 for the next talk. The title of the talk is avoiding kernel panic. Europe's biggest fails in digital policymaking. The talk will roughly cover the question of why the European Union is failing as an institution and what we can do about it. Our lovely speakers are standing right here next to me. We have Kirsten Fiedler. She's the managing director of European Digital Rights in Brussels. And she's also connected to netspolitik.org and to DigiGas, which many of you know, I guess. The second speaker is Walter von Holtz. He's ICT law practitioner by day and digital rights activist by night, he says. And now they will answer for you the question, what we can do about the European Union's failure. Thank you very much. Please give them a warm round of applause and welcome our two speakers. Thank you so much. OK, audio angle angels, can you check the headsets? I think it was on, but it was not on full power. Yeah, thank you very much. OK, yes. Hello, everyone. Well, my name is Kirsten. This is Walter. Yeah, do you want to start? No, you don't want to start. OK, so yeah, basically beyond our day jobs and beyond our activism, we are also both European citizens or Europeans. And well, we are trying to actively participate in Europe's policymaking processes. So we here at the 32C3, we care really a lot about the resilience of our technical infrastructures. But pretty much in the same way, we also don't want our political infrastructures that we depend on to be broken. And basically, in the last years in Brussels, we have been, on one hand, quite successful. On the other hand, we are completely overwhelmed and outgunned in that arena. And in this talk, we want to explore both the failures on the institutional side and also on the activism side. Because there's room for improvement on both sides of the equation. Before we start to delve into the reasons for the failures, we just wanted to give you a summary of our top four EU fails. So the first ones is that privacy protections will weaken. The second one, mass surveillance measures. Third one, policy-based evidence making instead of evidence-based policymaking. And the last one, well, our dear commissioner for the digital society and economy. So for the first fail, instead of ensuring that Europe's population can really benefit from real privacy protections, Europe's governments have been really trying very hard to delay the data protection reform process in the last years. And to water down the protections for the citizens. And Germany was pretty much leading these efforts in the European Council. And in the meantime, European parliamentarians were happily copy-pasting from, well, text suggested by the online industry into the data protection regulation. The second big fail is, well, instead of proposing real solutions to the migration crisis, the EU pursues a very short-sighted vision that focuses on border and travel surveillance, which is massively in breach of our privacy rights instead of, well, yeah, just finding real solutions to how we can handle migration here. With laws also that remain in force for years and years until finally a court may or may not declare them illegal. A third big fail is, well, instead of proposing evidence-based policies, the EU has been really moving more and more to an approach where it is justifying proposals with made-up evidence created by surveys. Or even worse, it is completely getting rid of evidence or impact assessments, like you can see here for a new directive that has been proposed in order to fast-track some EU anti-terrorism measures. And of course, the last one, yeah, there have been really so many fails in the EU that we almost forgot to put in the really most obvious one. So, well, instead of putting experts in charge of the digital agenda, we now have rather mediocre regional politician who knows nothing about digital policymaking. So basically, if you start looking into the reasons for all these failures, you run into elements like the European Union has rather poor architecture, if you want to put it in its software terms. The legislative processes are also very buggy. And there's a complete or almost complete lack of institutional memory. We'll give some examples later on for these. There are also a lot of poor, poorly functioning actors, especially the influence of lobbyists of special interests can be pretty bad. And then there is also this phenomenon which you could kind of translate into denial-of-service attacks. The same bad proposals come back and back and back again until they pass. Similarly, with the policy-based evidence creation that also happens in a similar fashion. But yeah, let me first expand a little on the poor architecture. Effectively, and I'm assuming everyone knows that Tia's political concept, the idea of separation of the executive, the legislative and judiciary powers, in which is supposed to be part of a normal functioning democracy, there's no such thing at the European level. Basically, which is supposed to be a legislative genre the European Parliament cannot initiate legislation on its own. And even though in all member states, the vast majority of national legislation is initiated by the executive, Parliament still do have to write initiative on their own. You can't do that at the European level. We have a very poor substitute surrogate for that called non-legislative reports. But it's sort of nonsensical in a way. Then there's this problem of having the executive twice in the legislative process. First, you have the commission, which is supposedly the executive body of the European Union. But then there's something called the Council of Ministers, which is sometimes called the Council of Ministry, which is made up out of the executives of the member states. And basically you have the executives of the member states together with the European executive initiating legislation and having a very unbalanced influence on the legislative process. And both the members of the European Commission and of the Council of Ministers cannot be sent home by the European Parliament. Of course, members of the Council of Ministers can be sent home by the national Parliament, but not by the European electorate as a whole. And on the judiciary side, which is probably the least problematic institution at the European level, there's actually fairly limited access to the European Court of Justice. And for all its successes, I don't think the European Union can become a gender democracy if we either just devolve the European Union back to the member states, which parties like UKIP are promoting, or we change what is now the Council of Ministers into a Council of Parliaments. It will be my personal preference. But as it is now, it's kind of stuck in between a bunch of democratic nations working together to do something or a generally democratic Europe functioning properly. And then there's also the failure of what is in English-speaking countries called the Fourth Estate. As an addition to the trios, the media can be considered an important element in balancing the various powers in a democracy. And basically, if you look at the national media coverage of the Brussels process, quite often legislative dossiers are only mentioned in national media after there has been an important vote, not prior to that. So the citizens of Europe are only informed about major legislative initiatives that have a major impact on their lives after the process has more or less finished. And if you realize that roughly 80% of legislation at your national level is initiated from Brussels by either directive or regulations, and if you're talking about digital policymaking, it's over 90% of all legislation that more or less is decided in Brussels. This is a massive failure. And it's mainly caused by the most national media outlets have little to no permanent presence in Brussels. And if there are any journalists in the room, please ask your editors why that is the case, because they should feel ashamed of that. And there's another thing that most part of everything in Brussels seems to be designed to bore you to death. And that is not helpful for the media side of things. And personally, I believe that the fact that commissioners cannot be sent home is part of that problem, because then you have sufficient drama to get the media involved. But right now, well, there is a lot of drama in Brussels, but it's kind of a sideshow compared to what you can have at the national level. Yeah, right. So this basically brings us to the first big fail of our community, TM, because we haven't been really able to run a proper analysis of the architecture. So despite the fact that, as Walter said, 80% or 90% of tech laws are designed in Brussels, many of us still don't know how the EU institutions function. But we really need to have an understanding how everything works if we want to be able to effectively address their flaws and then repair them. So I don't want to go into detail now and bore you to death even more of the processes and everything. But you can read all that in Edry's booklet, how the EU works or, well, the title is I think the activist guide through the Brussels Maze. You can find it online. So once we do understand how everything works, we could start step by step to repair it. So since the Lisbon Treaty, the European Parliament has gained more power. For example, it can say yes or no to international agreements, which is one of the reasons why we won against Akta. But as Walter said, the European Parliament still is not able to propose legislation itself. It can only modify texts that were written by the European Commission or ask the Commission to propose law. So maybe what we need is a constitutional crisis or maybe a revolt by the European Parliament. So why can it not just grab the legislative initiative? Why can it not just say, fuck it, we're just going to propose the law now? But I think giving power to the Parliament is also up to us. And so far, we have been failing to support the European Parliament as the only institution that represents us directly. If you take, for example, the 2014 elections, it was really the worst turnout in the anti-European history. So I think last year we had a participation rate of 42.6%, whereas in 1994, it was 56.6%. And in the Netherlands last year, only 37% of people went to vote. So yeah, the second reason for the fails of the EU are also the legislative processes, because many things are still decided behind closed doors. To give you just two examples of this, the first thing is the thing called Trilogs. And the second, the way in which trade agreements are negotiated. So Trilogs are something that's not defined in the European treaties, but it's actually nowadays the way in order to finalize laws in the EU. So the normal legislative process of the EU is the Commission Tables of Proposal. Council NDP work on the text, and then pass them in the first reading. If none of the institutions adopts the text of the other, it goes to second reading, and then ultimately to conciliation, if not adopted before. But what actually happens are so-called Trilogs. And this sounds like a great and fun thing to participate in, but actually in reality, it's a lot less crunchy. So anytime after the publication of the Commission Proposal, the institutions can meet behind closed doors in order to try to negotiate an agreement on the text. So this is completely intransparent. There are no meeting minutes, and there are no clear rules for this so-called Trilog meeting. And it's, yeah, well, it's completely undemocratic because new text is negotiated without anybody voting on this. And then there's the issue of the international agreements through which, especially for the digital sphere, a lot of relevant policymaking actually happens. And one of the roles of the European Commission is to represent Europe towards non-European counterparts when it comes to trade agreements, for example. TTIP is an ongoing process. But other examples are the Swift Agreement between the United States, which basically has led to a, well, it enshrined in law the fact that most inter-bank transfers in Europe are basically the information is willingly shared with the US under the Swift Agreement for the purpose of counter-terrorism operations. And the problem starts already with the process that quite often, especially with so-called trade agreements, the negotiation mandate of the Commission itself is secret to begin with. TTIP had been negotiated for about two and a half years already before the mandate given to the Commission was made public. And if you do realize, and that's one of the other problems with the European Union, if you couch everything in terms of it's just the economic things and therefore not relevant for policy, ultimately, economic conversions both within the Union and across, for example, the Atlantic results in changes in legislation. And it does touch upon fundamental rights at some point. You could especially see that with ACTA, which, thankfully, we managed to shoot down. But ACTA would have impacted our freedom of speech greatly. And likewise, with treaties like TISA, CTA, and TTIP, there are topics on the negotiation table that are not just economic anymore. It's about privacy. It's about freedom of speech. And also, which is less of our primary interests, matters of labor interest and the environment. And by kind of putting it away in this abstract notion of trade agreements, I think the European institutions are doing democracy at this service, especially when you realize that business interests quite often do have access to these documents while civil society does not. And so far, I think one of the failures of activism is to push hard-run transparency in these issues. The few times we succeeded actually was quite often because we were abusing loopholes, or we will say abusing, using them properly, actually, using differences in transparency legislation, for example, both sides of the Atlantic. It has been proven in the past quite useful to send freedom of information at requests on the US side, use the results from that to do similar requests to the European Commission, and any mismatch can turn out to be rather interesting. But this is also one of the things that normal citizens can rather easily participate in, just send requests to the Commission or to your national member states for information. And it becomes more powerful as soon as you start sharing the results of that. The slide is just to show that you could really do three little things in order to try to improve transparency at the EU level. First thing is to make access to documents requests. There's a platform called asktheeu.org, which is really easy to use. So you could ask, for example, communications between industry and the Commission on any topic that's interesting for you or ask for trial log documents or whatever. Or you could complain to the Ombudswoman whose job it is to investigate my administration in the EU and violations of rights. Or you could build or contribute or just use the awesome tools that are out there, for example, like Paltrack. Paltrack has been built in order to scrape data from the European Parliament's website, and it gives a super nice overview of all of the dossiers. You can have alerts on your dossiers and even link directly to amendments and that sort of stuff. There's also the issue that by the nature of politics, politicians tend to forget things they've sat in the past. And especially in a digital age, it's actually quite easy to remind them of what they've sat in the past. There's never been as much recorded what politicians say and do. And a very useful tool in this regard in the past has been, it was Mamapol, political memory, which basically was keeping track which MEPs had been voting in which ways on digital policy dossiers and actually gave a ranking to the parties in the European Parliament and the MEPs on to what extent they had been voting for the citizens in interest. And politicians that know that they will be reminded of their past actions will think their current actions through much more than they otherwise would because it will affect their chance to be re-elected. Then you get to the denial-of-service attacks on our freedoms. One example is the P&R dossier, the passenger name records. And this was already proposed by the United Kingdom in 2005 to have databases, especially for air travel, that the member states would share with each other who was traveling where, who was paying for their tickets, what their meal preferences would be. Likewise the US has been pushing for having that information exchanged. The UK proposal was ultimately shot down in parliament. We still don't really know how that happened because there was little activism on it, simply because civil society is kind of overburdened back then already and even more so nowadays. But parliament did its job and voted against it, saying this is too much of an infringement upon fundamental rights in a democratic society. That initiative was first proposed in 2005 after the London and Madrid bombings. Now we've had Paris. Same similar proposal was pushed forward and surprise it went through now. And the proposal was actually worse than the previous one as far as I know. But everyone has forgotten the very good reasons why the previous proposal didn't make it. They're all kind of short of memory in this respect. Really, we really need to be the political memory of our parliamentarians. We need to be there all the time to remind them of their duties and responsibilities as the elected representatives of the European people. So this year we lost the EUP in our file and we now have the massive untargeted surveillance of all air passengers flying out of the EU and inside of the EU. So I think this was due to the fact that there was simply not enough pressure from civil society. So we have just not been able to constantly remind the EUP that it is really there to represent us. But being there all the time is also a really huge challenge for digital activism at the EU level. Because, well, firstly, people who care about what's going on in the EU simply don't have the time or the luxury to be engaged over a long period of time or to find ways to transmit their knowledge of Europe's history and policymaking. Or secondly, well, secondly, our digital rights activists are still too few to point out every single time to policymakers when they're about to adopt a really crazy proposal. I think in entire Europe there's not even 50 people active on these sort of questions from civil rights organizations to defend your rights and freedoms. And this is just simply a scandal. So as Walter said, even if we're not in Brussels physically all the time, we would theoretically have the means to engage in a decentralized manner in policymaking. In the past years, we had Memopool. And unfortunately, due to lack of human resources, I think mostly, the tool has not been updated after the 2014 elections. And yes, so I think somebody has just now started to work on this again. And if you want to help out with this, go to the T-10 of La Quarta Turinette and ask how you can help out. Yes, and then we have the what we call bad devices. I would say in a way, especially the civil service and the European Commission, do not have the problems of shortest of memory. They do have the problem that are actually very few. Relatively speaking, the European Commission is a fairly small executive body compared to, let's say, the central governments of the member states. Given ID, there are about 24,000 civil servants working within the European Commission. And if you compare that to, let's say, the federal government of Germany, that's less than a tenth of that number of civil servants. And they tend to compensate for that by relying heavily on experts from the fields, a.k.a. lobbying firms. And lobbyists by themselves are not being paid to represent a general interest. They are being paid to represent a special interest. They are just doing their job. But their job is a bit of a nasty one, in a sense, that they are the main purpose to make sure that any legislation that comes through or is initiated is beneficial to the people who are paying them. And to give you an idea, just a little anecdote. Three years ago, we sat down with an MEP from Ireland about the General Data Protection Regulation, which is now finally in its finishing stages. That Irish MEP told us, you guys are the first people from civil society I've been meeting on this dossier. I have met between 40 and 50 different industry lobby groups on this topic, but no one claimed to represent the citizens. And that gives you an idea to what extent within the Brussels bubble, it's kind of a cacophony of voices from industry interests and much less of citizens' interests. And because industry lobbyists are mostly just doing their jobs, this also often then leads to very ridiculous lobbying attempts. So we have a couple of examples now. One example, for example, was last year. We had the copyright consultation. One of the questions the European Commission asked, should it be considered copyright infringement if someone were to have a hyperlink towards infringing content on the internet? And Bertelsmann answered with a long excuse that it was obvious that a hyperlink to content on a different website that happens to be infringing should be considered infringing itself. And you can be sure that of all the thousands of answers to that particular consultation, which thankfully was answered a lot of times by normal citizens, but all the ones by the publishers would kind of echo that sentiment. I think you have other good examples of ridiculous lobbying. Yeah. Well, we have a short video to show you made by the advertising industry on the data protection regulation. And really, you have to see this, because it was just so hilarious. Yeah, because, yeah. Evil Edgar has kidnapped thousands of slaves and stripped them of their identities so they can't be found and saved. I didn't look at all those poor slaves. We must do something to help them. Let's ask the genie. Yes, let's go. We need your help. We have to give these slaves their identities back and bring Evil Edgar to justice. If we find out as much as we can about him, we can predict his next move and put a stop to this. Well, that's not so much. I wish I could have had him, but the law of the lamp said this is profiling. We'd have to get explicit consent from everyone, which won't happen. What? The law of the lamp makes no sense. This is for the victims and the greater good. Wait, it doesn't have to be this way. If we find out as much as we can about him, we can predict his next move and put a stop to this. No problem, Aladdin. Give me one second. I can gather the relevant information I already have. So this should be quick. You've really helped us. We'll take it from here. I do realize that this particular lobbying firm had commissioned about five or six of these rather expensive animations to show to MEPs and how beneficial data mining will be to the general population. What could possibly go wrong? Other examples are that in the process of the Akta negotiations, industry was pushing very hard and got their way in the Akta documents to set damages for copyright infringement based on the excellent number of copies multiplied by the retail value of the copies, which would basically mean that we'd assume that any copy made was basically a lost sale to them. Just before the European Parliament voted for the first time for really strong net neutrality protections, there was a last-minute effort by the child protection lobbies in order to kill net neutrality amendments. You have to, yeah, it's really crazy logic. But one UK MEP argued in an email to her colleagues that net neutrality would actually lead to child abuse. And oh, my God, if Adri is like what I truly meant and access amendments went through, then all the children would be lost, basically. So this attempt was really so ridiculous that it failed epically. And the pro-net neutrality amendments went through, yeah. Yeah, we discussed this because we gave this one. Yeah, so Walter already mentioned the last one, DOS attacks, the same proposals are being just tabled over and over again. Another example for these DOS attacks, the EU's well-measures to fight terrorism because every once in a while, the European Commission launches talks with industry in order to encourage companies to just take voluntary actions in order to, yeah, find responses to all sorts of illegal or possibly just unwanted online activity. So in 2012, I don't know if some of you remember, there was a project that was called Clean IT that was financed by the European Commission and it aimed at reducing the terrorist use of the internet. They never said what the terrorist use might be. But the project produced basically a very long list, wish list for law enforcement. So among the really bad proposals was that internet companies must allow only real common names, governments must disseminate lists of illegal terrorist websites, and social media companies must allow only real pictures of users. So this project was then a really big failure because it was substandard quality and just produced no meaningful outcome at all. And yeah, I think the project's website today, cleanit.eu even links to some point at the very bottom. I don't know, you can check it out if you want. But anyway, so this year, the commission took this approach and just rebranded it. And so what they are doing now is launching an EU internet forum in order to talk with online industry in order to tackle terrorism and prevent radicalization. So in the past months, we've been really battling with the commission to get some documents because of course everything is being discussed behind closed doors with industry. But all we received were heavily redacted documents. So but yeah, everything we know is that the participants are Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and AskFM. And yeah, the goal is to discuss the reducing of accessibility of content and the development of counter narratives and also, well, to discuss the problem of encryption that law enforcement might have. We don't know more. Yes, another example of these DOS attacks is the retabling of the ACTA approach because we might have won on paper against ACTA, but the institutions have really been taking bits and pieces in order to introduce them into various initiatives here and there. For example, they rebranded the voluntary cooperation. If you remember in ACTA, the pipe that was most criticized was the suggestion that the business sector should cooperate between themselves in order to censor communications whenever a company thought they might have detected copyright infringements. So now in the new digital single market proposals of the commission, it was suggested in a leak, for instance, follow the money approaches have been put in place in order to reduce advertising revenues. Actions are sought from advertising companies or payment processors. And if you want to know what that means in practice, then you can go and ask WikiLeaks because they had their donations blocked by PayPal, Visa and MasterCard on the basis of zero legal basis and they have never been proven guilty and there was no court order. So this is basically the approach that the commission now wants to do as well for fighting alleged copyright infringements. Yes, so this was not the only time that the ACTA approach was retabled. If you take the net neutrality regulation that was concluded this year. So in the original proposal of the commission, there were a couple of exceptions where access providers were allowed to take measures in order to manage that traffic. For example, to comply with the court order. But the commission, or well, DG Home, added a note that said that access providers should also be able to manage that traffic in order to prevent serious crimes. So the commission gave no definition at all what crimes it might be talking about and well, yeah, this was clearly an attempt to introduce lawless blocking and filtering. And even the Council of the European Union raised in one document the concern that this might actually be contrary to the Charter of Fundamental Rights. So in the end, this bit of text was deleted by the European Parliament and it's not in the regulation. Well, basically I am large, it's not as for a reason called the Brussels bubble. There has not been enough involvement from the European citizenship, which basically mean if you want to change this, and of course, we cannot change the treaties, but a lot of other things are going wrong. We must get involved more. And yeah, as W. Coloman very eloquently put it, is if people were to exercise the citizenship more, there should be, by and large, it will be better for the effectiveness of activism in general, or what is often called activism as an extreme thing, should be considered more normal. You could endlessly discuss that. But to get your idea, where we also are failing as activists, is, this is a quote I heard from someone in Brussels but I forgot who said it, but basically it boiled down, we have civil society, we don't have to be civil. A lot of civil society involvement, especially when people initially come in into this arena, tends to be very, very impolite. You really don't want to know what kind of messages MEPs often get from the very few people that actually do get involved in dossiers. And of course, people are angry about, let's say, a very bad legislative proposal. But if you are angry about something, it may be worthwhile to sit down and realize the person who works on pushing this because he or she has been told by corporate lobbyists that this would be a good idea, may not actually be aware to begin with of the negative impact of this proposal to someone else. And if you start by calling them idiots or sellouts or corporate stooges, that's not very helpful in convincing people. Yeah, in terms of activism being polite and sometimes gets you a lot further than we feel in blunt. But please do get involved. And as far as we are concerned, the first stage of being more actively involved is just make sure that you are getting informed. Like I said earlier on, the national media are miserable failure in reporting on Brussels. But that is not necessarily a problem. We're from the internet and the internet has been about bypassing gatekeepers for the better part of three or four decades now. Subscribe to newsletters from NGOs like Adri or others in whatever policy area you're interested in. We happen to be interested in digital policymaking. But social media can always also be interested in just following the right Twitter feeds. Especially in this area, if you happen to be on Twitter, you can actually be, know a lot of the news that may be in the newspapers one or two weeks in advance. Also, the internet is more than about pictures of cats, as much as a love cat. And people may disagree with me. You can use it in a very useful way for activism. And for example, by just sending emails or engaged with your MEPs by merely asking questions about the shares. Not even saying that he or she is doing the wrong thing, but actively asking MEPs what their position is on a certain stage or a certain dossier is in itself a strong political signal that there may be electoral price to be paid when doing the wrong thing on a certain topic. Of course, you have to know a little bit about what's going on. Another thing you can get, if you don't want, if you don't feel comfortable with following the shares and very much in depth and will probably be much happier in doing technical things, the creation and maintenance of tools like political memory, like Paltrack, Pipi Longstrings, Lobbypla, you name it. It's only very few people who are doing that right now. And political memory, if you could reboot that again and get the wonderful people of Lackwader 2 more programming capacity because it was Lackwader 2 who was running political memory, that will be incredibly helpful to others. And that is much more than just coding. That is pretty much political activism in my book. Also, as a third stage, you could use other tools in order to get more involved, for example, by responding to public consultations. The European Commission launches every once in a while. So at the moment, there are a couple of very important ones open here on our picture. It says the 24th, but the one on platforms is actually open until the 28th. So this consultation will really be crucial for new rules on important issues like online privacy, like open data, copyright, or even the right not to have your uploads to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or whatever to have them deleted again. So, and these are just some of the issues at stake. You can respond to this one online on the European Commission's website. The second consultation, which is also still open until the 28th, is on geo-blocking. You know this annoying thing which prevents you to access videos across borders. So this is your chance really to tell the Commission that we need to get rid of blocked videos and barriers in the digital space. Third consultation, a very important one as well, that is open until March, is on the transparency of trial logs by the Ombudswoman. I think later today, there will also be a workshop here happening at 32C3 as a self-organized session where, well, we meet up in order to collectively respond to the consultation. So go check out the wiki if you want to come. We can do, well, we can do it live. And yeah, so in some, and we're going to come to an end now, we're still too few to battle on all fronts in order to be a true counterweight to industry lobbying. I heard recently that there's approximately 10 times more funding available for US NGOs from foundations in the United States than there is in Europe. So, but among the many reasons why we have been failing with the defense of human rights at the EU level is also the political indifference and resignation in our communities. We, well, we tend to stay still too much in our own filter bubble and in our own comfort zone. So we really should go out more and talk to people because otherwise we end up where we are now with a super distorted impression of the importance of our own issues. And, well, so far we have simply been failing to invest more efforts into making digital policy making a matter maybe by putting it in a bigger context in order to reach a broader audience. Yeah, basically we're seeing that the European project is under tremendous pressure. There's the refugee crisis, there's the Greek crisis in the background. France is in a state of emergency and there are actually noises that the state of emergency will be permanent. Poland and Hungary are borderline fascist states already. And at the same time, we are still European citizens. And if we leave this to the institutions themselves, these won't necessarily, well, we can continue to blame it on the politicians, but the politicians are only as good as the people that support them. Yeah, and unfortunately this year we have been losing some of the important battles on mass surveillance, for example. Yeah, like data retention or PNR in some member states. But we also had enormous successes in the past like ACTA, like net neutrality or we fought successfully against mandatory web blocking. So if only a couple of people are able to do all this to have such an impact, imagine what we could do if we were more. So I think we just need to stop blaming the EU for all its failings, which it clearly is. But we cannot creatively criticize the institutions if we don't also look at our own failures, if we don't try to change something and if we don't try to get involved. So yeah, I think we refuse to believe that this, well, designated and pessimistic vision of digital rights at the EU level is really the best we can do. And that was more or less what we had to bring here. Thank you very much for this inspiring talk. We still have around 10 to 15 minutes for questions and answers. If you have questions, please move to one of the four microphones we have on here. Just move to one of the microphones if you want to ask a question. And if you're already leaving the room, please do so very quietly so you don't disturb the people who still have questions for our speakers. We will start with a question from the internet. Hello, somebody on IRC asks, how can we mobilize more people to get active against bad legislation and how can we educate politicians that seem to be resistant against better knowledge? Well, for starters, mobilizing begins with informing other people. And it also means not only talking to your Facebook friends or because that again is what Kirsten was talking about, being in our own little bubbles. It's also talking to people who may not necessarily politically agree with you or are in different spheres. Yeah, I think you can just follow our three stages that we just presented. Firstly, get informed, try to read as much as possible. Secondly, try to contact your politicians and thirdly, communicate about what you are doing to your friends. All right, thank you. Again, if you have a question, just move to one of our four microphones. We will start with a question from over there. Two remarks about your talk. You first said that the citizens should fulfill the citizenship. Yeah, but in my personal opinion, there is the big missing link that you only can fulfill this citizenship if you know what it's all about. So I think we need to remind ourselves that the normal user of a phone or a PC or whatever is already overwhelmed by configuring his email or her email program. At the birthday party, I met some acquaintance of mine and I told all about the US and the agency and what we know from Edward Snowden and they called me nuts. I said, no, this is happening. This is happening right now. And I tried to boil it down for them, but they didn't believe me. So I think it's a responsibility to not educate but give the information to the people in a more simplistic way. Yeah, and the second thing I want to add, we need also as a more positive way of attacking this problem, strengthen the European parliamentarians by reminding them how important they are and that they are doing an important job. If you're looking at the crisis that we had the last couple of years, like the Greek finance crisis and so on, I would be rather pissed if it would be a parliamentarian because what the commission did back then and the state had were just nuts and I would be sitting here and have no power over the political agenda. So if it would also remind them how important their work is, I think this would also give a positive spin. Thank you. Thank you. Do you want to comment on that or? Well, no, really. Okay, all right, so let's go further with the next question from over here, please. Yes, thank you. I'm wondering if you also have an overview or an idea about how the actual, might call it half legal and illegal corruption from the lobbyists towards the parliamentarians is, how many benefits they actually give them to make some kind of that more public because that might also be a big deal breaker for reasonable suggestions. No, I don't have an idea about that. Every parliamentarian is required to fill out a paper that's called, what's it called, Rife? Conflict of Interests Paper where they state on which boards they are on or in which companies they've been engaged in. That you can look up on the European Parliament website, but it's not really known how much corruption there is because parliamentarians, well, apart from the Green Group who just started recently to make all their meetings public, we don't really know who they are meeting if they're invited to dinners or, yeah. But are there any more initiatives to actually cover that, to make it public? Well, in a way, it's a positive development that's not as much US skepticism because at least the US skeptic presses in the national level tend to have, for example, they have some parliamentarians were called by British tabloids that wanted to expose the corruption of the European institutions. But a few European parliamentarians that are stupid enough to get caught in this, the typical figures are actually not that high and the amount of money involved. It makes it actually more sad, actually. But like Kirsten said, there's no complete overview of how much happens. But it would be very interesting to look at your own MEP and, for example, I know at least a Dutch MEP that has a foundation called Friends of MEP Such and Such. So that foundation is not run by himself, it's not run by his friends. And obviously, any money that goes, that doesn't end up with him and does not influence him at all. No, sir, not at all. And there's only a few hundred thousand years ago when all of that foundation really happened to know that's from public filings, but there's not a complete picture of that. All right, let's proceed because we still have a bunch of questions. From over here, please. Yes, yes. It seems difficult to estimate the impact that it can have to, for example, write an email to an MEP or to fill out these long and tedious consultation forms. Can you give an estimation how much impact is it going to make if some person actually takes the effort to put all their thoughts into a mail or into a consultation? It always depends how you do it. If you just take a mass mail template and send it to hundreds of MEPs, then it will most certainly have not a lot of impact. On the other hand, filling out really long online consultations by the commission, I think it's really worthwhile doing that because the commission sometimes, well, they just tend to take all of the answers and then shamelessly exploit them and say, well, justify their proposals. If 90% of the answers are only coming from industry, then of course the commission is free to, well, follow whatever order it wants. And it also very much depends on whether the MEP you're writing to is actually, for example, a rapporteur or a shadow rapporteur on a particular dossier or actively involved with that. And another way to make an impact, sometimes more effective, is engaging with staff members of the MEP because a lot of MEPs rely heavily on their staff, on their assistants. And sometimes an assistant, having an assistant on your side can be more important than having that MEP on your side because that MEP is really leading heavily on these areas of assistance. Thank you. Next question from this microphone, please. Hi, it's not really a question, but you talked a lot about Memopole. And we have a group that is currently trying to update the project, but we need help. So if some of you are available, you can come to the tea house on the top floor and ask how you can help on updating Memopole. Thank you. Next question from Maria. Yes. Is it open? Yes, it is. Have you ever thought of using the tools? The colleague before has said, okay, you need to bring your message in a little bit more usable form to the people on the floor. There were about roughly 800 people over here. If you can arrange to have whatever this manifold by 1,000, and you can do this by viral tools, have you ever heard about Avers? Avers is a tool where you can set a petition which is sent to somebody, and this can be replicated using Twitter, using Facebook, et cetera. And the person who is in here who has a value of saying, I trust this person, this will be replicated. And this makes your task much easier as well as makes it ours. The next thing is for the news, only bad news are good news. That's a typical standard in the news industry. So what you need to do, for instance, and I'm trying to do something as well, like, for instance, net neutrality, if you take the list of who actually supported net neutrality, bring this in a simple chart and publish this, then the media will go on to it and also the people will go on to it and then the MEPs will listen to you. Okay. Send us your tool that you were talking about. Avers. Okay. All right, thank you. Next question please from this microphone. Hi, thanks very much for your talk. I wanted to add the information you mentioned that we're gonna fill out these open surveys at a self-organized session. So for everyone, that session is at 3 p.m. in room C3. Very easy to remember at C3. Room C3 at 3 p.m. So please be there, 20 minutes of your time can really have an impact on how the EU legislates every platform from Facebook to Airbnb to Wikipedia. We need you there. Thanks. Thanks for that reminder. Before, do we have another question from the internet? Yep. There is somebody from Switzerland asking how he or she can help. Actually, Switzerland is in a fairly unique position in the sense that it's mostly through bilateral agreements it merely has to execute whatever is cooked up in Brussels and has no say in it whatsoever. I would say a Swiss person would be most helpful in helping infrastructures for people within the union to be political active, things like political memory and all the other tools. Or being active at the Swiss natural stage, but there's no Swiss MEPs you could lobby to. Switzerland like Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein basically does whatever Brussels tells them to do without having a vote. So they're actually worse off than we are. And to support your local NGO. I guess would be the answer. Thank you. Next question from this microphone please. Yes, hello. I just want to say I really enjoyed your talk. For something that bothered me and I'm hearing here as well there's very much an us and them mentality between politicians and activists and just citizens. I'm a politician in Switzerland and I can tell you it's very lonely because people don't talk to you either they're angry with you and they just give you a list of complaints. So I enjoyed what you said about the approach. If you approach a politician don't wait until you're really fuming mad. Try and talk to them with information. And the other thing is, I don't know MEPs but for me it's very hard to digest all the information I'm supposed to absorb as a politician. I'm supposed to be informed about everything and generally speaking people get into politics because they have a pet project they want to fulfill and then they don't know nothing about all the other things and they rely on other people to inform them and this is why lobbyists are so powerful. But we can all be lobbyists. We can all write a powerful letter explaining in a factual and informative and also concise way how the technology works, how this policy will affect different factors of what. And I maintain that most politicians are quite innocent when they vote on something and they're just mal-informed. They don't know what they're doing. So please write letters. Yeah. Edri has actually written a couple of very nice booklets on the different topics from data protection, copyright and net neutrality where we try to put everything in a very neat format in a very short booklet with every sub-chapter just on one page in order to allow politicians to read this very quickly and just grasp the main ideas of the topics. So this is maybe something as well to do. Thank you very much. As we're running out of time, I will be closing the question and answer session right now. I'm sorry, but maybe you can catch the speakers after the talk. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for your questions and please give another warm round of applause to our fabulous speakers. Thank you very much.