So what happened at the LIBE hearing on mass e-surveillance of EU citizens?

All in all as in most of the cases, The Commission came to present their reports and analytics, and took a good amount of bulling from the Parliament for the insufficient work. That is, of course, very summarized overview of what happened.

One of the major topics was the effect Snowden’s revelations had on the relationship between EU and US and more specifically what is the impact of his disclosures on some of the agreements EU has signed with US, such as the safe-harbor, the TFTP and the PNR agreement for exchanging data. Their usefulness for EU was questioned and one main point was made from a lot of MEPs. Should we completely suspend those agreements and review the statuses of all the transatlantic agreements EU currently participates in, together with US, or should we keep on doing nothing about it, as the Commission’s report suggest by stating that no damages have been detected by the mass surveillance.

Outrageous, isn’t it?

We have a lot of meetings, sessions and hearings here inside of the European Parliament. Yesterday, European People's Party organized an event dedicated to the current state of a common market of telecommunications services - called Telecom single market.

The hearing had a form of four consecutive panels about these topics: Roaming, Net neutrality, Rights of the end users and (radiofrequency) Spectrum. Despite the fact, that roaming costs are right now seen as one of the major issues in European digital single market debate, I would like to focus here on the Net neutrality session.

All of the three speakers discussing this issue (Thomas Grob, Kirsten Fiedler and Frode Sørensen) supported the idea of net neutrality, as the idea itself is pretty much not a matter of concern. But how net neutrality or non-neutrality is seen and defined, that can be disputable. At least during this debate it was so.

I would like to mention here some of the interesting points of each one of these three speakers. 

One of the interesting points of Mr. Grob was the comparison made between Specialized Services and Internet stores. Both online stores and Specialized services are regulated by a simple company. If you have your application rejected from the Internet store that is owned by a private company, it should be only logical that only companies that can afford this can have their apps available as "Specialized services". Well... no. Do we really want to have infrastructure that is supposed to serve all of us to become a simple public business? Or what if it will turn to something else... How will our freedom of speech look like when a simple internet user won't be able to reach everyone, as he currently can?

Many Pirate Parties face the question of how to delegate power and representation. How to ensure that someone who is entrusted with a representative task for the party or political power in an elected institution or as president of the party is accountable and responsible is by no means easy.

One of the more common fears in Pirate Parties is that people holding double representative roles (president/elected member of parliament or treasurer in two organisations at the same time) will abuse their power in both roles. I will argue that double representation is not necessarily a problem.

An elected member of parliament has staff that helps ensure that the member (the representative) is efficient in its task of representation. That means an elected member of parliament with a steady income and staff stands a better chance of exercising the double role as president of the party responsibly than a president of the party who has a full-job on top of their representative role in the party.

In the Swedish Pirate Party one of the consequences of not having double representation is that one of our elected members employs both the previous president of the party and the present president of the party. This means that both the present and former highest representatives of the party are in a position of financial dependence to the elected member. This is clearly disadvantageous to the power balance in the party. The MEP can set the agenda for their staff, rather than having their staff help them exercise the agenda of the party.

For instance the Czech Pirates would not want to put themselves in that situation.

The Council of Europe is holding a Conference under the name “Octopus Conference Cooperation against Cybercrime” between 4 – 6 December 2013 in Strasbourg, France as its main focus would be on building safeguards and data protection tools and policies. The Conference is also hosting few workshops on policies and initiatives on cybercrime of international and private sector organisations; transborder access to data; protecting children against sexual exploatation; international cooperation for data preservation and cybercrime legislation in Asia/Pacific region.

Amelia wanted to participate and in particular she wanted to attend the discussions regarding the Budapest Cybercrime Convention, and so she registered for the event in her capacity of MEP especially active in that particular field, but she was rejected participation.

As a response to her rejection, she wrote the following Letter of Complaint to the organizers, the Council of Europe, COE (not to be confused with European Council)

Letter of complaint regarding Octopus Cyber Crime Conference

Dear Honourable Secretary-General Mr Thorbjørn Jagland,

The Budapest Cyber Crime Convention has been defining for Internet development and opportunities for industry for more than 10 years. It's an important issue, and concerns both the trust and the confidence for the markets of the European Union.

Yep, German Pirate Party, the biggest Pirate Party in Europe (when it comes to the amount of members) had a general assembly this week. New board of the Party was elected, together with new President of German Pirates (Thorsten Wirth). Amelia was there, presenting a speech from the Pirate point of view on current issues in the European politics, such as consumer protection, responsibility or transparency.

Yesterday, I had a nice opportunity to see the public hearing about the proposed directive related to the Single Telecommunications Market. Quite a big meeting; it took place in one of the larger conference rooms and it was attended by quite a lot of people. Many stakeholders (ie. parties deeply interested in the topic, but with contradictory interests) were present.