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EU Surveillance Studies Disclosed By Pirate Party
Spliffster writes "The German Pirate Party has disclosed some secret documents on how the EU is planning to monitor citizens. The so called INDECT Documents describe how a seamless surveillance could (or should) be implemented across Europe. The use of CCTV cameras, the Internet (social networks), and even the use of UAVs are mentioned as data sources. Two of the nine documents can be downloaded from the German Pirate Party's website (PDFs in English)."
No thank you to the surveillance state... we have all seen Metropolis, and as cool as it was, we don't want to live there.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Surveillance is fine if theres... a Cold War
Thats a slippery slope to tread. When mentioned under the right words, that could be used with concepts of the global power rise of China, the nuclear ambitions of Iran, ect... hell, enough spin and it could be used with consideration of the Taliban. Just need to frame it right to the correct people and suddenly your in a pseudo-Cold War with whom ever you can demonize enough (that is also unable to stand against you too much).
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
I guess we should thank the German pirates for putting it out there so we can have a nice ruckus about it...before we forget about it again in a day or 2.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I wonder if forcing every single human being to read George Orwell's 1984 would prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Perhaps it's just that people don't realize what could go wrong with an Orwellian government in place. Perhaps they just don't see it, they don't think anything can go wrong if the government watches your every step.
Then again, perhaps people just don't care. As long as it's not them (and by "them" i mean the generations that currently live) who suffer it, they just don't give a damn.
I can tell from personal experience that many people don't care about stuff like that even if you tell them the consequences. Perhaps Big Brother is precisely what we, as a civilization, need in order to realize that it's a horrible thing to live like that. After all, experience is a good teacher.
I've skimmed through the first pdf. It looks like they are trying to build an Event Control system. Designed to control and identify people at large events, like soccer games. Some countries in Europe have a real problem with soccer hooligans. Or just plain riots, like the ones in France last year. It's the cops who want a system to identify the rioters. Seems logical to me, Jim.
But the government could mis-use it for anything they want. And that scares me, as a E.U. citizen.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_social_network_spy_system_brief,_INDECT_Work_Package_4,_2009
Some deep ip, friend of friend of friend hunting software triggered by phrases, word use and IM connections.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
As far as I'm concerned everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And we have too many crimes, not too many criminals. When you make everything that people like to do or have to do illegal you create excuses for surveillance.
The project has a 10-member "ethics board".
Those documents aren't secret. They were released to the public by the INDECT project itself, ages ago. Right here!
Look again. The "D1.1 Report on the collection and analysis of user requirements" is not public available though the link you posted.
This is silly. The EU isn't "planning" anything. INDECT is an FP7 research project. So it's a bunch of universities and industrial partners that happened to get funding from the EU because the reviewers thought it was a scientifically interesting proposal. That doesn't mean anything the researchers come up with is EU policy. Besides, the EU doesn't have any authority or power whatsoever to impose a police state on its members.
(They have a FAQ, by the way.)
What happened to innocent until proven guilty? A system like this makes anyone a suspect (a potential criminal), this is very 1984 like!
My government is not allowed to survey me until a judge order so. The described goals are to survey everyone. The authors of INECT are absolutely aware that they would trump human rights (and they see it more as an annoyance than an problem), this is why INECT is trying to keep this shit secret.
To some of the commenters above; this has not much to do with Germany itself but the EU. It was just the German Pirate Party which leaked the documents.
-S
I know FP7 projects. The EU is definitely interested in the outcome. They cost many millions of euros. It's not just an exercise.
Not all the outcomes of FP7 projects (or FP6 or older ones) will be used, but it shows a trend in which way the EU thinks that Europe should go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Framework_Programme#FP7_Specific_Programmes
Part of the FP7 projects are quite fundamental, and therefore it is unlikely that they include "implementation", but the fact that they don't plan to implement this doesn't make me feel any more comfortable.
And the EU has LOADS of power to impose laws on its members. Already, the majority of laws in Europe come from Brussels... http://www.jcm.org.uk/blog/2009/06/what-percentage-of-laws-come-from-the-eu/
And with the Lisbon "Treaty", the decision making in Brussels was recently streamlined to make it all a little faster.
Please don't monopolize the use of the word "we" to mean "EVERYONE". "We" could mean "me and my friend". It referers to a group of two or more people of which I am a member.
Opinions expressed above are mine, and not my employees'.
"They may make it easier to catch people afterwards, but they don't actually prevent anything."
Just to emphasise, they may make it easier to catch *people*.
They do nothing to catch corporations obviously, though corporate crime is almost certainly a bigger threat to national security and well-being than any Joe Schmoe on the street.
In addition, by some strange coincidence, any time the police in the UK have been accused of misdeeds, (such as brutalising innocent members of the public) the relevant CCTV cameras have always been found to have been wiped/malfunctioning/looking in the wrong direction.
If street criminals have even 10% of the luck of these accused police officers, then the CCTV system is basically useless and pointless.
We'd be better off relying on members of the public and ubiquitous phone cams. At least *they* have caught the occasional police brutality incident. That makes them superior to the CCTV system in my opinion, and cheaper too.
We is first-person plural, Einstein. Flaming Fail - no pun intended, but the alliteration was.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
I live in China. This week, a friend of a friend left a large sum of money in a taxi. My friend's staff went down to the police station and came back with a record of surveillance video, all the stops the taxi made, a route the taxi took in Google Maps style format, the taxi driver's home address, ID card scan, and mobile phone number. This is coming to a nation near you, if it's not already there. It's funny, one of the ways you can tell if street construction is almost finished is when they install the surveillance cameras on poles.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That society, like most societies, is only an improvement if you're on top of the social heap. Similar to how most Ren Faire fans aren't so excited of the prospect of the real life of the average Renaissance person, which was generally a combination of working on a farm, being conscripted into an army, dying of plague (or dysentery or a host of other diseases), and praying to avoid dying of plague. Ditto for Ayn Rand's views - I have yet to meet an Ayn Rand fan who thinks that they're part of the unwashed masses who never accomplish anything important. Similarly, most Trek fans imagine themselves as a bridge officer instead of Second Class Deck Cleaner, and more Star Wars fans imagine themselves as a Jedi of some sort than some no-name moisture farmer.
It's all good fun, but hardly realistic.
I am officially gone from