Yes, this comment is about European regulations. It started with curved cucumbers and today not a day goes by that I do not send a few swear words in the direction of the Belgian capital over some minor but all the more annoying interference in my life. Somewhere high above, noble intentions such as privacy, space for competitors, or less waste are floating around, but at the end of the day, Kafkaesque bizarreness falls out of it.
The transfer of data from the EU to the US violates the right to privacy as well as European data protection laws because data are not sufficiently protected against interception by US agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) or the FBI.
The geopolitics of cyberspace derives from the geopolitics of information and is crying now for a posture of its own, ad par with the old-time geopolitics. This paper tries to sketch some contours, overlappings and missing spots of the geopolitics of cyberspace as seen at the crossroads.
Internet governance relies on multistakeholderism – a distributed policy making model based on voluntary cooperation of key actors, usually identified as states, business and civil society, operating “in their respective roles” (WSIS 2005) through “rough consensus and running code” .
This paper aims to examine the hindrances to formulating policies on the use of encrypted communication including the fundamental contradiction between the interests of the government and manufacturers or companies aiming to build the most secure software.
The utopian fantasies projected onto the rapidly evolving cyberspace have given way to the realities of the assertion of age-old human instincts, clothed in new technology. New risks, vulnerabilities and threats are manifested in a complex security environment, where cyber-criminals are carving out their ecological niches.
The tendencies towards greater intrusion into people’s privacy were visible well before 9/11 and can be imagined even without the elements of its influence. The transition to e-prescriptions, online banking and voting – these are daily routines in Estonia and will be rather sooner than later in other parts of the Western world as well.
