Nice: I just agreed with Investigate Europe that I’ll do several weeks worth of consulting with them over the rest of the year to build up their small donor fundraising.

How to fund high-quality journalism is one of the key strategic questions of our societies, so I am happy to get some first-hand experience. – And doing this with this amazing project and impressive and lovely team is just great. 🙂.

Glenn Greenwald’s keynote at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg was quite impressive. I found listening to it quite worthwhile, and highly reccomend it.

Some of Greenwald’s points I found particularly interesting:

How can we fight back against surveillance?

Greenwald discusses four main avenues how the surveillance state can be pushed back (my comments in italics).

1. Public debate leading to legislative changes through the US Congress.
   Although, this is probably the option most mentioned, Greenwald doesn’t see a lot of chances that this will really change something. He mentions several examples where Congress’s and the administration’s reaction to public outrage was completely symbolic.
2. A group of like-minded countries comes together and fights effectively back against US surveillance. Legally and/or technologically. He finds this much more likely.
   I’d say that mostly depends on the amount of pressure we can excert on our governments.
3. US internet corporations might feel economic costs of their collaboration with the US government, and fight back.
   This is a very interesting thought. It’ll only work if consumers start to look more closely into their internet-related companies and boycott those, that, e.g., freely share their customer’s data with the US & UK gov. However, my experience with friends and colleagues has been that the understanding for the importance of this act is still very limited. 
4. In the end, Greenwald says, the most important battle is the technological one. It’ll depend on the quality and integrity of software like TOR, OTR, PGP to determine how much freedom & privacy will still be possible on the internet.
   Greenwald of course strongly appeals to the Hacker’s conference’s audience. However, he does have a very important point.

One other very notable element of his talk is the surprising reluctance of media to believe that intelligence and law enforcement agencies will lie about their methods – although they have been proven to do it again and again.

Click on more to see the audio files. Continue reading 30C3: Glenn Greenwald’s keynote speech →

One of the weakest points of the new German government is to slow down the transition to renewable energy and the growing support for the interests of the coal industry. However, there is still hope that the coalition agreement is vague enough that its consequences could be significantly ameliorated.

Continue reading The next months I’ll be fighting @ campact.de for renewable energy in Germany →

I am trying to link my blog to facebook so that my posts appear (in a readable form) on fb. The plugin “Jetpack” is able to do this, but then I have to give the names of my fb friends to wordpress.com geben.

Is there a more privacy-conscious method?

Yesterday a quote of mine on the Gates foundation in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, today an interview with Deutsche Welle on the same topic. Being without a job doesn’t feel that relaxing yet…

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/microsoft-gruender-bill-gates-noch-kurz-die-welt-retten-1.1818053-2

The quote comes across more positively than intended, but “being too cozy with big Pharma” is still in ;-).