It seems that we have a fall full of elections in the Central Europe. First we had the general vote in Germany (where Pirates got a great support in some of the larger cities, like Berlin or Dresden), then there were elections in Austria, Luxembourg and now the Czech Republic.

2013 was a very different year in the Czech politics than the previous ones. First mass amnesty in 20 years, first president elected by the popular vote in history and first early elections after a very long time. All this changes destabilized the Czech political system severely. And the general mood that can be seen in the Czech society is not helping either. The outlook when it comes to many issues - not to mention the most crucial ones for the Pirates - is grim. 

After the failing policies of left-wing or right-wing parties, the situation in the Czech Republic is similar to Slovakia, Slovenia or even Croatia. Big parties failed in their promises and policies and the voters are desperately looking for anyone who might bring change to their country. The politicians are aware about this phenomena and they try to use it as much as possible for their cause. 

Julian Assange. Collateral murder. Bradley Manning. Cablegate. It's been a while since these words made it to the worldwide media. I still can remember the moment when the whole case stormed the general public discussion. As I remember correctly, almost everyone was talking about this issue and even the people from Wikipedia were affected by this;  being afraid for getting linked with the Wikileaks page only because of the -wiki prefix.(which would be like looking for a connection between United Airlines and Manchester United). Politicians throughout Europe were surprised by previously unknown actions made by US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of these contains for example the "Collateral Murder" video.

Shortly after that the whole project came into the major attention of the journalists around the world, security agencies from many countries started to ask questions. The project - as well as his founder, Julian Assange - became soon a target for many sides and it had to move from server to server. One of his companions, Bradley Manning, that published secret documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was charged and later sentenced for 35 years.

It was only a matter of time when one of the American documentarists will make a movie about the whole case. This year, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks debuted this June on Sundance Festival. As it can be seen already, in only few months the documentary attracted a lot of interesting, positive and unique reviews. Having in mind how the whole debate for the freedom of information is important, we decided to screen the movie here, inside of the European Parliament (12th November 2013, Room A1G-3)

One of the smallest countries in Europe - Luxembourg - held its national elections yesterday. Pirate Party of Luxembourg, one of the successful Pirate parties in Europe, tried to make it to the national Chamber of Deputies. I've been to Luxembourg for the whole weekend to see what was going on; to have chance to speak with Pirates, to see what outcome might be there and what future is rising for the Pirate Movent in the country of Luxembourg.

First of all - Luxembourg is unlike most of the countries in Europe. It is a tiny nation, hard to find on maps. Yet, it is very developed country, with well-known banking system and strong economy. The GDP per capita surpasses 250 % of the average of European Union, making Luxembourg the most developed country in EU. The people of Luxembourg speak 3 languages - German, French and Luxembourgish. 

They also have a very unique political system too. One might say that a small nation can have only one electoral district. However, the opposite is the truth. Luxembourg is divided into four districts (North, Central, South and East) and in order to get a seat, there is no distinct treshold that has to be crossed (like the 5 % in the Czech Republic etc).

As all of us know, children security on the internet is a problematic issue. Yet an important one. it is constantly triggering a lot of discussions in pretty much all the countries and even in the European Parliament. So far we could have seen many projects in the past, that were more or less successfull - for example the infamous "Red button" plugin for internet browsers in the Czech Republic, or other programs that are supposed to protect children from many evil things on the internet.