EU Surveillance Studies Disclosed By Pirate Party 343
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)."
Athors are from Slovakia (Score:4, Informative)
Re:wow (Score:4, Informative)
No, it hasn't proved useful in the UK. they became so ubiquitous that people don't care, the feed quality is bad enough that the recorded video is useless to the police or the courts, there are far too many feeds for anyone to be watching half of them and...
Well, it's that sort of a thing. I guess a lot of these could be 'remedied' by deploying modern CCD based cameras and using some sort of magical computer vision thing. But the main issue here is that it's been found that they jut don't reduce crime.
They may make it easier to catch people afterwards, but they don't actually prevent anything.
They have an "ethics board" (Score:5, Informative)
The project has a 10-member "ethics board". [indect-project.eu]
Re:Not secret (Score:5, Informative)
Those documents aren't secret. They were released to the public by the INDECT project itself, ages ago. Right here! [indect-project.eu]
Look again. The "D1.1 Report on the collection and analysis of user requirements" is not public available though the link you posted.
Flamebait (Score:5, Informative)
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 [indect-project.eu], by the way.)
What?? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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/ [jcm.org.uk]
And with the Lisbon "Treaty", the decision making in Brussels was recently streamlined to make it all a little faster.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:5, Informative)
The royal family don't really have anything to do with government. They're more of a tourist attraction. I prefer the zoo, myself.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:3, Informative)
> My question is simply this.
> Why?
Because "Yes, we can!"
> Does the government think the populace is going to go crazy and need constant monitoring?
Yes.
> A fear of Zombies?
Yes.
> Why is there a need to keep an eye on us all the time?
Because "Yes, we can!"
> If you make enough laws, everyone can be considered a criminal but this seems to be a case of severe paranoia.
Yes.
> And of course the private ventures or bureaucrats and politicians with their fingers in the pot appreciate the growth industry that the public's taxes will pay for.
Yes.
Glad to be of help :-)
Re:What?? (Score:5, Informative)
You missed something extremely important there.
Already, the majority of laws in Europe come from Brussels
I'm sorry, but that is just flatout wrong.
The majority of trade laws and laws relating to agriculture/production come from Brussels. But even under the Lisbon treaty the EU has no power whatsoever to impose criminal laws on its member nations. Therefore, even if the EU wanted to force police-state like control over its citizens, it has no means of doing so. EU does try to promote international police co-operation through Europol but Europol is just an organazation transfering and managing information, it has no rights to do arrests or search homes etc - all it can do is try and help local police forces to locate wanted high-profile criminals by relaying information from foreign agencies.
Don't get wrong, I'm as worried as the next /. about these kinds of projects but despite all the scaremongering the EU isn't quite as scary as you seem to think it is.
Look at it like this (Score:1, Informative)
They have always been as invasive as they can be. Yeah, the people had a lot more privacy before than they do now... Because we didn't have the technology to combat that! This isn't some new fad, they're just doing more effectively the things they've always wanted to do.
It also seems that whatever they are doing is working: The crime rates are going down, as you stated. So why stop here.
Practically, the government is doing what they should (investigate crimes, protect citizens who follow the laws, etc.) but just doing it more effectively than before. They'll save a lot of money (=lower taxes, etc.!) when they can just directly look up something that used to take many manhours of investigative work. In essence, they have defined goals and quality, do their best to achieve that and the goals just don't happen to include privacy for the sake of privacy.
There are just two problems here. First:
You might fear that they'll catch you for the "small" crimes you have made. (IE: you think that there are too many laws... Namely, the ones that you don't feel like following should be abolished.) This is however a problem that should be solved separately from this, it should not stop the police from implementing more effective methods to do their work!
The second problem is that if "the government" gains too much power, they can abuse it. I put the government in quotes because "The government" is like "The man" or "They": It doesn't exist as such. There is not one "The government" with access to all the powers and data that the government has, there is not one "The government" who decides what it should do and who to get rid of... There are millions of people who work, are supervised by their superiors and their conscience and limited to the resources that they can justify to other people who control what they're doing... Aside from the most important operations of CIA (Let's face it: If they really need to destroy you, they can. So they are irrelevant here.), "The Government" can abuse large databases like this, etc. only if there is very, very widespread corruption. And not necessarily much even then, as the higher ups with the power will want to keep the exclusive right to themselves, limiting its scope... Anyways: If there would be that widespread corruption and abuse, the street cops robbing you, etc. would be a much more serious concern than the high ups of the government being able to locate you if you are unmasked in a public place.
I might or might not believe everything I wrote in this post myself. Regardless, there should be some valid views.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:3, Informative)
US: GPS scanners on cars
India: Blackberry keys/40-bit encryption
UAE: Etelisat certificate/man-in-the-middle
Germany: INDECT
UK: CCTV/Echelon
You are comparing apples and oranges. INDECT is not a surveillance operation, it is a study on surveillance algorithms/techniques. Sure it is a bit shady, and they probably have access to some collected data sets, but in the core it is a research project, studying methods of assisting the focus of humans that watch camera walls. For instance, "suspicious behaviour detection" ... of course it will never work perfectly.
The great thing about surveillance is that it doesn't work, for once because personnel to dig through all the data is required. INDECT tries to cover this aspect.
It's not exactly some shady organisation doing secret stuff in their bunker. The document lists ~20 universities that collaborate on that. They are the ones to be asked what they are actually researching on, and whether it is ethical. That happened, and unfortunately INDECT decided to remove the documents from their website ( http://www.indect-project.eu/ [indect-project.eu] ), citing that the researchers don't get to researching because they have to answer questions all day long ...
This story is so old by now ...
However, contrary to US/UK, central Europe, and especially Germany has resistance against surveillance and has a culture of privacy (in the sense of "right to be left alone").
People everywhere are under attack by the armed gangs otherwise known as government. Then we have the gang union (UN)'s telecoms guy saying companies need to work with governments.
People have the government they deserve -- Joseph de Maistre. Especially in democracies.
People need to stop fighting each other and unite against their own governments.
Politicians are not a separate species. They are people like you and me.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:2, Informative)
There are 397,403 km [answers.com] of paved road in the UK so that makes it about 1 camera / 100 meters
Re:For what purpose? (Score:1, Informative)
And this makes it ok to monitor social networking accounts how? You can't stab or punch someone with a tweet. What are the they going to watch for? Terrorist activity? Paedophiles? Bad words?
CCTV [wikimedia.org] isn't very effective in stopping crime either.
The purpose of such mass monitoring schemes is not preventing crime. It's just not reasonable to expect so. And even if it did, the tiny percentage of crimes that can be prevented does not justify such intrusive measures.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:3, Informative)
Seems somebody has to point out to you that jobs below minimal wage are not available to legal workers.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:2, Informative)
>>>So cry me a river about your right to form mass uncontrolled protests without police planning and assistance.
If that's how you feel, then change the law. Until you make that change, the law is quite clear. PA Constitution: "The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man, and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty."
The latter allows the police to deal with people destroying property, but the first part allows the People to speak their minds (and that right is further reinforced by the national Constitution). That is the law and if you disagree with it, then alter it to strike-out the "free speech" part.
In the meantime those Pittsburgh protesters in the video had done nothing wrong, and had every right to stand there and speak their minds, per the Law of this Sovereign State.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:5, Informative)
In 1970 there was a massive, peaceful protest against the Vietnam war at Kent State University. The government reacted by killing protesters. [wikipedia.org]
I was a senior in high school when it happened, about a month before graduation. It was a relly big deal at the time, all over the news.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:3, Informative)
Well, the reality is that police do everything he mentioned, but it is only some of the police, and it is relatively infrequent. In the US, you're probably only a little more likely to be abused by a police officer than you are to die in an airplane crash.
You don't read much news, do you? A friend of mine got in trouble after a nasty divorce, and died in agony in the Sangamon County Jail [slashdot.org]. There's hardly a month goes by when someone from the Springfield Police Department doesn't kill someone, usually a crazy person. There are more people here dying at the hands of the police or jailors than there are civilian murders, and far more than people dying in crashes.
You can't hardly read the Chicago Tribune without reading about Chicago cops killing or beating the shit out of an innocent person. The police are out of control, at least in Illinois.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:3, Informative)
Hold on, the Government did not set out to kill people at Kent. I was a teenager myself at the time, it was a horrific act, but based on stupidity, not government orders ("Kill all the hippies" does not seem plausible.)
The basic point I make is that violence is generally met with violence. When untrained kids come armed with weapons to a protest then the potential for bullets flying get raised. When tensions are high it is bound to result in a more ugly release of that tension. Almost every effective protest was found and acted upon with non-violence. In couterpoint, riots around would meetings tend to turn people away from the message because that sight of burning cars and running people give better news feed then rational/reasoned actions.
I'll confess, I've never been oppressed, subjugated, or limited in my life. I cannot fathom the courage it takes to stand in the front line of a march on Birmingham, the salt mines of India, or the streets of Burma. What I see is those that stood, and stood against the violence, stoof in non-violence, even to the point of pain or death made more difference then any riot. The riots in Chicago didn't change the conditions there, same with Watts, same with Bangkok today. It only showed the world that people in chaos can bring about destruction, not construction.
Re:This is why we vote Pirate (Score:1, Informative)
Kent State wasn't as peaceful a protest as popular memory makes it out to be.
The reason the national guard was there in the first place was because the mayor had called the government requesting protection for the city from the campus, after a weekend of rioting. The national guard turned up to protect the town, and the students responded by burning the ROTC building. The shooting happened the next day, when one of the guard divisions -- itself made up of college age kids -- got turned around and cut off, pinned between a fence and a section of marching protesters. Most of the guards fired after hearing a shot, presuming it had come from the crowd. Had it been a planned shooting, their accuracy would have been a lot better.