Suchergebnisse

The Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee has been convening to discuss the regulation of spyware in response to the on-going fall-out over the Israeli police's use of the spyware Pegasus ("Saifan" in its local iteration) to surveil Israeli citizens, including political activists. Public debate has chiefly focused on the question of legal authority surrounding police surveillance but has generally failed to recognize the underlying cooptative dynamics of governmental technology procurement. In this post, we detail the contested legal grounds on which the Israeli police and Ministry of Justice rely for spyware authorization as well as an analysis of the government procurement of surveillance technology, with particular emphasis on the weaponization of trade secrets in the service of strategic concealment of governmental operations. We argue that the combination of outdated laws with nontransparent operations make public accountability and oversight intensely difficult.

The extent of (private) media regulation depends on the willingness to trade private for public power. This blogpost takes the Commission's EMFA proposal as an opportunity to question the assumptions about media, markets, and politics behind it. It finds that the Commission's approach treats private like public media: First, it functionalizes the fundamental rights of private individuals and companies in terms of their public benefit; second, it imagines the conditions of qualitative journalistic work as those of civil servants.

Large-scale deforestation not only accelerates climate change and biodiversity loss, it is also a serious threat to human rights. While the EU has pursued strategies to combat illegal logging since the early 2000s, it has mostly turned a blind eye to the adverse human rights effects of deforestation. The new EU Regulation on Deforestation (EUDR) acknowledges that human rights and the protection of forests are inextricably linked, but is this really a "major step for 'deforestation-free' trade"? This post provides a brief introduction to the EUDR, its most salient features, and critically, its weak points.