 Good. Hello. Hello. Hello. And welcome. I'm Merron Khalili and we are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is another live debate with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas you won't hear anywhere else. And today we're talking privacy. It's 2022 and our right to privacy is looking increasingly tenuous. First, earlier this year the European Commission announced that it wants your messaging provider to spy on you. In a misguided effort to combat the very real problem of child sexual abuse online, the commission has come up with a proposal to install a mass surveillance regime across the EU. This would require hosting and messaging providers like social media companies to scan all your content. So your videos, your photos, your messages and then make a judgment on what to hand over to law enforcement. It's not hard to see how this is an authoritarian government's fever dream. Meanwhile, in Greece, the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis was caught red-handed over the summer, wiretapping the phone of the leader of one of the opposition parties in a movement called legal but wrong. Spyware, i.e. software that essentially turns a phone into a surveillance device, was also found on this politician's phone as well as that of other politicians and journalists. But Greece isn't even the exception. Over the past year, spyware has targeted opposition leaders, activists, journalists, lawyers in France, Spain, Hungary, Poland and even staff within the European Commission. And finally to round off this rather bleak picture in a new UN report out this week, the organization warns that people's right to privacy is coming under ever greater pressure as digital technologies can be refashioned into tools of surveillance, control and oppression. So what the hell's going on? Are we going to sleepwalk into letting them spy on us? And most importantly, what can we do about it? Our panel, including Eric Edmund, our political director Yanis Varoufakis, our leader of the Merit 25 Party in Greece and the rest of our experts and campaigning gurus are here to discuss this topic and also to take your questions. That's you out there. If you've got anything you want to say, anything you want to throw at us, thoughts, rants, things to get off your chest. This is live. This is YouTube. Please put them in the chat and we'll put them to our panel. Let's start off with Eric Edmund from Brussels. Over to you Eric. Yeah, let's let's start with the particular and then expand to the to the more general question at hand. So let's talk about Greece in 2018 Mitsutakis was elected Prime Minister of Greece. And one of the first moves he did was to move the Greek Secret Service under the direct jurisdiction of the Prime Minister's office. A move that to put it mildly already seen dodgy at the time. He also then appointed his nephew, man called Grigoris Dimitriadis, as the Prime Minister's general secretary. All right, I'm setting the scene here. Now, Greece, remember ranks at the bottom of all EU nations when it comes to press freedom that includes Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, which I'm mentioning because they are the usual offenders when it comes to these matters. But Greece actually ranks at the very bottom of all EU countries for for press freedom. Now, on average, last year, for example, about 15,000 Greek phones were under government government surveillance at any given time, which is a staggering number, but it is strictly speaking legal according to Greek law targets of state surveillance must be informed that they are being surveilled. But there was a recent amendment that introduced an exemption to this if it occurs exclusively on grounds of national security so if the people being surveilled are considered to be spies, essentially. Now, what was revealed earlier this year was that Mr. Andrew Lachis, who is the leader of one of the opposition parties, Pasok Kinal, and Thanasius Kukakis, a journalist among other politicians and journalists, were in fact being surveilled, but being surveilled using a spyware called predator, which has been explicitly condemned by the European Union. Also, they haven't been informed of being surveilled, meaning that unless these people were thought to be spies at the time, the Greek government broke the law by doing the surveillance in the first place, let alone using this software which the government categorically refuses that they've done. Now, Kiriakos Mitsotakis is trying to shift the blame. He says that although he moved the entire Secret Service under his jurisdiction, he had no idea what happened, which either makes him a criminal or a criminally competent. You take your pick. And the whole affair is that the whole affair, he claims that the whole affair has been manipulated by sinister dark forces that tried to overthrow his government and destabilize the forces and the rest of it. Now, his nephew in the meantime, Mr. Dimitri Adis, resigned, and it has been revealed since then that while in office, he conducted a number of financial transactions with a circle of businessmen that had dealings with the owner of Intellexa. Intellexa is the owner of the predator spyware. So there is a lot of murky business going on here that the government hasn't answered to. Kiriakos Mitsotakis, until very recently, may I remind you, was the EU's golden boy. He was the golden boy while killing refugees in the AG and he was a golden boy while introducing police into universities in the country, while cracking down on peaceful protestors. All of that was above board. And even I would venture to say this surveillance scandal wouldn't have been a scandal if he hadn't been caught. The problem wasn't that he was doing it. It has become unattainable to support him because he was caught. So the EU here, which I will come back to in a moment. You also mentioned what they're planning isn't completely clean either. At the European level, the European Parliament has created a parliamentary committee called the PEGA committee, and I was set up to investigate the use of another spyware software called Pegasus, which the Polish government has been accused of using. Now this case, the predator gate as it's being called case is also being brought to the same committee to be investigated so far that committee, however, at the European Parliament has been criticized for being far too lenient with the governments that is investigating. It has a one year mandate at the end of that year that mandate might be expanded by a maximum of six months. So we're talking about a year and a half maximum. And after that, they need to publish a report to the European Parliament and some recommendations to European bodies, the council, the commission and so on, that then the parliament might adopt or not. So how effective this committee will be, is anybody's guess. Most likely it's mostly toothless, also because it's primarily populated by liberals and conservatives who are more often than not members of parties that use these kinds of techniques. So to open up the topic a little bit, Greece is not alone in any of this. We had a few years back the NSA spying scandal where the United States was seen to and the UK were seen to spy on almost all of their NATO allies, Hungary, Poland, Spain have all been accused of spying on journalists and politicians. The German government has been trying for years to find a legal ground on which to create a kind of network database of who talks to who how often and so on in their own country. And every time they're being slammed down by their by their courts. But they keep trying on new legal basis to to formulate this kind of yeah database of communication interaction within within the country, under the guise of anti child abuse. And this is important because it's exactly under the same guise of commenting online child abuse that a regulation is being discussed at the European level that would essentially pose a duty on all network providers to search or communication content for depictions of child abuse, child grooming by adults and so on, if they're ordered by the authorities. These are called CSS so client side scans. That's the CSS and this would basically run and check on all messages on any particular device to see if any child abuse images or communication has is included in those messages. And if there is a hit when this software is being run on any device, then it would send a flag and alert the control point which would then involve the relevant authorities. And the suggestion would be to create basically a branch of Europol that would have specifically the power to ask a network providers to run these tests on suspects and and also order the authorities to then investigate further if there are any hits. It has been widely criticized as a, as a proposal. There's even child protection associations have called it a change that the danger to privacy overreaching it's a danger to it security free and remove expression and democracy in general to be honest, and the current draft legislation does not even prescribe exactly the kind of legal procedures and and the protocols involved. They would leave all of that to be decided by this branch of Europol once it's created. So the whole thing is incredibly dodgy and the problem with it is that it would open the floodgates. It would create the kind of infrastructure legally and technically technically we already have this technology, but it would create the legal basis on which could then be further expanded on under more and more pretext to essentially render privacy entirely obsolete online. So it's widely criticized and incredibly problematic. And essentially what I'm trying to get at is that at the EU level, various national governments around Europe, including Greece, which is the latest big scandal if you like. They're all constantly trying to chip away at privacy rights, excusing it as as it moves to what used to be to counter terrorism, sometimes it still is child abuse, like we said, and so on. But the reality is that once, if, let's say not once, but if these floodgates are open, then those legal, that legal pretext to wiretap citizens could be weaponized to attack any kind of citizens on any kind of pretext. So it's quite dangerous and the only ones really fighting this fight currently, apart from a minority in the European Parliament and various parliaments around Europe are civil society organizations, which we could discuss further later on in this live stream. Thank you Eric for setting the scene there. To be honest, the only thing I find surprising is that people are surprised. I find this astonishingly surprising. Why are not always surprised political surveillance and commercial surveillance has been with us since the 1860s. Since the days of the telegram. The unknown case of message tapping was during the American Civil War, when one side was trying to decipher the messages that the other side was sending to the to the front. And in the case of commercial wiretapping, again in the United States, where else New York City where savvy stock market trader had found a way of tapping into a telegram line in which signals going to Chicago, the gutting share prices were transmitted. Because if he had, you know, five minutes notice, compared to everybody, all other traders, he would make a mint and he didn't make them in that till he was caught. So none of that's new. We know why Richard Nixon was different in 1975 in the United States because he was caught red handed. His administration was caught red handed, and he tried to cover it down, listening in to his opponents in the democratic party at Watergate, none of that. We have no excuse for being surprised after, you know, Ed Snowden came out. I mean, the reason why Ed Snowden is in Moscow is not because of the weather or the food. He's there because he revealed to all of us that every single phone is top up blue by the NSA. They can hear any one of us except those who use extremely ancient, you know, Nokia phones, non smart, very dumb, Nokia phones, but even those they have ways now of listening into when I was in the government in 2015 I've written this in adults in the room but I might as well for the benefit of those who are watching, because they count some moments. First we go first day I was in India in the ministry, the head of the Greek secret service of the Greek CIA. Pointed out to me the two vans employed by the German Embassy, listening into my communications and communications of my team. We had their license numbers we could even we even knew where they were. And of course, our services were trying to listen into what they were saying to one another. And the finest moment came sometime in May of 2015 when I was on the phone to our comrades and friend Jeff Sachs. Jeff Sachs has famous to support the DM at some point he appeared with us on stage if you remember in Brussels. He's joined the Progressive International. Columbia University professor establishment figure used to be very close to to the IMF has done tremendously damage to the countries of Eastern Europe and Russia. But he's done his mere cool by his apologize for a friend and a colleague back then he was helping me during the negotiations with Troika. And he was in New York and he was pushing me as if I needed any pushing to default to the IMF. And I was pushing the Prime Minister Zipras here. And at some point I succeeded in getting Zipras to say all right. At long last we're going to default to the IMF. So I remember we're still between the morning. I had just come home. Actually to this flat from the ministry and I called Jeff with a good news we are defaulting next week to the IMF. And he said oh yes that's great. At long last now let's plan the next step and so on. I was really dead tired to put the phone down. I fell asleep 10 minutes later. It wasn't 11 it was 10 minutes later the phone rings and it's Jeff saying to me laughing. He was actually laughing. He said Jeff why are you laughing what happened. He said you won't believe it. I just received a call from the NSC the National Security Council which is a White House president of the United States. Security organization in the White House. And they asked him. They asked Jeff, Jeff Sachs. They asked him. Professor Sachs do you think that what the Greek finance minister just told you that he actually meant it. So they weren't even hiding it. They were not even trying to pretend that they had had it somewhere else. It was clear. I was under surveillance. Everybody's under surveillance. We're on the under surveillance. And yet we can constantly find it on ourselves to be surprised by this. It doesn't mean we should not be outraged doesn't mean that we should take it for granted. But let's not pretend that we just discovered it now. Eric is right. What is significant about the events in Greece. Very significant is that three things. First, that the prime minister. That was the first thing he did when he assumed office prime minister missed attack is took the Greek CIA under his personal responsibility. So it's like saying to the world, if they fuck up whatever crime they commit, it's my responsibility. No other prime minister has ever done that anywhere in the world that I know. Number two, he gets caught with his pants down, so to speak. So it's revealed that the CIA, the Greek CIA that he had accepted full responsibility for was listening in to one of his political opponents during a very crucial period in that political parties machinations. I'm not going to go into this. I don't want to bore you with that. He was actually caught. And the third very important thing is he said it's okay. He dismissed it. He said, so what, you know, it was legal. It was not the right thing to do. It was probably political mistake to do it, but it's legal. So in other words, it was suddenly normalized. And you have a European Union with a member state like Greece. It's not so ban, Hungary. Effectively telling the world that it's okay for the prime minister to be personally listening in through a service, secret service that he has adopted as his own to be listening into his political opponents. So it is the declaration of something that was new went on. It's declaration as something that is legal. That is a precedent that is new. The fact that it's been happening, not even Nixon said that not even Richard Nixon there to say that now he was trying to deny it. And when he was caught that, you know, red handed, he was forced out of office. So that is not being forced out of office. The European Union is not starting proceedings against the great government, the way that it started proceedings against the Hungarian government for anti-democratic behavior. And it was not just, of course, it's like it was journalists, anybody who opposes the order of things. So what we need to do is we need to make sure that the standard DM 25 line. From the very beginning of our integration in Berlin, back in February 2016. Remember what we used to say? We used to say, we want, we demand, we demand it's a part of our political agenda that citizens should be opaque and those in power, corporate power, as well as political power should be transparent. In other words, a reversal of what is going on. That should be a political agenda. It was our political agenda from 2016 onwards. Now that the European Union or at least parts of the European Union are proclaiming the opposite of our goal. It is time for them to fight to repeat more vehemently and more fiercely and more passionately our original line. The line of Julian Assange, the line of Edward Snowden, the line of DM 25, that citizens must be opaque. And it is governments that must be governments and the oligarchs who must be transparent. It's a good political campaign to have, even though it's very difficult to imagine us winning that without changing the whole of the texture of the socio-political economic system we live in. And this is how I finish because it's one thing to say that commercial surveillance has always been with us since the 19th century. I mentioned the example with the stock exchange trader who was trying to discover insider information in order to make money in the stock exchange. What we now have is something far, far deeper, worse, more insidious than that. Big tech, they're not just surveillance. It's a very long discussion. I could speak for hours on this. I promise I won't. I'll just mention it a bit dramatic. We have a new form of capital, which I call cloud capital, because it lives in the cloud. It's algorithmic. Of course, it's got wires and optic fibers and satellites and cell towers and all that. But it is a very special kind of capital because it's not producing commodities. What it does, it produces a network of power, a network that has the capacity through surveying what you do, what you say, your facial expressions when you look at a product in the screen of your computer or your phone. It can predict ways or it can plan ways of surprising you pleasantly with good recommendations for movies, for books, for things to wear, for this, that or the other. And you think, oh my God, how did you know? And then you start trusting it because the things it recommends to you are things you actually like. And the more you trust it, the more sucked in you get into its capacity to tell you what to do, to tell you what to buy, where to go, which platform to visit, which platform not to visit. And if you take into consideration the fact that this very same kind of network, algorithmic network, this kind of cloud capital, is also replacing marketplaces, markets, physical markets. Amazon.com, Alibaba, and so on. The same algorithm that through Alexa, through Siri, through this, through that and the other, listens into you, trains itself to train you, to train it, to tell you what to do. The same algorithm is now selling you the stuff that it has convinced you you want. That's not a marketplace. This is what I call techno feudalism and this is not surveillance captains. It's a very dumb term. This is techno feudalism. There's no marketplace. There is no market competition. There is simply a new digital feudalism in which your attention is not simply drawn by the algorithm through surveillance. Your attention is shaped. Your desires are manufactured on the same production line as the things that you think you desire and therefore that you purchase. So we're not talking about some sinister people listening into what we do or some surveillance capitalism or some kind of CIA or NSA or NSC. These are just the very beginnings of the realization that what we now have is a socio economic and political system. Most of its capital lives in the cloud. That's why I call it cloud cloud capital that has you said has gone far beyond capitalism. It has effectively replaced capitalism with a new kind of feudalism, which is technological, algorithmic and well beyond the human minds and human political systems capacity to do anything other than overthrow it. Thank you, Janis. You did. You did my up in Berlin from a more technical perspective. Thank you. So, of course, I agree with what has been said, but I do think that maybe we're taking things too, too simply. We're saying that there has always been surveillance. As you just have to imagine, I mean, the obviously the husband's surveillance, but even the GDPR, the GDR East Germany was not able was not able to surveil people at scale. They hired like every first person to be a spy. And even so they were not able to listen to every conversation. And they had to actually install wires if they wanted to listen to your phone calls. Nowadays, well, the first revolution was that all of our most of our conversations are now happening online, even if we're calling on the phone a lot of it is happening voice over IP which means on the internet. So that suddenly there is a possibility and a possibility that is being used for the state or worse for private companies to suddenly have access literally to everything that's being set and to do this at scale. And of course, another problem was that even if you log every single phone call from every person on earth and every single text message, then you still need a huge number of spies to analyze all this, especially across a lot of different languages. And this is where we're on the cusp of another technical development where AI will be able to analyze all this and tell the state exactly this conversation sounds more dangerous than these thousand other conversations and to help save on employee costs, and to actually make it possible to determine who is searching in the various plot and who isn't of course at the cost of a lot of ordinary people also being caught caught in this web. And this law that the EU is contemplating against child sexual material. This already exists in some form in America and I believe in the state of Arizona there was a woman who tried to send a picture of her little son's genitals to their family doctor. And she got arrested by the police for spreading child porn. It's just to show that these these algorithms are not as intelligence as they would have to be to actually catch just the people that are affected they will result in a lot of ordinary people seeing their privacy violated. They can totally be a danger in the sense that they reduce the the staffing costs by 100 or 1000 to be able to to actually process all this material. So I am worried about adding and not just the ability to store all this material on all our conversations, but adding artificial intelligence to this process, which will make it more possible than ever before to listen into what a lot of us are saying and to actually glean some insights from that even with a high mistake count. And the other thing I wanted to talk about this, the current spice spice candle in in Greece. It's about this software called Predator which was created by an unknown North Macedonian company. This software is also be used by Saudi Arabia and other countries that are not known for the human rights record. And the way it works is that it sends you a text message or maybe a WhatsApp message saying, I, is this really you in this video, something like that, you know, and like a prompted has you absolutely want to click on the link that they sent you They can install some malicious software on your phone. And that is bad enough because a lot of people don't know that they're not supposed to click on links from people that they don't know, or from, I think in in in this case of the of this Greek MP the the message actually seemed to come from from someone he knew. So they like spoofed this record and then send this message. But yeah, generally just if you see a link that that looks strange. It's not like Google dot com but some kind of weird number common and letter combination just don't click on it. But the problem is that this does not protect you anymore so this used to be the advice don't open attachments that you don't recognize don't click on any links that you don't recognize, but it's not enough because there is also this other software called Pegasus, which was used against Macron and more than 600 politicians from like 34 countries, including some other heads of state, and with this software with Pegasus, which was created by an Israeli company and it's used by the NSA by the German Secret Service by a lot of different different secret services. And with this software you don't actually need to click on anything. It it installs itself without any input from you. And this is possible because they have invested money in in in buying bugs from iPhone and Android developers. So they they the buy the right to know how to exploit certain parts of the operating system that already exists. If they're the only ones to know about it and the company itself has not been informed where they're called zero day exploits. And this is the bigger issue with our system that we have right now we have all these smartphones that have become a an essential part of everyday life, but they're not regulated or control the way that other essential parts of everyday life are there no audits like water is is audited a lot of places by a lot of different organizations. But there is no such audit for the quality of the hardware and the software that runs on our smartphones. And there is a possibility both for the manufacturer of your smartphone and for the people creating the operating system to introduce something that that would allow them to to listen in on you to log everything and send your data wherever. And and that is the issue and you can you can you now have a choice whether you want to trust Apple not to do that or Google not to do it, but it's not a big choice and especially with Google you also have to trust your manufacturer because if you have like a Nokia phone with with Android running on it then you also have to trust Nokia, because Nokia also has the ability to install an extra part to the operating system, which is not part of the official Android operating system and which you cannot actually access and and check whether there is anything nefarious in this thing. And even if you think okay, Apple or Google or whatever they wouldn't betray us we know that they do I mean, in some cases we know that they haven't reacted even after some of these exploits became known probably because important people were exploiting them. Or more recently there was a case where a bunch of researchers found out that it is possible for iPhone apps to insert extra code into websites that you're visiting while you're using their app. And these researchers created a tool that you can use you just open that website and it tells you if the app is inserting something. This way it became known that tick tock, for example, is logging every single thing that you type while you're using tick tock while you're using the browser of tick tock so if you're going to like your mail provider and you type in your email and password, then they have a copy of your password. Can I ask you something though because it's getting a bit technical. I mean, I understand, okay, tick tock. Can I finish this? Yes, yes, okay. Sorry, I didn't plan enough but I was trying to make this point. So it was found that the tick tock, for example, is one of these apps that collects everything that you type your passwords and whatever. And the reaction by Apple was interesting because Apple, when they saw that some of these apps are logging everything that you type, they created a new way for apps to have a browser where the apps can do anything you want, anything they want and you're not able to detect this anymore. So in response to researchers showing that some apps were really abusing the system and collecting all kinds of stuff from your phone, Apple just made it impossible for researchers to know that they're doing it. They're not protecting us from apps doing it. Okay, now your question. Sorry, I wouldn't ask you. I mean, I understand tick tock in their own app. They do this logging, keystrokes and so on. I mean, Facebook's Instagram, Apple's also monitoring how you're looking at it. No, not just when you're browsing tick tock videos but if you are in the browser that's in the app. Yeah, if someone sends you a link, you tap on it and you went up using Facebook or another app and yeah. Okay, no, I understand that. I mean, but if we look at this Pegasus thing that we were talking about before, why is it not possible today that we can quickly check are we infected with these very, very capable spyware apps like Pegasus? Why don't we, isn't there an app for that where we can just download it and go, yes, you're infected or not similar to an antivirus on a PC? No, because for Apple it's obvious because every app is in a sandbox so it can only access its own data and it cannot check what other apps or what the operating system is doing. For Android there is a bit more access but still there are some parts of your phone that are locked down that you simply cannot look at. If you want to check, for example, there are some instructions online on how you can figure out if you've been infected by predator or Pegasus but basically it involves you cracking your phone, jailbreaking it and trying to get access to the parts that are locked and it's not certain that you're able to see everything that the manufacturer tried to hide from you and hidden partitions and so on. Okay, and before we move on to the next speaker I wanted to ask you, do you agree with what Yanis said that essentially we're all being monitored, surveilled all the time? I mean that's sort of the new normal so presumably we should change our behaviour to fit that new normal, that new technical normal, given that we can't avoid it, we can't reshape it without massive sweeping changes in legislation and cultural shifts and so on. Do you agree with that? Well it's well known ever since Snowden that everything we do is recorded. It's another question is whether they have the interest in the manpower of doing anything about it and maybe if you're just exchanging recipes with your grandma and you use high grade encryption then maybe they don't find it worth their while to decrypt all that but I don't know. I would assume if you're doing anything worthwhile then you should assume that your activities are known. Okay, interesting, thank you Yudit. Julian Azita from Germany, over to you. Thanks. I think on that point that it's also not just about using the data against us. I mean the having the data and collecting it and selling it, you know, crosswise from one company to the other is also of high value to them so it's not always about getting kind of to us but just like accumulating data. Yeah, I wanted to say about Germany for example, indeed it's illegal, most of that software, but for example the state of Hessen and the state of Nordrhein-Westphalia are using a software which is called Palantir or Gotham. They just named it in German like Hessen data or something so it sounds boring but it's really a software which is unbelievable because it also mines data but it has also all these algorithms which are supposed to also predict based on the data for the police. And what I thought about is if you start and they say it's good for the police because there's so much they are able to see and to solve more crimes with it. But if you see in practice now the crime scene, the police are just collecting the data on the crime scene and they're giving it into the computer and the computer searches for everything and also they just give in the names of people that are related to the crime scene. And the algorithm and the AI does everything for them. So basically if you wait for one generation or two, I think that police work would change through this technological use and that at some point police work would just be like that and nobody could go back to doing the police work as they did it before without the data. So, I think that there is a point of no return with these things. So, so I think that transparency is, is definitely needed when it comes to why we're using the data and how did they start to use the data because there are questions of why do they do do they use software of a US company. And I guess it for example and who made the decision it's all in transparent and there was no parliamentary decision over the usage of it because normally you would choose amongst many different companies and not just one company, you know, you would not take the first offer. So this is what happened there and it's illegal but there's, but it's in usage, you know, it's like for several years now. So how is this happening, although there is no legal ground. And there, therefore me at least is the big question of, I mean, in any case we're not doing enough, but what can we really substantially do to maybe, of course, on one hand, yeah, make public what is happening. I also feel like many people are not taking serious like it's, well, I'm not a criminal so let them know what I'm doing. I don't care, you know, but they don't see the bigger picture and it's really difficult. Well, to talk about it and to be serious about it with those reactions. Yeah, and that's a very important point. What can we do about it? I mean, I think it needs to go a lot further than just installing signal on your phone because I would imagine Predator and Pegasus they probably read everything from signal as well, right. So let's let's put our heads in that now and have a little brainstorm please on potential solutions. Let's hand over to Julia. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Hello everybody. Yeah, taking taking the link points maybe with a specific UK device. We opened the top of this evening with Eric and the analyst talking about it's legal. It's not okay, we shouldn't be doing it, but it's legal and therefore we'll do it. So if we as a movement actually go back to the core of why DM 25 was created in the first place is about reforming the institutions in the EU. We have legislators who themselves are either within the institutions by integrity or if the legislative group doesn't have teeth and they're not there to instigate policy because that comes from the powerful commissions. Then we've got the wrong people making law and and that's what we're discussing this evening. We may specifically be talking about digital matters this evening in the digital economy. But if if our viewers and people are interested in reform, look at the origins and what the commission does at the EU and the directorates general and the lack of transparency that runs through the the core of what is done there, the lack of election, the lack of profile, how difficult it is to find minutes of meetings of things that go on, especially in the competition directorate general. All of these things take us back to why we are where we are with 25 and with our view of the next European elections. So if I can give a specific EU twist on this and talking about digital surveillance. The legal device in the UK, which is pretty unique, not not completely unknown in the rest of the world called judicial review. And it relies on the independence of independence autonomy of the judiciary to be able to scrutinize the acts of parliament. Because they often are called in to have a look at the security services, the work that GCHQ do. They were prevalent in the Shaila spy case of many, many years ago, and the judicial review process itself is under attack by an ever increasing right authority tendency, shall we say of the British politics as it lurches even more to the right and of course the judicial, the judges who eventually investigated prerogation and the insistent that parliament take a take a vote on triggering the exit article, not forgiven for that. And therefore, the incoming conservative government that sits at the moment is determined to unravel the judicial review process because of its effectiveness of looking at what governments do. So if we take that as a domestic device and then apply it to the institutions of the European Union, it's what DM 25 was created to do was to reform the institutions to make the institutions more transparent. Most crucially, to make the legislative the MEPs, the instigators of policy, rather than the powerful commission, the commission is is is entirely driven by its epithet, it's the guardian of the treaties. And of course, under reform, that needs to be challenged that needs to be reformed and the legislators need to legislate and as Juliana has made the point, and Eric and Yanis made the point, we then may be within an institution that shines a light on what it does. And I think the digital question best illustrates it at the moment, but of course this applies to the rest of the commission's work as well. Thanks, Miran. That's me. Thank you very much, Julia a couple of comments and questions from the chat here. Somebody asked what's going on with digital IDs is that going to be tied to our entire lives online and off so perhaps someone would like to take that question. Also a question. Why is big tech not debated more in the mainstream it's. It's also essential in the discussion on transforming society into being more green, for instance due to energy demands from data centers. True. And a comment referring to the, the fact that the commission's proposal that Eric outlined at the top of our talk is ostensibly for the to combat child sexual abuse online. There's the most effective way to keep children safe our community, the most effective ways our community based and don't rely on tech quick fixes. And I would also be curious to know from the panel if, if they, if they accept that idea that this is really all about child sexual abuse, or if there isn't just this creeping desire to to get it involved a little bit more in citizens activities in the same way that Juliana was talking about her local police force, installing, or employing these kinds of methods over there. Okay, Lucas Lucas probably our communications director, Lucas. I live in Berlin, and so I use public transport a lot, and I'll often find myself in like a very crowded subway train and I will take a look around and I'll see, I'll sort of do a account in my mind of how many people are looking at their phones. And it's usually most of them, you know, if you ever find yourself in a situation that among dozens of people that might be three that aren't doing something on the phone listen to music text someone. And I, and I'll think like, my God, these are the devices that these people are using two companies basically make the systems that they're interacting with and that's so much of their lives and their communications. Depending on and so many so much information about them goes into those things. If you want to count the other cell phone manufacturers that do slightly alter versions of Android, then the count goes up to, I don't know, a 10 but nevertheless is very few of them. And the power that they have, you know, everybody has a smartphone everybody uses it's a ton every single day. And even if you're, if you think a lot about these things it just impossible to think about them all the time while you're using them and so it's impossible for you to be aware at all times of the things that it isn't not just the things that it's recording about you but how it's influencing your behavior I remember a few years ago I think it was, I think this happened in Australia and internal documents by Facebook made for me by Facebook for potential advertisers, in which they were bragging about the ways that they have found to manipulate people's behavior using the algorithms I remember there was a specific example. I believe that they could do something like take a teenage girl for example they could because of the patterns of her behavior using her smartphone. That say for example on Thursdays in the evening she tends to be depressed and that that because of that that that's the ideal the optimal time to show her an ad for clothes or for makeup or for something like that that would make her feel better about about herself and her looks. So it's not just a matter of understanding what type of clothes or type of makeup you you like it's it's about really honing in on the on your vulnerability and to actively manufacture this this purchase and a conversion for the client. And I'm saying this because I'm I'm just wondering how we got to this point in which this is so pervasive and legal and accepted. And I think the way we we got to this point is, we got cow cow with our pants down because 20 years nobody understood that any of this would ever be possible even the people at Google they didn't realize at first that there was a ton of money to be made by those little crumbs that people left behind when they did when they use their search engine. And so because nobody saw it coming there was no it wasn't free for all there was no legislation society wasn't prepared for it lawmakers, even if they were well intended, they just didn't couldn't anticipate that this was to happen and by the time everybody realized what was going on it was too late because the systems were in place. 234 companies own everything. They had mind boggling amounts of money to do the lobbying and to do all sorts of stuff that would prevent legislation from then breaking the status quo. And I think, you know, some other people here more logical than me in terms of what we can do right now to, to, to help sort of fortify our privacy a little bit, but I want to look a bit further ahead into the future. And I'm going to use an example for just for illustration here that the metaverse. Is this ever going to be a thing is ever going to catch on I don't know I hope it doesn't you know, at least not in the format that meta has presented it to us. But I think we have to sort of assume so that it help doesn't happen again we have to assume that it does. And we have to ask ourselves, what is it that we need to do right now to prevent that the same things happen in the next iteration of online communications essentially which for illustration sake here we think that is going to be the metaverse. quasi physical space that might become very important in how people interact in the future. And if we don't get our act together. By the time we realize what's going on, Mark Zuckerberg owns the entire damn thing, and it's going to be very hard to to change that. So I think that's the case with technology in general right there was always going to be a next thing that's going to revolutionize things. The first time that it happened if we really got punching the guts and those companies that we call big tech took everything over. And it's very difficult to see how that might change but the good news is that there's always innovation there's always a new technological revolution and I think what we have to do is learn from the past. Be ready for the things before they, they turning to something that people are actually using in their everyday lives, talk to people who know about these things to activists to to understand what is it that we can do right now. What's on the horizon so that we can prepare for it, so that you won't be a free for all next time in the next time after that. Thanks, Lucas and you're so right I mean technology is always ahead of the politics isn't it it's always ahead of the regulation. If you saw the way that the US Senate were questioning Mark Zuckerberg two years ago, you could see that imbalance of power he was running rings around them. These these old gray haired guys just going well yeah this this this and they sounded so nonsensical compared to Mark Zuckerberg and they they you see the imbalance. And I think also perhaps we can speak to this before I hand it to deny. There are so many groups that are active in these areas. Why haven't they made more headway. Groups that are staffed by people that know a lot more than any of us about this stuff. What is it that they are doing wrong or could do better. Is it just about money is it just about incentives or other other approaches that could be taken in order to to kind of even the score and create that awareness so that we're not. We're not, as you say, Lucas, kind of just sleepwalking into it. Then I then I started. Yeah, I don't have much to say about they say but because I did experience this whole period that the honest was talking about earlier during 2015 when he was minister and he had all the means to. Supposedly people taking care of the safety and security of his conversations, etc. Well, this is a provocative question to him because I was here experiencing all this and even my own phone was like it was underwater and every time I picked it up so I know they were also listening to my calls but so young is in reality. I think didn't believe there was anything that could be done. And they can see this in his practice every day that he doesn't protect himself on his phone emails, nothing. So, in reality, is there anything we can do, or just either not have smartphones and stuff and not have Google or Gmail accounts, or how can we protect ourselves either is there really a way I don't think, but I pass it on to Yanis because I don't want to get a second go at it. I'm going to answer in a way that most people disagree with. I personally do not believe that this problem can be solved on a personal basis through personal investment in defeating those who are surveying us in the same way that when people come to me and say, you know, I have no prospects, I have this problem and that problem, what can you do for me, what can the party do for me, the movement. The answer is nothing, because if we, I mean, the whole point of having a political party and a political movement is because individuals cannot solve the problems that the whole system has created for society. This is why we need politics in order to change the system, not in order to find private ways of dealing with the system. So, personally, I've given up, I really, as you said, when I, I don't care who is listening to my conversations, I assume that everybody is. There are some basic things you can do, you can put your phone in the fridge. If you want to have a moment of privacy, we used to do this in the ministry, but besides that, I think it's a complete waste of time. I have colleagues that disagree with me that try constantly to update their signal to have meetings face to face, to check the room for bugs and so on. This is too oppressive. In the same way that capitalism cannot be overcome through private initiative and can only be overcome by changing property rights. I believe that the question here is one of property rights, who owns what. There was a question that madam mentioned that was in the chat and asked the question about identity or digital identity. Look, the number one issue of true identity politics is exactly that are digital identity. If you think about it, what big tech has managed to do is to be the owners of our identity. Your digital identity doesn't belong to you. In order to convince somebody that you are who you are, you have to beg your bank that has your digital identity, Google, Facebook, Instagram that had bits and pieces of your digital identity. Big business, big finance and big tech own your digital identity. They own your data. You do not own your own data, you do not own your own identity. So, cut a long story short, nothing short of a political revolution can shield us from surveillance from nothing short of a political revolution that changes property rights over, not just means of production but also over cloud capital what I call cloud and that includes our digital identity can bring about the change that we want. This is why we need the movement and it is not a question of an app or a trick or a technique that individuals can use in order to shield themselves from surveillance. This is why we need a movement and that's exactly what we've got. Please join us to address some of these issues that we're talking today. It's a sprawling massive, very complex problem, but you can be part of the solution instead of just fretting over the scale of the problem. Join us at dm25.org slash join and become a member in seconds. Thank you very much to our panel. Thank you very much to you out there for your questions and comments the discussion will go on in the in the comments of the of the YouTube video and tune in at the same time in two weeks from now same place. Thank you very much again and take care.