The Pirates in the European Parliament have submitted the nomination of Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. For the Pirates, the case of Assange, who is currently imprisoned in the United Kingdom, is a symbol for the oppression of freedom of speech and the public’s right to information

Julian Assange is an Australian journalist, activist, whistleblower and founder of WikiLeaks, a platform which has made millions of confidential documents available to the public since 2006. Leaks published by the non-profit organisation covered the U.S. involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen, as well as the work of secret services. WikiLeaks has also released reports of corruption and crime in countries such as Turkey, Russia, China and Peru.

Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer comments:

“We nominate Julian Assange for his achievements and revelations, butthe detention and prosecution of Assange also set an extremelydangerous precedent for all journalists, media actors, and freedom of the press. No journalist should be prosecuted for publishing ‘state secrets’ of public interest because this is their job.”

Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová comments:

“The story of Julian Assange is highly symbolic for me. It is about the fight for freedom of speech, of the press, for the protection of journalists and all those who bring information to the public. Julian Assange has exposed a number of serious practices committed by the U.S. intelligence services and the military. His prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917 is practically a persecution. Punishing someone for publishing information in the public interest sets a dangerous precedent. Protecting journalists, their lives and their work is a fundamental democratic principle.”

In the United States, Assange faces up to 175 years in jail. The Australian has lived in various countries for security reasons, spending time at the Ecuadorian embassy in London from 2012 to 2019, where he was granted political asylum. In 2019, the U.S. asked the UK for his extradition and he has since been imprisoned in the UK’s Belmarsh prison. In December 2021, the British High Court agreed to his extradition to the U.S. on the condition that he would not be placed in a maximum security prison, as expert reports indicated that his mental health is weakened and he may attempt suicide. Assange has challenged the decision on his extradition, on which the Supreme Court will decide again.

Full text of the nomination of Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize

patrick-breyer.de/en/pirates-n…

On the occasion of tomorrow’s European Data Protection Day, EU lawmakers are addressing the European Commission in a cross-party letter: They warn that the draft legislation announced by the Commission for March 2022 on indiscriminate message and chat control on all mobile phones would result in mass surveillance of the private communications of all EU citizens. Moreover, the legislation threatens secure encryption and IT security in general.

Similar to Apple’s highly controversial „SpyPhone“ plans, the EU Commission plans to „protect children“ by requiring providers of digital communication services to bulk intercept, monitor, and scan the contents of all citizens’ communications.

A draft legislation is to be presented on 2 March. Communications that have so far been securely end-to-end encrypted would need to be screened on all mobile phones and, in case of suspicion, automatically redirected and reported to the police. „Indiscriminately and generally monitoring everybody’s online activities ‚just in case‘ causes devastating collateral damage,” MEPs appeal to the responsible EU Commissioners Margrethe Vestager, Margaritis Schinas, Věra Jourová, Thierry Breton, Didier Reynders and Ylva Johansson. The proposed surveillance requirement “fails to respect the essence of the fundamental right to confidential communications (Article 7 of the Charter), and is therefore neither necessary nor proportionate “, the letter continues.

„It has a chilling effect on the exercise of fundamental rights online, including of children and victims, minorities, LGBTQI people, political dissidents, journalists etc. It sets a precedent for expanding it to other purposes in Europe as well. The outsourcing of law enforcement activities (crime detection) to private corporations and their machines removes the protection afforded by the independence and qualification of public investigators, as well as the institutional oversight over their activities.“

MEPs express concern about recent media reports that investigators shut down child sexual abuse platforms such as “Boystown” but failed to report the linked content for removal. This means that thousands of gigabytes of illegal images remain accessible.

„Investigators argue that they lack capacities to report material they are aware of. Adding thousands and thousands of mostly false reports of alleged circulation of well-known material via major communications services to their burden would fail victims whose safety depends on focusing all resources on preventing abuse and the production of abuse imagery in the first place,“ underline the MEPs.

MEP and civil liberties defender Patrick Breyer (German Pirate Party) comments:

“This EU Big Brother attack on our mobile phones by error-prone denunciation machines searching our entire private communications threatens to lead to a Chinese-style surveillance state. Will the next step will be for the post office to open and scan all letters? Indiscriminately searching all correspondence violated fundamental rights and is the wrong approach to protecting children. It actually puts their private pictures at risk of falling into the wrong hands and criminalises children in many cases. Flooding overburdened law enforcement officers, who don’t even have time to sift through already known child pornography, with mostly false machine-generated reports is irresponsible with regard to the victims of ongoing abuse.”

Marcel Kolaja Member and Quaestor of the European Parliament (Czech Pirate Party) adds:

“Monitoring across large platforms will only lead to criminals moving to platforms where chat control will be technically impossible. As a result, innocent people will be snooped on a daily basis while tracking down criminals will fail. Moreover, it will discourage victims from seeking help digitally. Not to mention that e.g. witnesses or harassment victims, whose lives may be in danger, are highly dependent on confidentiality of their communications. Therefore, chat control would only cause widespread uncertainty and distrust. Rather than mass surveillance of digital correspondence, the Commission should focus on assistance to victims, prevention of child sexual abuse, and coordination of targeted investigations.”

Background:

Apple’s plans, announced in August, to search personal photos for suspicious content prompted a public outcry. More than 90 organizations called on the company to scrap the plans. Apple eventually put its plans on hold.

MEPs warn that the Commission’s plans would trigger a similar storm of protest. Providers would need to implement a backdoor in their software („client-side scanning“) to enable such monitoring. Implementing a routine for automatically reporting suspected communications content in case of a match would break safe end-to-end encryption altogether and eliminate the security and trust that comes with it. Individuals, businesses and government rely on end-to-end encryption to safeguard their personal, commercial and state secrets.

patrick-breyer.de/en/members-o…

As part of the Digital Decade, the EU Commission today presented its draft principles that are supposed to strengthen fundamental rights in the digital era. According to EU Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, the text shall serve as a benchmark and guideline for corporations and policymakers, when implementing new technologies in the future. EU civil society and the representation of its fundamental digital rights, such as privacy, empowerment and inclusion shall be at the heart of policy.

Patrick Breyer, MEP for the German Pirate Party and digital rights activist, is skeptical:

“It is positive to see the EU Commission not only talking fundamental rights, but wanting to put them into practise. However, in light of the actual policies of von der Leyen’s Commission, this announcement turns out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. You cannot, on the one hand, point to the right to confidential communications, while at the same time pursue chat control to monitor EU citizens’ private messages without suspicion. You cannot, on the one hand, publish a survey, according to which 91% of citizens consider the right to confidential communications of paramount importance, while at the same time pursuing data retention plans to collect information about the communications of the entire population. You cannot, on the one hand, promise ‘artificial intelligence’ that conforms to fundamental rights, while at the same time reject a ban on biometric mass surveillance in public spaces. All in all, the suspicion is growing that this ‘declaration’ is only a smoke screen, while the actions of the EU Commission seem rather inspired by the model of the Chinese surveillance state.

“Extremely dangerous and hostile to fundamental rights is the statement that children needed to be protected from ‘harmful content’, that they have a ‘right to be protected from all crimes, committed via or facilitated through digital technologies’, and that all crime should be ‘prevented’. Preventing all crime is impossible in a free society, and trying to do so would result in creating a totalitarian Stasi state. Without asking for their opinion, children are currently being instrumentalised by politicians to justify policies such as indiscriminate chat control as well as attacks on secure encryption. Children have a right to be protected from political instrumentalisation!”

patrick-breyer.de/en/hypocriti…