2. July 2020

France’s second try at the Intelligence Act

What the French Parliament needs to discuss in its upcoming…

Floran Vadilloby Floran VadilloAssociate Researcher, University of Bordeaux

Floran Vadillo, PhD in political science, associate researcher at the IRM (University of Bordeaux) and teacher at Sciences Po. Floran was security advisor to the President of the National Assembly's Laws Committee and, in this capacity, played a major role in the drafting of the 2015 Intelligence Act in France. He then served as advisor to the Minister of Justice and, since 2017, has been working for a major French digital company.

29. June 2020

Greece: Technology-led policing awakens

Hellenic police and border authorities are bulking up on…

Eleftherios Chelioudakisby Eleftherios ChelioudakisCo-Founder, Homo Digitalis

Eleftherios is a co-founder of the Greek civil society organisation "Homo Digitalis", which is a member of the European Digital Rights (EDRi) network. He is a lawyer admitted to practice in Greece, while also he works as a research associate at the Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP) of KU Leuven. Eleftherios holds a LLB from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a LLM on Law and Technology from Tilburg University Law School and a MSc in Digital Humanities from the Computer Science School of KU Leuven. Finally, he holds a Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) designation from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).

3. June 2020

Covid-19 tracking apps, or: how to deal with a pandemic most unsuccessfully

Are tracking apps really the solution or do they just add…

Didier Bigoby Didier BigoSciences Po Paris

Didier Bigo is professor of International Political Sociology at Sciences Po Paris-CERI, France. He is part time professor at King’s College London, department of War Studies. He is additionally director of the Centre for study of Conflicts, Liberty and Security (CCLS) and editor of the quarterly journal “Cultures & Conflits” published by L'Harmattan. He is one of the co-editors of the new PARISS (Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences) journal, Brill, 2019, as well as founder and previous co-editor with Rob Walker of the ISA (International Political Sociology) journal.

22. May 2020

Try harder, Bundestag! Germany has to rewrite its foreign intelligence reform

What the German Constitutional Court’s decision on the BND…

Thorsten Wetzlingby Thorsten WetzlingEditor-in-Chief, about:intel

Thorsten heads Stiftung Neue Verantwortung's research on surveillance and democratic governance. He created the European Intelligence Oversight Network (EION) and is a Principal Investigator in the new collaborative research project GUARDINT, designed to address and to redress the gap between increasingly transnational surveillance practices and still largely national accountability mechanisms. Thorsten gave testimony before the European Parliament and the Bundestag on intelligence legislation, and his work appeared in various media outlets. He is a member of the advisory board on Europe/Transatlantic of the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin and the scientific committee of the Cyber and Data Security Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Thorsten holds a doctorate degree in political science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. In the past, Thorsten worked as Senior Fellow at the Brandenburg Institute for Society and Security, The Hague Institute for Global Justice, and as Advisor for the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). As Transatlantic Post-Doc Fellow for International Relations and Security (TAPIR), Thorsten studied national surveillance policies at the French Institute for International Relations (ifri) in Paris and the RAND Corporation and the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

27. April 2020

The Polish surveillance regime before the ECHR

After ignoring the Constitutional Tribunal’s call for…

Barbara Grabowska-Morozby Barbara Grabowska-MorozPostdoc Researcher, University of Groningen & Former Project Coordinator, Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Poland)

Former project coordinator at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Warsaw, Poland), where she conducted monitoring of the legislative process dealing with i.a. access to justice, surveillance law, criminal defense rights. Together with activists from Panoptykon Foundation, submitted an application to the European Court of Human Rights regarding lack of effective protection against illegal surveillance in the light of the Polish legislation.

1. April 2020

The Club de Berne: a black box of growing intelligence cooperation

An in-depth account of how this notoriously secret club has…

Jan Jiratby Jan JiratJournalist, WOZ – Die Wochenzeitung

Jan Jirat is a journalist working for independent Swiss weekly WOZ - Die Wochenzeitung in Zurich. He mainly writes about security and far right extremism. He is a member of the investigative journalism networks investigativ.ch and Netzwerk Recherche eV.

16. March 2020

Digital technologies in peace operations

As conflict moves to the cyber realm, peace efforts must,…

Annika S. Hansenby Annika S. HansenSenior Researcher and Deputy Head of the Analysis Division, Center for International Peace Operations

Dr. Annika S. Hansen is a senior researcher and Deputy Head of the Analysis Division at the Center for International Peace Operations, Berlin, Germany. She previously worked for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

11. March 2020

European metadata retention: news from the EU court

An analysis of the AG’s opinion on data retention and…

Bastien Le Querrecby Bastien Le QuerrecPhD candidate in public law; Member of litigation team, La Quadrature du Net

Bastien is a PhD student in public law at Université Grenoble-Alpes (France). He is working on algorithmic decisions of the administration and their impacts on human rights. He is also a member of La Quadrature du Net, a French NGO that promotes and defends fundamental rights in our digital era, and its litigation team.

13. February 2020

Years of MI5 lawbreaking expose failure of UK surveillance safeguards

The only thing worse than secret services with sweeping…

Megan Gouldingby Megan GouldingSolicitor, Liberty

Megan Goulding is a lawyer at the UK human rights organisation Liberty. Megan specialises in privacy, technology and human rights and runs Liberty’s litigation in this area. She is currently working in particular on state surveillance and police technologies. She is acting for a client in the first legal challenge to police use of facial recognition technology. She is also running Liberty’s own challenges to bulk surveillance, both at the European Court of Human Rights and in the UK courts. Previous to Liberty, Megan worked as a solicitor in private practice.

23. January 2020

Update pending: intelligence oversight needs oversight intelligence

Seven ideas for how to close the gap between high-tech…

Kilian Viethby Kilian ViethStiftung Neue Verantwortung

Kilian Vieth manages Stiftung Neue Verantwortung’s work on digital rights, surveillance, and democracy. He is the project manager for the European Intelligence Oversight Network (EION), which provides European intelligence oversight officials and other experts a space for regular and structured exchange. As a researcher in the GUARDINT project, Kilian studies the potentials and limits of overseeing surveillance and works on the development of an intelligence oversight index and a surveillance law database. His research focusses on the democratic control of intelligence and reform approaches for rights-based and more efficient intelligence and surveillance policy in Germany and Europe. Beyond that, his research interests include digital human rights and critical security studies. He was invited to testify before the parliament of Hesse on regional intelligence legislation. Kilian previously worked on different research projects at the Center for Internet and Human Rights (CIHR) at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, where he is still a Fellow. He has also worked as a consultant and project manager in political campaigning at a communications consultancy in Berlin. He holds a dual master’s degree in Political Science and European Affairs from Sciences Po Paris (France) and Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) and a bachelor’s degree in Public Management and Governance from Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen (Germany).