 The next talk will be about the current political situation in Brussels, or how it's developing. And it's presented by two employees of Adrye, European Digital Rights, and they, Claude Bettelamy and Andrzej Beilu, and they will introduce themselves further. Thank you. Everyone, first of all, we decided to do this talk today on this topic because 2019 was quite a year. And especially in Brussels, we felt it, we felt the different power shifts and the new balance in EU politics in particular. So today's talk is aiming to perhaps contribute a bit to an understanding on how this new balance is going to impact our online freedoms, but also suggest perhaps some laws that is worth keeping an eye on in the next couple of years. So, just as a disclaimer, we will aim to give an overview, paint a bit the landscape of digitized states of affairs, not go too much into detail with neither of the topics. Let's chat afterwards if you're interested in one of the particular files. So what we're going to plan for this talk is first to discuss about the shifts and power balances, notably those who were influenced by the new parliament in Brussels, but also the new commission, but also Brexit. And then we will update you a bit on the low file that we are currently following, and what are their impact on digital rights and maybe what their future might look like. For example, we will give you an update and explain a bit the ePrivacy file or the Data Retention Directive, or any kind of other surveillance measures that the European Union wants to adopt and push forward. Lastly, we will share with you our expectations about those new institutions and those new people in power and their plans for digital policies in the future. Now, most of you, some of you, many of you, few of you here know a lot about EU politics. So this next slide will be a bit redundant, but I think it also is important to give a bit of a quick round up about the different institutions and their role in the EU. Also for those who are not so familiar with these topics, we will be referring to the Commission, the EU Commission, who traditionally has the role of proposing new laws, and then the EU Parliament that forms an opinion on them based on some different committees in the parliament. Once the proposal has been put forward and the European Parliament has formed its opinion, the EU Council forms also an opinion, a position. The EU Council is formed out of representatives of governments, while the EU Parliament is formed of members that are democratically elected, is the only one of the institutions. Once all of these opinions are formed, everything goes behind closed doors into a process that is called trilogue negotiations. We focus mostly on the European Parliament and focus our activity towards members, its members. But wait a minute, who are we actually? Why are we here on stage and talking to you about Europe? You probably don't care. We're actually both working for EDRI, European Digital Rights. I'm Chloe, I'm a Policy and Campaigns Officer and this is Andrea. I'm a Campaigns and Communications Officer. EDRI is actually an umbrella organisation that means that we represent 42 civil rights organisations across Europe and also beyond. For example, in Germany our members are naturally the Cataclysm Computer Club, Digitale Gesellschaft, Digital Courage, FSFE, Wikimedia Deutschland, but we have many more. Since 2002 when we were formed, our aim has been to promote, protect and upheld civil and human rights in the digital environment. In 2009 we opened an office in Brussels and ever since our work with the institutions intensified. So in the past year what we've been doing is monitor the law proposals that are likely to come or are already being proposed that might pose a risk to our freedoms online. We have identified the risk and intervened through talks, consultations with the members of the parliament and other key decision makers. So this is what we do basically. So Andrea said we work at EU level, this is very important for us. And 2019 was actually for us an intense year because we got the European elections, which mean a new composition for the European Parliament, people that are new that we're going to have to work with. Quite some fact about this new parliament, it was quite a high turnout this time, so 51% on average in the European Union, so people going to vote, which was quite high for EP elections. They are usually seen as secondary or second class elections. But also what is more important is that 60% of this new parliament is actually newly elected MEPs, so newbies. They are not really inquanted about the politics in Brussels yet, so we have to teach them a bit. Also 40% are females, 60% are male. And obviously the big winners of those elections were the center groups, so the center parties, but also unfortunately the extreme right-wing parties of the political spectrum, one lot, and to a certain extent also the greens. So that's something we need to keep in mind when we work. Also the digital right champions left, such as Julia Reda, Jan-Philippe Albrecht, or Mariette Schacke, sorry for the pronunciation. So we need to find new allies as civil society in Brussels. Now we understand and we have been facing this a lot. When we talk about EU stuff, people get bored, they start yawning, it's like blah blah blah, all these terms, all these processes, I don't get it. So we thought that to make it easier for you to follow or maybe more interesting to follow, we thought that we would make today a comparison between the European Parliament's groups and some of the houses in Westeros from this show called Game of Thrones. Has anyone here watched that show? Yes, okay. So I haven't, and I had to watch some summaries for this talk, but it's important to keep in mind that we will have no spoilers for those of you who watched it. And those of you who haven't watched it, it's also important to remember that you will be able to understand everything, even if you don't know who the Lannisters are or what not. So speaking of the Lannisters, them and the Baratheians have been the big houses in the land of Game of Thrones. Compared to the European Parliament, we can look at the Social Democrats and the EPP, the European People's Party, who have in the past secure majorities. The situation has changed in the meantime. And the smaller houses, slash political groups, such as the Stark, the Targaryens, the Boltons and the Greyjoys occupy quite an important role. So the European People's Party, the biggest group in the Parliament, currently has 182 seats. In the election they lost 34, which is quite a number. Just like the Lannisters, they're quite good at political games. They're united and they're faithful to their members. This is why we often see the EPP voting in bloc. The Conservative Centre-right group, EPP, has as a German member, for example, the CDU. But when it comes to more nasty kids in the bloc, we can point at the Hungarian Fidesz, Orbán's group. We saw before the election that Fidesz has been suspended. But we were hoping that perhaps they will be excluded, the rumor circulated. We saw that after the election, none of this conflict existed anymore. And this is pretty much of a pointer that the EPP is increasing its flexibility in terms of political ideology. We think that this is something important to remember when it comes to the next years. Now let's go to Stormryans, the seat of the Great House of the Baratheons. The SND, the Socialists and Democrats, are composed of those two groups. They're quite centre-left in terms of political orientation. And the German member of this group is SPD. Like the Baratheons in Game of Thrones, they are housed that once had great power and influence. But unfortunately, they are slowly disappearing. So as in many countries in Europe, also in the European elections, they lost a lot and they are losing some influence and visibility. So they're going weaker and weaker. So as much as the EPP, they lost more than 30 seats and they are now 154 in the parliament. And that's unfortunate because just like Robert Baratheon died and Jimmy Lannister lost an end, we have the SND and the EPP who were the traditional biggest parties forming an alliance, but now they are weakened, meaning that this grand coalition between the Lannisters and the Baratheons no longer can exist. They have to find new allies among other political groups to form a majority of MEPs to pass laws in the parliament. This has a great impact on securing alliances and compromises because if you do not have more than 50% of the MEPs within two groups, it means that you have to go look somewhere else for some more. And this is where all the ex-all the current Renew Europe comes in as a potential kingmaker role. The House of the Liberal Targaryens, the centrist political group has seen quite a rise from 69 to 108 seats as a result of the elections. Macron's political party had a big role in this. Now, when we're thinking about Macron and Daenerys, she's that blonde blue-eyed girl with the sword on wallpaper, when we think about them, we often think about characters that are nice people, they want to bring peace and unity, but then you look at a second look, you see something edgy, something perhaps sword edgy with some dragon flames involved too. So just like in the political aspect, we're expecting a lot of more direct confrontation coming from this group. It is currently the third-largest group and it will call much of the games in the next alliances. Let's look at the fourth force in the European Parliament. Let's move north to Winterfell, House of the Greens, EFA. They were the first one who alerted that winter is coming, you know, they're fighting against climate change. And just as the Greens are actually teaming left-wing parties with ecological movement, and just as the Green team up with S&D in the past, actually the Starks had an alliance with the Baratheons. Unfortunately, the Baratheons, I told you, are losing influence and they are almost extinct. Therefore, they are losing for their own kind of fight. They are defending their own space and they want to grow political influence, so they are letting the Greens a bit aside. So that means for the Greens that they will have to find new alliances to push for the Green policies, like for example, looking at the Targaryens, the Liberal, who were at least some part of the Liberals are quite progressive on this. In terms of seed, the Greens were the big winners of the last election, strengthened by climate and youth movement. So they gained at least 20 seeds. Another political family who was less successful in the last elections are Güey and North Green Left, yes. They are the Iron Islands. They were the house who is actually left-wing, politically oriented. From Germany, their member is actually Die Linke. So like the Greyjoy, they are very much divided. Some part of the Güey are think that the EU is an international solidarity project, but some others are flirting with anti-European sentiments. So they are quite divided. Because of this division, they lost a bit of influence and they lost 11 seats in the last elections. So one way of explaining that is that the new Lefty MEPs wanted something modern and looked at more attractive families like the Targaryens or the Targaryens. So they joined the Targaryens or the Targaryens in the parliament this time, weakening the Güey. Lastly, the Boltons, the Cruel Guys. They are kind of the extreme right-wing in the parliament doing the dirty job of the conservative of the EPP. They are populist a bit and less diplomatic house, I would say. Before, they were quite insignificant. Quite small, very small influence. Why they were divided into small fractions? But now, actually, their star is kind of rising. The Italians and the French Nationalists managed to secure an agreement on the political program and they also attracted other nationalists from Europe. They created this big group which is called Identity and Democracy. And actually, after Brexit, they're going to secure a fourth place in the parliament, so past the Greens. They're going to be the fourth bigger group. And if they team up with ECR that you can see on the screen, so it's one remaining party from the last mandate, if they team up with those conservatives as well, it could be the second largest bloc of anti-European parties in the parliament. That's quite worrying for us. In terms of Brexit, since you mentioned it, it is important to remember that once 73 British MEPs will have left the European Parliament, 27 of those seats will be reallocated. This means that the rest of the remaining seats will shrink the size of the parliament. So from 751, we will now have 705 seats in total. If we look across the water in the UK, we're looking at the new Prime Minister in the shape of Boris, who many times shouted loud and clear that he will not check in out this time. Brexit will happen on the 31st of October. He made a lot of promises, no more deals, nothing is changing. Now, if we look a bit at other promises made in terms of Brexit from important people in the EU politics, such as the newly elected commissioner, we might doubt a bit whether Brexit will happen or not. What were the promises that the new European Commission president did? Actually, Ursula von der Leyen was elected mid-July by the parliament and she promised that she would start Brexit as soon as possible. She did that strategically to get notably the votes from the British Greens MEP to secure her seat. The question is now, will she keep her promises? Something also important to note, as Ursula von der Leyen is becoming the new president of the commission, is that yes, she is respecting the rule that the biggest party in the European Parliament, which is the EPP, is getting this position, this really top job position. But at the same time, we're not respecting the Spitsen candidate process. She came out of the blue and she was not a Spitsen candidate. Now, during her campaign, Ursula made a lot of promises and she managed to secure a lot of blessing. On top of the Pope's blessing, she also got the blessing of some of the Eastern countries. So she got the support of the members of the parliament from that geographic area, but of course at a cost. This is why we're expecting that the list of the new commissioners will have representatives of the Eastern countries in quite some important dossiers. If we also look at the European Parliament's role, such as the president, we will see that Eastern countries representatives don't occupy such a central position. So who else will take a seat? In the commission, you have another 26th position to fill. There's been some rumors going around. This is a bit speculation, but we're quite sure that Margaret Vestager from Denmark, who was a very visible commissioner in the last term because she was a commissioner for antitrust and competition law. She issued a lot of fines against Apple, for example. She will secure another position this time. Another person is Vera Jurova. She's coming from the Czech Republic. She was former commissioner for justice and consumer rights. She was quite vocal on GDPR, on the data protection law. So she's lurking at a digital portfolio, so we'll have to work with her. And then the result of the behind-the-door negotiation for top EU jobs is that the S&D managed to secure a post, a position for front-team events from the Netherlands as vice president of the commission. Now, we've been discussing a bit about all of these changes, roles, different names, different institutions. All of these change, but what remains are some files that are open. And these are the files that we put a lot of focus on that we'll be going a bit in details with next. The first one is ePrivacy. And it's a reform of what was called the cookie law. It refers to the data protection, privacy, and confidentiality of digital communication in transit and stored. Now, the reform has been pushed forward. The European Parliament has issued an opinion on it that we think is not so bad from a human rights perspective. And the next step was taking it into negotiations, those closed-door negotiation trilogues that I mentioned before. It stayed there for the past approximately two years, and it's not coming out. We don't know what's happening. We tried to write several open letters to the council presidency, even before elections. We draw the attention that this is a good time to advance. However, nothing happened. European Corporate Europe Observatory, an organization that looks into the lobby of different files, claimed that the lobby for ePrivacy has been one of the fiercest they've seen. So it might be an explanation. We don't know, of course. Another file that is really important for us at the moment is the eEvidence file. It's a very complicated file. It's about criminal justice. The idea is basically that member states are always complaining that they don't get evidence in criminal investigation fast enough from internet companies. So now the commission has put forward a proposal for legislation that allows any law enforcement and authority in Europe to request directly the personal data of anyone, directly from an internet service provider, directly from an internet company, and from anyone included various little secrets, legal secret messages. This is done obviously without going through the legal route, through the normal justice corporation mechanism, and that means circumventing a lot of safeguards and rights. So we are very worried. ADRI managed to warn the parliament about those kind of dreadful effects it could have on human rights, and so the parliament is now taking a cautious approach to this file. The next topic we're closely looking at is data retention, and this refers to the traditional obligation of telcos to retain data for as long as possible of their users, just in case they commit a crime in the future and the police might need it. Now, in the past, the data retention directive, European-level law, has been killed in court by members. So we were thinking that, okay, maybe it's gone, but just like the Night King, data retention seems to come out of the flames alive. And the reason why we're saying this is current coincidences between the different institutions. So in June, the EU council issued conclusions on data retention that tasked the European Commission to do a study, a study that looks at possible solutions for retaining data, including the consideration of a future legislative initiative. Now, every members have been part of a meeting with the European Commission, and they were assured that no data retention law is being proposed. In the same time, the meeting was told to be part of a series of stakeholders meeting the commission is having, and these meetings were held to discuss potential data retention initiatives that could be or could not be put forward. So a lot of, we don't know, but there could be, but there couldn't. Another very important fight for us in the next years, and that's for sure this time, is content moderation. The commission intends for several years now to reopen the rules, the book that contains the rules for how content is more derated online, and especially what are the responsibilities of platforms, of internet companies that are hosting content online, content that is posted by their users. This is a very basic principle of freedom of expression online, and so we are very worried that if the commission reopens the file, it will impact severely our ability to discuss and share information online. The commission already inserted some exception with the recent reform of the copyright or the new currency passed terrorist content regulation, meaning that companies and platforms have more and more responsibility to take down content that policymakers don't like. So we are shifting the responsibilities towards platforms who will now increasingly have more power to decide what is good, what we are allowed to post online or not. So a big fight for us. Moving on to net neutrality. In 2015 we had the open internet regulation that established some safeguards and protection for the principle of net neutrality. And this principle of net neutrality is like the great wall protecting the folks of Westeros from the northern threats. What we are seeing though is that private actors are trying to create more and more breaches in this wall. At EDGE we are monitoring how these breaches are dealt with by the commission. We are always trying to ring the alarm that the implementation of the safeguards for net neutrality is not closely looked into. Lastly, last file, artificial intelligence like anywhere else is a buzzword in Brussels. So it's on everybody's lips. Nobody really understands what it is, but everyone wants to look at it and regulate it. The commission set up recently a high level expert group. It was Jargon, but basically it's a gathering of experts who are proposing something to the commission. Notably industry representatives, but also civil society like our member AccessNow. And they were tasked with developing ethical guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence and how to invest money into it, into developing those three-eyed-reven technologies. We were quite disappointed with the results of the high level expert group because there was no concrete and serious action on how to protect human rights when AI is used or created. Right, but now we gave a bit of an overview of the power shifts and the new roles in the EU. We gave an overview of the files that we're looking at. So now, what? I mean, what does one mean to the other? In terms of the different topics that we discussed about earlier, the parliament and the commission and the Brexit, they all have very important outcomes. In terms of the European Parliament, we are looking at undeniable increased awareness for our topics. Even if for Cambridge Analytica alone, new members of the parliament know a bit more what digital rights are seasoned with. And this is a win on our side. Moreover, the increase of the Greens as a group is a win for our side too because the Greens have traditionally been a natural supporter of human rights in the digital sphere. Now, what it also means, looking at the fact that the social democrats and the EPPs are no longer securing over 50% of the seats, it means that they will need to invite the third actor to the table. 15. When you invite the third actor to the table, agreement might be reached a bit, it might take a bit longer to reach agreements. Compromises might be more difficult to reach, which also means that the processes will be lengthier. This might have also great impact for our work in a good or a bad way. We don't know yet. We'll see. Regarding the European Commission... I have one thing to say about the US sentiment. I decided to say it because we have time. We have time. Go ahead. Just explain them. When it comes to anti-U sentiments, there is a growing vibe among EU legislators that we need to regulate big tech coming from the US. And that's great. Sure, regulate Google. The problem with regulating only big US companies in the European environment is that if you regulate an internet as if it's comprised only from Google, you will end up with an internet that is only made out of Google. If this mental state continues, small entrants on the market, SMEs in the EU, will find it more and more difficult to deal with these legislation. The European Commission. In terms of the European Commission, a new president has a lot of power. It has influence on what takes priority over what. In our program to get elected as president of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen put forward a lot of things. She promised a lot of things in terms of digital policies. Notably, she said that within the first days into her office, she would pass legislation on the human and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, which sounds good, but any good legislation deserves sufficient time to think and to look at the different impacts it will have. So we are a bit cautious about this kind of hurry. She also definitely said she wants to look at the content moderation rules I talked to you earlier. And then thirdly, I would say that as a president, Ursula has already passed in terms of digital policies. Back in 2009, as she was minister of family affairs in Germany, she pushed for legislation that was obliging internet companies to block access to certain websites for allegedly hosting child abuse material. The problem is that this was based on lists that were secret and that were established by the federal police in Germany without any judicial oversight. And, well, there was a great risk to lead to over blocking and censorship, obviously. So she gained at the time the name of Senzo Zula. So we are looking at her very closely. Now, in terms of Brexit, the short-term effects will be perhaps not as visible as the long-term ones. Laws such as the GDPR or rulings from the European Court of Justice or net neutrality, they will all have to still be implemented. In the future, though, we don't know what will happen with the implementation of EU laws in the UK. However, the long-term landscape sees quite some scenarios. We cannot obviously be sure, but we can speculate. One scenario is that in order to compensate for the lack of access to the EU digital single market, the UK will try to make it easier for their digital businesses to survive and compete. So they will deregulate the market. This can come with a big threat to users, people's human rights, and can actually open the doors to a lot of exploitative practices. Another scenario, though, or another observation is that traditionally we have seen the UK as a strong voice, as a tone-setter when it comes to surveillance measures in the name of state security. So backdoor access, VPN blocking, and so on. And this has been in the European environment. Since they will be gone, their voice will no longer set the tone that much, which is a good thing. But on the other hand, we're very much expecting that another state will take this role instead. France might be a good candidate for this. Now, we have been giving you a bit of an overview. We hope your head is not completely spinning and that you still remember some things. We still have some time for questions, Q&As, and we're hosting two workshops on Saturday in our village about freedom. We'll have a discussion on privacy-friendly green policy in the European Union, how to set the debate. And we're going to have also, if you're interested in content moderation and how not to lead to overblocking of content and freedom of expression online, come to my workshop on Saturday. It's going to be super fun. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. We have about 10 minutes left for questions. And there are two angels with microphones in the middle aisle. Walk up to them if you want to ask a question. And a brief reminder that your questions are short sentences that enter the question mark, no introductions of yourself, no thanks to the speaker, and so on, and so on. Just ask a question. Go ahead. Could you give us an insight into who else you're working with? You're working with the left and the greens. What about other lobbyist groups? Who are we close to? Like children's rights is always a difficult one, apropos of Sensuala. Sensuala. Should I... We can both answer? I mean, traditionally, we think of censorship as of left and of right. History teaches us that, you know, we have quite a variety of spectrum of leaders that are fond of these measures. So we cannot limit our scope on one hand. This is in terms of politicians, but in terms of other lobby groups, we're... I can answer that. So traditionally, we were kind of stuck in our bubble. That is true. Sometimes we were reaching out to specific actors when we needed on certain files. But more and more, we are trying to enlarge our vision and our strategy to other types of human rights groups. Notably, we are trying to apply different lenses, such as gender lenses, racial lenses, trying to reach out to this group who are defending vulnerable groups to enlarge our vision of human rights online and try to extend it to the right of non-discrimination and so on and so forth. This is what we're doing at the moment in the process. And on politicians, it's true. We are having our natural allies to the left. We're trying to talk to the right, but sometimes they don't even open their doors. We have to find new allies within the conservative group now. If I might add one note about the children rights, your rights, it is a tricky topic. I think it is important. We recently wrote a short blog post about the exploitation of children's data online. And we got a lot of support for that. And people said, hey, we should talk about this more. And I think this is part of a reform of the narrative around privacy. We often think about privacy in terms of nothing to hide. But I think also in the frame of children's rights, it is important to reframe the privacy narrative towards much to protect. Because when we're talking about children's data, we're talking about protection of children. And I think there's a lot to it where we're looking in that more. Hello. Thank you for the very interesting talk. I'm interested in your opinions about the different parties when it comes to digital rights, obviously. So how keen are they about it? I guess the conservatives, the EPP, are not so much giving my opinion now. The Greens, you said, as far as I hear, are really going for that. But what about we know Europe, so the liberals and about the social democrats? Do you want me? So indeed, the conservatives are very hard to convince. It's easier to approach them with an innovation angle, so protecting the market and so on. So this is to try to frame it differently when we approach them. The S&D, a very tricky one. Sometimes they would be on our favor, sometimes not. There is a lot of division. Thank you. There is a lot of division within their group. So we never know what's going to come next. Copyright is a really good example. They were completely split. Oh, the liberals. What are the French influence going to be? They are coming massively into the Aldi, so the new liberal group. It depends on the topic. The French are... They are the French. I don't know. I think when we're talking about groups and the way to characterize them as a unitary cell, it depends. Like we said a bit earlier, the EPPs tend to all vote in blocks. So if we get one, two, three opinions, then we're kind of sure that we don't have chances to reach any low-hanging fruits. But with the social democrats, they're very split. I'm Romanian and I know that the social democrats in Romania have had quite some conflicts at European level. And that is also the case with other countries. Then we cannot really say how the social democrats are in general with our topics. There is national influence as well. Sometimes governments also call the EPPs and set the line against the group majority. So it's variating on the topics. Maybe another question before we finish. Yeah, I think we have three more minutes or one more question. I'd like to ask the signal angel whether there are any questions from the internet first. Signal angel? No, okay. Then we have room for at least two other questions from here. Could you say something about the right to repair? To repair? Repair in the world? Repair the Venice. Particularly in electronics and DRM and copyright. So it links to the green movement and digital rights. I am not prepared for that question. Well copyright is an important topic we have been working on and the saviour internet campaign occupied much of our working hours. But I don't think we have focused so much on the right to repair. Maybe we can discuss afterwards because I think it offers quite... It could offer quite a good framing to this discussion. Do you have any thoughts? No, I think in terms of copyright and laws at EU level they are not really keen on right to repair unfortunately. They like patterns and so on. We're not working on this but it could be a topic we could bring in our suitcase. You had a short mention about the e-evidence that might be upcoming. As I read that actually it will be... There are already talks with the S to hand that over to the S as well. My question would be like was there any discussion about how they will handle it in the matter of groups or let's say private set-ups who do so. As an example let's say you have 6 hours to reply for such a request. How does an NGO or a small group who runs a mail server would be able to do so? There's no way and you would get 4% fine or whatever it is to. Is there any discussion on that in how it will affect civil rights groups in the parliament? Everyone says it's just Google and that's it. Very good question. As any other kind of digital policy that is being made, we always have in the back the big US tech when legislation are drafted in the European Parliament and the European Commission. Typically the e-evidence file was brought forward because Microsoft refused to end over data from one of its users to the US. The US passed a law called the US Cloud Act and to reach out to this data who is stored abroad. And now the EU is like oh damn we should do the same to get access to data from Microsoft that is stored in Ireland. They're never having thought about the smaller entities and this is what we're bringing forward. It's like you're putting forward rules that applies to big giants who are able to have funds to go to courts to resist government requests but this is not the case for smaller. So unfortunately maybe they're going to do some carve-outs in the copyright, not the smaller not the ones who are respecting ABCD conditions. But unfortunately so far the discussion is focused already on the rules not so much on who does it apply to. Time is up. Thank you.