#PiratesWork in Europe – Our Track Record

Our first MEP in Brussels (2014-2019) was Felix Reda – Europe’s internet expert par excellence. Thanks to him, the Europe-wide resistance to the restriction of freedom of expression online through upload filters and link taxes was so strong that hundreds of thousands took it to the streets (#SaveYourInternet).

That’s what we achieved for you back then in the European Parliament:

• 1 million euros to promote the security of free software
• Photography of landscapes remains permitted (freedom of panorama)
• Development and use of software for publishing lobbyist contacts
• Cross-border use of video services and internet shops facilitated (geo-blocking restricted)
• Digital citizen participation in the drafting of the report on copyright reform
• Publication of a secret study according to which file sharing hardly reduces the profits of the entertainment industry
• Europe-wide resistance to internet censorship through “upload filters” and “link tax”

The internet is dominated by large tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Meta, and there is hardly any way around their offerings. This dominance and indispensability invites abuse. With the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Europe is standing up to the internet companies. As Pirate MEPs, Marcel Kolaja from the Czech Republic and Patrick Breyer from Germany were involved in the legislative negotiations.

The result: The cross-platform monitoring of your internet usage by Big Tech is now prohibited. When you search for products, Google must now show you better offers than just from its advertisers. Apple must also allow apps from platforms and internet browsers other than Safari on its iPhones. A particular success, which has only been included in the law thanks to us Pirates, is cross-messenger communication (so-called interoperability).

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“Until now, many of us have been unable to avoid using the messenger top dog Whatsapp to reach our friends and follow important Whatsapp groups. However, Whatsapp has repeatedly displayed anti-consumer conditions and practices. Thanks to the new law, Whatsapp users and groups will also be reachable via other messenger services if the services and users agree to this. Of course, cross-service communication is completely voluntary and dependent on the user’s consent. It has the potential to break our dependence on WhatsApp, create real freedom of choice and initiate competition for the best messenger. This will also give privacy-friendly and non-commercial messengers, which themselves have few users, a chance – as a better gateway to WhatsApp.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

On the initiative and under pressure from Pirate Party MEP Dr. Patrick Breyer, who is himself a judge by profession, the European Court of Justice is becoming more transparent than any other court: in the future, when a question has been referred to the ECJ for a ruling, the Court will proactively and systematically publish the letters and arguments submitted on its website after the judgement has been delivered. An exception applies if the author of a pleading objects, but in this case, there is a right of access to information via the EU Commission upon request. As co-negotiator of the reform of the ECJ statute, Breyer has pushed through the new transparency of European justice.

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“After landmark judgements with far-reaching consequences, the public has a right to know and discuss the positions our governments and institutions advocated for. I am sure we will be surprised by some of the positions our own governments take. In a democracy where freedom of the press reigns, it must be possible to hold the powerful accountable for their behaviour in court. At a time when the EU and its Court of Justice are facing a crisis of confidence, transparency creates trust. It is a privilege that, as a Pirate Party MEP, I was able to introduce our core concern of a transparent state into the negotiations and successfully push it through.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

“The prosecution of the Wikileaks founder for exposing war crimes deeply shocks our sense of justice and sets a devastating precedent for investigative journalism around the world. Transparency must not be a crime!”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP for the Pirate Party

In the digital age, it should go without saying that libraries should also lend books, CDs etc. digitally, but copyright law stands in the way. At the suggestion of Pirate Party MEP Dr. Patrick Breyer, the EU is funding a study into how distance learning and research can be facilitated by adapting copyright law. Also at Breyer’s suggestion, the feasibility of a “public EU directory of works in the public domain and under free licences” is being examined. Such a directory could strengthen access to copyright-free knowledge.

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“The Pirate‘s fight for free knowledge has never been as important as during the pandemic, when schools and libraries often were closed. We finally need legal certainty. Business interests must no longer stand in the way of digital learning and research. The pilot projects I have proposed are an important first step in bringing the laws into line with the needs of our digital knowledge society.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP for the Pirate Party

With a globally unique draft law presented in 2022, the EU Commission wants to make it compulsory for chat and messenger providers to search private chats, messages, and emails for suspicious content on a massive scale, without cause, and indiscriminately. The reason: prosecution of child pornography. The consequence: unprecedented mass surveillance through fully automated real-time chat monitoring and thus the abolition of digital privacy of correspondence. Even secure end-to-end encryption is to be overridden for the first time. Age controls are intended to make anonymous communication impossible; a minimum age of 16 for apps would mean digital house arrest for young people.

“We Pirates invented the concept of chat control and talked about the dangers for years until a broad resistance emerged far beyond the online movement. Our private photos and intimate chats have no place in the hands of foreign moderators and government employees and are not safe there. Law enforcement officers complain of being overworked, criminologists warn of the criminalisation of young people, the Child Protection Association and victims of abuse criticise the destruction of safe spaces.

As a co-negotiator of the draft law on chat control, together with civil society, I succeeded in convincing MEPs across all parties and across Europe that we need a different approach to protecting children online: proactive searches of the open internet, deletion obligations for providers and law enforcement officers, but above all a more secure design of internet services that prevents unwanted contact between sex offenders and children from the outset (security by design). Mass surveillance of chats, the destruction of secure encryption and anonymous communication, digital house arrest – the EU Parliament has rejected all of this in response to our pressure.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP for the Pirate Party

However, this does not mean that chat control is off the table: the majority of EU governments (EU Council), as the second legislator, are sticking to the original Big Brother proposal on chat control. So far, critical EU governments have blocked this, but are to be persuaded to give in by making minimal concessions. We Pirates report regularly on the status of negotiations (chatcontrol.de). If chat control wins thought in the EU Council, the Parliament is in danger of falling over in compromise negotiations (trilogue). The European elections will decide whether we Pirates will continue to sit at the negotiating table and be able to defend the digital privacy of correspondence.

In the course of the “chat control gate” scandal, it also emerged that an international lobby network of technology companies and law enforcement agencies was closely involved in the development of the extreme draft law on chat control. Following a complaint from us Pirates, the EU Ombudsman is currently investigating whether Europol employees were allowed to switch directly to US technology companies that sell chat control algorithms. Pirate MEP Dr Patrick Breyer has also filed a lawsuit against voluntary chat control on the Facebook platform. The parent company Meta (Facebook, Instagram Whatsapp) has since announced its intention to introduce secure chat encryption and abandon the screening of private chats.

Read more: www.chatcontrol.de

We are all getting an electronic patient file in which every treatment is to be recorded. The EU has decided that the patient file will also be available for private patients and will be accessible throughout Europe in the future. If we receive treatment abroad, doctors will be able to access our medical history. And, access to our data is supposed to improve medical research. But what about medical confidentiality and our right to self-determination as patients, especially in the case of sexually transmitted diseases and sexual disorders, impotence and infertility, abortions, addictions, or mental illnesses? Will those who fear that their intimate problems will become public still be treated? Pirate MEP Dr Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table during the negotiations to create the “European Health Data Space” and repeatedly called for patients to have control over their data.

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“Thanks to our work, the EU Commission’s original plans for a remotely retrievable, networked electronic patient file containing all of our treatments will not materialise. We saved the German right to object to an electronic patient file with the help of an amendment that received a broad majority in Parliament. Anyone who objects to the electronic patient file can therefore rest assured that the treatment information will only be stored by the treating doctor. In this way, we can protect ourselves from the risk of hacks and losses of highly sensitive treatment data.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

A new digital identity app is supposed to enable EU citizens to access public and private digital services such as Facebook or Google and pay online in the future. As Pirate MEPs, Mikulas Peksa from the Czech Republic and Patrick Breyer from Germany were involved in the legislative negotiations. The result is not satisfactory, but we Pirates have achieved major partial successes:

• We ensured that Member States will not be obliged to assign a lifetime personal identification number to every citizen. This would have made it possible to combine our internet use in very different areas into a comprehensive profile.
• The use of the eID app will be voluntary and it will still be possible to access public and private services with other existing means of identification and authentication.
• The code of the app client will be publicly accessible and therefore verifiable (open source).

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“We have successfully prevented the assignment of a unique, lifelong personal identification number that could have been used to comprehensively record and monitor our digital lives. And the ‘digital identity’ remains voluntary. Now it’s all about implementation.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

In the negotiations on a regulation to “combat the dissemination of terrorist content online” (TERREG Regulation), Pirate MEP Dr. Patrick Breyer has campaigned to protect the freedom of expression on the internet to fight censorship. He was supported by over 60 organisations, including journalists, human rights, and data protection associations. He was able to push through important safeguards in the negotiations:

• Content disseminated for educational, artistic, journalistic, or research purposes or to raise awareness of terrorist activities, as well as content that expresses polemical or controversial views in the context of a public debate, is exempt from deletion.
• Penalties for small or private providers unable to comply with deletion orders within one hour are excluded.
• The mandatory use of error-prone upload filters is expressly excluded. Upload filters are censorship algorithms that cannot reliably distinguish terrorist propaganda from the legitimate use of images/videos.

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“Ultra-rapid, cross-border deletion orders without a judge’s reservation threaten freedom of opinion and freedom of the press online. Censorship of open platforms can quickly push terrorist propaganda into direct channels and thus further radicalise subscribers. Anti-terror laws are repeatedly used for completely different purposes, for example against the Catalan independence movement and Spanish musicians, against social protests in France, against climate protectors or immigrants. I worked hard in the negotiations of the TERREG regulation to defend the fundamental right to freedom of expression – with considerable success.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

Unfortunately, the EU continues to fund the development of dystopian technologies for the mass surveillance and control of the population, even if their use would be unethical and contrary to fundamental rights. It has tested unscientific technology at border crossings that claims that it can determine whether a person is telling the truth or lying based on their facial expressions. The EU kept many of the documents produced about the “iBorderCtrl” project secret to protect the commercial interests of the companies involved.

Patrick Breyer’s complaint to the European Court of Justice against this secrecy was partially successful: the EU Commission had to issue a critical ethics report and a critical legal opinion, among other things. As a result of public criticism, the video lie detector is still not in use today.

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“In the course of my transparency complaint, it emerged that those responsible for the project had misappropriated the research funds in order to lobby for a change in the law that would make the use of the ‘video lie detector’ possible. Systems for detecting conspicuous behaviour gradually create a uniform society of passive people who just don’t want to attract attention. Such a dead surveillance society is not worth living in. I am convinced that this pseudo-scientific security mumbo-jumbo will not find terrorists. For stressed, nervous, conspicuously dressed or tired people, such a suspicion machine can quickly become a nightmare. The development of technologies for the ever-increasing surveillance, recording and control of people must stop!”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

In secret, a one-sided EU “group of experts” is working on breaking secure encryption (“security by design”) and reintroducing the Europe-wide retention of our contacts, movements (locations), and internet connections without suspicion. This is to be implemented after the European elections. We Pirates have brought the plans of this surveillance hotbed to public attention. Our pressure led to the hand-picked group having to listen to and involve critical civil society and data protection organisations.

We Pirates have been following and supporting the Europe-wide fight against data retention with our own campaigner for years. With a surveillance map, for example, we have proven that the supposedly “targeted data retention” in Belgium actually has a nationwide effect. Our work has also prevented a new edition of the EU Data Retention Directive, which was overturned by the ECJ.

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“Expose and build pressure – this is how we Pirates in Brussels are defending our fundamental right to private, secure and free communication against the #EUGoingDark surveillance factory. Because we know how quickly these secret plans will reappear in the official work programme of the next EU Commission, it is crucial to ensure that the public is informed very early on and persistently to organise resistance.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

“Today’s technology enables a high-tech surveillance state, and China is already building it. We Pirates are sounding the alarm when we see steps in this direction in Europe too. We say no to a life under constant surveillance and a culture of fear. Yes to our right to freedom and privacy, to diversity, to our right to seek our own happiness. A future in freedom is worth fighting for!”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party

Paper is patient. Politicians speak differently than they act. And the media often tells us little about what the EU decides and who is responsible for it. That’s why we Pirates create and publish voting charts that clearly show which parties and MEPs voted and how. Our Pirat-o-mat shows all voting graphics and compares your positions with real votes in the EU Parliament. This feature is unfortunately only available in German.

“As an ordinary citizen, you generally don’t know who votes how in Brussels and whether the voting behaviour lives up to a party’s promises. Because the EU Parliament makes its voting records as incomprehensible as possible, our voting charts ensure transparency. The Pirat-o-mat will surprise many users, annoy some and hopefully lead to further questions and discussions. Our democracy thrives on transparency, participation, credibility and accountability – the Pirat-o-mat is our contribution to this.”

Dr. Patrick Breyer, MEP of the Pirate Party