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Trustworthy encryption - Greens/EFA co-president Rebecca Harms takes a concrete step to stop the pollution of pervasive surveillance



Hi Debian Publicity,

I am very happy to share with you that Rebecca Harms, co-president of the Greens/EFA Group in the European Parliament, has announced a project to use trustworthy encryption in cooperation and dialogue with the European Parliament IT services and Debian!

http://www.rebecca-harms.de/index.php/lesen/trustworthy-encryption-a-small-step-to-stop-the-pollution--32935

Text pasted in full below.

Best regards.

//Erik

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28.12.2013

PRESSEMITTEILUNG

Trustworthy encryption - a small step to stop the pollution of pervasive surveillance


The Green Group in the European Parliament is reaching out to the Free Software community to join in a project to use trustworthy email encryption.


Greens/EFA co-president Rebecca Harms explains the "laptop-project" as first step:


"Thanks to Snowden we are beginning to understand the full scope of what it means to live in a digital environment polluted by pervasive surveillance. Commercial and governmental surveillance is undermining trust in our democratic institutions and corrupts the very fabric of democracy. This is now a global problem of such scale that each individual effort will fail, yet without taking small concrete steps from accepting where we are, no progress is possible. Therefore, the Greens/EFA is now reaching out to the Free Software community to join in a small project to use trustworthy email encryption in cooperation and dialogue with the European Parliament IT services.


"As the Green Group in the European Parliament we want to make an effort to ensure that nobody but the intended recipient of an email can read it. Such emails need to be encrypted, travel over the internet, and then be decrypted on the receiving computer -- and nowhere else. In this project, me and colleagues in the Greens/EFA will use a selection of Free Software from Debian and run it on computers dedicated for this purpose. We will start small scale with 10 regular consumer laptops. This is not special hardware running special software, but general computers running software available for everybody."


As Greens in the European Parliament we are very pleased that we are supported by Debian. Debian is a community of programmers and developers abiding to a social contract to share and maintain their common resource which they call Free Software.

_____________________________________

For further information, please contact Ruth Reichstein at +32-472-702996 or ruth.reichstein@europarl.europa.eu

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--
Erik Josefsson
Advisor on Internet Policies
Greens/EFA Group
GSM: +32484082063
BXL: PHS 04C075 TEL: +3222832667
SBG: WIC M03005 TEL: +33388173776

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