| 2000
November 2000
Participation in the World-Information.org
exhibition held by Public Netbase in Vienna's technical museum. quintessenz
presents a remembrance shrine, historic Big Brother Awards statues and
a top secret international collaboration called Red Rover.
October/November 2000
quintessenz is amongst the
twenty-eight GILC member organizations from around the world who have urged
the Council of Europe to reject the current version of its Convention on
Cyber-Crime. Our
letter to Council of Europe secretary general, Mr. Walter Schwimmer states
that provisions of the treaty run contrary to internationally accepted
human rights norms and would infringe on the free speech and privacy rights
of all internet users. The convention is currently being reworked as mistrust
arose lately amongst the G-7 states concerning industry espionage. Multilateral
trans border search in databases and networks being legalized for law enforcement
could open doors for intelligence agencies as well...
October 2000
To our own surprise the Big
Brother Awards Austria 2000 managed to top last
year's (1999) event. Again more than 1000 people assembled on October 26 in
Vienna's Flex to name and shame the nation's worst privacy invaders and
advocates of a surveillance society. Three of the six
robodogs were awarded to members and origanizations of Joerg Haider's
Freedom Party. For the first time the awards were held simultanously in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and received again fine
media coverage.
September 2000
Privacy International, the
American Civil Liberties Union and quintessenz organized the International
Forum on Surveillance
by Design September 22, 2000 at the London School of Economics.
July/August 2000
After having been guests
on varius servers for a long time, quintessenz.org started set up up an
infrastructure of its own. The first of a planned series of servers is
running on debian linux.
July 2000
Support for IRIS and numerous
other French organizations in opposing
the so called Liberty of Communication Act in French parliament.
June 2000
German officials put pressure
upon the Forschungsgruppe
Informationsgesellschaft und Sicherheitspolitik in Berlin to remove
a draft document on the protection of national infrastructure off their webspace. We managed to find
12
mirror sites in different countries to ensure that the document would
remain in the public infospace.
April 2000
Active participation in
the Outlook
for Freedom conference in Moscow on exchange of experience among human
rights activists from various countries on Internet privacy matters. The
conference was carried out under the aegis of the Global Internet Liberty
Campaign, Chaos Computer Club and quintessenz represented the German
language area.
January 2000
- until when?
We still host
the DeCSS program on our ftp the Motion Picture Association of America
[MPAA] and other lobby groups want to have banned worldwide. A series
of US court orders even made t-shirts and songs containing the code illegal.
Members
of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign joined with
groups from the open source community in
defense of free speech on the internet.
We still get love letters from
MPAA lawyers threatening to sue us if we would not remove the code.
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