US war on terror EU SWIFT(ly) signs blank cheque on EU data

The EU and the United States signed the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (also known as SWIFT Agreement) agreement giving the US authorities access to bulk data containing the millions of records in the EU to enable the US authorities to trace financial transactions related to suspected terrorist activity (or to put it bluntly, against US interest). The SWIFT Agreement added some data protection safeguards, but the United States has been found to circumvent the agreement with the aid of the Europol. The EU Commission and the Europol have classified all documents concerning the SWIFT Agreement as secret. EU citizens confront a dark future where unelected EU bureaucrats continue to betray the trust of the people handing out bulk data to “counter terrorism” but at the same time undermining cherished values and violating human right standards and principles.     

30 years on - The review of the Council of Europe Data Protection Convention 108

The Council of Europe is engaging in a process of revising its Data Protection Convention (Convention 108) to meet and overcome these challenges. The Council of Europe celebrates this year the 30th Anniversary of its Data Protection Convention (usually referred to as Convention 108) which has served as the backbone of international law in over 40 European countries and has influenced policy and legislation far beyond Europe’s shores. With new data protection challenges arising every day, the Convention is revising its Data Protection Convention. Computer Law and Security Review (CLSR) together with the Intl. Association of IT Lawyers (IAITL) and ILAWS have submitted comments in response to the Expert Committee’s public consultation on this document. CLSR aims to position itself at the forefront of policy discussion drawing upon the high quality scholarly contributions from leading experts around the world.     

Voting at 16: Turnout and the quality of vote choice

Critics of giving citizens under 18 the right to vote argue that such teenagers lack the ability and motivation to participate effectively in elections. If this argument is true, lowering the voting age would have negative consequences for the quality of democracy. We test the argument using survey data from Austria, the only European country with a voting age of 16 in nation-wide elections. While the turnout levels of young people under 18 are relatively low, their failure to vote cannot be explained by a lower ability or motivation to participate. In addition, the quality of these citizens' choices is similar to that of older voters, so they do cast votes in ways that enable their interests to be represented equally well. These results are encouraging for supporters of a lower voting age.     

Critical Punishment Memorialization in Canada

Recent criminological scholarship on penal history museums has shown how sites of popular culture tend to silence the voices of prisoners and present them in ways that legitimate the deprivation of their liberty. While representations that reinforce the penal status quo are observable at most Canadian penal history sites, there are outliers that situate imprisonment as a form of oppression, and account for prisoners’ struggles and resistance. Drawing on three case studies from a 5-year qualitative research project on Canadian lock-up, jail, prison and penitentiary museums, we discuss what critical punishment memorialization looks like in a context of penal intensification in Canada. We show how such critical representations depend on the historical contextualization of penality as a manifestation of colonialism and/or the incorporation of prisoners’ voices and standpoint. We argue that the critical representations and narratives at these museum sites open up possibilities for the social distance between penal spectators and the incarcerated to be diminished by bringing humanizing prisoner narratives into focus in an otherwise dark tourist space.