00:00:02 Domen Savič / Državljan D

Welcome, it’s the 11th of February 2025, but you’re listening to this episode of Citizen D Podcast on the 15th of February same year. With us today is Joe McNamee, a senior policy expert at the EU Disinfo lab who’s been working on topics related to Internet regulation for over 20 years.

From 2009 to 2018, he led European digital rights, so-called Adri, the Association of Digital civil Rights organizations in Europe, working on major topics such as adoption of the general Data Protection Regulation and the Copyright Directive. So welcome Joe, welcome to the show.

00:00:43 Joe McNamee

Thank you.

00:00:45 Domen Savič / Državljan D

Let’s start at the beginning… there’s tons of things happening in the disinfo area of EU policy and practice as well, but I want to start with your previous or pre-previous employer; European Digital Rights Association.

How did this field of digital rights change in the last, let’s say, 10 years, the so-called digital decade. What were some of the challenges that were, let’s say, present at the beginning and what were some of the solutions we saw as the as the as the decade wrapped up?

00:01:30 Joe McNamee

Well, I’d say the problems are easier to define than the solutions because the problems are inspired by things that seem to last forever, and solutions change as technology changes. So, I think over the last 10 years, as you mentioned, the general Data Protection Regulation getting across the finish line was already a success, and it being a reasonably solid instrument was also a success.

We had the adoption of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act on a European level which served to strengthen the role of the of individuals in society in the digital society, we had things like the latest revision of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which is more important than people think in regulation.

What we see in here in the audial space, particularly with video streaming services, both based on profiling like YouTube and paid for like Netflix… So, there’s the one thing I think that is a fundamental change is that I remember in 2014, two 1015, there was a lot of objections to the notion that there were digital rights.

Whereas now I think the question is answered that the rights valued in the pre-Internet age have a different character and a different value in the in the digital age, in 2025 and we have to think about what it means to transfer those rights and to protect those rights in the digital environment compared with the more analogue life that we had prior to 2015.

00:03:50 Domen Savič / Državljan D

This was actually my follow up… so how do you see or how did you see the change in, let’s say, civic organizations or the general public, the change of perception of this field.

So, I remember like back in was it 2011, 2012, one of my first, let’s say campaigns was against the ACTA Treaty and back then it was really hard to sort of broaden this this issue of treaties of surveillance of, you know, monitoring, monitoring the different digital past. It was very hard to translate this into a language that the general public would understand, right… as we progressed it seemed in a way that the public is getting more in attuned to these issues, to these values. There’s a bigger connection between, as you said, human rights and let’s say digital rights.

But again, looking at the past 10 years, how did you see this area changing or adapting to the to the new reality?

00:05:04 Joe McNamee

I think it’s a question of people and society being better able to map what they consider to be unquestionable values of society like democracy, like privacy, like freedom of expression, mapping that onto the digital society.

And I think ACTA… it was perhaps one of the first examples of a certain part of society going “We can’t just leave this to arbitrariness…”, we have to have better control of our freedom of communication online and since then, we’ve had different challenges, different opportunities, like the update of the Data Protection Directive which became the GDPR, where there’s a lot more understanding among policy makers among politicians than there would have been two years before, or even or three years before.

I remember when the GDPR was proposed first by the Commission, there was… It was met with sort of a degree of bafflement, and the degree of misunderstanding and deliberate misunderstanding to a certain extent. So, I think it’s society becoming more in tune with old rights in a new digital form, I think that’s really the big change over the past 10 years.

00:06:46 Domen Savič / Državljan D

OK. And what were some of the drivers of this attunement?

00:06:54 Joe McNamee

I think, it came to something like data protection, I think it became more obvious just how much data was being generated about each individual and what could be extrapolated by computers … if we imagine the foundational work for the GDPR was done in the early 1990s and the number of computers that existed and their computing power was fairly minimal and we were talking about protecting personal data that was largely on sheets of paper. And I think in the course of the… between 2010 and 2020, it became more embedded in society that it’s a whole different level of magnitude; personal data being protected now with huge amounts of data being collected and data that can be compared with each other.

I wrote a paper for EDRi, back in the day, where I talked about data that had no parents. So, data that was generated by comparing two other pieces of data. If you’re this, and if you’re that, then chances are you will be… If you’re A and you’re B, chances are you’ll be C and the awareness of that change in what those that hold the data and those that are allowed to process the data can do with it was finally understood in that period. And I think even in 2014, I think it was when the initial conversation started, society wasn’t there yet, hadn’t quite understood and I think now you know that your data can be used in this way and I think that is a fundamental shift that allowed good things to happen, even if implementation of the GDPR is sometimes disappointing.

00:09:33 Domen Savič / Državljan D

And how do you see the difference between, let’s say for quite some time the, let’s say the good guys were the big intermediaries, right? Facebook and other US-based companies and the bad actors were these shady companies that nobody really knew about.

As the time moved forward, you had this… I felt like a change between the perception of these big intermediaries that weren’t all good and at the same time the issue of foreign states came into play, right? You had the US, let’s say China, Russia in in the last couple of years… so do you think this change from commercial to geopolitical sense of digital rights helped the progression of this field?

00:10:49 Joe McNamee

I’m not sure there was ever a possibility to make a complete distinction between state and private because we saw… most simply were in the Data Retention Directive that showed, once data is stored and once data is processed it will be kidnapped for and repurposed for state reasons… So, I think one leads to the other rather than one being different from the other.

Of course, China went off in in one, the US, with its big tech base, went off in another direction and is going off in a new direction now, but I wouldn’t see them necessarily as a distinct phenomenon.

00:11:53 Domen Savič / Državljan D

I mean, sure, they’re connected. But at the same time, I get the feeling that, when we were discussing, let’s say, the GDPR, the main actors that the data needed to be protected against were the big intermediaries.

Right now, you have… after or maybe even during or just before COVID, you had this shift to a more geopolitical sense, where companies were maybe replaced by country names or regime names in a way, right.

So, you were talking or we were all talking about, you know, EU digital sovereignty in regards to both China and the US, you had this whole push towards more EU-centric development of private, but also public sector in this regard.

And on the other side you, you also had these quarrels between the W