300 issues of EDRi-gram

*That seems like rather a lot. More than I expected.

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EDRi-gram - SPECIAL EDITION!

fortnightly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe

EDRi-gram 300 (13.10) - Digital rights news from 2025, 20 May 2015

Read online: https://edri.org/edri-gram-300-digital-rights-news-2025/

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We are celebrating the 300th edition of EDRi-gram! This special edition
includes articles from the brightest stars in the digital rights
universe, reflecting on the potential future threats and opportunities
for digital civil rights in 10 years.

1. Foreword
2. Preface
3. Digital rights in 2025 – same problems
4. The road ahead: Marching backwards into the future
5. A letter from the future
6. Social Media Platform™: “Removal of contents necessary for user safety”
7. PM Lane Fox reinstates modding
8. Profiling to solve Europe's demographic crisis?
9. Cash is for criminals and paedophiles
10. New privacy impact assessment of Danish e-government services
11. Neuro-implant hack reveals secret deals between health insurers and
employment agencies
12. First court hearing of “Schrems vs the European Commission” case
13. The year 2025: A new hope for privacy
14. The red pixel curtain
15. 2025 – what are the odds for a copyright crisis?
16. Dangerous Data
17. ENDitorial: Whistleblowers are History
18. Recommended Action
19. About

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our
citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. This
government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.”
- David Cameron

Press release: Counter-Extremism Bill - National Security Council
meeting (13 May 2015)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/counter-extremism-bill-national-security-council-meeting

by Andreas Krisch

The EDRi-gram is the fortnightly newsletter by European Digital Rights
(EDRi), a not-for-profit association of digital rights organisations
from across Europe, defending human and civil rights in the field of
information and communication technology. The EDRi-gram shares good news
on positive developments in the defence of civil liberties and exposes
and raises awareness of attacks on freedom of expression and privacy.

The EDRi-gram collates privacy advocates’ news from across Europe.
EDRi’s members, observers and guest authors frequently contribute with
reports and analysis from their home countries.

The first issue came out on 29 January 2003, and since then, 40 issues
of the newsletter have been published each year thanks to the hard work
of the editors Sjoera Nas from Dutch EDRi member Bits of Freedom
(2003-2005), Bogdan Manolea from Romanian EDRi member Asociatia pentru
Tehnologie si Internet, ApTI (2006-2014), and the current editor Heini
Järvinen, EDRi’s Community and Communications Manager. The EDRi-gram has
a global reach and is being widely read by digital rights advocates,
academics, policy-makers and interested citizens, both in Europe and
around the globe.

Today, we are publishing EDRi-gram’s 300th edition! To celebrate this
occasion, we’ve collected articles from the brightest stars in the
digital rights universe. This special edition, “EDRi-gram 300 - Digital
rights news from 2025”, reflects on the potential future threats and
opportunities for digital civil rights in 10 years.

—
Andreas Krisch is President of European Digital Rights (EDRi), of the
Austrian Association for Internet Users (VIBE!AT) and the Austrian Forum
Data Protection. In his professional capacity he is managing partner of
mksult GmbH, an Austrian data protection consultancy.
Andreas regularly contributes to the European discussion on a data
protection compliant adoption of Information Technology. He provides his
expertise on data protection, RFID and the Internet of Things to
institutions such as the European Commission, the European Parliament,
the Council of Europe and the OECD, and he is member of the Austrian
Data Protection Council, an advisory body to the Austrian Government.

by Dunja Mijatović

Gather the brightest minds and the best innovators from academia,
international organisations and civil society and ask them to predict
the technological landscape in 2025. The odds that they will come up
with completely different visions and predictions are basically 1:10.
Unfortunately, the odds are that we will be fighting the same battles on
digital rights in 10 years’ time. Sure, the technology will have
evolved, we will have new gadgets guiding us through our everyday lives
and we will be connected to the Internet in ways we can’t even grasp today.

Although I would like to say otherwise, I still think we will experience
censorship, filtering and blocking of Internet sources. The major
difference is that the curtailment of our digital rights will be more
sophisticated. Add to that the surveillance programs infringing on the
right to privacy, which are unlikely to either decrease or diminish in
scope.

In ten years , we will still refer to the era we live in as the age of
digitalisation – and the age of surveillance. Our fight to restore our
basic human rights and to make sure they apply also on the Internet will
be as fierce as today.

Human rights will still be inalienable, absolute and universal. And our
main argument will remain the same; we have a right to these rights
regardless of the platform through which we choose to enjoy them.
There will be one major difference. The battle for freedom on the
Internet will not be the new frontline for the battle for freedom in the
world. In 2025 it will be the main frontline.

Fighting the same battles for our digital rights in 2025 as we do today
might not seem like something to write home about. But it is, for many
reasons.

No one claims Internet regulation is an easy task or that it will be in
ten years’ time. Far from it. Still, there is one very easy rule when we
are approached with this problem: Those who govern least, govern best.
That’s the headline I hope could be used for any news story on digital
rights in 2025.

—
Dunja Mijatović, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the OSCE Representative on
Freedom of the Media. She took over this post on 11 March 2010.
Mijatović is one of the founders of the Communications Regulatory Agency
of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2007, she was elected Chair of the
European Platform of Regulatory Agencies. Prior to this, she chaired the
Council of Europe’s Group of Specialists on freedom of expression and
information in times of crisis. Mijatović is an expert in human rights;
communications and media strategy, and regulatory and policy media
framework. She has extensive knowledge of institution-building in
transition states and many years’ experience of issues related to
journalist’s safety and new technologies, with the emphasis on
digitalisation, convergence and Internet technologies.

by Hans de Zwart

“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and
underestimate what will happen in ten.”

This is what Bill Gates wrote in his afterword for ”The Road Ahead”, his
1995 take on how our lives would change because of the “information
superhighway”. It is easy to look at his predictions now and point out
all the things that he got wrong (he thought it wasn’t likely we would
receive video on our mobile devices for example), but it is more
interesting to read into these predictions the preoccupations of that
particular time. As McLuhan would say: We march backwards into the future.

Gates wrote quite a bit about privacy in the book. On the one hand he
was concerned: “Loss of privacy is another major worry where the network
is concerned. A great deal of information is already being gathered [..]
and we often have no idea how it’s used or whether it’s accurate.” But
he was also naive: “A decade from now you may shake your head when you
remember that there was ever a time when any stranger [..] could
interrupt you at home with a phone call. [..] By explicitly indicating
allowable interruptions, you’ll be able to re-establish a sense of a
sanctuary.”

If I try to extrapolate current trends and developments ten years into
the future, then it is exactly this sanctity of the home that seems to
be under pressure. In the next few years the ”things” in our house will
all get their own operating system connecting them to the Internet.
Today it is a toothbrush that can tell you whether your kids spend
enough time brushing their teeth, a weighing scale that tweets your
weight to the world to keep you motivated, or an electronic book that
tracks your reading habits. Tomorrow it might be your washing machine
ordering its own detergent or your candles tracking their own burning hours.

Today it seems like all my Internet connected devices always have some
updates that need to be downloaded right when I need to use them. I
often joke that I don’t look forward to a future where I can’t open my
washing machine because it is “Downloading 3 of 8 updates”, or where I
can’t light my candles because they are getting a firmware upgrade for a
better and safer user experience. But there is a serious point to make
too. Gates seemed to assume that you would be in control over your own
technology. You could explicitly set your preferences and your
technology would just comply. This is not the direction we are moving in
now. Governments are forcing “smart” energy meters into many households
that report your energy use back to headquarters, eBook providers are
remotely deleting books from their customers' devices and cars can
already be turned off from a distance when a car payment is overdue.

The 1995 Bill Gates would be appalled by how little control we have over
our own devices today. If we continue down the current road, I think our
current selves will be appalled by our future situation, too. It is
therefore important to take back control over our devices to ensure that
we will have meaningful agency in the coming years.

—
Hans de Zwart is Director of the Dutch digital civil rights organisation
Bits of Freedom. He operates on the intersections between technology
(which he prefers to be “open”), civil society, innovation and
education. He believes that technology is never neutral and that design
matters. He wished he was the first one to write that “technology
creates feasibility spaces for social practice” (he wasn’t...).

You can always talk to him about: the most recent book you have read,
juggling, philosophy, free software, dominoes, or The Big Lebowski.

by Simon Davies

It is 2025, and this is a scary time for privacy. The new era of
interactive technology that silently grew from the early 21st century
now feels like a living organism that wraps ever more tightly around us.
It’s not meant to be hostile, just helpful. But increasingly, all of us
feel like mere subjects of a new Technological Order.

This development was once called “The Internet of Things”. In its
original form, this was merely a mass of radio-frequency identification
(RFID) devices. Now it is the new data grid that carries more personal
information than any platform in history – and it was created in less
than a decade.

Almost every item on the planet now has sensor technology that
interfaces with the digital ecosystem. These sensors are often locked
into the mobile spectrum, pumping out vast amounts of usage data to
ensure your safety.

Omnipresent health and safety control has found synergy with the
technology. Even food packaging now has sensors that alert you to use-by
dates and possible health risks – whether you want the information or
not. Never before has Judge Brandeis’s idea of the “Right to be let
alone” been more meaningful.

The most intricate interface involves “high risk” activities such as
recreational drugs, drinking, exercise, sports and even some forms of
sex. Increasingly, there’s a legal obligation to directly link the items
being used to the identity of an individual. In many countries you
cannot even buy a bottle of whisky without a sensor being linked to your
identity.

Because driving is generally considered a high risk activity, we long
ago gave up any idea of the “open road”. Every movement – on the road
and off – is minutely analysed, and in many cases is linked to your
profile of interactions with other high risk activities (such as alcohol
consumption). All vehicles – even bicycles – have become surveillance
devices that continuously analyse and transmit data. Indeed many common
items are openly manufactured as continuous surveillance devices,
including almost all doors and windows, items of clothing, road surfaces
and rooftops.

We once imagined that all this communication between people and things –
and things and things – could happen anonymously. And there was a brief
period when such privacy was actually possible. But now the ecosystem
knows what you cook, where you are, who you are with and what you’re
doing – together with all the dangers and variations in those patterns.
It’s the new social contract.

For some of us, the most unsettling feature of our life these days is
the fact that many people openly publish this information, not just to
their own networks, but to the world at large. Full disclosure has
become the accepted way to validate your character and integrity. And
full disclosure is also the best way to achieve credibility with
potential employers, future friends, insurers, banks, schools and
commercial organisations.

It’s not all bad. Wealthy societies are certainly safer and more orderly
now, but the idea that people could have freedom to do as they please
and that they could control what is known about them has vanished. As
long as we assume that this society is perfect, maybe we don’t need to
worry that dissent is impossible and our community can no longer evolve.

—
Simon Davies is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential data
protection and internet rights experts in the world and is a pioneer of
the international privacy arena. He has founded numerous key initiatives
such as Privacy International, the Big Brother Awards and Code Red. His
work in consumer rights and technology policy has spanned nearly thirty
years years and has directly influenced the development of law and
public policy in more than 50 countries.

He has advised a wide range of corporate, government and professional
bodies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Simon has worked in various roles in the London School of Economics
since 1996, and is currently an Associate Director at LSE Enterprise.

by Jillian C. York

The text called for a peaceful uprising in the imaginary country of
Absurdistan. But regardless of the fictional nature of the post, it was
swiftly removed from The Social Media Platform™, the terms of service of
which began banning calls for uprisings in late 2019 under a general
prohibition of “calls for changes to the political, social, economic,
government or other status quo”.

It was around 2010 when digital rights advocates began to really become
aware of the threats to free expression posed by Internet companies, the
so-called intermediaries. Prior to that, groups such as the Global
Network Initiative had raised awareness of the role of intermediaries
vis-a-vis governments, but until the second decade of the century, the
public was generally unaware of how corporate entities like Google and
Facebook controlled and manipulated content and free speech on their
platforms.

The issue reached its zenith around 2018 when, following the publication
of Rebecca MacKinnon’s second book (a dystopian follow-up to 2012’s
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom),
activists began a movement dedicated to eradicating censorship from
major social media platforms. While the movement had some early
successes, the eventual merger of the world’s most popular social media
platforms into The Social Media Platform™ quickly quashed the movement.
With six billion subscribers posting cat videos and daily photos of
meals, the Platform™ simply became too big to fail.
Today, there’s one thing activists can count on when they use social
media: Censorship. The Platform™’s 173-page Community Guidelines dictate
what users can and cannot write, post, or search for, with artificial
intelligence text interpretation meting out swift, summary “justice”.
Violators of the rules will find their accounts immediately terminated,
with no chance of appeal. While some have spoken out about the rules,
calling them “draconian,” “absurd” and “totally fascist”, The
Platform™’s CEO claims it is necessary for user safety and that nobody
is forced to sign up. Advertisers aren’t subject to the guidelines.

Although netizens still have some alternatives, such as Identi.ca, users
of the service often complain that they feel they’re shouting in an echo
chamber. “I’d rather use a service like Identi.ca,” said activist Allen
Smithee, “but literally everyone I know is on The Platform™.”

This is entirely a work of fiction, but not an impossible future. For
more information on how social networks police speech, read MacKinnon’s
excellent book or my 2010 paper, “Policing Content in the Quasi-Public
Sphere”.

—
Jillian C. York is a writer and activist who serves as the Electronic
Frontier Foundation’s Director for International Freedom of Expression.
She is the co-founder of OnlineCensorship.org, a platform that seeks to
inform the public about intermediary censorship.

by Cory Doctorow

Quick: what do all of these have in common? Your gran’s cochlear
implant, the WhatsApp stack, the Zipcar by your flat, the Co-op’s
3D-printing kiosk, a Boots dispensary, your Virgin thermostat, a set of
Tata artificial legs, and cheap heads-up goggles that come free with a
Mr Men game?

If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. But UK Prime Minister (PM) Lane Fox
had no trouble drawing a line around them today during Prime Minister’s
Questions (PMQs) in a moment that blindsided the Lab-Con coalition
leader Jon Cruddas, who’d asked about the Princess Sophia hacking
affair. Seasoned Whitehall watchers might reasonably have expected the
PM to be defensive, after a group of still-anonymous hackers captured
video, audio and sensitive personal communications by hijacking the
princess’s home network. The fingerpointing from the UK Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Military Intelligence (MI6) has
been good for headlines, and no one would have been surprised to hear
the PM give the security services a bollocking, in Westminster’s age-old
tradition of blame passing.

Nothing of the sort. Though the PM leaned heavily on her cane as she
rose, she seemed to double in stature as she spoke, eyes glinting and
her free hand thumping the dispatch box: “The Princess Sophia affair is
the latest instalment in a decades-old policy failure that weakened the
security of computer users to the benefit of powerful corporations and
our security services. This policy, the so-called ”anti-circumvention”
rules, has no place in an information society.

“Anti-circumvention pretends to be a rule against picking digital locks.
These rules prohibit modifying your WhatsApp so that it can place a call
without police listening in. They prohibit changing software on your
National Health Service (NHS) cochlear implants to stop your
conversations being analysed by terrorism scanners. They prohibit
tinkering with your goggles to allow you to cheat on games, they
prohibit tampering with your thermostat so that you can keep your heat
turned up when the power company needs you to turn it down. They prevent
3D printers from making guns, they prevent wet printers from mixing
prohibited narcotics. They allow Wonga to immobilise and repossess your
artificial legs, and they stop car thieves from making off with Zipcars.

“This government supports many of these goals, but we cannot and will
not support the means by which they are achieved. If three decades of
anti-circumvention have taught us anything, it’s that it doesn’t work.
Clever people have always figured out how to get round these locks and
the computer scientists tell us they always will. But these rules also
have a chilling effect on security research.

“Scientists who go public with information about weaknesses in systems
protected by anti-circumvention are at risk of prosecution, and face
powerful adversaries when they do. So, a system covered by
anti-circumvention becomes a reservoir for long-lived security
vulnerabilities – programming defects that attackers like the ones who
compromised Her Highness leveraged in the course of their grotesque and
unforgivable crimes.”

“The princess will have her systems audited by our security services,
but the rest of us are not so fortunate. What do we say to the man who
is robbed by thieves who take over his artificial legs? The grandmother
whose privacy is violated by eavesdroppers who listen in on her most
intimate conversations? The driver whose car is hijacked and driven to a
remote place where she is at risk of robbery and even rape? What do we
say to the family whose heat is disconnected by pranksters in the dead
of winter? These are not mere hypothetical. This parade of horribles are
all real-world examples from the past year. It is for these reasons that
we will introduce legislation this week to eliminate all
anti-circumvention statutes.”

PM Lane Fox’s own backbenchers grew increasingly jubilant through the
speech. At the end, they were on their feet, roaring and gesturing for
the cameras. And the Lab-Cons? Apart from one or two of the more savvy
members, most of them seemed baffled by the whole affair.

But the PM clearly knows what she’s about. She was trending throughout
the Anglosphere and Commonwealth last night, and has had letters of
support from Pirate Parties from Tunisia to Iceland. Elsewhere in
today’s edition, Italian PM Beppe Grillo’s exclusive editorial supports
PM Lane Fox, saying, “The Prime Minister is the only global leader who
knows what she’s about. The world has long waited for a political class
that understands the importance of technology: finally, it has one.”

The article was originally published in “Wired Reports Back From 2024”
(http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/07/features/wired-dispatches-from-2024).

—
Cory Doctorow is a non-fiction and science fiction author, activist,
journalist, blogger and the co-editor of Boing Boing. He works for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.

by Katarzyna Szymielewicz

After the failure of many public programmes aimed at getting Europe out
of its demographic crisis, eyes of the governments have turned towards
Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Who should know better than them how
to convince younger generations to give up on clubbing and make babies?
Policy makers hope that the same companies and advertising experts who
created the currently dominating demand for individualistic lifestyle,
will now find a way to start another trend. An informal coalition of
Internet Service Providers, led by the Social Circle and the Search
Engine, accepted the challenge. This new public-private project aimed at
increasing the birth rate in Europe will be rolled out in the coming
months under the label “Future is Family”.

“Our key challenge is to identify real obstacles that prevent citizens
from creating families. After years of running public programmes that
offer financial support for young couples, we understood that these are
not just financial or employment related concerns. Apart from such
rational calculations, we are looking at a deep, cultural trend, which
can only be tackled by soft measures, such as social advertising,” said
EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, explaining
public rationale behind the programme.

How can Internet generated data wealth be harnessed for public policy
reasons? After the successful use of vast amounts of commercial data,
such as telecommunication metadata, email contents and search engine
queries for public security purposes, the task seems to be manageable.
Companies that declared participation in the “Future is Family”
initiative seem optimistic:
“We plan to use our cutting-edge data analytics tools and predictive
profiling schemes to meet the real needs of our clients when it comes to
their love and family life. Algorithms will be redesigned to identify
and suggest a perfect life partner, the optimal time to get pregnant or
health insurance for the whole family at a good price. Modifying news
feeds to promote positive mentions of family is a socially responsible
thing to do. We are excited to be part of the program, which may change
the future of our societies, not only by contributing to economic
growth, but also high happiness indicators. Our recent research clearly
indicates that adults living single lives are more likely to suffer from
depression. We have the ambition to reverse this trend. We have a social
responsibility to make people feel the emotions that will promote
economic growth,” explained the CEO of the Search Engine.

Details of this public-private initiative are yet to be announced but it
is already clear that all types of user-generated data from search
engines and social media will be used to ensure extremely efficient
behavioral targeting and content manipulation. Companies will be allowed
to integrate data about citizens’ consumer preferences, travel patterns,
education, professional life, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity,
history of intimate relationships and financial status. EU officials
working on the programme confirm that existing data protection
principles are flexible enough to justify such broad use of data,
including sensitive information, when vital public interests are at stake.

In Brussels, the level of concern about possible economic and social
implications of the demographic crisis has reached a point where
counter-arguments are barely present in the debate. The only point
discussed at the high-level meeting of relevant EU Commissioners and
Internet Service Providers was citizens’ privacy. What if somebody would
prefer not to be included in the program? The answer was very
straightforward: Citizens will be given the right to opt out or modify
their “family” profile, for example by declaring their preference to
remain single. However, our anonymous source in the European Commission
warns that such choices may come at the price of a more expensive health
insurance or a higher tax rate. It does seem that some crucial details
of the “Future is Family” initiative still remain unknown and we can
expect more controversies around the program.

—
Katarzyna Szymielewicz is a lawyer specialised in human rights and
technology and Co-founder and President of EDRi member Panoptykon
Foundation – a Polish NGO defending human rights in the context of
contemporary forms of surveillance. She is Vice-President of European
Digital Rights – a coalition of 33 privacy and civil rights
organisations, board member of Tactical Technology Collective and
Amnesty International (Poland), and Member of the Council for
Digitisation in Poland.

by Joe McNamee

On 20 May 2025, the governor of the European Central Bank (ECB), the
Director General of Europol and the European Minister for Financial
Affairs announced at a press conference in Frankfurt that the Euro, in
physical form, would cease to exist by the middle of 2028.

“Cash money is simply unacceptable in today’s society,” Minister Plutus
announced. “With mobile banking allowing even the smallest transactions
to be undertaken electronically, there is just no more excuse for the
chaos that is cash”.

This analysis was backed up by the governor of the ECB. The cost of
maintaining millions of coins and banknotes, transporting them around
Europe, printing new cash, minting new coins is just unacceptable, he
explained.

Europol Director General Gerrae Rumoribus: “Look, we’ve been saying it
for ten years – if you “follow the money”, then you have no crime.
Innocent people have nothing to hide – they have supermarket loyalty
cards already – so why not have an electronic trace of every transaction
that they make? Imagine a world with no crime, no money laundering and
we save money in the process! The only people that will oppose this
measure are criminals and paedophiles”.

In response to questions about the threats to the privacy of citizens,
the Director General was very clear – it will not damage existing
privacy rights. He explained that we already have the “only once”
e-government approach launched by the 2015 Digital Single Market
Communication. He reminded the one journalist at the press conference
that the “only once” principle was subsequently expanded to allow
access to all citizen data by all relevant national government agencies
across the 28 EU Member States, following a very helpful parliamentary
question from Liberal MEP Antanas Guoga in 2015.

Added to this we have the 2018 Network Access Knowledge and E-Devices
Discovery (NAKEDD) Directive, which gives us access to all online
searches, social media interactions and mobile location data. If we
already know you are searching for health information from your online
searches, if we already know that you are going to the pharmacy from
your mobile location data, is it really that much of a problem that we
will know exactly what you bought, when you bought it, how often you
bought it and why you bought it?

All three leaders concluded the session by confirming that, as many have
forecast for years, it is finally time for the EU to completely stop
making cents.

—
Joe McNamee is Executive Director of EDRi, having joined the
organisation in 2009. He has been working in internet-related sectors
almost continually since 1995, when he joined CompuServe UK as a
customer service agent.

by Jesper Lund

In April 2025, an independent privacy impact assessment of the Danish
public sector was published. The European Commission has often praised
the Danish government for its efficient data processing practices and
suggested Denmark as a role model for other Member States, even though
serious privacy concerns have been raised by Danish NGOs, including EDRi
member IT-Pol Denmark.

Denmark has never introduced mandatory ID cards, but every Danish
resident has a social security number, which is used in all
public-sector systems, from health care to tax management. The pervasive
“once only” principle means that Danish citizens never have to provide
the same information to two different public authorities. Instead, the
various databases, all based on the same citizen ID number, are closely
integrated so that data can be re-used.

The integrated databases also make it easy for the Danish government to
use data about citizens for entirely new purposes. All Danish citizens
are regularly subjected to profiling for welfare fraud and tax evasion.
Secret data-mining algorithms with access to all databases produce lists
of possible suspects. Some citizens complain about being under
surveillance, but they are told that if they have nothing to hide, they
have nothing to fear. Still, news media regularly cover cases where
citizens with unusual behaviour are put on suspicion lists, even though
they have broken no laws.
Between 2010 and 2025, the Danish model with centralised databases and
the “only once” principle was gradually expanded into a public-private
partnership. This was facilitated by the Danish eID system, which was
developed as a joint venture with the banking sector, and by 2020 used
as single sign-on for virtually every website in Denmark. With the eID
system, public and private databases could be integrated in a secure
way, the Danish government argued.

By 2014, the financial sector could access citizens’ income data from
tax authorities, for example for credit assessment. In the beginning,
consent was required for every data transfer and citizens could choose
to document their income in other ways. But after a couple of years,
banks only accepted the automated information exchange, and consent was
effectively coerced. Later the data-sharing set-up was extended to other
parts of the private sector, and the government soon became the
preferred data broker for private companies. Giving consent for private
companies to access personal information in government databases was
generally compared to clicking on the cookie consent pop-ups that had
existed on websites until enforcement of article 5(3) in the E-privacy
Directive was silently abandoned in 2018.

The most important part of the Danish public-private partnership for
personal data is medical research. All medical records from hospitals
and general practitioners are put in a central database, which is made
available for research by universities and private pharmaceutical
companies without consent, justified by a liberal interpretation of the
research exemption in the EU’s new Data Protection Regulation, which was
finally adopted in 2017. Unlike most other countries, medical data from
the Danish government can be combined with all kinds of socio-economic
information since all databases use the same citizen ID number. Even
life-style information such as alcohol consumption and eating habits can
be included. In co-operation with the retail sector, Danish banks
register all purchases made with credit cards, and cash is no longer
accepted as payment at Danish stores.

The outcome of the privacy impact assessment came as a major surprise to
the Danish government. The report concluded that the public sector data
processing, and especially the partnership with private companies,
undermined the privacy and data protection rights granted to Danish
citizens by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Unionand
the European Convention on Human Rights. A number of changes must now be
made in order to bring Danish e-government data protection standards in
line with fundamental rights.

—
Jesper Lund is Vice-Chairman of EDRi member IT-Political Association of
Denmark (IT-Pol), a volunteer digital rights organisation with around
200 members. Since 2011, he has worked on data retention, privacy,
government and private surveillance, and net neutrality. His daytime
job, to support his passion for digital rights, is teaching financial
economics.

by Kirsten Fiedler

Neuro-implants by Europe’s largest insurance company Axia have been
hacked, according to a report published by German newspaper Penrose. The
company’s implants connect the nervous system to the Internet in order
to monitor, store and synchronise health data with individual home
devices and the company’s servers.

Blue Ant, a German-based neuro-hacker group, has now demonstrated that
health data synchronised with the insurance company’s server has been
systematically transferred to employment agencies. Further
investigations reveal a deal between Axia and several human resource
outsourcing companies.

Implants have long made the transition from being used exclusively for
severe problems such as deafness, blindness and amnesia. Although there
has been resistance to the first generation of commercial brain
implants, an increasing number of people are currently opting for the
second – and significantly cheaper – generation, due to the discounts
and other incentives offered by insurance companies.
The neuro-implants monitor blood glucose, breathing and heart rates and
can therefore sense the onset of chronic illnesses or stress. Moreover,
Axia recently started testing the stimulation of specific regions of the
brain that are responsible for addictive reactions, for example in order
to reduce nicotine and alcohol craving, with ‘beneficiaries’ able to
benefit from cheaper insurance rates. Blue Ant demonstrated that it was
possible to access this latest generation of implants and to
re-programme stimulations sent by the implants to the brain.
An open letter by thirty-six civil rights groups published yesterday,
argued that this incident shows, once again, that citizens no longer
have control over their personal data. The organisations criticised the
fact that health data are being shared with human resource companies,
led to a situation where these are able to create detailed risk profiles
based on the job applicants’ information. Applicants can then be
accepted or rejected due to information that is not available to them.

It has indeed become increasingly difficult for people to be aware of
what personal data is circulating about them and to change information
held by companies that is false or outdated. In recent years, this has
leding to various negative consequences for individuals, ranging from
price discrimination to arrest orders.

In their letter, the organisations therefore call for the revision of an
eight-year old law that is simply no longer fit for an era of
permanently connected citizens. The last reform of privacy rules that
was finalised in 2017, failed to provide for meaningful protections
especially with regard to the so-called “legitimate interest” exception
that allows data to be collected and re-used by third parties, including
for profiling.

Today, as demonstrated by Blue Ant, this means that insurance companies
are completely free to unilaterally decide that their interest in
processing citizens’ data is greater than any possible harm to citizens
from this processing. Consent is not needed if the company feels that it
has a “legitimate interest” in processing data. As revealed by the hack,
these data are now being passed on to other companies that are
processing personal information for reasons that are completely
unrelated and incompatible with the original purpose.

In related news: European Commission’s B.R.A.I.N research project is
currently holding a public consultation on the ethical implications of
first generation neuro-compilers. These consist of implanted interfaces
connected to the Internet that will be able to automatically translate
clearly articulated silent thoughts into an online search engine and
project a summary of the results directly into the brain.

—
Kirsten Fiedler is EDRi's Managing Director, an organisation which
defends human rights in the information society. After her European
studies in the UK, France and Germany, Kirsten became a blogger
reporting on digital rights issues and started advocating for free
speech and privacy rights in the digital environment. She is also a
member of Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. and the Chaos Computer Club. Born
nearby Cologne, Germany, Kirsten is now based in Brussels.

by Erich Moechel

Today’s initial hearing in the lawsuit commonly called “Schrems versus
the European Commission” at the European Court of Justice (CJEU) saw a
record-breaking number of high profile defendants.

Thirteen former EU Commissioners, including two Vice Presidents and a
former head of Unit of the Commission face a crucial CJEU decision. All
of the defendants have been indicted at their respective national courts
before, some are already appealing convictions of data fraud, wilful
deceit of the European public, embezzlement or similar clauses. Three of
the appeals are against convictions of espionage for a foreign power at
courts in Portugal, Sweden and Belgium. All of these cases concern the
roles of the Commissioners in international agreements such as the “Safe
Harbor” agreement, or agreements on the wilful de facto theft and export
of Passenger Name Records (PNR) or financial data that had been bundled
to one lawsuit in 2023 and sent to the CJEU for a framework decision.

Plaintiff Max Schrems is a professor of international law at the
Sorbonne and best known for his successful lawsuit against Facebook in
2021. Schrems had sued Facebook for wilful, repeated and organised data
larceny in 270 million European cases and won 19 billion euro compensation.

Note: Both the author and European Digital Rights know that such
activites fall outside the real scope of the Court of Justice of the
European Union. As Police Chief Wiggum of Springfield Police Department
once said, the law "is powerless to help you, not punish you".

—
Investigative journalist Erich Moechel primarily writes for ORF.at, the
webportal of the public broadcaster ORF in Vienna. After a career in
Austrian daily and weekly print media and radio 1983-1995, he turned to
WWW-publishing only in 1996. Erich M. first became publicly known to a
wider public when he published the so called ENFOPOL papers containing
the secret EU GSM surveillance plans in 1998.

by Raegan MacDonald and Estelle Massé

July 2025, Brussels - Yesterday, members of a global privacy movement
gathered in front of government buildings and corporate headquarters
around the world, just as they have done every day for the past several
months.

The privacy campaign, inaccurately described as privacy “riots” by some
media outlets, has grown steadily since late 2019, when a string of
high-profile data breaches shook the public, spurring citizens to demand
an end to what they call “data appropriation”.

Until 2019, most of the people who are now part of this mass
mobilisation didn’t seem to understand the importance of privacy in
their lives. All of that changed on the morning of 8 April, when a flood
of sensitive financial data was leaked through a massive breach of the
Terrorist Financial Tracking Programme (TFTP) databases, leading to
millions of people becoming bankrupt from accounts that had been
emptied. Most citizens hadn’t even known about TFTP, part of a nearly
decade-old programme ostensibly developed to detect and prevent
terrorist crimes. Citizen outrage deepened when an investigation after
the breach revealed that the programme never led to the arrest of a
single suspected terrorist, yet a terrorist group had successfully used
it to expose the private data of millions of people around the world.

In the aftermath of this unprecedented data breach, additional breaches
in the private sector fuelled the movement’s progress. None was more
rousing than the Smart Home scandal of 2021. Often referred to as the
“breach that broke the camel’s back”, the scandal erupted after it was
revealed that Smart Home alarm systems had systematically been
recording private conversations taking place in people’s homes. Not only
were conversations being recorded, but they were secretly being shared
with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. These data were merged
with Intenet browsing data, mobile location data and supermarket loyalty
card data to generate new information guessing at the likelihood of
criminality, health problems, increased insurance risks, financial
stability and other commercially valuable information.

Now, four years after the Smart Home scandal, privacy protests take
place daily, from New York to Brussels, Sydney to Cape Town, Delhi to
Buenos Aires. Most of the protests are peaceful “sit ins,” where
activists gather in front of landmark buildings. Government officials
have responded to these protests by arguing that spy programmes and
information sharing with corporations are vital to security. They have
successfully partnered with social media companies to pollute news feeds
with critical news articles, misleading information about low turnout to
the demonstrations and mood manipulation, to discourage activism.

Fortunately there is a glimmer of hope. Now mired in crisis, government
officials have signalled that they are willing to meet with leaders in
the privacy movement to hear their demands. Technology companies, now
hobbled by bad publicity and consumer boycotts, have begun to experiment
with new approaches and business models that respect the privacy of
users’ data. It may have taken a global crisis, but 2025 could be the
year we get our privacy back.

—
Raegan MacDonald is European Policy Manager at EDRi member Access’
Brussels office. She specialises in net neutrality, privacy and data
protection. Raegan is a member of the Steering Group for Code Red, an
ambitious global initiative providing resources and tactical advice to
human rights groups and human rights defenders across the world. She is
also an Advisory Board member of the Brussels Privacy Hub, an academic
research institute focused on privacy and data protection. Since March
2014, Raegan is a Privacy by Design Ambassador, an award from the
Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada.

Estelle Massé is Policy Analyst at Access. From Brussels, she works on
net neutrality, data protection, data retention and trade agreements.
Prior joining Access, Estelle interned with European Digital Rights
(EDRi) and graduated with a Master in European Law from the University
of Granada in Spain.

by Bogdan Manolea

What’s tiny, dark and knocking at your door? The future.

1 May 2025. The day when the so-called “new Internet infrastructure”
rolls out after the old Internet was deprecated following massive
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that made accessing any web
page almost impossible. It is still unclear who was behind those
attacks, but we know the result today - three major Internets and
hundreds of smaller ones:

The European Internet, called EUNet, is now a functional reality. The
long lasting desire of some bureaucrats has won, despite all possible
technical, economic and societal arguments. All European Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) and mobile operators must from now on use the
EUNet, a space where “all Europeans will be safe”, as the European
Commission President Nicolas Sarkozy advertised in his manifesto for a
cleaner Internet since he took over the Brussels position in 2019. Now
this “civilised zone of the digital world” is the new mandatory Internet
of the European Union Federation - a digital world where no unwelcome
content is allowed, where there’s no counterfeiting and no copyright
infringement. At least this is how it was promoted before the former
Internet was abandoned. Everyone will have complete freedom to be fully
protected from anyone with views that might be unwelcome. As Sarkozy had
promised, Europe redefined its freedom in ways that ensured that
terrorists could never take it away.

But I don’t know how the EUNet works...

The FreedomNet, which was set up by the US, UK, Australia, Japan and
Canada is the other part of the former Internet. It inherited a major
part of the old features of the Internet from 2017, after the
revelations of James, Jones and Jimmy had shown that the United States
National Security Agency (NSA) was actually a major shareholder in
Facebook, Google and Yahoo, allowing them to not only have direct
access to the data collected through these services, but to also merge
the databases. Based on the Digital Safe Harbor Agreement between the US
and the EU, some websites and services are accessible from one network
to another. It’s like the limited duplication of functionality in
certain apps for Android and iOS in 2015, but slightly better.

But I don’t know how the FreedomNet works, either...

Look no further than Enlightenment Internet, nicknamed the “red pixel
curtain”. It’s red, according to the colour of the first letter of the
logo of Yandex, the mandatory search engine that opens instantly as the
home page of every browser accepted in the network. The Enlightenment
Internet was the idea of Putin, during his sixth presidential term. His
IT team took the “best” out of the open source software of the
FreedomNet and EUNet in a new proprietary system.

The automated copyright infringement detection tool in EUNet has been
re-purposed to identify and deny posting of all content that could be
considered as unfair criticism to the current political leaders.
Browsing and e-mail data are merged with location data and facial
recognition to identify individuals who might use the EUNet for evil
purposes and automatically disconnect them. The system builds on the
great “child-protection-from-bullying” feature and has been transformed
into a “mandatory-Internet-ID” system that tracks and stores all your
digital activies for six years in a central server system hosted in the
Antartic. Besides Russia and China that actually manage the entire
Enlightenment Internet’s content and infrastructure, other Asian
countries and European countries now outside the European Union
Federation were slowly but surely included in the largest digital
network of the world, as part of a carrot-or-stick game with economic
sanctions.

But I don’t want to know how the Enlightenment Internet works. It’s just
too depressing.

The reality is that we’ve destroyed the Internet that we had expected to
be able to pass on to future generations as our generation’s greatest
legacy. Now that we’ve lost it, it would be a good time to invent time
travel, go back 10 years and start supporting digital freedoms. Because
the price of liberty is eternal vigilence. It is time we started paying it.

All characters, countries and situations appearing in this work are
fictitious. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental and should
be treated as a technical red pixel failure.

—
Bogdan Manolea was the EDRi-gram editor between 2006 and 2014. He still
lives in Bucharest, Romania. He is the Executive Director of the
Romanian EDRi member Association for Technology and Internet (ApTI).

by Monica Horten

A prediction about the future of copyright is always a little tricky,
especially in the complex world of the Internet. Are we going to see a
resolution to the attacks on Internet intermediaries? Are we going to
see vertically integrated intermediares welcoming calls for them to
become Internet police? Will we see a drama turn into a crisis?

From a digital rights perspective, a key issue will be how the
entertainment industries will manoeuvre politically. These are global
corporations, who are engaged in global political campaigns in order to
enforce a system of copyright that ultimately protects their monopoly
businesses. Over the past twenty years, these corporations have called
for a re-invention of the Internet to suit business interests. Their
main tactic is to lobby for liabilityprovisions for Internet Service
Providers (ISPs), to coerce them to monitor and police the Internet.
That’s why we’ve seen “three strikes” measures that require them to
disconnect people from the Internet if they are accused of breaching
copyright law. They have also successfully demanded the implementation
of an array of court injunctions, which force intermediaries to restrict
web content.

There is now a growing body of research and case law to show how these
restrictive actions can restrict free speech. The risk is that
legitimatly shared content is restricted also. There are various ways
that this risk manifests itself, depending on the exact technical
procedure for implementing the court-ordered measures. But that the risk
is real , is not in doubt, as illustrated recently when legitimate
customers of the Cloudflare service found themselves on the wrong side
of a copyright blocking injunction.

The abutment of free speech rights and copyright creates an edginess to
policy-making. It is exciting, and dramatic, but also tough. There is no
straightforward decision path based on economic evidence. Instead,
diligent policy decision-making is about balancing rights, and this puts
policy-makers between a rock and a hard place.

However, copyright has found ways to squeeze through. The attempts to
include copyright and intermediary liability into trade agreements such
as Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) is well known. Less well understood is how copyright
is sneaking into filtering measures.

Rights-holder lobbying is relentless. Pleading that they are victims of
a terrible Internet scourge, the entertainment industries have embedded
themselves in lobbying coalitions and government committees. They have
politicised their business issues in order to earn State backing for
enforcement of their copyrights. In the past 10 years, we’ve seen huge
pressure wielded as the entertainment corporations persistently turn to
parliaments – both national and European – with demands to “clean” the
Internet. They’ve drafted amendments and even entire laws, handing
policy-makers ready-made solutions. In political moves that have
confounded copyright traditionalists, the rights-holder lobbyists have
repeatedly targeted telecoms law. The desired level of Internet
restrictions has been stepped up each time.

Free speech rights provide the only bulwark against these
ever-increasing Internet restrictions. Digital rights campaigning has
played an important role in supporting that bulwark against the weight
of entertainment industry lobbying departments. As a consequence, the
political tension in this policy area is high.

The European Union wants to reform copyright. However, it is not even
clear what would be meant by copyright reform under these circumstances.
For some people, it means harmonising the exceptions to authors’ rights.
For others, it means freeing up distribution of content. Any such
proposals will be sure to result in rights-holders swinging in with
counter-measures for stronger enforcement. They will be re-imagining the
Internet, phase 2.0. In this environment, copyright reform for the
Internet era will become a high-wire act.

Turning to the question we began with, we may well wonder how the
ongoing political drama will play out. More precisely, what are the odds
on a political resolution for copyright reform by 2025? It’s clear that
copyright policy is not isolated, and any changes will result in
significant effects outside the entertainment industries. If the balance
is not handled carefully, the drama could well turn into a crisis.

—
Monica Horten is a Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics and
Political Science. She is a member of two European expert groups,
including being an independent expert on the Council of Europe’s
Committee of Experts on Cross-border Flow of Internet Traffic and
Internet Freedom. She is the author of two books - A Copyright
Masquerade: how corporate lobbying threatens online freedoms & The
Copyright Enforcement Enigma: Internet politics and the Telecoms Package
- with a third forthcoming in 2016. Her Iptegrity blog has generated a
core readership among the Brussels policy community. She has been an
invited speaker at conferences around Europe. Her academic research,
which includes several peer-reviewed academic papers, has had
measurable impact both in the media and in scholarly journals. In a
private consulting role, she assists with policy analysis and reports.

by Douwe Korff

The Internet of Things will generate enormous amounts of data that are
directly or indirectly linked to us, our mobile phones, homes and cars.
But other major data sources are also increasingly made available
online, with little constraint for wider use: population-, company- and
land registers, statistical data on health, the environment, crimes or
traffic incidents, and others. Many of these data sources will become
“richer” - more detailed, and more personal - because of the Internet
of Things.

Increasingly, governments wish to make these “rich data resources”
available for socially beneficial uses, such as determining
environmental factors that lead to lower crime rates, or discovering
links between social factors and health. Researchers are naturally keen
on them; and companies want to exploit them for commercial purposes.
What is more, they all want to be able to combine, match and analyse
these data, from all these sources. This accumulation of vast and
complex information databases, and their exploitation, is referred to as
“Big Data”.

In theory, from these “big” resources, far-reaching inferences can be
drawn, on which business and government decisions will increasingly come
to rely. However, it is not easy to turn “Big but dumb” data into “Smart
Data” (the new catchword). The data need to be cleverly “mined” in order
to extract relevant, useful information and, especially, to discover
“the hidden pattern, the unexpected correlation”. Moreover, the logic
used in the analyses - the profiling algorithm - is increasingly
“improved” by the computer itself, using “artificial intelligence” -
putting it increasingly outside the control not only of regulators, but
of the organisations using it.

However, the capability of analysts to capture human behaviour in
computer code or algorithms is not as infallible as often claimed. In
practice, profiles and “human behaviour models” suffer from serious
statistical limitations and often perpetuate social inequality and
discrimination. Yet at the same time, because these algorithms are so
“clever” and dynamic, they become utterly intransparent and consequently
almost impossible to challenge.

This poses a fundamental threat to the most basic principles of the rule
of law and the relationship between citizens and governments or between
customers and businesses in a democratic society. We must become more
aware of that threat, and counter it.

—
Douwe Korff is Emeritus Professor of International Law at London
Metropolitan University and an Associate of the Oxford Martin School of
the University of Oxford.

This short article draws on a 2013 Council of Europe report, written by
the author, on “The use of the Internet & related services, private life
& data protection: trends & technologies, threats & implications”.

by Annie Machon

From the perspective of 2025, as I sit at my keyboard drinking a whisky
and writing my scurrilous memoirs, it seems strange that there was even
a concept of “whistleblowers” - brave individuals who risked their jobs,
their very way of life and even their freedom to shine light in the dark
corners of corporate crimes and government lies.

Yet even as recently as a decade ago, in the world of intelligence,
where secrecy was paramount, where crimes could be hushed up, and where
there was no avenue for voicing concern and dissent, it was perhaps
inevitable that whistleblowers such as Senator Edward Snowden continued
to take such risks.

Until recently, whistleblowers had a bad rap in the media, deemed to be
traitors, grasses or snitches. However, rather than a phenomenon to be
feared, if handled correctly the concept of whistleblowing gradually
came to be seem as beneficial to organisations.

This progress fills me with pride, as I have a nodding acquaintance with
the process. In the 1990s, I worked as an intelligence officer for the
UK domestic Security Service, generally known as MI5, before resigning
to help my former partner and colleague David Shayler blow the whistle
on a catalogue of incompetence and crime. As a result, we had to go on
the run around Europe, lived in hiding and exile in France for three
years, and saw our friends, family and journalists arrested around us. I
was also arrested, although never charged, and David went to prison
twice for exposing the crimes of the spies. It was a heavy price to pay.

However, it could all have been so different if the UK government had
agreed to take his evidence at the time of spy crimes, undertaken to
investigate them thoroughly, and implemented the necessary reforms. This
would have saved us a lot of heartache, and could potentially have
improved the work of the spies. But the government’s instinctive
response then was always to protect the spies and prosecute the
whistleblower, while the mistakes and crimes go uninvestigated and
unresolved. Or even, it often appeared then, to reward the malefactors
with promotions and awards.

The draconian Official Secrets Act (1989) imposed a blanket ban on any
disclosure whatsoever. As a result, we the citizens had to take it on
trust that our spies worked with integrity. There was no meaningful
oversight and no accountability.

Many good people did indeed sign up to MI5, MI6 and the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), as they wanted a job that could make
a difference and potentially save lives. However, once on the inside
they were told to keep quiet about any ethical concerns: “don’t rock the
boat, and just follow orders”.

In such an environment there was no means of raising concerns, no
accountability and no staff federation. This inevitably led to a general
consensus – a bullying “group think” mentality. This in turn led to
mistakes being covered up rather than lessons learned, and then
potentially down a dangerous moral slide.

As a result, after 9/11 we saw scandal heaped upon intelligence scandal,
as the spies allowed their fake and politicised information to be used
to make a false case for illegal wars across the Middle East; we saw
them descend into a spiral of “extraordinary rendition” (ie kidnapping)
and torture, for which they were successfully sued if not prosecuted;
and we saw them facilitate dodgy deals in the desert with dictators.

But all was not bleak, even then. In 2013, Dr Tom Fingar received The
Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in Oxford for his work on
compiling the US National Intelligence Estimate of 2007. In this he
summarised the conclusions of all sixteen US intelligence agencies by
saying that Iran had ceased trying to develop a nuclear weapons
capability in 2003.

There was immense political pressure on him to suppress this evidence,
but he went ahead with the report and thereby single-handedly halted the
US government’s rush to war with Iran in 2008. By having the courage to
do his job with integrity, Dr Fingar was responsible for saving
countless lives across Iran.

But in other sectors, mistakes were just as life threatening and the
need for exposure just as great. At around the same time, in the UK,
many senior medical whistleblowers were emerging from within the
National Health Service (NHS), detailing mistakes and incompetence that
put the public at risk. Alas, rather than learn from mistakes, all too
often NHS bosses either victimised the whistleblowers by suspending them
or ruining their reputations, or they insisted that they sign gagging
orders and then covered up the mistakes. Neither option was a good
outcome either for staff morale or for patient safety.
Similarly, during those years, we saw many whistleblowers emerge from
the banking and finance sector. All too often, the whistleblowers were
victimised but the banks carried on as normal until they crashed the
global economy yet again.

While the culture of cover-up existed, so too did whistleblowers.
However, after the Snowden disclosures and the flood of whistleblowers
after him, lessons were learned.

Employers instituted cultures of trust and accountability, employees
with concerns were fairly heard, the appropriate action taken, and
justice done. As a result, the needs and imperatives behind
whistleblowing disappeared. Potential problems were nipped in the bud,
improving public trust and confidence in the probity of the organisation
and avoiding all the bad publicity following a whistleblowing case.

Plus, of course, the potential whistleblowers had a legitimate avenue to
go down, rather than having to turn their lives inside out – they no
longer needed to jeopardise their professional reputation and all that
went with it such as career, income, social standing and even,
potentially their freedom.

Placing sound procedures in place to address staff concerns proved to be
a win-win scenario – for staff efficiency and morale, the organisations’
operational capability and reputation, and the wider public, too.

One could but dream, in 2015.

—
Annie Machon was an intelligence officer for the UK's MI5 in the 1990s,
before leaving to help blow the whistle on the crimes and incompetence
of the British spy agencies.

She is now a writer, media commentator, political campaigner, and
international public speaker on a variety of related issues: the war on
terrorism, the war on whistleblowers, the war on drugs, and the war on
the internet. She is also the European director of LEAP and a founding
board member of Code Red. Annie has an MA (Hons) Classics from Cambridge
University.

Fight for your privacy!
Join the daily global privacy movement gatherings in front your local
government buildings and corporate headquarters, and show the
decision-makers that your privacy matters!

Say NO to neuro-compilers!
Answer to the public consultation by European Commission’s B.R.A.I.N
research project on the ethical implications of first generation
neuro-compilers!

EDRi-gram is a fortnightly newsletter about digital civil rights in
Europe. Currently EDRi has 33 members based or with offices in 19
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