 citizens. Thomas Looninger and Alexander Jadilek from Vienna are experts in that field of work, and they will introduce the current state of this topic. Both of them belong to Aka Furat, which has now got a new name, which we'll put in later, and it's basically focusing on privacy laws of citizens of the country. Thomas has already done many, many presentations on this topic, in Belgium, also in the parliaments. Alexander is part of epicenter.org as a lost lawyer, and the stage is yours. And welcome everyone to the translation. This translation is done by Nini and Starfish, and we welcome you. All right. A little bit of January topics, though a working group on... In 2017, we reached our highly set goals. So we were thinking, what do we do now? Are we going to work on or are we just going to stop now? But there was this Mr. Snowden, and this made us realize that we have to move on. We are working on many other topics in data retention now, including the state surveillance law, as well as net neutrality and other issues. And so we started... We changed our name because we thought that data retention is not enough to tell what we're actually aiming for. The new work epicentrum works wants to show that it's like shock waves through all of society, the topics that affect us in this field. We're going to work for basic and human rights in Austria. And we have a lot of stickers with the slogan, civil society works, because we think it's a recipe for success that if we work with support from the citizenship, for example, when we work against the secret service, but also with telecom organizations. This talk is not only about epicenter, but also about net politics in Austria and generally. For example, there have been many things going on there. We now have a regular event called Netzpolitische Abend, net political evening, which is happening once a month in Vienna. We learned in Berlin how this works at the Netzpolitische Bier, and a group of people found itself to replicate the same thing in Vienna. And we have always had a full house, really every single time, for very different kinds of talks. For example, what the unions are doing when it comes to consumer protection rates, but also more core things. Without any structure, we're just a discussion room. There is no statutes or organization behind. Just join if you ever happen to be there in Vienna for the right time. At the same time, last year, there was also the founding of the Chaos Computer Club Wien. Yet another try of founding a Chaos Computer Club in Vienna. There was a Chaos Neigruppe in Vienna. There have been a break, but now there's a new group like this. The Case Computer Club in Austria has been active with consultation by the parliament, but also pulled off a very interesting event called Privacy Week. Austria didn't have a bigger net politics event than one evening event, and this changed with the Privacy Week this year. We had stellar talks, and I really want to thank everyone who worked together for making this happen. We're looking forward that this works next year as well. And another thing that I definitely have to mention, a Jugendhakt, which you from Germany probably know. It's the concept that you youngsters teach how to program how to code with mentoring systems. And I was at the first time where that happened in Austria. And now we have this going on in Austria with the same concept that you guys had in Germany, and I've heard nothing but good things going on with that. And if you have any youngsters around you that are interested in like sending them there, it's a lot of fun. It's really good for them. All right, let's get to the hot facts now. The most important law this year was the Staatsschutzgesetz, the state safety law. We've been talking about the problematic aspect of this law in Austria for quite some time now. And because of a lot of privacy issues, this is something that we really need to pay attention to and not approve of. Over 30,000 people signed our petition to watch this law and not make it pass the way it's been constructed at the moment. We've done a lot of creative things to work upon this topic. And I'm very thankful for everyone involved in working on this. The bigger picture is something very simple. What we see here is the parliament building. And what we did was we took balloons and put a security camera watching, rising high into the sky. And with this very small but very creative concept, we really made it big in the news because this is something that works visually very well. Unfortunately, politicians did not think about reconsidering the way that they're putting this law forward. So we worked on it again and did something different and portrayed on buildings of political importance related to this law, slogans that we are basically creating new secret services. And we also portrayed Edward Snowden's face on the buildings with projectors. And it was one of the very few snowy nights in Austria. And it was very, very effective and it worked really well. But the law unfortunately got passed. What we're now seeing is the parliament making the decision about the law that they've been trying to prevent from passing in the way that it was formed because it highly interferes with personal privacy of Austrian citizens. We basically are watching with four perspectives into the parliament and they're trying to be part within the decision making process and want to try to show who is making what list, who's making what decision. Normally it takes five months to figure out who is making what decision. But this time around within one week we figured out who in which position of which party voted on this issue and this matter. And if they voted on their own conscience or what their faculty like their faction of the party would want them to vote on. The law is publicized by now and it will be instated publicly by July in the past year, so July 2016. For the second time in history we filed constitutional complaint. And in order to do so we need one third of the parliament to support our claim. And we got basically what happened was we got two parties to get involved in this, so we got to file the constitutional complaint which is going to be dealt with in 2017 and we hope that this will go our way. And now we're switching over to the second project, second subject, which is the Bundes-Trojaner, which is a Trojan Malware state-based. I would like to say a warm welcome to Werner Reiter, who unfortunately cannot be with us. So the Bundes-Trojaner is what they named, what in Germany is the State Trojaner, which is a straight Trojan horse. And it's something that we're fighting because we see it as a very problematic law. A little bit of short note on the history of the subject. We know about a leak that the text of the law was in the drawers of the ministry. But it was only brought forward in 2016 after the attacks in Brussels. And if we take into consideration how long it takes until something gets out of the drawer, normally it takes up to 83 days. But on this law it took nine days after the attacks of Brussels for that to be brought forward from the drawers of everything. It's a classical case of laws of being forward based on action that is taking place in other places where they're taking emotional, basically emotional reasoning to bring something forward and make something pass that normally maybe wouldn't pass. The ministry basically argued that the terrorists of Paris through the network of PlayStation 4 communicated through that network. And this story was something that was basically fake news that was revealed in 2015 and in 2016 explained in the ministry as the reasoning for why this law is necessary. So basically they're stating a case based on fake news. I don't really want to go into depth on the law level of these kind of things. There's an unreasonable attack on privacy and data security that's happening through this snooping software, this surveillance software, which causes problems within. It starts with a question of who is programming this kind of software. And I mean, we can be sure that within the ministry nobody is doing that. So you've got to hire companies that start doing that, phishing companies, hacking teams who also cater to totalitarian systems. You've got to buy on the black market. You've got to pay tax money into very, very fishy fields and industries. You have to target critical security issues when you're using this kind of software. So on the one hand you have, you're wanting to use this kind of software. And then at the same time you also have the same ministry who's responsible to be protective in the same kind of field. And upon asking about this issue, we only got evading answers. Another point that I want to raise is that searching a whole system. So if you want to look at all the data on one computer. So that's what they refer to as online searching, but it technically goes against the constitution of the state. So online surveillance of data and messaging data that is unencrypted is basically against the constitution of Austria. Yet it's still going on with the laws that they already have. So there's a certain separation that the Austrian government is claiming exists, but within the text of the law this separation does not exist. So they've been making exceptions, which so and all of this obviously remembers us of the thought police of George Orwell's 1984 computer systems, smartphones, our devices are super personal, highly personalized devices that know more than our actual partners that we share our lives with. There was a lot of critical voices reviewing what was going on with this kind of law and there's a lot of state institutions as well that also criticized these kind of passing of laws, these kind of working of how surveillance is already taking place. And we're really proud that we are one of the first few who entered their own suggestion of what should be changed, of how this should be addressed. We've talked to a lot of people and a lot of people have very very critical thinking about this. There's a lot of private citizens also involved. This is the list. There's 56 official statements that were brought forward and now I want to show a short video. That's the state hack into our smartphone soon. Will they look after all of our steps? This should be made possible by a state law change officially to be more efficient in the fight against terrorism. The state should be allowed to install software on smartphones and other devices of suspects without them knowing. The Justice Ministry is therefore decorated today with a Trojan horse. It is symbolic for the so-called Bundesztriana, which is a software in order to surveil on people at least according to possibly implemented law. The activist from Aka Vorrad Österreich for the normal citizen, this would mean to be surveilled down to the underwear. Also, a professional person will know when they are hacked and will be able to use surveillance tools. The state has a state of interest in this case. The state will now be interested in surveilling and making sure that surveillance works on their citizens, which also would be available to third people. At the same time as their protest in front of the door, the Justice Minister is giving an interview. In that way, apparently the law is not really useful, but we're going to work on it. This happens very rarely that the minister says, well, maybe we haven't talked too much about our law. We're almost in tears because of so much honesty. We didn't come to tears. For us, it was immediately recognizable that even though the Justice Minister was very insightful, this was a ministerial draft, but it didn't get moved over to the whole government, which would then be able to put it forward to the parliament because they figured out that this would be nonsensical. The changes that were made afterwards were not really detailed. On an EU level, we're talking about anti-terrorism laws and security and anti-terrorism organizations should be able to use these kinds of tools, investigative tools for covered surveillance, including electronic surveillance. We will stay alert, but now we're going to talk more about net neutrality. As said, this EU anti-terrorism directive is a directive, so it doesn't immediately get put into national law, but national parliaments have to form their own laws after this directive. This means we can fight. Only in two cases, we were able to stop the law with good arguments and a little bit of pressure from the street. In this case, this worked with the long list of very many people that raised their arguments, and in this case, the politics listened to it. It shows that democracy works, but also that an actor is necessary that points out these issues. We are only able to show the tip of the iceberg, but all of the administrative tasks and also the legal work is very necessary. If we move on to an European topic, net neutrality, we had a great success in August after three years of campaigning. The new rules for net neutrality for the internet in Europe are fixed. In my other talk today with Chris from Lagat-Katatudu.net, we have explained what is inside this law. Here I'm going to show you only very quickly, because we in Austria were a key actor to make this large change possible. Safety Internet in the EU was developed mainly in Austria, and we had, for example, this demonstration with many, many groups that have not only in Vienna, but also in Riga, where the European Regulation Authority has its seat. We came over and brought the first box of 100,000 comments. There were almost half a million contributions in six different EU languages. In most of these consultation processes, there were only a couple of hundred, mainly contributions, but this time this was very different. We due to some technical issues, not all of the emails, they were able to receive all of the emails. Last time, the last fight, we won with faxes, and also this time we had to revert to some old technology. Now we have some form of phrasing, and now we're moving over to making sure that this is actually implemented. Just like with data security and ePrivacy, we're working on the practical implications, especially where providers are actually not following the new net neutrality regulations. For example, in Austria, the mobile provider 3 was, if you look on this graph, this is the Austrian Broadcasting Station's online service, and after you have used it for quite some time and have hit your limit, then it drops the traffic and you're unable to watch it. But if you have used a provider that is part of the 3-mobile TV plan, then you are still allowed to use it even though you have used all of your data volume. This is hurting the net neutrality principle, and so we fought against this and put public pressure onto it, and the mobile provider changed their plans, which in some cases led to 1700% more data volume for everyone. The same principle, after the same principle, providers also worked in Slovenia and the Netherlands where net neutrality was implemented beforehand. We're going to work on all of these issues in the future. If you ever see any violations of net neutrality, please turn to us for respectminet.eu, where you are able to add your new case. If you see it on your own internet access, just put it there, and this is our crowd source to-do list in the field. Also, if this is going well, we're looking for an economics person for our team, because this is a part where you also have to make an argument from an economic standpoint of view. So moving on to the next topic, transparency law, which is something that seems to be a burning topic, a continuously burning topic in Austria, which Austria is one of the few countries that still has a certain kind of law that makes you able to keep things very secretive and private, which is part of the Austrian constitution, which is rare within Europe countries. And what we're trying to work on is creating a transparent state, however, not a transparent citizen. We want to have a see-through democracy, but not see-through citizens within this democracy. We have a group of people that do amazing work on this kind of field, and they raise great awareness on this topic, and we really want to thank them. You can see one of the authors who's working on this issue portrayed on the slides right now. There is a draft that at this moment is being put forward, but it's not publicly accessible. So in parts, what we already know is that is something that's going to make stuff worse than better. Everything that's considered in relation to how company practices, well, basically how companies get the actual job. That's something that's being impacted by the way that this law is being framed. And the question right now is, are we sticking to the 19th century secretive act or are we creating a transparency law that will make the state more comprehensible for its citizens and democratic members? This law last December was dealt with in the constitutional ministry, but it's still not part of the daily agenda of the parliament. We're sticking on this subject with the colleagues of a forum who's also working on this issue, and we're trying to continuously break it forward. We're now talking about copyright laws. Gunther Attinga brought forward a copyright law that is disastrous. One of the aspects that's the most disastrous is called the upload filter, which forces any host of a website to check whatever they upload against copyright laws, which basically means that technically Google with Content AG knows about any kind of cultural stuff happening around the world and publicizing that they can't really do that anymore because that's basically infringing copyright law in the understanding of how the EU is trying to put this forward with what Gunther Attinga is trying to do. The minister for media is at least partially in favor of that, but the most important part for him is how press support and media support will be handled in the future. We would hope that this would be put on new feet and reinvented totally. Currently it seems like Austria is producing its own problems and boulevard media by financing it, but for example fake news, it would be a good idea to buy in funding in the future to reducing fake news. The invite email to the media ministry's consultation includes many, many people. There's many, many laws that are being implemented at the same time and most people don't have the energy to work on all of them, so it's very important to get knowledge about all of these things and see what you're actually interested in. In yellow you see on the invite other ministries and state bodies. On the green people on the list are the copyright industry and in blue that's civil society and everyone else, starting at whatever. So in green we have the people who are the actual rights holders and in blue we have the industry itself. The law, the law that Ertinger has inherited us before he was moved over as commissioner for the budget of the EU. Whenever Ertinger does something stupid he will get promoted and this is one of the most problematic laws in the net politics field including the upload filters for all platforms from Wikipedia to Moodle e-learning platforms. We need to put this away. This may not exist in Europe because you need the censoring infrastructure of China to actually put this in place and then it can be used for other things as well. We also work for a unified fair use. There should be some forms of limitation to copyright and there should be including the modern forms for example if you make a gift this should be in a fair use manner possible to do and the third thing we're working on is the ancillary right for press publishers which has already been in place in Spain and Germany and which has massively failed there and we shouldn't put it on an EU level. Next topic is heat which Alexander is going to take over. For the last block we're going to talk about the project heat the handbook of evaluation of anti-terror legislation in Austria. This is a work that we have worked on for the past year and there was many many contributors who has written it. We're gonna I'm gonna the ACA for that or now AP Center works has started all of this and the research institute the Center for Digital and Human Rights in Vienna I've worked together for this it was financed by the IFA by some random grant in Austria and with 25 000 euros of crowdfunding. Why did we do that? We are losing the war. We sometimes win a battle but and we also argument all of the intricate legal stuff and and we also move over to constitutional laws but in the bigger picture we're losing the war. We want to have a effect based security policy. We don't need ad hoc nitric legislation and for that we need transparency about how effective all of the measures put in place actually are. So we looked at all of the laws. The fact is that the need for a law has to be evaluated by the state already before putting the law in place. This happens rarely in the field of surveillance. We wanted our arguments that we put forward to the courts already heard during the legislative process. We were in contact with a member of the government and he was like well why do we have to look into this already during the lawmaking process the constitutional court will look into it anyways later on. In this case we were able to talk the ministry into thinking about these issues beforehand but usually this doesn't happen and he is supposed to be a total balance of surveillance. This is a picture of the federal German constitutional court in Karlsruhe during the data retention directive implementation in Germany. They were the constitutional court in Karlsruhe during the EU directive implementation case in Germany for data retention was introducing the word comprehensive surveillance footnote evaluation and so it exemplifies the need of the state to think about the total sum of surveillance that hits a single person. We have an interdisciplinary angle and we're not only working first of all from the law side but also from the technological and from the humanities side. Just got the 20 minute warning so I'm trying to keep in time so we've taken this interdisciplinary attitude and angle on this and we've been trying to work with everyone together and I don't want to leave them out who've been involved in this project. On the left Professor Kreisel from Vienna for Social Security who's a social scientist and wrote the social scientist chapter of the charter. So basically the way that we addressed this we started asking questions started asking questions to the governments in Austria it's possible to bring forward questions towards the parliament which we thankfully could do due to small parties within the oppositions. Basically which brought also from like one of the things that was brought forward is that there was no children's software that was put to use within the Austrian society through the government which was something that was never done through them yet however we have a leaked document from the state police which is from 2008 which clearly states the internet surveillance through key logging software which was asked for which would brought forward to the state officials and the courts and so obviously the government had no idea what their actual policemen were doing or they just lied to us we're not sure of this. So we looked at a few laws which laws did we look at there's obviously the police state securities law which is one of the most important ones which was instated this year which is a law that enhances the possibility of surveillance and this is something that we up to this point have not had and now we're waiting on the constitutional courts whether or not this is actually something that they can pass and they can take into actions. I would like to show you some graphics this is one that we created what we've tried to do is mapping basically what we've tried to do is bring forward offences and we've tried to figure out what kind of ministry is getting involved in clearing these offences and what is being used what kind of surveillance is being put forward and what kind of offence do I need to have in order to get the kind of state surveillance that I want to have. Do I for example need a judge passing a law do I only need a state attorney getting involved these kind of things so we kind of made kind of made clear if you have something like so damage of property property damage like what am I going to do with it how do I get an actual surveillance warrant issued if this is a terrorist act all of a sudden this doesn't really matter anymore it's not just a damage of property it's obviously a terrorist act which creates a completely different kind of justice scenario which means that I don't even need a judge anymore to pass that kind of surveillance warrant. So what we want to show now is the the weight of justification you're all invited to download this document take a closer look at it it's it is about the weight of justification you have the criminal act and the further I moved into the pre-field of the actual criminal act there is a much much bigger weight of justification the law government needs to give facts and give reasons of why these kind of laws need to already apply this kind of like in this kind of early stages and the weight back like in those early stages is much much higher so this is about a fair trial so this graphic shows the more people are affected by a directive like data retention for example it means the whole public of Austria but already within Funktzenauswertung where you basically extract the data of all the people whose phone numbers are within this kind of radar point that already is a very big group of people which obviously is not the whole public but it is a large number of people so what we did was we looked at the relevant judiciary issues and we also looked at how it was dealt with within Germany and within the European courts because obviously those affect us and these are good exemplary cases and we look at what kind of measures are available to security officials and which are the ones that they actually use like what kind of technologies for example the current law that they passed is obviously it's possible to extract geodata geolocation data but it also goes as far as actually listening and we've also tried to go into sociologic theory to really look at surveillance theory of surveillance and what it does within the society structure and we know that with surveillance conformity is something that is being enhanced highly we also statistically want to understand what kind of surveillance directives are being put forward which ones are rejected but I mean we want to have an understanding of it but obviously this is a difficult case because part of it is always a bit in the secretive field of this kind of lawmaking but one of the central parts is the catalog of criteria what you see in really tiny letters is an overview of the kind of criteria that we've tried to work out all of this is not completely new we did not develop the wheel anew but we've added a few things that we want to zoom into so that we could still have a few areas like time for questions in austria based on article 18 we have the principle of legalizing norms need to be comprehensible norms cannot be against the constitution only if the normal citizen of austria can understand the norms and act upon these norms the laws can be passed and especially within the police state security law this is something that needs to be highly questioned so there's the formal aspect if it is not even fulfilled another aspect is the actual control of a judge is that something that that is given or not so that's part of the legal protection when it comes to the kind of laws it's obviously possible that evidence cannot be proved like be put forward within a case of justice and in the court of law but at the same time it's the question of if you can still base your judging and ruling on that why are we doing this for who are we doing this and i mean obviously for the people who work within the ministries but at the same time it's also for all the politicians it's for all the civil civilians it's for everyone who works within state security as well and this overview will show you how it affects our fundamental laws in austria this is a graph of how the constitutional court in austria handles basic rights infringements and if they are allowed or not we the next steps are making a printing version we are very glad that professor chau kind of touch her from the united nation he is the special envoy on the private sphere has written the preamble to our text we will want more transparency and we will act to make newer versions of this document as we move forward we would also like to do the same thing on an EU level and hope that our book is used both for judicial analysis but also in constitution in court cases we also want to work on some form of legal measure that is currently used to evaluate certain topics when it comes to the forming of law including gender and and environmental issues but not basic rights issues and we want to like restructure all of that and are supported with that from lawyers in the so we now want to back it up and really kind of understand of what is our understanding what's our responsibilities our responsibility is a platform we're a platform for protest civil protest within relation to our constitutional basic fundamental laws and if you ever want to get involved if you think that you can do a better job than we do our tools are all open source as well as our tool for contributions we believe that not politics and activism will only work if we have an actual community of shared community of shared culture of transparency and I mean everyone is only cooking with water you know and if you think that stuff looks a bit heavy-headed or just overwhelming it's an amazing feeling to be part of it and in the most cases we can make a very big difference on the topics that we work on and there's so many that we need to work on on the I think that on the European base up to this point we've never had this many issues and laws that we're dealing with these kind of issues with net neutrality copyright infringement all of these things there's so much happening and we're expecting that next year within Austria there's going to be something forward a law proposal for a copyright reform if you want to participate you want to take part there's whatever you can do your program or your graphic design you want to put your your talent forward there's so much that we need and we have a small office but without the volunteers there's literally very little that we could do nothing would be possible no press release would be being put forward in public without the volunteers that contribute so this is why I think it's so important that we make transparent how we work so honestly we live of your donations our only way to secure political independence is by financing ourselves through the donations from all of you from the private sector and we would be excited if you would donate obviously and be a member of us thank you very much for your attention and we're now moving on towards the Q&A questions please hi Tom hi Alex amazing talk thank you so much thanks so much for your amazing work two comments that will lead me to a question so you keep talking about the fight the conflict charged situations with lawmakers in a different talk we heard about how the FBI globally hacks to take out child pornography rings and I mean there is the cases where the state needs to have these kind of methods and methodology how can we have a consultative process where you can on one hand where you can have a collaborative process that where the lawmaker can make pass losses with you guys in the kind of balanced ways with you guys and the way that it works in England with the kind of white papers where they can bring forward a draft for a law that actually takes all the different perspectives into account that's a very good question it's not the answer all right so we try to naturally create a constructive base for a discussion that includes all parties in all angles and all the aspects and we're not only criticizing of course we really try to when when ministries are doing a great job really also talk about that so I mean in order to create something that will work for every one of the civil society is important to also point out when stuff is going well so I mean there's a lot of stuff that is being discussed previously but I mean we are also very hesitant to be part of these kind of cuddling parties I mean there's there's circles if you if you keep that kind of policy like you'll be privy to all basically all drafts of what kind of laws will be passed but this is not what we think we don't think this kind of discussion and basically lobbyism will create the kind of environment that we will want to work in we don't think it's healthy to be owned by the politicians in this kind of perspective we've had offers of entering ministry referendums based on the fact that afterwards we would not be allowed to speak about what was being discussed and what we talked about this is not how we think in a democratic society these kind of things should be discussed so that's why we do make decisions on what kind of contact we want to have and what we don't want to have now we're very sorry outside oh we have one more time like a little bit more time for a one quick question I'm interested how the constitutional court in Germany has influence on Austrian things and how you can argument things in Austria then many things are quite common between Germany and Austria but the constitution is the constitution is not one of these fields for that you have to say that the Austrian highest court or constitutional court and and the German one are somehow friends they have some form of closeness in in like constitutional history and oftentimes we look to Germany and see how it goes in Germany I trust in Karlsruhe the German constitutional court it is some form of guardian of basic rights also in Luxembourg the the european court of justice and at this point they turn off the audio for us um we will