CYBER British EU Commissioner: ID check & prior approval for online posts - EDRi

LEAK: British EU Commissioner: ID check & prior approval for online posts - EDRi: "For the past year, Commissioner King and his services have been strongly pushing for “upload filtering (pdf)” – the automatic approval of all uploads in all formats before they are put online.

The aim is to ensure that nothing that was previously removed on the basis of the law, or the arbitrary terms of service of an internet company, or that is or has been assessed as being unwelcome or illegal by a guess made by an AI programme can be uploaded or re-uploaded to the internet.

If the European Commission succeeds in getting this principle accepted by the European Parliament in the Copyright Directive (vote is scheduled for 20-21 June 2018), it plans to rush out new legislation to cover other forms of content within weeks. It seems that some Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are already being lobbied to push for this.

Paradoxically, while the European Commission uses populist demands about “all parties” making “more efforts and faster progress” on removing “illegal” content, the Commission itself has no idea how many items of allegedly illegal content that were flagged by the EU police cooperation agency Europol led to an investigation or a prosecution – clearly showing a lack of a serious, diligent approach “from all sides”. “From all sides, except ours” might be more accurate.

ID Checks:  Now, acting on his own initiative, Commissioner King has decided that “voluntary” identification (by companies that are eager to collect as much data about us as possible) is the next battle – this time in the fight against “online disinformation” (whatever that may mean) and to fight against abuse of data (collecting data as a way of avoiding collected data from being abused). Facebook’s “real-name policy” has previously caused demonstrable harm to vulnerable and marginalised groups.

 In the letter, King proposes multiple ways of achieving this control – such as through the WHOIS database of domain name owners, through surveillance of IPv6 internet protocol numbers. The European Court of Human Rights ruled this week (pdf) that a court order is needed to gain access to IP address data." 'via Blog this'