Panel 1 transcript

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Good morning. I am happy to introduce the panel, which is to be divided into two parts. I would wish now for the panellists to come up and take their seats on the stage.

This panel is about something which per definition concerns all of us, because we are going to talk about privacy, about protection of personal data, about privacy as a human right. We are going to do this in two parts. We are going to listen to a presentation about a recent study made here in Estonia about privacy as a human right in the face of modern technologies. Privacy and data protection are not just linked to modern technologies, but we all know how our lives have changed because of the way we all communicate now differently, with our friends, with our colleagues. So what does this mean? Is this a question of doing the same things now differently? Or is there a fundamental change to the whole concept of privacy? Maybe there is no privacy.

There has been a study done recently under the auspices of the Institute of Human Rights and this study is going to be presented by some of the people involved in it. This is going to be the first part of our panel today. This study will be presented by Katrin Laas-Mikko and Maria Murumaa-Mengel. Katrin is a PhD candidate at the University of Tartu in the Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, and Maria is a PhD candidate also at the University of Tartu in the Institute of Social Studies.

Before I give the floor to them, I will introduce this panel, who is going to continue the discussion after this presentation with a bit of a wider outlook also internationally on these issues, but also perhaps comment on the findings that we will hear from this study. I have here Professor Simon Davies from Privacy International who has been working on privacy issues since the “digital stone age” from the early 90s, and is a well-known international expert on these issues. I have Professor Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt from the University of Tartu who is a professor of media studies, and she has also been involved in this same survey that has been made. Last but definitely not least, I have Laura Reed from Freedom House, Freedom on the Net. As those of you who are interested in privacy issues are well aware, this organisation has recently come out with its study on global privacy issues.

I am happy to give the floor to our presenters who will speak in Estonian, so be ready with your headphones, if you need them. I will also say this that we will take questions and comments at the very end, so we won’t take any questions immediately after their presentations, just remember those, in order to save time but also in order for you to hear the whole picture.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: I will do the order in a very democratic manner, namely by alphabetic order of the last names, which means that Prof. Davis, you would be the first speaker. We will have a fairly short time, about 7-8 minutes for the presentations in order to have time for debate later on. So please, your reflections on what you have just heard or on privacy in general.

Simon Davies: Here or the podium?

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: It’s completely up to you.

Davies: I’m more comfortable here. It’s been a long day. It’s been an utter delight to be here, thank you for the invitation. It’s my first time in Estonia, I’m normally stuck in Riga, and this is going to be a wonderful couple of days. I want to start off by apologising in advance for being the most unpopular speaker here today, and I’ll tell you why. Although this report is an excellent piece of research, it is also one of the most depressing pieces of research I have read in three years. There are several reasons for this. We heard the President, an enlightened man, talk this morning about this wonderful transition of Estonia in the past 25 years. Unfortunately, looking at the results of this survey, it does not square with the President’s view. Here you are on the border of Russia. There is, as the President says, much aggression and threat and hostility, active or passive.

When I look at the results of this survey, two of the results really disturbed me. First, a fundamental lack of concern over government power. Privacy is about power. It is not about choices of how you do things, it’s not about fancy technologies on Facebook. Fundamentally it’s about power and human autonomy. When I look at the result that says that the overwhelming majority in this country are prepared to accept the government having that autonomy, to use their information without consent, I wonder whether the Estonian state has let its people down historically. Whether perhaps there have not been lessons learned from history.

When I look at another result of this survey, which is that the majority of people feel that this issue is down to the individual to protect – I see one of two things. If I was a libertarian, an American, I would say they just don’t trust the state, and fair enough. But I don’t imagine that to be the case here. I think it comes down to lack of education about the important lessons of history. My view is this. Backed up by fact. Democracy occupies the tiniest sliver of history. Estonia in the past 25 years has occupied that tiny sliver of history. By surrendering privacy, by allowing a population – a young population particularly — to become apathetic, you hold this nation hostage to a very dangerous future.

Let’s think the unthinkable and imagine there is hostility from your neighbour. Not counting the 2 years it would take NATO to respond – let’s hope that it’s better than that – but let’s say that it’s a more subtle encroachment – by subtle I mean hostile surveillance, for example. By allowing the state to capture privacy, by allowing the generations in Estonia to be apathetic about privacy, you create a surveillance grid. A surveillance society from which there is no escape because there is no anonymity, there are no margins of freedom, because you are hostage to fortune to the prying eyes and the controlling tentacles of a hostile state.

So what happened to 1988? Has Estonia forgotten 1988? The wonderful advances, the thinking that created a new society and defied the old. I wonder whether 25 years ago has been forgotten, whether the state has become as apathetic as ordinary Internet users have become. I am not being a doomsayer, I am not saying that bad things are on the horizon for Estonia as a neighbouring state. I am saying that it is hypocritical to say, on the one hand, that we are an enlightened society that has stood up for democracy, and yet you do not let those democratic mechanisms to be empowered, by delivering them to young people particularly. It’s a terrible message and I am sorry to be unpopular with that message, but I expected different results. I expected an empowered society that was suspicious of the state and was aware of its history and was terribly concerned about establishing tools that would ensure that democracy could continue. Don’t imagine for two seconds that Europe  would save you in its entirety. Because if there is a conflict, if there is any problem in the future about this slow encroachment of surveillance by hostile states – and believe me we’ve seen that through the NSA, the Edward Snowden revelations – a so-called friendly country which spies on its friends. So we have to be very careful to ensure that we are empowered. Many of us in civil society, the whistle-blowers, the former spooks and spies, have been deeply concerned about this trend. It’s not just Estonia, believe me, it’s worldwide.

So we published 100 principles of citizen activism to try and raise the temperature to engage people who are concerned to protect their democratic rights and their privacy published with the University of Amsterdam last week. The second is “code red”, you’ll hear a lot about “code red”. It’s we hope the next big thing in terms of activism to protect us against the surveillance vultures, to protect our privacy. It’s many of the key whistle-blowers and activists across the world, many of the law reformers, and we will be launching this initiative next month in Brussels. I would hope that many of you could become involved in this initiative. In closing I would say again I don’t mean to be critical. I just think that societies fall when they just accept democracy as a natural state, when they accept freedom as a natural state – they become apathetic, that’s is when societies fall. I think that’s the big message from this report. Thank you.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: I am very happy to give the floor to Pille who will pick up on those issues or go back perhaps to our report.

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt: Thank you for inviting me to be a panellist here. And thank you Simon in terms of making a reality check, or two reality checks already. One with the data and one with the critical interpretation of it. I apologise to the translators, as I have sent them some notes, but will now deviate from them. I want to take up some of those issues as to why the Estonians are so state trusting? How come? Is it the fact that we haven’t learned anything from our past, really truly, or is it something else we can point to.

We were at some point discussing with the experts that there are two groups in Estonia who are best equipped to deal with the loss of privacy. They are the grandmothers who have lived throughout their lives with the certain knowledge of Big Brother watching you. The Big Brother had a distinct shape and was definitely everywhere. You would not know whether your neighbour or your co-worker or someone else was reporting your activities to the KGB, so you learned to self-censor. The other group who is very distinctly aware of Big Brother watching you, is the youngest group. They have learned to cope with the fact that Big Brother watches you with a little bit of a self placating notion of “yeah, but I don’t have much to hide” or “I will do everything in my power to make sure that I put out there into the online space stuff that I feel ok with”.

There is this distinct alarmist or moral panic notion that God, what do the young people put out there – their party pictures and – however will they get jobs if their online profiles look as they do? To a certain extent, young people are very aware of that loss of privacy, and they are very aware that this privacy is a very ephemeral thing; there is a certain amount of acceptance. We are dealing in the world of trade-offs. Strangely enough, the middle-aged are the least suspicious about their state and big companies, and the least suspect of the positive trade-offs that the online space offers today. So we are dealing with the notion of what do I get in return?

About the hostile neighbour and about the state doing things to us or not doing enough for us, I do believe that Estonians, being a very small population and accepting the state – to a certain extent despite the fact that there, as in most democratic countries, a deep alienation between politicians and the people. Do we trust them to take care of our best interests? There is still a very strong belief and trust in technologically driven innovation. We do believe that ICTs have brought us out of the Soviet regime into the future. This is something that our President and different ministries are very actively proposing in the public discussion. This is something we have bought into, together with a group of technologies that I think make Estonia very unique – the whole notion of digital ID-s which are secure. On a scale of absolutely secure and non-usable to a moderately secure and ultimately usable technology – they are well there on the scale – they are usable, many people use these technologies and accept the protection these technologies provide for our privacy.

I am very critical about the fact that the data is being collected about us. We don’t know what is done with the data. I do think Estonia could set a standard here. We could take the next step and say that we are E-stonia the e-state, and we will be the most transparent state in the whole wide world about what data we collect, what we do with the data and how we process this.

This does not take away the notion of other hostile or more friendly neighbours, distant or close, watching us and collecting our data or selling it to companies and also buying the information from companies. But that could set a certain standard of how the notion of privacy should be dealt with in a democratic and transparent way.

One of the recommendations we made at the end of the study deals with the issue that we would really like that Estonia together with the new e-residency notion would set an example by making  visually clear short and sweet and comparable – possibly also in the form of info-graphics – privacy conditions. Which would allow you to compare services and see what service takes away what privacy this many notches, and what it does with the data. And the next service does this similarly or differently. But there could be a “gold standard” from the Government that says, ‘this Is how it is done. This is how you communicate to your public, citizens, your neighbours and friends. This is the privacy we take away, this is what you get in return.” We could be the first country in the whole world to make such transparent, clearly legible and understandable infographics. And to give that power to people, to make those kinds of decisions. Whether they are ok with their privacy being exchanged for the greater good.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Thank you, and you are perfectly on time as well.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Our final panellist is Laura. You will have some reflections perhaps from a more international perspective.

Laura Reed: Thank you to the conference organisers for inviting me to participate on the panel today, and thank you to my fellow panellists for their comments thus far. I would like to pick up on a few points they mentioned and also look at a more global perspective. Freedom House is a non-governmental organisation based in the United States. We focus on human rights and democracy promotion and we produce an annual survey “Freedom on the Net” that examines global internet developments in 65 countries around the world.

There have been estimates that the amount of data online doubles nearly every two years. Everything we do online and in our mobile communications leaves a trail of data. The international community has affirmed that the right to privacy is equally applicable to online communications.

However, I think it is clear that we need new frameworks for understanding and unpacking this right to privacy – what it means and how we can protect it. For example, the UN Resolution on the Right to Privacy in the Digital Age, adopted last December 2013,  specifically notes that the rapid pace of technological development has also made it easier for governments, companies and individuals to undertake surveillance and data collection practices that may violate the right to privacy.

In response to some of the questions posed in this study, I would argue that modern technologies have changed both the amount and types of personal information that can be accessed and used by third parties. Additionally this information can now be accessed by actors outside of national jurisdictions, by foreign governments and international technology companies, meaning that domestic legal frameworks are no longer enough to protect individuals from infringements on their privacy.

To start, I’d like to note the part of the study which stated that of the various institutions that collect or process user data within Estonia, the state and local governments are among the most trusted. 61% s of respondents said that the state should have more rights to process data without consent in order to protect national security, which reflects the general notion that Estonians are characterised as having significant trust in the government. I wanted to highlight this point, because it brings into focus the importance of rule of law when it comes to protecting internet freedoms across the board – especially the right to privacy and the very real threats that come with not ensuring this right.

In many countries the government is still the greatest threat to individuals when the right to privacy is violated. There are countless examples from around the world where Internet users are arrested, detained or physically assaulted because of information they communicate or inadvertently reveal online.

In our study, Freedom on the Net, we documented arrests of Internet users in 38 of the 65 countries that we study, noting that social medial users are increasingly targeted by governments for repression. We are also finding that governments are increasingly passing laws that expand surveillance capabilities or restrict user anonymity. In 19 of the 65 countries in our study, these governments passed such laws or decrees since May 2013, despite the widespread international outcry in reaction to last year’s NSA surveillance revelations. In some cases these are passed under the guise of protecting citizens’ data from foreign surveillance. For example, data localisation laws that require companies to store communications data on servers located within the country in question have multiplied over the past year, in some cases gaining traction due to the NSA revelations. In Russia, for example, the Government passed a localisation law this July requiring Internet companies to store Russian citizens’ data on servers within Russia. This regulation actually creates more threats to Russian citizens’ privacy, as the law could potentially make it easier for the Russian intelligence agencies to access the communications data of their citizens, specifically those who may already face threats from the Government, such as activists, journalists or opposition figures.

These examples and the perhaps contrasting findings from the Estonian survey highlight the importance of rule of law and state institutions. These threats to privacy are magnified in contexts where democratic institutions are lacking. They also highlight that it is not always clear to people in what situations they should be concerned about their privacy, which was another issue that was raised in the Estonia study.

One of the changes to privacy is the fact that it is not only one’s own government who may have access to one’s information. International tech companies are becoming much bigger players as intermediaries who in some cases are the only ones who can take specific actions to protect Internet users’ data and right to privacy .

As just one example, most recently in Egypt where citizens are noting the Government’s crackdown on the gay community, there were reports that Government agents were using the online dating application Grindr to locate and target gay men within the country. The company has since been re-programmed to issue a warning to their users. The company also issued a statement stating that the location proximity feature would be disabled in countries with anti-gay legislation. This one example illustrates how in many cases both users and application programme creators may not be aware of the full extent to which their applications can create real security threats for their users when these applications are used in different contexts.

Additionally there has been a lot of talk about US tech companies operating in Europe. In May the European Court of Justice issued a decision stating that search engines like Google and others may have to remove search results if the data is deemed to violate an individual’s right to privacy. However, the recent Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner report on rule of law and the internet stated that we should limit the role of private companies in determining whether content should be removed from the online sphere.

In any case, I think we have to ask, how effective is this approach? If we agree that in certain cases people have the right to remove information that is linked to their name online, is it feasible to do so and is this decision really having the effect of protecting people’s privacy?

Recently the European data protection authorities issued a statement recommending that the ruling apply to all Google domains including Goolge.com, which may have the effect of actually increasing people’s privacy, although I don’t know if the court has the jurisdiction to do that.

Finally, as the Estonia survey identified, individual responsibility for the protection of one’s privacy is important. On a positive note, in our report we have seen efforts increasing over the past year to protect one’s privacy. This graph notes the increase in the use of encryption tools and other privacy tools by a number of users over the past year since the NSA revelations. Data suggests that people are taking their own privacy protection into their own hands, but as the survey notes, there is definitely room for improvement. Thank you.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Although we started a little bit late, we still have about 15 minutes for questions and comments from the audience. Or if the panellists have something they want to question or comment to one another. I will immediately look around to see if we have any questions or comments. If you need a moment to think, I will start with one myself. If we look at the results of the study and also other discussions, it appears as if people are maybe not as concerned as at least Simon would like them to be. I wonder if people are not concerned about something, should we tell them to be concerned? Should we who are better informed maybe, who study and analyse these things and look at them more from a human rights perspective, should we say well, you should be concerned, or should we just accept it if people are not. That may seem odd to us, but that may be the way it is. That we are artificially creating a concern because of what we thought was correct earlier.

Simon Davies: I will start…

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Yes, I guessed that you would like to start.

Simon Davies: I think it is the state’s responsibility to be clear and transparent. I like the idea of a transparent society, a transparent government. A transparent state that is honest and has a contract with its people should be honest about risks. I don’t know to what extent this is a public concern here, but anybody who is worried about the Snowden revelations should have been told by their government that that risk exists. Instead of that government “getting into bed” with the violators, as more than a third of European states have done, there should have been a level of honesty and transparency, so you could have a dialogue as a nation. If you look at examples from history, look at industrial health and safety. There wasn’t a conspiracy that let’s not tell people the risks. In fact the reverse. It became an issue where the people were aware of the problems of workplace health and safety and the mortality rate of workers in many industries. But there was a level of increasing openness about those risks. People didn’t have to worry about dealing with it themselves. There was an acceptance that the government and the employer, companies, had to take this responsibility on and be transparent about how they are protecting workers. The same with sanitation and public health. So yes, I do think there needs to be that level of openness with the public.

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt: Education seems to be the easy fall-back. We should be more educated, because if we are not, how do we know to make these decisions? But there is also that after we contemplate things, after we contemplate the risk, after we read the privacy conditions, we decide, “who cares?” But still we make a somewhat more informed choice.  I think it’s also down to the whole notion of literacy. We are in the very distinct need of understanding the information literacy of the modern age. And the technological possibilities are running away faster than our school system or public education system can cope. But unless we say that together with the traditional alphabet and together with practicing your letters, you need to know about issues of data getting out of hand, running away from you, being able to be stored, multiplied and divided and spread across the Internet – unless you are taught that from a very early age onwards, unless you accept that this is the rule of society, so to say. Unless we do that, we have no right to expect people to make informed choices. And then we’ll become a kindergarten. Because governments and companies can’t be the babysitters of individuals. That would violate their privacy, violate their freedom of expression, that would be making your decisions. “You are not allowed to put your party picture online, you know that, don’t you?” If government would send me notices like that I would be really, really scared. That would be the whole flip side to the notion of loss of privacy. There has to be a reasonable amount of education but we can’t build gated communities, we can’t build kindergartens of our own communities.

Laura Reed: I agree. I think that there is a lot of focus on education and making more informed choices. I find that when you tell people that they should be concerned about something, it is not very effective unless you give examples or reasons why that might affect that individual person. I think one thing we hear a lot is that people come back with the response that they have nothing to hide so they are not concerned, but we need to go beyond thinking of this way of thinking about privacy. We need to think more broadly, in terms of informational self-determination. Having the power over one’s information, how it’s being used and how that’s impacting your life. I think people still think about privacy in terms of they don’t have anything to hide, they haven’t done anything illegal or they don’t have anything the government might arrest them for. But we need to go beyond that and understand the ways the governments and companies are taking every thing we do online, every data trail that we’re leaving and might be using that in automated ways to offer certain services or not, and determining what you have access to. In the United States for example, the President issued a report about big data and its impact. One of the sections of the report mentioned that there is this concern about big data reinforcing discriminatory practices that have occurred for hundreds of years and supercharging those practices, making them worse. So I think we need to move beyond this idea of  just “I have nothing to hide”, and take more active control over our information and think more broadly about how privacy is being impacted.

Katrin-Merike Nymann-Metcalf: Now we have some time for questions, I see we have some questions. I think we can take a couple of questions. Please say who you are as well.

Eero Talvistu: I am Eero Talvistu from the local NGO “Private Party”. I liked Prof Davis’ comment on this research, because although it did reflect some notion that people need to watch out for themselves on the Internet and take care of themselves, this lack of scepticism towards government was alarming. There is a stereotype about Estonians that they are quite stoic, quite sceptical, but it might seem that in this case it goes the wrong way, because the scepticism is often about “How can they use my data against me?” We have our own state know, what will our good state do wrong against us?  This is a wrong kind of scepticism, in my view, because governments all around the world have been misusing data and misusing practices that concern data, like with spying software. I would like to stress that for individual rights, it is important to protect privacy but transparency goes for government and healthy scepticism of government is required. We should have the presumption of innocence in place, that there would not be mass surveillance and misuse of technologies in the modern world. That’s my comment. Thanks.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Ok, we will take one more question from the middle there and then we will give the panellists a chance to comment. Or do we have maybe a third one as well? Please go ahead.

Avo-Rein Tereping: I would have a question. But I would ask that the interpreters translate it into English for those who do not speak Estonian. I am Avo-Rein Tereping, I represent the State Infocommunication Foundation and Tallinn University. A rather practical question: regarding data on people, we are talking about the state context, and mostly about the Internet. But there are also other technologies that allow us to get information about a person’s movement. GPS tracking systems are quite widely used by companies to track the movement of their vehicles. This is of course because the vehicles are used for work purposes and the companies want to use them as efficiently as possible. But inevitably this gives the company quite a lot of data about the movement of its employees. My question is this: did this issue come up in the study? And the issue of an employer that provides an employee with something for work purposes and then monitors him — the employer can monitor the employee – what it does with the information is another matter. Might this also be part of our discussions here, or an example of a privacy violation?

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: I see that the clock is ticking so we will not have time for another round of questions. So I have one more here – if you have any more questions this is your one and only chance. So we have a fourth question, so I must close the debate, and could you please keep it short.

Anto Veldre: Anto Veldre is my name. I have a question to Professor Davis. My standpoint is that privacy as we see it today is the result of industrial society created by Indo-Europeans. Could it be that in post-industrial society, where Finno-Ugric people are most successful today, there are other realities. I remember a European project, Tabula Rasa, which noted that in 2030 only a microscopic part of GDP will be needed to fully monitor all citizens, because it will be technical possible. Could it be that in post-industrial society we will have a new normality, which means that technically privacy is not achievable any more?

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: I will take the final question.

Reid Nelson: My name is Reid Nelson, I’m from the National Democratic Institute. It seems to me that attitudes towards privacy are a product of the legal structures and data structures we have. They tend to follow that. We have a model where data is centrally located, the legal structures define how that’s collected and accessed, and we as individuals have to often access the collected data. My question is, are there technological solutions or is anyone working on technological solutions that could reverse that structure, so that we collect our own data and we are in control of the access? It seems to me that the legal structure could then support that, and public attitudes might change.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Thank you very much. As we started a little bit late, I’m going to infringe on your privacy to the extent of violating your coffee break a little bit. I am going to give the speakers 2- 2,5 minutes each to comment on all of these questions. We are going to start with Laura.

Laura Reed: I think we need to address the last question about technology solutions and in terms of reversing the current structure. I think the emphasis is again on who has control over the data. I think there are more efforts to again make people aware when they are engaging with different platforms of what information they are giving up and how that might be used. I think there is still a focus on the companies that are collecting the data. I don’t think we have yet moved to a case where people have control of their data to that degree. I think the way these technologies and applications are developing, they are all predicated on having that information and using it.

But to a broader point, I think it’s important to focus on how tech companies are creating their products without thinking about the social or policy implications. Just this morning I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned that technology companies, especially from the US, have the habit of making a product first, and then thinking of the policy and regulatory implications second. I think there is beginning to be a strong push to reverse that, given all the problems some of these companies are finding themselves in.

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt: I’ll take the question that was most directly oriented to the study itself. We didn’t study the GPS systems, but we did study the question of whether people feel that employers are part of their privacy violations. This is a rising debate all over the world. In terms of the employers together with the equipment they provide for work, together with the contract for work, they also take the right to monitor people’s activists, both online and in the physical space. In Estonia, 2/3 of the respondents were concerned about the notion of the employer watching them and being a threat to their privacy. We didn’t specify as to via which tools. It might be the truck drivers being concerned about being watched through GPS or office workers concerned that their e-mails are being read through the company server. It is an issue that we need to be aware of together with the whole debate about state, about the companies who we get services from, but also the employers are part of that equation of to whom do we lose our privacy. We haven’t really discussed the whole idea of “other people”. We have been more concerned about the “big players”, the ones who have significant outside power over us. But the other players – our friends, neighbours, co-workers, who are also part of our privacy equations, are also part or and are actually the biggest source of actually felt loss of privacy. This is another side of the coin. We don’t feel that the abstract government  collecting data about us is that much of a threat, but a colleague posting a party picture on social media hits significantly closer to home. But I will give the floor over to Simon.

Simon Davies: Before I begin, is there anybody here from the Estonian Data Protection Authority? Yell out if anyone is. Is there nobody here from the Data Protection Authority? There is? Good. I thought I was going to go on a rant there for a moment. I do think a lot of this comes down to the relationship, and the data protection authorities are empowered and entrusted to help empower people. I have noticed something very interesting. I was speaking at a meeting in Paris on Monday at UNESCO, with the French Prime Minister. Remarkably, the Article 19 working group of all of the data protection supervisors has produced a political document. The Brits didn’t support it, but they don’t support anything political. All of the Data Protection Authorities have produced this great political statement about the importance of our information and protecting it. I recommend you to read this on the Article 29 website. One thing I will close with: this is a political issue, in the sense that it should make people passionate and make them aware that we are living in an unstable time. The first question related to the presumption of innocence. The problem with surveillance these days is that it reverses that presumption of innocence, whether it is surveillance on the roads or whether it’s national security. Do you know that Estonians have been spied on by your British friends? The GCHQ Agency, the biggest spy agency outside of the NSA, has operated more than three dozen programmes to spy on the rest of Europe. Including one called “Optic Nerve”. Is there anyone here who uses Yahoo’s messenger service? If you have used Yahoo cam, there is a very good chance that you have been spied on by the British, who are your European colleagues. Now where is the anger about this? Where is the passion? One of your member state colleagues in Europe was spying on innocent Estonian citizens, just to establish what you might call a norm of behaviour, and if you fall into that norm of behaviour, then you are fine. If you fall outside of that norm, you’re a suspect. That’s the new surveillance empire, and that’s what we have to destroy, and there are tools being created to help do that but it’s going to be a tough road.

Katrin-Merike Nyman-Metcalf: Ok, well on that cheerful note, we will go for our coffee break. I think the organisers will tell us how long of a coffee break you can have in order not to disturb the programme too much. But let’s first thank our panellists.