 or under the hashtag C3T on Twitter. All right, welcome. We wanna show in how in Austria we are addressing the subject of state surveillance. We wanna do this by two lines of argumentation. First of all, the abstract apparent threat that is being portrayed bigger than it actually is to give reason to further surveil and then downplay, on the other hand, the consequences that surveillance has on the regular folks. So we will look at this language that's being used very precisely and to understand how surveillance is being justified. Thank you, Angelika, that is our law person amongst us, our advisor. My name is Thomas Lohninger and we're gonna speak on behalf of EpiCenter Works. We're a company that is maybe mostly known for data saving and that we took to the European High Courts. So if you don't know us that, you might know us from Nat Neutrality with safetyinternet.eu. We pushed for Nat Neutrality in Europe, but thank you very much. There was a round of applause. But continue to Werner Reiter, my other colleague up here with me. All right, I've never spoken in front of this many people. I'm a little bit nervous. Please help me out. There's a round of applause for him as encouragement. That was not the question. The question was, please raise your hands who does not like state surveillance or a state-run Trojan horse. Everybody's raising their hands. Basically, well, there's not a few people. Now I have something for you. We have a video, but we don't have a sound. We'd like to show the video now with sound. We're now listening to a video. Everyone in the parliament who is pushing back against the kind of security package that we're trying to pass are basically attacking the Austrian public to not have security that other countries already have. All right, that is Wolfgang Tsuveta, former Minister of Inner Security, and he basically showed his response to you not wanting to be snooped upon, and you're basically being made out to be the attacker onto safety of a state. The emotional blackmail that is part of this statement is a real bad thing. So you are a bad citizen, he says. Sorry. What is this topic, and those people who know me will know that we've discussed proposed laws for Austria in 2017 of the black-red government. We'll come to the current developments, but at the moment it's not all that sure. So today is what has the second highest office in the state, and he has set it as clearly as no other, and here are the measures that he wanted that caused us to take action here. So he's asking for networked video surveillance. He wants tickets in public transport and he wants cars tracked. So he wants all movement of anyone tracked. The thing that was discussed most was the, the Trojan software, the spy software that they wanted to employ. Since Nodin, we have end-to-end encryption, and they want to break into it, and this is why they want the Trojan. This kind of espionage software has been tried to make legal in 2016. When our Justice Minister wanted to try and make it possible, and we tried to stop it then, and it was taken back before it was even finalized. And in 2017 they tried again. But they always want this kind of surveillance. So our campaign was to stop this whole package of surveillance measures. In the civil society we found many supporters for this. And this campaign covered all of Austria, not just the network, not just Vienna, but all towns. We made a hotline where you could call politicians and convince them that this was a bad idea. Oh, that it goes far beyond anything that is compatible with our base price. And we all also called Mr. Buch at 11 on Thursdays to tell them that this wasn't a bad idea. And we also produced a tool with which you could participate in the public survey and submit your own opinions. So it was proposed, there was a long debate about it. Then there was a long wait until the summer break, and then just before the summer break the original proposals were made even worse. So they wanted to introduce a network censorship, and they wanted to have those filters under the guise of protecting the youth and filtering out pornography. They also wanted to extend mobile catchers and wanted to extend them to cars. And we also had prevented the... the foot tracker for dangerous people. So what we are asking for is protection of private... Not every form of surveillance is automatically contradicting the constitution. And there must be multiple aspects for this to be compatible. And the main aspect is that it needs to be appropriate. And during the whole debate there's never a justification on how it would improve security and the compatibility and the appropriateness is never proven. So we see it as a danger to our freedom and ironically also to our security. So we insist that all of those things together are checked for their compatibility with our basic rights. So we're going to go back further a bit to the very beginning. So what was the starting point for all of this? The sound is not very good, but it's a historic video and I've got to show you. And I have a very personal example. It's a few years old back then. Every three weeks I had basically a dump of shit, human shit in front of my house. So I put cameras up in front of my house and after that no more shit in front of my doorstep. I hope with subtitles it's fine. You probably also misunderstood what he was saying. Our minister for inner security is obviously fighting dumps in front of his house with cameras and he doesn't think about why anybody would put a dump in front of his house. And I mean this is very symptomatic for this kind of debate on security in Austria and probably also for other countries. You try to fight the symptoms with placebos to really speak about the reasons for stuff. And which is when we get to politics of emotions. And now we're going to watch the second part of the video. And the surveillance of the camera and that it's only a security feeling and that gives people the feeling of security. So this is a very essential kind of term that's being used in the debate on security. It's about this subjective security feeling. It used to be a feeling for people who fought against this kind of surveillance and today it's the feeling that's being used to give reason for implementing measurements like this. I mean this is obviously not about stopping attacks to happen. This is not about measurements to prevent stuff from happening. These are all measurements that are being implemented and established in other countries and they're not being effectively put to use. But in Austria yet we still kind of actively try to use this rhetoric to justify measurements that were undertaken. We're going to hear another quote from our minister from his last few days in office. We know today that the next attack is being planned. We don't know when and we don't know where. And this is also very typical. It's about protection from very abstract threats instead of concrete, evident, driven attacks. And this is how laws are being passed against potential attackers. They're not concrete. It's about people who are not actually giving any reason to be planning an attack apparently in the abstract they're being dangerous. So in the new... agreement, the new parliamentary agreement, it says that there needs to be measurement that you can undertake before stuff even happens. So you have to want to start limiting electronic measurements of communication for people who are being potential threats. So I mean, we could all be potential threats. You can only say that you're against this kind of security package and based on our minister of inner defence. You're basically an attacker onto the democracy of Austria. And the problem with these kind of databases of potential threats is that it's really hot to then afterwards be taken out of these databases. Like, how are you going to prove that you're not a threat any longer when you were there, being put there in a first place on very flimsy kind of evidence? So we've talked about this kind of abstract, yet very big, bad threat. And the measurements that we want to use against this are very small. We're going to watch another video. We just basically want to close the gap. We just want to close the gap in our measurements of surveillance by using digital means. I mean, it's all about closing a little tiny gap in the surveillance that we've been using anyways. And then everything is being safe again. That's the thing with the technology. We a lot of times reach the threshold of understanding technology. And it's kind of like making family policies and not really understanding how families actually work. In this case, it's unfortunately not leading to people stopping to make more statements. They are kind of more fired on to do more. We can see more. I mean, we could basically have more people in cyber crime that could technically look at how this looks like. All right. Thank you very much. I mean, I'm not the really good technical expert, but I could... Yeah, sorry, I can't explain. So Peter Gridling, who is the boss of the protection of the Constitution, basically the boss. And we should remember this name because he's going to come up later. Very similar is the Vienna head of the police. So you could look into the software being used. And you could basically look into people's private homes. And his response to that is kind of like, well, I mean, these are technical measurements. I mean, you can't say that these technical measurements aren't possible to execute. And they're basically showing a bit of technical ignorance. You basically can't have a fact-driven conversation with these people as they do not fully understand the technicality of things. So their attitude towards this is more towards of a toy, where they're like, oh, why don't you just give them the toys? Let's just not talk about it for longer. Let's just... Now we're going to look at the former minister of justice. So if the boss of the Bayfadi thinks these are important measurements, you just have to undertake them. I mean, he's like cheering people on to give more applause. Basically, one reacts towards the wishes of the constitution safety. And he cannot give a response on how this is supposed to technically work. But don't worry. It is for me very curious how the state permanently, where everybody swears an oath on the constitution, that they're being basically accused of misusing the kind of data. I mean, basically just trust the government because they never misuse data. It doesn't exist, does it now? I mean, there's multiple examples of data misuse. I can give you one example where one police officer gave a woman that he liked information and data on the current men that she was seeing and on his background. And I mean, no, there's no misuse on the state level when it comes to personal data. I mean, you shouldn't just trust the state and the government. I personally wouldn't trust anybody who defends themselves with arguments like those. Here again, this is Werner Armand, the security speaker in the parliament. He says data protection must not be misunderstood and turned into a perpetrator's protection. But data protection is a foundational right that protects everyone, including perpetrators. And there's nothing to be misunderstood about it. And secondly, those permissions are to investigate and they are directed against either both those that are accused and those that we don't yet know. Now, the debate on surveillance is characterized by a very diffuse or surprising competition logic. It cannot be that... And here comes a football analogy. Champions League, regional league. Champions League and regional league. Other countries also have those surveillance capabilities and we're not going into competition with other countries, but we're going into competition with terrorists. So we need to apply methods that also the criminals use, but perhaps that isn't what he meant to say. So there's a strange interpretation of democracy. So here he states that security is more important than politics. I don't want to not have a political discussion about this and I do not understand why it needs a political agreement on this, or political compromise. There was a debate and then in 2017 elections, there were two topics in internal politics or internal security politics. So the FPO did not take any stance in this debate and he said he didn't want to draw this delicate topic into the election and he does not want to use it to distinguish from the conservatives. So here the ÖVP tried to make people feel good and they stated that... and they made it seem like they were against it, but they continued with it. There's still no transparency law under the new government. Before the elections they were opposition party and they were against it and they declared it to be the end of the legal law-based state. So here the topics Islam, migration, security and surveillance are mixed up in order to create insecurity and create emotions. This is Harald Wilinski, a high politician from ÖVP and he's an EU delegate. He wants to show that he is a security party but not a security party. He's in the opposition party and he speaks about the ÖVP, which was his opponent then and now is his coalition partner and he says that they want to be a security party and really they are only a surveillance party. After the National Security Council he stood before cameras because the left wing succeeded and all of those items in 8 months we took them off the table. With 220 people we submitted 18,000 comments and that was the biggest in Austria and with a long distance. Difficult for us was that this topic needed to be discussed in Austria. Now we've had multiple journalists that wrote about it in their newspapers. Even Boulevard papers were talking about it and we are very proud that we prevented 10 of those 12 topics and now it is after the elections and the whole thing is coming up again. You can remember my statement from a few months ago and when I said it's an attack on the security to not do this. If we don't give those abilities to police then we have a few chances to find the terrorist networks. He repeats the accusations that he made in the beginning of this talk and shows you to anybody who thinks that these kind of measurements are threatening democracy so he thinks all of you are potential terrorists. Since very shortly we have a new government and when the coalition papers were released we released an analysis of the 180 pages and we color coded their relevance towards cyber security and surveillance and we basically color coordinated by traffic lights. There is gaps in internet communication that are supposed to be closed. You basically can see the Trojan horse of surveillance lurking in the corners and that's not all. If you remember dieselgeras there is supposed to be a database where all of your reports from kindergarten over high school to university are supposed to be saved to then be made accessible for potential new employees in the future. For grownups this is supposed to be introduced within all e-learning classes and there being basically another bigger topic that is kind of above all of this. This is the third attempt to introduce a third Trojan horse run by the state and that raises the question is when have we actually finally won? When do they remember? The tough response to that is that civil rights are not defending themselves. In order to protect our civil rights our fundamental human rights we need to be aware, we need to keep up awareness and there only needs to be one moment of unawareness where that can be taken away from you. The FPU that back in the days was so much against surveillance is now in line. This is our new Minister of Inter-Defense Habat Kikkel. He's basically paraphrasing what the other guy was saying about how it's impossible that threats from outside have these capabilities technically speaking but the own government and the own police are basically not allowed to access the same kind of technologies to defend themselves. But they've also taken on another rhetoric. The one from the counterparty from the electoral campaigns. So in the first interview that he's given he was basically quoted saying if our security is doing well all of us are doing well. Funny enough the website itself that the news was released on is not even under HTTPS security yet. Oh the irony. And I mean obviously like what they're thinking about is once again the same bullshit that we've heard over and over again. To come to a conclusion of this we would like to talk about our language. The language that we used to have something to be put against the kind of political rhetoric that's been going on. So what we've tried to really make sure is make clear that this is a package of surveillance and we successfully managed to set these as a rhetoric of the media. This is not a security package this is a package of surveillance. These are all surveillance measurements. So this changing of the narrative was what I want to conclude on because that I think is the aspect of this story that is maybe potentially for all of the people who are interested in this or even in the private life is maybe the most useful. The changing of the narrative that we need to make possible. We only, only win the debate on mass surveillance. If we change the subject. There's a lot of other measurements that can be undertaken that are a lot better and more effective for security while also still maintaining our own privacy. We need a fact based politic that is still in line and in accordance with our fundamental civil rights. We need to have all these measurements being checked towards their accordance with our constitutional rights and that's what we can thank you on. Thank you for listening. Applause from the audience. I don't think we have time for questions but we have an assembly in hall three right beside EFF in Edri. We're here until day three and even on day four for a little bit and we are a donation based association. So please support us, we need it. Thank you so much for listening to the talk, The Language of the Surveillers by Thomas Lohninger, Werner Reiter and Angelika Adenzama. The translations today for you did... Always 10,000. ...and Merle. Send us feedback if you have any at C3 lingo or at under the Twitter hashtag C3T.