By by The European Conservative
An Interview with MEP Patrick Breyer
The European Pirate Party’s mission is to fight surveillance and censorship online. We asked German Pirate MEP Patrick Breyer, a legal expert and judge by profession, about the lurking dangers of the EU’s ‘digital transition.’
The von der Leyen Commission passed two landmark laws as part of the EU’s ‘digital transition’: the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the AI Act. What should voters know about these?
One problem is that the DSA doesn’t protect freedom of speech. The large online platforms are using error-prone upload filters to censor our speech, and even manually take down completely legal speech.
The other problem is about privacy. The large platforms have a surveillance-capitalist business model that relies on collecting our entire online activity. This pervasive online surveillance is all about manipulating us, and the DSA doesn’t tackle it.
It does make sense to regulate artificial intelligence, but the final AI Act somehow just made it worse. While civil society was pushing to ban biometric mass surveillance, the Commission passed into law that it should even be possible to use real-time face surveillance in public spaces. Just by saying that you are looking for specific persons for specific crimes, a government can justify placing the entire country under this error-prone and chilling face surveillance system.
France is already rolling this out for the Paris Olympics, and even legalized ‘behavioral surveillance,’ meaning that AI will alert the police as soon as you behave differently from the crowd. That creates a very Chinese-like, conformist society. The Commission’s AI Act did nothing to ban this, it will be totally legal in Europe.
These surveillance systems are not only extremely powerful, they are extremely error-prone too. We know from the United States that there have been many false arrests. So we will be in fear of being mistaken for criminals, and that has an additional chilling effect. Read Full Article >
