There's quite a long list of things I could be telling about myself, but I'll try to keep things short.

I'm one of Amelia Andersdotter's new interns from the Finnish Pirate Party (Piraattipuolue). But where others focus on keeping things orderly and doing a mountain of paperwork and typing, I have a whole different task which is filming and editing the exile6e series. I've never worked in a highly political (not to mention international) surroundings like the one inside the Parliament, but I'm up to the task that's been flung at my direction!

My experience what comes to video making comes largely from personal experience, but some of it comes directly from Keskuspuiston Ammattiopisto, which was the vocational school I graduated from in 2012. The media branch of my school focused mainly in graphic design and photography, thus video and audio work didn't get as much attention in our curriculum as I would've hoped. Since the school was largely based in photography and graphic design, I learned most of my videomaking by watching tutorials and doing internships in different web tv/multimedia companies.

What do we associate space with? Star wars? It can be, we actually had a “cold” one, years ago. Star Trek ? Yeeeees,  people that are always late (including me) have literally dreamt of being instantly (and successfully if possible!) teleported. More down to earth, we can also consider space as being a sector of top research and innovation. The hostile laws of physics to reach space and its great scientific and technological potential have motivated human intelligence and skills to create new materials and technologies, and understand better THE earth environment. Some European countries have acquired a relatively solid experience, France, Germany, Italy… The European Space Agency (ESA) has been performing an efficient cooperation for peaceful space activities between many more European countries. Now the EU wants to encourage and benefits from such activities.

It’s true that “downstream” space applications are important and growing: thanks to the satellites we can have internet connexion, broadcasting, navigation system and earth observation services.  Of course, the root of this industry is still defence-oriented with old and active military satellites covering the orbits and whose reign reached its peak during the last decades of the Cold War. Also the main activities such as the launching and manufacturing of space crafts are entirely or partly under national, military assets.  But the civil sector is surely taking more “room” in space, and the fact that the EU wants to better diffuse social and economic benefits of space activities is welcomed. After all, most of the money in space comes from the public.

As I've writen in my earlier post, most of the central European Pirate Parties are getting ready for the elections. This literally means Germany, Luxembourg, Austria and the Czech Republic. Pirates from the last mentioned one gathered in the city of Plzeň in order to talk about the upcoming elections, to review the progress made so far and most of all - to elect a new Board and a president, which could lead the Party to the early elections in October 2013.

But not only elections were on program during the all day long meeting in Plzeň. The current member of Czech Senate (one and only Senate member representing Czech Pirates), Libor Michálek briefed about the work he made in past months. He also expressed a strong word of support for several candidates for the upcoming legislative elections in certain regions of the country. Oldřich Kužílek, one of the authors of the czech Law on public access to information (106/1999) had a presentation related to the Freedom of informations component of the Pirate program. 

After a long work the foundation of the Pirate Party Europe entered one of it's final stages. The ceremony of signing the statutes and manifesto of the Pirate Party Europe took place on 4th September in Luxembourg City (Abayé de Neumünster) and it was part of the Pirate Party Europe Conference. 

A day earlier me and Mattias arrived to Luxembourg to meet some of the Pirates, who decided to go to the event with us. Since the conference took place in Luxembourg, it is not surprising to see that most of the visitors came mostly from Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France or Switzerland. There were also delegations from more far-away countries, like Spain, Russia etc. The conference began with a nice morning workshop, which was then followed by voting of amendments and possible changes in the manifesto.

In order to avoid prolonging the whole conference, the voting section was decided to be simple and strict. First of all the changes made since the Warsaw conference in July were presented and then voting begun. Most of the amendments were of cosmetic nature; some of the Pirates from Italy proposed to change the name of the title of the leading person of PP EU, due to translation reasons. The voting section was perfectly organized so the whole process did not take very long (abouth half an hour). The conclusions were clear. After the voting session Amelia and Joni (our new intern, a photographer) arrived for the signing ceremony. 

As the month of September started, the elections in Germany (22nd September), Czech Republic (25 - 26th October) and Luxembourg (20th October) are closing.

First of all, it is important to mention that the situation in all three countries stated above is incredibly different. Luxembourgian Prime minister decided to resign after a wiretapping scandal, in the Czech Republic the Prime minister decided to resign after several members of the government were accused of corruption. In Germany Angela Merkel tries to defend her position in regular elections. 

How did my trip to Dresden start? In Ústí nad Labem, I joined with Alix from French Pirate Party, and then we travelled to Dresden, where we met Sebastian, one of the leading pirates of Saxony. The level of his understandings of the situation both in Saxony, as well as Germany was quite impressive. To be honest, it is hard to comment such a complex foreign policy analysis of his, especially when you are from such a small country, where politicians deal mostly with regional issues. 

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jan Loužek, and my nickname in the internet reality is Aktron. I am a new intern here in Brussels at Amelia's office. 

Who am I anyway? I am a guy, who is interested in Pirate agenda, as many of the agendas of other movements, dedicated mostly to the very same thing - making the Internet a place, where we can do things like sharing informations, interchange knowledge or speed up cultural progress without the obstacles that we face unfortunatelly now. To stop processes that can cripple free Internet, or that can put it into chains of someone's interest. This is the goal. Tools, how to achieve it - are many. 

I can remember clearly February 2012, when I went to Belgrade in order to visit a conference, dedicated to the cooperation between internet communities and culture-related institutions. All the way to Belgrade I was puzzled by a question: How to make an interesting speech to 120 people in one room? Few hours after the actual speech I was asked to speak to cca 2000 people at the anti-ACTA demonstration at the Republic Square, prepared also by the Serbian Pirates. This was my first engagement in Pirate-related activities. Then I joined many of the pirate activities when I realized my actucal contribution can be worthy. For example, I helped Croatian Pirates during their election campaign in april 2013 - as a person, that also speak Croatian language, aside of English, Russian and Polish (the third one is a language I am actually learning). 

Few people have evaded the Christian democrat proposal  to reform the present Swedish institutional framework in such a way that public authorities should no longer be able to make large-scale trading of personal data they have collected from Swedish citizens, without having a choice for Swedish citizens to abstain from the collection.  Nils Agnesson writes at dataskydd.net that the EU proposal for a data protection regulation in fact already handles most of the problems the Christian Democrats describe. So it sounds and hopeful for the future that one of the Swedish government parties actually does support reforms that are in line with fundamental human rights and the privacy of Swedish citizens?

But what is the government position?

Well, the Swedish government has been lobbying very hard to get a special exception in  the data protection regulation which would permit exactly the kind of personal data trading by public authorities that is now harshly criticized by the Christian Democrats. The result is a new bit of added text, an article 80(a), which effectively removes all protection from all European citizens in every European country against this type of abuse of power, which is seen by most citizens as something inherently unfair and bad for the public sector to do.

Tillägg i efterhand: gick igenom mina tabbar och insåg att nederländska konstitutionsrådet dragit slutsatsen att en avkrypteringsplikt är i strid mot europeiska konventionen för mänskliga rättigheter. Tydligen har vi en allmän rätt enligt konventionen att inte inkriminera oss själva gentemot våldsmakten.

Det är svårt ibland att landa mitt i nyhetsflöden. I dagarna har jag hittat många upprörda tweets och nyhetsartiklar på flertalet språk om att Lavabit, en krypterad mejltjänst, och Silent Circle, en likaledes krypterad mejltjänst, har stängt ned sina leveranser av tjänster efter att ha utsatts för påtryckningar av amerikanska säkerhetstjänsten. Sen är inte den svenska debatt som uppstår i dessa amerikanska händelsers vak, och i en kommentar från svenska .SE-stiftelsen ställer sig Måns Jonasson frågande till huruvida kryptering håller på att förbjudas.

Om så vore fallet skulle det nämligen gå emot många av .SE-stiftelsens ansträngningar för att få fler att kryptera mer för att åstadkomma bra saker som källskydd, privatliv och säkerhet. Inte så bra.