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Big Brother in Europe
by Raf Jespers
Big Brother is watching you.
How? By inspection, surveillance, supervision, monitoring, policing, ... What are the tools? RFID chips, observation cams, search engines, scanners, DNA kits, spyware, databases with algorithms, spy satellites... Plenty of those in our daily lives! They are indicators of how we don’t just lose our confidentiality between each other but even our own private selves. Transparent governance and transparent business are still a distant cause, the transparent civilian however is a fact.
The European Union, in particular, is pushing this reality with such organizations as Europol and Eurojust, with the Frontex border guards, eborder concepts, Galileo and expensive pilot projects on safety research, with European web checks, a European police academy, special investigation and intelligence methods and so on. The Union is building a dangerous safety net at the service of the free market, regarding civilians as potential safety risks. Democratic, social and cultural rights have their hands tied. The war on terror became the alibi to drastically limit every expression of freedom.
Raf Jespers’ book summarizes everything. The result is highly explosive. Civil rights and freedoms are not safeguarded by abolishing them: Europe is in need of a new charter for the protection of fundamental rights.