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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Zur Verteidigung des Offenen Internets

At an event organised by Brussels think-tank Security and Defence Agenda, EDRi's advocacy coordinator debated freedom and security online with:

- Robert Madelin, Director General of DG Information Society of the European Commission,
- Erika Mann, Member of the Board of ICANN and Vice President of the Computer and Communications Industry Association,
-Suleyman Anil, Head of the Cyber Defence Section of NATO.

This is EDRi's opening speech:

Thank you for the invitation to speak this evening on a topic that is of major importance to free speech, innovation and t

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Deutsch: Der seltsame Fall der Internetfilterung in Irland

One of the most important developments for freedom of expression online has been the growth of internet filtering systems, which have rapidly been adopted by national governments as the "solution" to various forms of internet wrongdoing.

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Deutsch: Facebook löscht Profile von Aktivisten

Facebook has just deleted about 50 UK activist groups' profiles and users' accounts without any notification to the owners of the accounts.

While the reasons are not very clear, a possible explanation being that the respective groups have technically breached their terms and conditions by using a "profile" rather than a "page", there are suspicions that Facebook might have acted after a law enforcement complaint and the purge could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain. In any case, Facebook's action is questionable especially as the platform performed the

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Deutsch: Die "Virtuelle Schengen Grenze" oder die "Große Firewa...

During a meeting in February 2011 of the Council of the European Union's Law Enforcement Work Party (LEWP), a forum for cooperation on issues such as counter terrorism, customs and fraud, a disturbing proposal was tabled to create a "Great Firewall of Europe" by blocking "illicit" web material at the borders of the bloc with the intention to "to propose concrete measures towards creating a single secure European cyberspace."

According to the proposal, the secure European cyberspace would have a "virtual Schengen border" and "virtual access points" whereby "the Internet

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Europarat – Eine neue Begriffsbestimmung für Medien

The fourth meeting of the Council of Europe (CoE) Committee of experts on new media (MC-NM) was held on 28-29 March 2011 in Strasbourg, with two main points on its agenda. The first one was a discussion on comments received in response of its public consultation on two draft recommendations on the protection of human rights with regards, to search engines and to social network services, respectively. This MC-NM work is led by The Netherlands representative (Sjoera Nas), with the help of the Secretariat.

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Deutsch: Serie: Privatisierung der Online Strafverfolgung – Teil C

The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice recently published his views with regard to the Scarlet/Sabam case C-70/10 in the European Court of Justice. This is a crucial case with regard to privatised enforcement, as it is the first time that the legality of this approach has been tested. The case came as a result of an attempt by the Belgian collecting society Sabam to require the small Belgian ISP Scarlet to install a filtering system to monitor all peer to peer traffic on its network and block files which Sabam ruled to be unauthorised.

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Deutsch: Italienisches Gericht macht Google für Suchvorschläge haftbar

On 31 March 2011, an Italian court of Milan ruled that Google was responsible for its Google Suggest, the "autocomplete" function that suggests words and characters to complete a partial search for its users.

The case was brought to court by a person whose name, when typed in the Google search field, was associated, through the "suggested searches" (now "related searches"), to the words "truffatore" (con man, swindler) and "truffa" (scam, fraud).

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Deutsch: Aserbaidschan: Dissidenten mit neuen Internet-Tools ausgeforscht

As freedom activists have increased their activity on Facebook, the Azeri government has also increased its attention and surveillance of social networks.