decided democratically society was interested in giving you a lifetime punishment they can send you to jail for life if they say that you are no longer worthy of having a normal life we have the death penalty in the first of all cases in Europe we don't agree to read the terms that mostly we want for sentences to be time constrained and then after you come out you have the chance to prove that you can become another person and this is what the right to be forgotten is and I know in different jurisdictions when you think about this differently in different jurisdictions you also think about court records so in Germany if you ask for a court record you will not get the names of the people that were in the case you will have to go to the legal council but you will only get initials or even blanks or even no information that was involved at all in Sweden you normally get all the witnesses or perpetrators the victim of the crime all of their names are published my personal feeling is that in Sweden we are going to be transparent we are needlessly re-victimizing people in the victims of crimes and also we are making it impossible for people even though we are making it very trivial crimes we need to move on and have a new what much can be said about that the right to be forgotten is certainly a lot of these things to discuss I don't think the right to be forgotten is to implement the battle protection regulation particularly in Sweden and the way that it's been implemented in European courts up until now it's mostly those foundation in which people not going to the other countries will be dealing with that and I think that's reasonable we can move on we can move on we can move on why not if now we only get quite mild campaigns I don't think we will go too far with some other countries not anyone will be able to do that so we have to learn a lot to get out of this so this is also the core principle of the act of national law Internet-talking and filtering the European Union is much different from in India because our governments were able to shut but they still do Internet-talking and filtering and this has now become such a big problem that the Council of Europe which is our regional human rights organisation has decided to make it a priority to make all governments have applicable systems for this in the next three years because Sweden is one of the countries that doesn't have laws around when the government is allowed to cast content from Internet to date about unfollowing this with great interest because the Swedish government really introduced some procedures to this so that it's foreseeable when the government considers a lawful I'm just curious that Google and other companies published in the U.S. where for NSF National Security Network how many requests for take-off for take-off overseas that would be different from member states so in Germany I don't think the government could be allowed to do that there's a super cool case in Germany now actually with D-6 Internet exchange in Frankfurt is that the German Internet exchange? no no no, D-6 is a German Internet exchange they found a lawsuit against the German government from prior to afternoon Internet exchanges in September of this year which I think is super cool and I'm following this in first case so in Germany they like procedures if you've worked for met German people you'll know that they like to stick to the rules and they like to have rules in place and there's a big point in that actually that it makes their society and their government predictable that whenever they violate you it's foreseeable, which is a good thing in France, I could imagine it being different in the UK, we are dealing with TCHQ and all the very secretive about South Africa and the South Sweden would also be more like the UK so it would be impossible to generalize in Europe but normally maybe in Europe not as bad as in India the governments in Europe that are on a similar level of corruption as India are so small that they couldn't make the same amount of harmful impact on our confidence and so India has played this event that should be in some place is huge, kind of administratively sometimes it becomes stable but I'm sure you'll be able to do a good job things will improve the European Union has played hate member states and all of them have different rules and also put everybody's contacts so in Sweden we have a lot of people that are who are not who are not who are not who are not who are not who are not who are not so in Sweden if it concerns features of children who have been exposed to section violence then normally the police without the court order can make the decision that a particular piece of material or photographic art that should block there is no appeals to fear there is no transparency on this and ISPs have to use this, well we don't have to but they do if they are more than 10,000 customers for copyrighted content the issue is still not settled in Swedish law, there is a court case going on we believe that the court case will not be settled until the European Court of Justice in the Dutch case whether in fact talking about copyrighted content is mandatory but even in that case you would probably actually report the copyrighted content and that would be a big problem in Sweden in France they have a public authority that without court procedures there is no copyrighted content and it's a huge mess and especially for big actors like Google who are now increasingly going to give a comment this is a very up-to-date for the whole situation that they won't like and so the European Union sometimes tries to harmonize this but then it turns out it's very difficult and they give up there is an excellent report from the European Commission from 2010 which shows that there is supposed to be a problem all over Europe that the European Commission we tried to abandon the European Commission about this event in 2013 but then another commissioner but not the person responsible by talking but the one responsible for telecommunications decided to launch a super large and very insane proposal and that was actually lost and so everyone was kept busy with that and I'm sure that we had foreseeable rules for the European Commission so it was our last problems in the European Parliament which I lost sadly we had predictability and foreseeability in the law and we said we got whatever the regulations and internet connections are and everyone called victory also that we traveled over Europe which was the case just recently to reach both the Swedish telecommunications regulator the Swedish tribe requirement where it's very clear that it's going to be the only avenue to travel in the European Union and try regulations of crisis elimination but we have some technical regulations that I think often feel simple to reduce for people it's an ongoing problem haven't been reelected there have been a lot of it surely but there's also a lot of work to be done outside of the legislative institutions so this covers all of my insights if you have any other questions that you feel like asking me or very welcome to ask me questions some of you already know but I'm on twitter where you can also contact me whenever you want because you have interesting information about India that you feel I need to know and you can contact me over email you can visit my website it's all in Swedish but I produce a large amount of high quality Swedish content so if you learn Swedish it would be very useful for you mostly it's covered in PDFs so I can't submit it to the government it's my new, they call it theory of change in the non-governmental organization world of the CIS but because the Ministry of Justice is all lawyers I think that lawyers have long documents to lots of good notes these are making lots of PDFs that are long and have lots of good notes in the books that lawyers and the Ministry of Justice will read them and go oh this is very sensible of course which I think it is it's not just arbitrary so those are the ways that you are also facing if nobody else has any quick questions about you face me this is the basic we came up with a couple of things I'm not sure if some of you have any general selection which is a part of your opinion how does it sit with any of your members own like what is the opinion like you write things versus country I think so by the way if you pass a legislation that's an interesting question so formally European law does not override member state law but the European Court of Justice says what it does most of the law human rights so we have in the European Union after the Second World War we also have the invention of human rights which is allowed by the Council of Europe which has been an organization and that theoretically overrides member state laws but in practice governments are sovereign and this is increasing the problem in the European Union that whatever these courts of human rights are doing in the European Court of Justice are making human rights political judgments member states pretend they're not there and it's even at the point where in France for more than a year they've been in a state of exception where all of the human rights don't apply except the right to life and in the UK they're planning to make a law which exempts troops from human rights obligations because I can't remember the threes I made but I can paraphrase some of the true code and their activities that we have to respect you and the others so the human rights in Europe at this time isn't very good we lack complete moral leadership the European Commission has not been able to stand in for that and certainly the easiest example of this is the out of attention laws in Europe but if the European Court of Justice makes a ruling of out of attention so the mandatory internet collections of large sets of data on all individuals who say telecommunications we have the same kind of rules in India and the Court of Justice made a ruling that anyone who is sensible who is kind of literate that leads to this would say the Court of Justice is not a group for that out of attention and still the member states consistently interpret it as a yeah but actually it worked out very well here which you do very carefully in the last paragraph in terms of paragraph 67 you'll see that the Court is not making a cumulative list of demands we're making separate the requirements that each community will build and therefore we can still continue to do that out of attention even though most of our citizens will believe that it's not there in Europe and this is a huge problem because it creates a discrepancy between what citizens