Some impressions of the Freedom Not Fear 2013 in Brussels, 27-30 September 2013.
For more Info visit: http://www.freedomnotfear.org/
Unite to be strong! -- Inspired by this motto, 70 activists from 17 different countries and the USA got together on the weekend of September 27th to September 30th in the European capital of Brussels. They met to share their experiences and to learn from each other's situations in all the different countries.
The opening event of the "Freedom not Fear" was a key note speech of Caspar Bowden, the former data protection commissioner of Microsoft. He highlighted the immense importance of Edward Snowden's leaks for worldwide data protection and that the success of the European data protection reform strongly depends of the degree of the penalty bosses of IT-companies need to fear. Because only if there were high fines or even prison sentences for high IT-company officials could there be prevention of an illegal cooperation with the NSA.
The "Freedom not Fear" provided the opportunity to all participants to visit numerous different workshops on topics such as mass surveillance, drones, RFID (radio-frequency identification), open source software, encryption, automatic facial recognition, smart borders or net neutrality. The discussions which took place over this weekend were collected and presented in a plenum and so placed at the disposal for all participants. On Saturday afternoon the group took a walk around Brussels to have a look at the "natural habitat" of the NSA-surveillance. Among the visited sites were the Google headquarters, the EU intelligence analysis centre and the British, German and American embassies, where the walk was first observed, then stopped by police forces.
A special highlight for the activists taking part was the possibility to attend to the 4th inquiry of the EU LIBE Committee (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) on electronic mass surveillance. There were whistleblowers of the NSA and the Mi5 -- Thomas Drake and Annie Machon talked about their backgrounds, motives and experiences and pleaded for a better protection of whistleblowers all over the world. Also, one of the speakers was a famous whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack, who was giving a small insight into the difficulties of performing her job to the Members of Parliament participating in the LIBE inquiry. She pressed them for stricter laws for the protection of whistleblowers and also forwarded a letter from ex-NSA analyst Edward Snowden to the European Parliament. In his letter he thanked all the people for trying to shed some light in the case of electronic mass surveillance.
For records of the 4th Hearing and further information please visit our channel.
The next "Freedom not Fear" is already planned for the end of September 2014 and might be even more interesting than the last one!
http://gooutsidewien.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/freedom-not-fear-2013-video-and-report
Thanks to http://binaerpilot.no/ for the free use of the song "Song for tact" of "Release #7".
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