Laws Should Reflect State of Technology, EU Parliamentarian Says
Laws should be updated based on the current state of technology, not the other way around, said Marietje Schaake, Dutch member of the European Parliament and governor of the European Internet Foundation, at a discussion Friday hosted by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus in Washington. “We must, as lawmakers … think about our responsibility to update the laws” to match the evolving development and use of technologies, she said. On Tuesday, the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs will vote on Schaake’s report on a digital freedom strategy, she said, and she’s hoping it will be adopted by the Parliament. “For the very first time, the EU will have a strategy for digital freedom in its external actions,” she said.
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Government and private companies should work together to create an infrastructure that allows tech companies to sell to other governments and state-owned companies without requiring those companies to police their foreign buyers for human rights violations, Schaake said. There should be “much deeper conversations between companies and government to see how they can reinforce each other,” she said. Technologies that are built with one legal system in mind should not just be sold in a country with a different legal system, she said, citing the recent case of Nokia Siemens selling technology with monitoring capabilities to Iran. The technology was built with “lawful intercept” in mind, but “what is lawful intercept without the rule of law?” she said, referring to Iran. Companies “are mostly driven by the desire to make money” and their responsibility to their shareholders, she said, but “I am encouraged when I also see companies taking clear moral positions,” such as Twitter’s hesitation to supply the U.S. Department of Justice with private information on its users.
Companies like Nokia Siemens suffer public relations problems when they sell products to governments and state-owned companies that use those products to violate human rights, Schaake said, but “there are a number of other companies whose names you and I don’t even know.” With no brand value to lose, those companies have fewer reasons not to sell potentially dangerous technologies to other countries, she said: “This lack of awareness, lack of transparency, and, as a result, lack of accountability, I think, needs to be addressed."
The U.S. should be careful to not enact protectionist policies “under the guise of national security,” she said, specifically referring to a recent House Intelligence Committee report on the Chinese network equipment maker Huawei. While the European Union has not yet tackled the issue, the U.K. is currently interacting with Huawei to learn more about its technologies, she said: “I think we need to know more about what’s going on,” rather than rushing to conclusions about the company.
The conflict between using the open Internet to promote human rights and controlling Internet tools to prevent crime is “being fought out in the market and in courts,” Schaake said: “This is kind of evolving on a day-to-day basis.” Law enforcement should go after the people who use the Internet to commit crimes, whether the crime is copyright infringement or child pornography, she said, not the Internet itself. “Sometimes it seems like people forget that it is people who are committing these crimes,” she said, likening the Internet to a knife that “can cut bread or cut someone’s throat.”