EDRi, Panoptykon Foundation and Access expressed their concern regarding the proposed Directive on EU Passenger Name Record. In current form, the proposal poses the risk of discrimination e.g. on religious grounds. Moreover, the proposal will bring significant costs to Member states. And all these with lack of evidence that such measures are effective in prevention of serious crimes.

Anna Buchta (EDPS), Gwendal Le Grand (CNIL), Paul Nemitz (European Commission), Katarzyna Szymielewicz (Panoptykon Foundation) and James Leaton-Grey (BBC) discuss CJEU Google Spain and UPC Telekabel decisions and their implementation implications for rights to privacy and freedom to expression in Europe, as well as safeguards, processes and mechanism to protect human rights online.

"All indications are that the attack on the editorial offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo will provide a pretext for the introduction of further limits on our civil liberties - a new order the victims of which are unlikely to be terrorists … Independent analyses confirm that data inflation and the growing use of algorithms in intelligence work do not improve the effectiveness of threat detection.

There seems to be little overlap between “open government” and “surveillance state”. Public security –the most quoted justification behind surveillance – is routinely presented as the exemption from the expectation of state transparency. While we have seen significant developments towards more openness in such sensitive areas as public procurement, health management or IT infrastructure, when it comes to “our security” all rational arguments seem to fail.

Every year more and more public money is invested in surveillance technologies – everything from drones and video surveillance to data mining software for public administration. Recently, the Polish government announced a new programme of co-financing surveillance cameras in the schools.