to be here. Thank you. Um, it's true I support a lot of organizations but I try to consider

myself an independent one. Um, um, what I want to talk about is how we can influence policy making at the European Union level and this is basically like the collateral damage of ACTA. Like ACTA has positive, um, effects on, we, we've developed a lot of

tools while we wanted to counter ACTA. Um, and we created a lot of tools while we, while we created the resistance in the last three or four years against ACTA. And I want to show you some of the tools, uh, five in, in fact, that we have developed in this toolbox in the

last, last three or four years and how you can use those tools to really like, um, subversively influence policy making at the European Union level. So, European Union has one beautiful motto which I think is, uh, is really one of the biggest strengths of

ours. It's the united in diversity. If you think about, if, I don't know if you know that the European Parliament has 23 official languages, 27 countries, uh, six political groups and more than 170 parties represented in the European Parliament. So, that is such a huge diversity. That means there's like never, uh, at least a group agreement

or there's like always, even in the socialist group, there's like some, uh, renegades that are voting against the group policy or something like, um, there's, there's such a great diversity and such a, um, like chaos as well that I really enjoy, um, um, playing

with. Um, so, um, let's talk about the institutions where we can and want to influence this policy making. Of course, this is the order, um, as, as the legislative pipeline goes. Like when there's a new legal proposal, that always comes from the commission.

The commission is a bureaucratic institution that is not democratically elected and, and they come up with a text. And the text gets submitted to the European Parliament where there's a lot of different and quite complicated stages, um, that the legal, legislative proposal goes through. That might last like from a few months to a few years or if there's

a dead, um, proposal, then of course forever. And then after the parliament has scrutinized the legal proposal, then the council that is like the representation of the member states, the 27, like the ministries, like the ministers of telecommunication of even each member state, that is the telecoms, uh, council, um, they

decide whether they approve this or not. And if they approve, then it becomes a directive or regulation or whatever. And if they don't, then the whole cycle starts again, basically. So there's other authorities that you can also, um, involve in this policy making. Um, the data protection, um, um, officers, one very nice guy, then you have

telecoms regulation authorities like baguettes, which is, um, an umbrella organizations for the 27, uh, telecoms regulatory authorities in the 27 member states. So there's, there's a lot of, of attack, um, surface where you can mount your attacks. But I don't know how

many of you do software development, but whenever you do software development, there's a saying that the earlier you fix the bugs, the less expensive it is to fix the bugs. Or, you know, like, it's really, really hard to change a fucked up law when it has been

already adopted in the countries or when it has been voted in the parliament. So you need to fix the law before that. Way before that. Um, so then that's, I'm going to, to the other, uh, organizations. So some of the organizations that do very good work on the European level. Um, and then we have some allies everywhere, of course, the

European Parliament. There's like, um, good people in, in every institution. I have, from my own experiences, we have the pirates in the European Parliament. We have other MEPs, mostly in the greens, but socialists. But there's even some good people, I guess, in, uh, in the conservative parties or groups there. Um, then there's the

European Parliament Free Software User Group, which is very active and tries to support in the European Parliament people who wants to use free software and free standards. And then there's even people in the commission who, who do good jobs and, um, like, they're, I guess there's also a bit deprived of civil society. Like,

so, so the cost for getting there and, and, and giving advice to these people is quite high. You need to be in Brussels. Brussels is not cheap, et cetera, et cetera. Big lobby companies do have the money, but civil society, it's kind of, you know, we have Adri at least, um, and, and some other organizations, but it's, it's difficult. So they are deprived even in the commission of, of the input of civil

society. And, and when they get that, they're usually very thankful for that. And then the biggest ally again is diversity. Like you can, there's like so much chaos going on. I, I really enjoy that. Um, so then there's, there's a lot of issues that we care about besides ACTA. Uh, network neutrality is one of those and

one of the tools I ever show or some have, have, have roots in, in the network neutrality debates. Then we have the passenger name records. The cyber crime directive is now at the moment, um, um, in, in the plenary stage already. And it's, it's a very bad, uh, piece of legislation. It's like the hacker

paragraph in Germany three years ago, I guess. Um, and if you remember three years ago in Germany, there was like huge outcry against that. At the moment there's five people working against a cyber crime directive. I'm one of them. And, and it's, it's, it's very horrible. So if you can help out with a cyber crime directive, that would be really nice. We need some big noise around that. Um,

then there's data retention, the IP reinforcement directive will be open up this year, possibly, which is a, um, uh, follow up to ACTA. Uh, the PSI directive from the past, we had swift agreement, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of issues that we do care about and some of these, uh, organizations I showed you, and their allies help us with. Um, so, um,

basically this is the context in which we try to operate and, uh, the issues that we care about. And the very, I have this like notion of, of, of, of a pipeline of how legislation comes to, to life and then how, how it gets

implemented and so on. So I, I've prepared five of these cases, um, for presenting the five tools that I want to present to you. The first tool that I want to present to you is about understanding law. I'm not a legal lawyer. For me it's quite difficult to, to read these long texts that are, uh, quite difficult to understand. But it, it's also true that some of these text

blocks are, are like memes, legal memes that get copied from one piece of legislation to the next one. You get very short memes that are like, like phrases that are very often common, uh, and very common. But then you have also longer phrases which are, um, uh, quite interesting. Like, um, uh, the

European Interoperability Framework was co-authored by the Business Software Alliance, which has been found by a similar tools, but this was used by, that was done by, uh, manually by hand by the Free, uh, Free Software Foundation Europe. The Kyrie Forum, it's a trade agreement, one of the biggest, uh, trade agreements I ever saw in my life. Like in ASCII text, it's 4.5 megabytes. And out of that, I think five, four megabytes

is, is, uh, tariff tables, uh, tables like customs and, and stuff like that. Um, and it contains IP Red Article 8 actually, um, which is, it's not something that you really want to export. And you can find that with, with Pippi Longstring, which basically detects, um,

copy pasts or, or like text blocks that appear in other documents, which is really helpful. And there's a big difference to, you know, diffs from coding. If you did ever did coding, a diff also is a diff and you just move around the text and in your code, like re you, you move it later in the code. We don't care about that. If someone

renames Article 7 into Article 28 and moves the article back, we still care about that, that, um, this is the same text, but we don't really care about, uh, whether it was Article 7 or 8 or, or whatever. Um, then you can use this also for collaborative commenting. This is like, um, I don't know if, how many of you know

STET, uh, which has been used as a tool in drafting the GNU public license version 3 or comment.com, which is a really nice tool where you select the text, uh, online with your mouse, and then you get a small text input box where you can comment on that part of, of text only like this. And, and that everyone else sees that there's a comment on that

because it's highlighted like, like here. Um, so, um, it's really useful for if you have a legal text and you want to do commenting on that, like a collaborative understanding of what is this law going to do to us. Um, it automatically

imports text from Eurolex, which is the database of documents of the European Union, um, which is quite nice and convenient. Like if you ever want to refer to a dossier or directive, uh, you can make up automatically the URL and PIPI long strings. It doesn't even have to exist because PIPI imports it automatically. And, um, you can even refer

to articles. So you can have very precise references to, to, to parts of, of laws and send them as URLs along to other people. Hey, look at article seven in this and that directive. This is quite impossible, uh, using the existing tools. Nowadays you have to ship around PDF files or something like that. Um, then, you know, Gutenberg, if

you ever want to scrutinize PhD dissertations of, of, uh, politicians you want to get rid of, um, you can do that with this as well. You can basically, uh, with PIPI long strings, you have a reference document that you want to analyze and you have a bunch of, of other documents that you want to analyze against. So you say, tell me what are the

passages in this document that are shared by all these other documents and then you will get, get a, get a nice list. And then there was like this other, um, uh, case that I don't know how many of you have heard. Hungary, Hungary, the country now has, has a new constitution and one of the reasons for doing this new constitution was apparently that,

uh, the old constitution has been written after the Second World War and it's completely com- communistic and blah, blah, blah, we need to have a, a modern and new constitution. And I did a comparison with the constitution from 89 and a fantastic result for me is that there's absolutely no overlap. There's one match that is five

tokens long, nothing else. So that reasoning that we need a co- new constitution because it's written by the communist is complete bullshit. Um, so this is how it looks. This is from the Kerry Forum, uh, trade agreement. And here you have, I guess this is, uh, um, article eight of, of the

IP Red Directive. I don't know which one is, some of, one of these, I, I need to check that out. But, um, yes. The judicial decision is taking finding infringement of an intellectual property right. The judicial authority is my issue against the infringer and injunction aimed at prohibiting the continuation of the infringement. Um, IP Red.

Um, so this is, this is helping you to understand what is going on even if you're not a lawyer. Maybe you can involve lawyers that can, uh, give you comments on, on parts that appear here. But basically this is the first step. You read through the law or the proposal and you, you,

you, you do some analysis. Do we need to take action? What do we take action? What kind of action do we take? So the next step that you need to influence this whole decision making process is to know when to supply the right, um, input to the right people. What is the time? And for that you need to do, uh, monitor the process. You need to be

aware, as I said, it's too late after the adoption in the member states, um, to protest against any proposal. You need to do this in the, in the, in the amendment stage where you can still, like, patch the law. You know, you fixed the box earlier on. So you, you supply, uh, fixes. You

can, you supply changes to the proposed law. And for example, when you can submit something like that, you need to know about that. And if you want to know it today, you can go to the European Union website and you can subscribe there and you can get, uh, notifications there as well. But the database there is not so nice and they don't have

actually the data about the tabling of amendments deadlines because they are hidden away in PDFs. And you need to check the PDFs on a daily basis whether they have been updated. And they're like 20 something, uh, committees. So that means if you're interested in any dossier, you need to download 20 something PDFs and read through them whether something has changed in that. What a hassle. So how do you

know when the tabling deadline is? You come to Powertrack. Um, because we have more databases, we scraped them from, from the internet, from PDFs, et cetera, uh, from the official sources. And, um, you have better data. We have actually people inside the European Parliament are thanking me for the service. Um, I'm, I'm

encouraging you to see what is the process coming up with each legal dossier that I care about. Or even you can monitor what new dossiers are introduced in the Parliament on a daily basis. Like there's not very

many. Like on, I think on a weekly basis you have like three dossiers a day. Um, but most of them are not important or uninteresting for, for my value system that I try to, um, protect. Um, automatically linking to documents in Pippi Longstring so whenever you have a dossier in Powertrack, you can go over to Pippi Longstring and

see the text and do the commenting over there. Um, you can, we have, we have, uh, very interesting data for example on the members of Parliament. You have that also available of course on the public source on the, uh, on the European Parliament website. What they don't do is they don't have, uh, um, change locks. Like was this guy, what

was he doing before? Like he's working here for four years but he's not been in this position for four years. There's a lot of shuffling around going on. Like for example, assistants, you know, secretaries or, or people helping the members of Parliament. There's a churn of

fifteen to twenties, uh, secretaries or assistants going in and out on a daily basis in the Parliament. They're being accredited or not. So there's, there's a huge number of people, number of people going in and out as being employed in the Parliament. And we can track that actually those people. Which is quite interesting for later on if you

might want to see some lobbying of, oh this guy has worked for this and that MEP or something. But then there's also very interesting data that's more interesting than I think yet useful is like how are the members of Parliament moving around in the offices? Like this is now his office but he's going to be assigned to a new position that is important so he moves his office next to the,

I don't know, uh, the secretary general of, of that organization where he's going to have some, some more important position. So actually you can see, uh, the position, the inside of a, of a member of Parliament inside, uh, the ranking of the Parliament by where his office is and how he moves around. I think this is

quite interesting at least. Uh, and then this is also of course useful when we are on ground in the European Parliament and want to go and knock on the office and talk to the member of Parliament. We need to know that. And, and we have very accurate data on that. Um, so basically this is how it looks. Very simple. Um, you have various, um, um, views. You have the

dossier views, you have the view on the representatives and you have views on the committees. This is the most important stuff that, that we care about in the European Parliament actually if you want to intervene in this, in this process, in this legal process. Um, so what can you do otherwise?

Which is I think by combining also this data we were able to also find out new, um, information that is unknown until today or if you don't use ParTrack. Like for example, by combining, combining the data of who is taking responsibility for dossier and having the member of Parliament, we can combine that actually which is unavailable anywhere

else. And you have a list. This member of Parliament has taken responsibility for these and these dossiers. And you see who's important and, uh, how many dossiers someone has taken care of and whether these are dossiers actually that matter or they're just like filling dossiers because the Parliament is always churning something out even if it doesn't make any sense. So you can also

see if someone is like a procrastinator who's just doing dossiers because he has to do some but they are mostly unimportant. And then you can see people like for example Amelia Andersdottir who has like three incredibly important dossiers already and she's in Parliament for three months or something. I think this is really important to see also who's doing the important work and who's just like a, um,

someone who's not trusted by anyone and just getting crap dossiers because he has to do something but we're not giving him anything important, you know? Um, so I think this is also very important to see the influence on each dossier, um, which we can also deduce from, from this nice data. So then we're going over already to the next step and this is a, uh, joint project

with La Croix de la Toudonette. This is called Political Memory. I guess all of you have heard about this. This is focusing, um, mostly off on the representatives. So we know the history again like what have they taken care of? How was their voting behavior? With La Croix de la Toudonette there's this, um, working pattern that they're not only submitting amendments but we're also

submitting voting lists. Like after the amendments have been submitted, we go through the list of all the amendments and we tell the members of parliament, this is a bad amendment, vote against this, this is a good amendment, vote for this and so on. We get a long list and this gets handed out to, to the members of parliament so they know how to vote. This

is an incredibly important service. This is what they get from lobbyists actually. This is the right data at the right time and the right place. You don't need anything else, just here press yes. They don't care about anything else really. So this is such a list which gets handed out to the members of parliament and after they voted, we can compare. Have they really

voted like we recommended to them? And by doing that we can set up a list of who's on our side, who's voting like we recommended and who's not voting like we recommended, you know? So we see who are our allies and who are our enemies, who we need to focus on, who is a lost cause, you know? So this

is actually, um, very important and also like having a memory of all these bad votes, that is like, that is the case of the, Jeremy likes to call it the increasing the political cost of fucking with our rights. I'm not putting the fucking with our rights on, on the slide. Um, but now it's on camera. Um, so this is very important also for

campaigning. Um, there's integration with the, uh, pi phone, which is basically when we know that who are the influential people in the dossier, there's always campaigns to call them. And there's now this new tool called pi phone, which is basically you give your phone number, you get the call from pi phone, so

you don't have to pay anything, and you get connected to one of the influential members of parliament and you can give him a call and you, you get a briefing before that on the phone and you can call them. And this is very important for, for campaigning. And then of course, when the elections come, we have this memory of, is this guy that you have to vote for actually

someone who represents the, represents the values that I, I stand for, or hopefully you as well. Um, so, um, this is very important. And also we realize that members of parliament also read this, like seeing the assessment of, of, um, who's, uh, doing what. And, and this is going way beyond

of, um, the usual vote tracking, like VoteWatch EU, this is one of the services you have, uh, that tracks all the votes. We don't care about all the votes, we care about whether the important votes went the way we wanted them to go or not. Um, so, yes,

and this is also important for citizens to claim their political role, but we have experiences now with ACTA, for example, like the huge outcry with having tens of thousands emails to, to the members of parliament, or when, uh, like whether to, to not set up

a small phone booth with five phones in a conference and then they had nothing to do, people were sitting there and calling members of parliament and we were in the parliament and, um, being like, uh, feeling the aggression of the members of parliament like, are you guys tossing your phone system? Yeah, we have so many phone calls

all day and this is like having huge pressure on them and, and changing things for us. And then you have also, you know, all the statistics of who is aligned with what we do and who's not. This is like one of the graphics. You see the EPP is the conservative group, uh, mostly the obstacle that we need to overcome, but then socialist group is mostly green, but then

you see the Brits are always, um, like, like the conservatives in this case. And now a British member of parliament is actually a socialist, is responsible for ACTA, which is quite interesting, I think. Um, then you have like visual stuff where you can see that Hungary is the worst

sucky country in Europe. They are most hostile to all the freedom on values that we care about, or I care about at least. And then you see, uh, Scandinavia that might be like a good role model. Uh, so we have like this historical data and this is the Python. This is like the voice over IP, but this is not, this is just the logo. Um, but this is, uh, this is

a very nice service, um, for putting the pressure on, on the members of parliament besides the email thing, um, which is not so, um, effective. The only effective part of that is like when they see the numbers, I got the same email 10,000 times that, but it's not going to be read 10,000 times, of course. So

legislative comparison, this is, uh, an old project that is a bit of dormant and we are now relaunching it. And I think this might be like an official relaunch now because it has not been advertised anywhere else. So this is basically, we want to do a world CIF actbook for, for digital rights, having country overviews or like country briefing pages on digital rights situations in, in your country, in all

the countries. Um, this is how it looked earlier. It's a simple Wiki, but now we have fancy schmancy graphics and like there's a censorship visualization and then a list of what is the status in all the countries in the world that we have data on and then you have

this also on the country basis. And this is basically, uh, also remaining a Wiki, but we'd also do import lots of data sets from other organizations. And, um, we also import news items. So you always have, uh, what is currently in the news in the country. You have the input from professional digital rights organizations. Like for

example, in this case, the open net initiative that do, did this report on censorship. And, um, of course we really, really rely. And if any one of you wants and can help, please go to the river.org and update the German page or whatever country or form, if you have any insights in these cases, or if you have good data sets, please supply that to us.

Um, and the last, um, uh, stage and influencing the European policymaking is when the law has been made or when the directive has been passed, um, and it sucks or it was a failure or half failure. What do you do then? Well, this is, in this

case, um, the law is the, the telecom packet, which is the telecommunication regulation in Europe. And the result was from Neelie Kurst, she will speak tomorrow, that there's nothing wrong with network neutrality. There's no violations. Everything is a riot and blah, blah, blah. And we said, no, that's not true. And we submitted not, uh, bits of

freedom as a Dutch organization and another organization, um, maybe like whether to do that, I don't know. They both compiled long lists of, of network neutrality violations across Europe already back then. And Neelie Kurst simply ignored that. Um, so, so we said, okay, then let's do

something. And we created Respect Minet, which is, um, looks like that. Um, it's basically a very simple bug tracker for, for violations of network neutrality. Whenever you sense a network neutrality violation while you are surfing the internet, because you're not able to connect to

SMTP or your, your voice over IP is blocked, your torrenting is blocked, peer to peer is blocked, or you are not allowed to tether your, your wireless connection or whatever. That's all network neutrality violations. And we want them here in that, uh, tool, um, respectminet.eu. Um, and this is, um, very helpful, not

only for us and doing our campaigning, but it's also being used as input for the regulatory authorities. There's a, a BEREC report, which is the umbrella organization of all the European telecoms regulators, and they use the data from Respect Minet for doing their own report that they are going to

write for Neelie Kurst. And, um, I think we dominate that list with all the submissions that we had. Uh, and also the French regulator is really, really happy about that, uh, that we have such a huge list of, of, of all the violations. And now they're going after that. So by just creating this

resource where people can come and submit that, the regulatory authorities actually have, have a huge interest in that and using this. So actually maybe tomorrow we can show of, of course Neelie knows already, but, um, that what she said, there's nothing wrong in the net is, is, is bull crap. Um,

so for the future, um, you see this is, this is three, four, five tools that I presented here. These are important and I think we need to do more of these tools because this is how we can really get into, um, get our voice into the policymaking. And, and so I

want to do more of these tools. So in the future I want to do some kind of organization that allows more hackers to focus on creating some tools like this. So, um, people that want to, um, be involved in this policymaking can, um, actually do that, which is quite hard now, but you can, you see with this

technology, you can do a lot of things and doing these, this is not really campaigns, these are more longish, um, uh, longer term projects. And so, um, we need a few hackers that do coding. We need a lot of people who do visual things because we're like hackers, you know, we'd like console graphics, if that's graphics

at all. Um, so people who like colors and rounded corners, very welcome. Um, um, so yes, so, and this is what I call constructive hacking. So this is like the contrast to, um, I don't know, like the anonymous debate that we had earlier. Like you can

create a lot of constructive things and do have a huge impact on, on this whole stuff. You don't need DDoS thing for that. So if anyone has the skills, use it for constructive things and not for, uh, destructive things. So that concludes my talk. Thank you.