 Great. I have the fantastic honor and the great pleasure here to introduce to you someone without a presentation. Can you push that button please? Because something will be happening. This is Hendrik Eubler. I pronounce his right. Good enough. Good enough. And he's actually studying in London currently living there in the British environment and from that perspective in a kind of Gonzo journalism style, can I say? Tries to solve one little question. How did Great Britain, how did the UK end up in a situation where they had a snooper's charter? Presumably some of you don't know what the snooper's charter is, but the snooper's charter is actually about the sneaking charter that the British government decided to get into. He's going to give you an introduction to that kind of situation. It's a very uncomfortable situation and he will explore it from the inside out. Please give a warm welcome. Light the fuse. Put it in play. Let's roll. Hi, so I'm living in London. I'm studying there and I'm not a legal expert. I'm not a technical expert, but I do try my best to figure out why we end up with a situation where we have a surveillance law that many think of at maybe the craziest we have ever seen in democracy. But I want to start with this picture. Every other week on the way to university I encounter something like this. It's a mobile CCTV unit and if you haven't seen on top of it is a camera. And in London, there's approximately one camera per person living there, but there's still the need for a car with a camera on top of it. And this is only the old model. The new one has six cameras around it and more equipment inside. So for me, it was a pressing question. How can a country where this is the more or less unchallenged status quo publish and make a law about regulating and re-establishing the whole surveillance regime we've encountered the past years. So what I'm going to do in the next half hour is first give us a sense of what this new law is. It's so-called Investigatory Powers Act. And of course, why is it so dangerous? Why should we be concerned? And then maybe the more interesting part is I'm trying to explore how a democracy can pass such a law. How a democracy can end up at a situation where a majority supports such a law and learning from that experience how we could fight back, how we can educate our decisions. And of course, with the first part, we start. Then Home Secretary, Theresa May, introduced the bill in 2015, late 2015. And the bill really touches upon all different sorts of surveillance on hacking, interception of communication, access to data sets, internet data retention, encryption, and of course, it re-regulates supervision. And recently, the government described the bill as a bill that provides some of the strongest protections and safeguards anywhere in the democratic world with an approach that sets new standards for openness, transparency, and oversight. That's a bold statement. And we will see if that holds true in the next minutes. But because it's such an exceptional law, I will go over each of the different areas individually and we'll start with hacking. The government doesn't quite call it hacking. It calls it with a wonderful euphemism, equipment interference. And it's available to regional and national police, GCHQ, MI5, MI6, so the usual suspects. And the normal procedure, every warrant issued for hacking needs the approval of a so-called judicial commissioner. The person supposed to increase protection to prevent overreach. But that's very questionable, as I explain later when I get to the supervision part. And the reasons for which such a warrant can be issued is a very, very broad interest of national security, purpose of preventing crime, or interest of economic well-being as so far in the interest of national security. But you can see very, very broad terms you're dealing with here. And if you're not in situate on the British Isles, the British authorities might even issue a bulk warrant. So with a single warrant, give the ability or allow a certain agency to hack a whole number of devices in a regional or for a group of people. And one such warrant is obtained, the means with which the desired information can be extracted are unrestricted, any conduct which it is necessary to undertake. So the restrictions placed on the different agency are extremely little. That means, for example, if the British government believes that there's a terrorist group in Stockholm planning an attack on Great Britain, it could potentially issue a bulk warrant to hack devices in the whole city to find out this or to listen to this group. And this power of surveillance goes hand in hand with the next topic, which is Interception of Communication, which whether the who and how and when of the approving of the warrant is very similar to the hacking regime. And it's rather surprising after years of knowing or after years of reports being published that the different agencies misused their power of interception. In this new bill, this power was reinforced, reinstituted. And again, if one of the members of the communication is not in British Isles, we can issue a whole bulk warrant. But in this context, we also need to talk about encryption, because interception and encryption go hand in hand, of course. And the legislation listened to concerns that strong legal protections and support for encryption. No. Business can be asked to help circumvent encryption, actually. And it even goes so far as to say that if you are developing a certain kind of encryption technology, the government might give you a notice and then you need to inform the government of any plan changes for the future. So, of course, they have time to adapt their technology to your increase in technology. Interesting approach, I would say. The next part is the access to data set. And what this means is it's available to only the Secret Service, not to the police services, but it gives them the power to analyze and access public as well as private data sets and also create them or combine them to come up with new analyses. And that means, for example, the next time you visit your GP, you might need to consider that the information he has about you are also available to a government agency, or all the information you give to your fitness tracker might at the time be analyzed by a government agency. And there are some further limitations in the bill and the court of practice, but it explicitly states that many innocent people will be affected by this kind of analysis. Now, the danger of affecting many innocent people is also imminent to the next and maybe most outrageous part of the bill, which is the so-called internet connection records. And put simply there, data retention on steroids. If you visit any website that your internet connection providers now need to save for one year, the domain you visit, when you visit it, from which device, where, and further metadata. And messenger services might need to do the same. So also they save them, who you contacted, when, from which device, where that person was located. Now, this sounds like a very powerful tool and you might think that only a handful of people have access to this kind of surveillance technology. Well, I've listed all the departments having access to it. They're 48. And my favorites are the Department of Health, the Food Science Agency, the Gambling Commission, and of course, how what we do without it, if they hadn't had access to the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service and Health and Social Care Trust. So another comes to the best point, you don't need the approval of a judge. You just need the approval of a senior officer in your department to access this data. That's actually true. But if this data is allowed to yield such power, how are these powers controlled? We have this wonderful new investigatory powers commission, which unifies the work of three previous bodies. And those were commissions on different kinds of interception and different kinds of surveillance measures. This new commission unifies this work. And normally, one commissioner needs to give his approval for issuing a warrant, like the hacking warrant or the interception warrant. And this is the so-called double lock system, where not only the state secretary needs to approve a warrant, but also a judicial commissioner. Now, it's good to have something like a supervision, but we need to keep in mind the old men, sorry. All members are appointed by the prime minister. And I have very good faith in theories I made to only put people there, which you can trust. And I also doubt that this commission is able to exercise powerful scrutiny. In 2014, the Guardian published half a million authorizations for interception warrants were issued. And then if your commission has less, say, than 100 people working a normal 40-hour week, you only have several minutes to look over each warrant and assess whether or not to give its approval. So I have very, very high doubts this commission can exercise powerful scrutiny. Nevertheless, this commission was declared a great improvement over the previous situation. And other often cited improvements are increased transparency because you have codified these surveillance measures. See, it's improvement if you do something previously unlawfully, and now you have it by law. You also have increased safeguards because you have unified the legislation and control mechanisms. I doubt that's very helpful if these control mechanisms aren't very effective. And thirdly, accessing data without a warrant is no criminal offense. That's good. I mean, that's something, but should rather be the status quo instead of something we ask for, right? And lastly, the House of Lords in late summer was able to include another improvement, which I need to show you. I don't know who thinks can find it, the great improvement. It's this. It's the first sentence setting out that this bill may be used to interfere with privacy. So the great improvement was that they now have reinstated that this interferes with privacy and therefore have said that they want to respect privacy, and this is the first sentence, so it must be very important. Now, this gave you a very quick overlook of what the bill does, and I want to go to the next part, how this has an impact on myself, really. I spent lots of my time on the right building. It's the Sandhouse Library in London, and incidentally, it's also the building that inspired George Orwell for the Ministry of Truth in his favorite novel, 1984, and you can really see why. And I know I would be called an innocent citizen, I've done nothing to really weaken the state power. I wrote some articles against it like any student. I went to protests, I'm holding this talk, very rebellious, but because of the new regime, I don't know how I'm viewed. I might need to adapt my actions just because I think they have such a great power that it's reasonable for me now to adapt my actions, even though I've done nothing that should concern anyone. And precisely because this new law is no longer a measure against the threat of terrorism, where I had the moral excuse of, well, that doesn't affect me anyway. Now, this is really a measure against crime in all sorts of ways. And on top of all of that, we have the realization from Snowden that we cannot trust these agencies, specifically the British agencies to remain inside the boundaries of the law. And even though this law puts nearly no boundaries on them, I rather have them than not, but I can't trust the agencies to stay inside these boundaries. Now, internationally, you might say that this is just part of a larger trend, unfortunately, because we've seen, for example, Germany and other countries not taking the hint from Snowden to maybe rethink a surveillance regime, but rather reinforce the surveillance regime. But this law in particular is in scope and size unmatched by any other regime in a democratic country. Neither the Patriot Act nor the emergency measures in France include such far-reaching and intrusive measures. And I would say very ironically, this delegitimizes our criticism or the criticism of our state hats of other despotic and undemocratic regimes for censoring their internet, for surveying them, because a country in the midst of us is doing the very same, and China has already pointed to this law in defense of its own mechanisms and surveillance measures. Now, the reason may set this, if you remember, and I don't really agree with it, I think this is wrong, this doesn't really fit. I'd rather say this bill establishes the most intrusive surveillance measures anywhere in the democratic world, and it attacks the principles of openness, transparency, and oversight. But now having understood the extent of the bill, I wanna ask the next question, how can democracy pass such a law? And for that, I first wanna give you a quick look how the British democracy works. We have a parliament that's made up of the sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, where the sovereign is the queen, but she doesn't really interfere with politics. The last time she did it, she caused somewhat of a civil war. The House of Lords isn't really important either, it's really the House of Commons being the most important part in the system. And another really important point to understand is that the UK isn't governed by constitution, but rather by custom and common law. That means that there's not a single document that regulates who has how much power and where the boundaries, but it's rather a system of experience, of the expectation that different actors will behave the same as they did before. That is combined with the first pass to post electoral system. That means the whole UK is divided into different districts and to win the civil majority in these districts, represents the district and parliament, or in the House of Commons. And that has produced a very powerful House of Commons controlled by the Conservative Party, who got 37% of the votes, but 51% of the seats, and because there's not really any need for a two-thirds majority to change anything, that gives a total control over things. And that leads us to the next question, why was the law passed? Well, the simple answer is other laws were expiring and they had to pass a new law, and the previous bill was also blocked by then-collision partner, the Liberal Democrats. And now with the new government, they didn't need to rely on them anymore. Additionally, the Labour Party was in opposition and simply didn't put up a fight. It actually voted in favour of the bill. The bill passed with a majority that's rather reminiscent of North Korea. And the Labour Party really seemed to me, at least, distracted by its own power fights in the leadership to solicit its own party and lost the sight of this important fight. And later the House of Lords, the second chamber, didn't really improve much. Well, this is only the meta-analysis, and I wanted to rather understand why does the Conservative Party think that such law is needed? Why does a democracy think this law is a sensible measure? And the first thing to understand, I think this is my first hypothesis, is that the political culture in the UK is based on trust. If you have a political system in which there's no constitution, in which for hundreds of years, for centuries, things stayed the same because they always stayed the same, trust in the system and trust in the diligent behaviour of your opponent is essential to the working of the state. That, of course, also leads to a long tradition of thinking, if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide, because if everybody is behaving so in a way to preserve the democracy, you have nothing to hide from it because everybody is just behaving in a good way and trying to do his so-and-so best. Secondly, the political system puts the focus on other topics. We have the two large parties, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, who are able to win certain districts based on this old kind of US two-party system where cities' Labour Party wins and rural regions' Conservative Party wins. And then there are some other parties, some regional parties, like the Scottish National Party or Northern Irish Party, and they succeed in winning their districts and their regions. And their focus obviously lies on representing this region, of representing their local communities. But what this doesn't do is say there's 10 to 15% of the people really interested in these topics, really angry about these laws, where they have no way of being represented in Parliament, if in all the different districts they only have 10% of the votes. That way, they can't really have a platform in Parliament. And thirdly, especially in this year, all the attention, the media attention, and also our attention was dominated by the Brexit referendum and the US election. Maybe incidentally, the bill was passed between the high time of the Brexit referendum and the US election, but that's only, I can only guess, probably in incidents. But what this created was that the public outcry that ensued was too late. Only after the bill was already passed, there was a petition of more than 204,000 people to challenge it again. That was too late. But no one has been, had been listening to the debate except for a very small circle of people. Now, I think you have now a good idea of why the law passed and I wanna put forward some ideas what we can learn from it, how we can find against it. Well, first of all, it's a simple solution. It's a technological solution. We can use VPNs to protect against the interconnection records. We can prepare against hacking. We can use encryption impossible, and so on and so forth. These are measures to have been long tested and most of you, I guess, are able to do just these things but I don't think that this is a long-term solution. And I don't think it's a solution for all of society. It works for me, it works for us, but it doesn't work for all of society because if we're honest, most of the people will not invest hours and hours in putting up these systems. So what we really need to come up with is a system that works for all, a response that doesn't only protect us but puts the discussion on a different playing field. And the first thing is, go to the courts. Some weeks ago, I think, I hope many of you have heard of it, the ECJ rejected in a great decision a large part also of this bill, even though it wasn't challenged directly in court, the infamous part of the interconnection records will most likely not stand up to the decision of the European Court of Justice. And there are certain rights, we have those rights and we need to tell it, we need to go to the courts and defend them. Either ask or give money to people who do it for us because these decisions affect all of society. Secondly, and maybe we need to take some time to explain this point, we are currently in a position where many people want more security and we have many people who have come up with the idea that more access to data will lead to more security. Now, I can genuinely believe that sometimes more access to data would have prevented a murder or would have prevented that sort of crime. But once we're in this narrative, we lose the sight for other forms of increasing our security. And I suggest we try to a tier strategy. Once trying to decrease this will of increasing failed security because I normally feel quite secure and maybe we just need to make everybody else feel more secure to end this vicious circle. And maybe a second part, something that's not often discussed is maybe we can come up with different ideas how to stimulate this desire, how to increase security while not sacrificing our digital rights. And the next point comes back to the point of trust in a democracy. How do we view government intrinsically? If I have many discussions with friends in London, yes, they criticize this bill but they have such a trust in the government that they won't misuse it that there's not really any progress in the discussion. So one of the I think major challenges is for us to make it possible to view the state as a threat and a delusion actor because it must be both and we must be able to raise the first and say this could be a threat and also use the state in other scenarios. And this is very difficult to paint not a good or a bad picture. And this is a very difficult challenge we may all need to engage in. How exactly I'm open to any suggestions. Next on list, I think we need to make our systems more representative. What I said earlier about the UK system is that some parties are over represented and other opinions are under represented. And making the systems more representative is the very easy solutions to give critics a larger platform. But what it also does is give, if we are already chipping away our substantial rights at least the majority is doing it. I think that's something we should all agree on that not 37% should be allowed to do it should be at least the majority. And of course, going back to the critics I don't think if we give critics a larger platform that these kind of laws would be passed. And lastly, I think, I especially need to work on my attention because I was blinded by the Brexit referendum by the US election. It really sucked me in it. It was a spectacle, it was a media spectacle and I like many others lost the side of the things around us for not really here but for a very long time. And I certainly have to learn to diversify my attention and also to diversify my actions. And this is maybe then the challenge to also make others diversify their attention and not be blinded by these spectacles we see nowadays in the international media. That's it. I hope you've got some good ideas from this, some suggestions and learn some interesting lessons about this new bill. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hendrik. This is once again a situation whereby we have to reboot the system. You actually, the moment you came up with the why question I was immediately thinking about why do dogs lick their balls? And the answer there is because they can. So you get in a situation that the system is rolling out and no one actually can do anything about it seems. Yeah, I think the incentives in the system are laid out in a way that it develops in this direction. It doesn't need to, but if we don't challenge the incentives the development is imminent. So this is a call for action as well again? You're taking action as a journalist, I understood. I'm writing as long as I find time for Nets4Tik.org. I also did an internship there. I really enjoyed it. All right guys, go there to check out these publications. We have some questions from the audience I suppose. Firstly, practically try to take this door as exit. Please, sir, go ahead. Thank you. I have two questions, first question. You mentioned that they have to detain the domain. Is that to understand in a technical way that they have to domain the domain name like DNS or is it also for IP addresses? So if I set up my website just on an IP address will that be detained or not? I wish I could answer the question. I hear yes from here. I guess I know that the IP addresses are safe. So I guess this is, because I didn't end with it. They say everything is safe. Yes, exactly. Everything before the last slash. So I suppose it's just using HTTP data. Don't do other protocols like what I know, Bitcoin or something like that? I'm sorry, I wouldn't know the answer. That's maybe something we have to get to know in court. Something, some of these things, as I said, are no challenge by the ECJ. I wish I could give you a better answer. Okay, and my second question is, I would listen to your opinion about how do you think we as outsiders as European Union or even maybe even far should react? What do you think about, especially about sanctions? Could we use sanctions to influence UK? Because as I see as an outsider, I don't have any rights and they can inspired me at all. So I think that's harmful for me and maybe some of my government would put some sanction on UK, it could influence them or whatever. I don't think that that could work in a positive manner. Because of many, many motivations. And one of them is that instead of having a positive effect, I would rather see a retaliatory effect of these sanctions. I don't think that the British government, just because they have these measures and the majority of things that they're good, the problem isn't that only they lead things as a good measure, but we have certain poets from Yugov saying that the majority of people actually supported the bill. That doesn't mean they support, they know what's in it. But I think it's more important to change public opinion instead of just putting pressure on the state system. Well, but wouldn't that have some pedagogic influences of the people too? And also, I mean, well, let's think we're making easily some sanction to Russia and I think they are, yeah, how to tell? I mean, I think that should be, at least for the outsiders, some soft sanctions. I mean, they don't have to make the bad things, but how about the tax as a valence tax? Because I mean, for all the security or let's think arm, Armisen UK company and why not putting some little money on top of that? Because I don't know whether there is some things put in which will wiretap my mobile phone because I have an arm process or so. I think as outsiders, we should also be active in this way. And also, of course, in our own choice. Can you just get to the question and otherwise? No, the second one was just kind of an idea. It's a suggestion, yes. But thank you. We have a question from outer space. I noticed. Yeah, the first question was, are there foreign services or companies widely used by UK citizens and not conforming with the UK laws? Are they blocked? Well, first, there are some special regulations on foreign businesses. For example, it's not possible to issue public warrants to foreign businesses. Only case-by-case issues is possible. And there is some talk of definitely fines and other measures that government is able to take if these companies do not oblige to the government, if they are given notice. It was another question. Yes? Yeah, you're born from space, I mean. Yeah, the next question was, similar law just got passed, parliament in the Netherlands and is due to be treated in the Senate. What advice do you have on exposing the lies governments used to get these types of laws passed? Everything before the slash or after the slash. That's the answer, I think. Let's take the other question there. May I? Because we can discuss this for hours. A question, a direct one. We don't have that much time. OK, it is a direct question. You talked about a more representative system that would help to impede with such laws. But I have a slight fear that also more representation could also be used as a tool for populists, because as we know, the prime minister, that we all know are not that much in favor of, was elected democratically. So what kind of more representation do you mean and how would you try to find a way that populists couldn't use this tool? First, I was not trying to use the word making it more democratic, because it very much depends on how you define your democracy. And with representative, I meant making it more representative of national opinions, of the national distribution of opinions. So right now, though, you can make an error index of how many votes did that party get, how many percentage votes, and how many seats, or how many percentage of seats did it get in parliament. And in the UK, this measure is a 44% error. So 44% of the seats are somewhere, so not in accordance with a public vote. And yes, that means parties that didn't get into parliament or that got there and have no more percentage seats as votes. And if you add up all the differences, you get it to a really high number. I think if the public is on our side on defending our rights, and I think this is something we need all to engage in and make it possible, and this is the case, we shouldn't fear populist, because then it's a majority opinion. But more importantly, I think if we have, or if parliament can be a platform for parties that challenge these things on a constructive level, we can magnify the impact of the criticism to a larger extent than just populist reframing the security narrative. I have the question here. Please, sir. Thank you. You mentioned that one of the things we should work with is making sure that people actually understand the privacy impact of the Charger. So would you agree that privacy has gotten out of fashion, and what do you suggest we do about it? I wouldn't say that privacy has got out of fashion, but rather people view it differently. So I think most people have the same idea of privacy if we think of an analog world, the same sense of privacy they had 50 years ago when they're in the house and they don't want someone looking through their windows. I think the challenge is much more to translate this sense of privacy to a world where there isn't this idea of, OK, I can see someone looking through my window. I don't think as much that the will to have a private sphere has changed, but rather that the idea of what my private sphere is has changed. And the only thing that helps is educating about the technologies we use and making people aware of the impact of their technologies. Good. Do we have time for more questions? I think, yes, the lady, please. Hello. So given the prevailing political atmosphere in the United Kingdom, Brexit means Brexit, red, white, and blue, Brexit, all of this nonsense, what do you think are the realistic chances of Theresa May taking the slightest notice of the recent ECJ decision and depending on your answer, what does this tell us, both about the campaign such as it was against the IP bill and what we do about it now? One of the positive scenarios is definitely that the government will say, well, we don't want the ECJ interfering with us. We don't know there was a decision by the ECJ, but because it was a Brexit, we reinforce our right to make our own laws. And they give it a 50-50 chance, depending on how fast Brexit is. You're much more of an optimist than I am. I'm sorry, I have to wrap up this. Thank you, Hendrik, for your fantastic speech here.