The same way we don’t want our technical infrastructures to be broken, we don’t want our political infrastructures to be broken.
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Privacy protections weakened: instead of safeguarding European citizens privacy, Germany leading efforts in . EU parliamentarians happily copy pasting from
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Eu migration policy: Instead of finding long term solutions for how to address migration crises increasingly draconian
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Mass surveillance
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Oettingar
Sources of \#EU \#fails
- Bad architecture aka EU institutions: No Trias Politica
- EU parliament cannot initiate legislation
- Citizens have limited access to court of justice
- Council of ministers instead of Council o Parliaments
- Members of commission or council cannot be sent home
- We cannot have more democratic EU without member sate governments ceding power to either national parliaments or the EU parliament
- Failure of the 4th estate:
- BXl coverage by national media after the fact
- Too few civil servants (way less than typical member of state governments)
- Little presence of national media in BXL
- Everything in BXl seems designed to bore to death
- #unfail: You need drama to get media invloved e.g, commisioners an be sent home
- Many tech community has little understanding of how eu works.
- #unFail: Run diagnostics and repair
- #Unfail: more power to EU parliament. We need some constitutional crisis or revolt by EU parliament.
- #unfail: support the EU parliament as the only institution that represents our interests in the EU. Fix low voter turnout
- Bug in the OS aka legislative processes
- #fail: what should happen (get visualisation from Walter). What does happen: Trilogues. EC can meet after in secret trilogue meetings, no rules, no minutes, new texts negotiated.
- #fail: secret negotiations. E.g. trade agreements TTIP negotiated in secrecy.
- #unfail: Send in requests for documents request via asktheeue.org, or the European Ombudsman
- #unfail: Use cool tools like Parltrack to keep track of dossiers
- Bad RAM: lack of institutional memory
- #unFail: Keeping track of, and Visualising, previous versions of bad proposals and why they were thrown out. See Accessnow & EDRI poster on Surveillance in the EU: How EU repeats same mistake
- #unfail: we need to be the institutional memory of the EU parliamentarians.
- #unfail: we need more human resources, more civil rights actors to be active in EU to protect your digital rights (total in EU is 50!).
- Bad devices: lobbyists
- Examples of attempts by lobbyists to frame Hyperlinks pointing to possible copyright infringement, as copyright infringements themselves
- Example of attempts by lobbyists to frame anonymity as slavery: See video by advertising industry. ( search for:EU datap video slavery)
- DOS attacks
- Internet
What can you do: "We need to be the memory of policy-makers"
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Be civil, even when angry. Calling people sellouts, or corporate stooges, is not very helpful in getting people to change their minds.
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Get informed: If the media are failing us, we can bypass the media. We’re from the internet, and the internet is about bypassing gatekeepers.
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Second stage: Contact your MEPs. Ask your MEPS about relevant dossiers. Write and maintain the code that helps others: ParlTrack, Memopol, Pippi longstrings).
Q&A
How do we mobilise more people and convince politicians?
- Follow the three steps. talk to people who are not just your FB.
Maybe we can turn this into a short intro for LOTE5? Looking forward to meet them in Brussels.