There was standing room only at the VOX-Pol panel at yesterday’s CPDP conference.
The 8th International Conference on Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) is ongoing in Brussels until Friday, 23 January. The event features 70 panels covering a wide range of current debates such as mobile technologies, border surveillance, big data, encryption, privacy and innovation, revenge porn, cyber security and EU data protection reform. For the full conference programme, visit:http://www.cpdpconferences.org/Resources/CPDP2015_PROGRAMME.pdf
The VOX-Pol organised panel, Monitoring the Net for Violent Extremist Material, comprised contributions from Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, Sadhbh McCarthy, Centre for Irish and European Security, TJ McIntyre, University College Dublin, and Robindra Prabhu, Norwegian Board of Technology. The panel was chaired by Pete Fussey of the University of Essex and moderated by Maura Conway of Dublin City University.
Prof. Ian Brown’s remarks were directed to macro level issues of surveillance and proposed multilateral standards for regulating same as laid out in his co-authored paper. CIES’s Sadhbh McCarthy took a more bottom-up approach, focusing upon the role of citizens as online censors. UCD’s Dr. T.J. McIntyre focused, on the other hand, on UK law enforcement’s efforts to sanitise the internet of extremist material and the legal footing of these. Finally, Dr. Robindra Prabhu focused on the influence of the Breivik attacks on Norwegian attitudes to online monitoring and police activity in this realm.
Questions from the floor were largely around social media monitoring and content take-down and the relationships between social media companies, law enforcement, and legislation in this process with a particular focus on the UK context.
Watch the full panel discussion here: