Stasi, GDPR and You

September 14, 2018 by Marc Handelman in GDPR

Perhaps understanding the former East German Stasi can also help non-European countries in their effort to understand GDPR - at least, that's what Rob Pegoraro - writing at The Parallax would suggest, whilst cautioning us on government overreach.

"East Germany’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—”Ministry for State Security” in English, “Stasi” for short—employed a network of civilian informers to spy on the communications and even inside the residences of its subjects, to enforce conformity with that communist regime. The Stasi Museum, housed in the agency’s former headquarters in the onetime East Berlin, reveals its methods to anyone willing to pay that admission fee." - via Rob Pegoraro - writing at **The Parallax

via Wikipedia: :The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) or State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst, SSD), commonly known as the Stasi was the official state security service of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). It has been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to have ever existed.

And, of course, via Wikipedia, defining the GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 ("GDPR") is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas. The GDPR aims primarily to give control to individuals over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU.5

EDPB To ICANN: No Can Do

July 24, 2018 by Marc Handelman in Bureaucracy, GDPR, EDPB, Privacy, Privacy Prophylaxis

In one of the more amusing (El Reg is more often than not, amusing...) article titles to date: Kieren McCarthy's 'ICANN't get no respect: Europe throws Whois privacy plan in the trash' let's us know - whilst mincing few words - of the apparent ineptitude of current ICANN efforts to align WHOIS with European privacy concerns (via a correspondence from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB)). I Say, it's timee to create another study ICANN! ICANN's repsonse? See ICANN 's General Counsel and Secretary John O. Jeffrey's blog post. Perhaps it's time for an ICANNexit...

'Despite existing solely to develop rules for the internet's underlying infrastructure and possessing a $100m annual budget, ICANN has put itself in the position where it has effectively outsourced decisions over the critical Whois service to a group of bureaucrats in Brussels.' - via Kieren McCarthy, writing at El Reg