February 2020

French Court Rules against Facial Recognition in High Schools

Posted on February 28, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

A court in Marseille ruled on Thursday that authorities in France’s southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region had no power to authorise the use of facial recognition systems in two high schools in Nice and Marseille.

The city’s Administrative Court overturned the decision of regional authorities, ruling that only schools had the power to authorise such technology.

The court ruled that the decision breached the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, as such systems are based on consent but students cannot give consent freely given the relationship of authority that binds them to the school’s administration.

“To my knowledge, this is the first judgment in France concerning the use of facial recognition technologies in public space,” said Alexis Fitzjohn O Cobhthaigh, a lawyer representing several associations that brought the case to court.

Disproportionate measure

The case stems from an experiment launched at the end of 2018 to equip the Ampère high school in Marseille and Les Eucalyptus in Nice with virtual access control devices, by which cameras would recognise high school students and grant them access and be able to follow the trajectory of people.

A number of digital and human rights organisations said the plan violated individual freedoms. France’s National Data Protection Commission, CNIL, also came out against it in October 2019, calling the experiment disproportionate and illegal.

“This installation cannot be implemented legally,” the head of the CNIL wrote to the regional authority in charge of approving the trials, according to a letter cited by the investigative website Mediapart.

According to French media, parents and teachers’ unions also opposed the experiment.

The Administrative Court ruled that using facial recognition to control access to high schools was a disproportionate measure.

Nevertheless, some French media reports said regional authorities were pressing ahead with the plan regardless of the court’s ruling.

Call for total ban

The case was brought in February 2019 by French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, which works to promote and defend fundamental freedoms in the digital world.

“In France, this is the first court decision about facial recognition and the first success against it! We hope it will be followed by a series of other successes leading to the total ban of facial recognition,” the group wrote on their website on February 27.

La Quadrature du Net and 80 other civil society groups signed a joint letter on December 19 calling on French authorities to ban facial recognition for any purposes of security and surveillance, citing similar bans in San Francisco and other US cities.

“Facial recognition is a uniquely invasive and dehumanising technology, which makes possible, sooner or later, constant surveillance of the public space,” they wrote.

“It creates a society in which we are all suspects. It turns our face into a tracking device, rather than a signifier of personality, eventually reducing it to a technical object. It enables invisible control. It establishes a permanent and inescapable identification regime.”

Senator Sees China’s Hand in Central Europe TV Sale

Posted on February 28, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

US Republican Senator Marco Rubio has asked the US Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General to launch “a full review of the national security implication of AT&T’s upcoming sale of the Central European Media Group Enterprises, CME, to the Czech-owned conglomerate PPF Group”.

AT&T is a US multinational telecommunications conglomerate and the largest shareholder at the CME. The owner of the PPF Group is Czech tycoon Peter Kellner, whom the Florida Senator accused of being a “China proxy”.

In 2018, Petr Kellner was set to buy Bulgaria’s largest media company, Nova Broadcasting, which owns some of the most popular commercial TV channels in the country, but the Bulgarian competition commission blocked the deal.

If PPF buys the CME, it will take control of popular TV channels in several Central European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia. It channels, including rating market leaders ProTV in Romania and bTV in Bulgaria, reach an audience of 97 million people, according to Rubio’s letter.

Rubio said this was potentially worrying. “The administration needs to conduct closer reviews of corporate deals like … [the] sale of CME, and understand how the Chinese government and Communist Party work through proxies like PPF,” he said.

Rubio, who co-chairs the Congressional Executive Commission on China, CECC, and is a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, warned of the threat that “the Chinese Communist Party’s political interference in foreign governments and societies” could pose to the countries where CME operates.

He argued that the sale would affect US national security, as Washington’s priorities include “preserving a free and open media environment overseas as well as preventing the Chinese Communist Party from subverting these platforms”.

US legislation authorises investigations of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers when “the acquirer is controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government” and when “the acquisition results in control of a person .. that could affect the national security of the United States.”

In Rubio’s view, the PPF Group already has “a record of acting as China’s proxies inside the Czech Republic” and its financial ties to China were clear.

“Approximately one-third of the PPF Group’s profits come from subsidiary Home Credit’s individual lending businesses in China,” the letter stated, adding that this “politically precarious business relies” on Beijing’s non-banking loans license.

The Senator claimed that Beijing uses the company to support “China’s malign activities abroad”. One example he cited involves Serbia, where he said that “PPF-owned telecommunications firms are working with Huawei to develop 5G networks”.

He also claimed that PPF subsidiary Home Credit “hired a public relations firm for 2,000 hours work devoted to manipulating Czech public opinion favorably toward China”.

This included “spying on Czech politicians, pressuring media to withdraw news articles critical of China and creating a new think-tank, Sinoskop, to employ biased analysts to influence public debate”.

Social Media a Help and Hindrance in Balkan Coronavirus Fight

Posted on February 27, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Serbia has no confirmed cases of coronavirus yet, but on Tuesday a WhatsApp voice message began doing the rounds on social media claiming several people had already died from the virus in the capital, Belgrade.

“Doctors are strictly forbidden to talk about the virus,” the woman is heard saying on the message, which was published on several Serbian news portals.

A similar thing happened in neighbouring Croatia, where another WhatsApp message contained the claim that the first case had been recorded in the coastal city of Split, before authorities actually confirmed the first case in the capital, Zagreb, on February 25.

With its epicentre in Italy, Europe is grappling to contain the spread of Covid-19. In the Balkans, cases have been confirmed in Croatia, North Macedonia and Romania.

Governments and concerned experts and citizens in the region and elsewhere are taking to the Internet, social media and mobile phone messages to spread information.

But likewise they face what Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, has called an “infodemic” of false information and scaremongering in the media and online.

In Serbia, the interior ministry said on Wednesday that its Department of High-Tech Crime was trying to identify the women who made the WhatsApp recording claiming that coronavirus had already claimed its first victims in the country.

In Albania, prosecutors on February 24 announced investigations into what they called the “diffusion of fake information or announcements in any form aimed at creating a state of insecurity and panic among the people.”

Scientist: Behaviour ‘not in line with magnitude of danger’

Serbia’s Health Ministry has launched a website dedicated to the coronavirus outbreak, regularly posting updates, news, advice, contacts and warnings for those coming to Serbia from affected areas.

On Wednesday in Moldova, the government began sending mobile phone text messages telling Moldovans what symptoms to look out for and what steps they should take if they suspect they may have contracted the respiratory virus.

“Take care of your health. Call your family doctor immediately if you have a fever or cough. If you have returned from areas with Coronavirus and feel ill, call 112,” the SMS reads.

Croatian scientist Igor Rudan of the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, said on Wednesday the state of panic in Europe did not reflect the level of threat posed by Covid-19.

Even if the virus were to spread throughout Croatia, he wrote on Facebook, “the casualties should be at least roughly comparable with the number of cases of death from the flu or with the number of road traffic fatalities during the same period.”

“This panic is triggered by the persistent media coverage… rather than by generally accepted and scientifically-based knowledge about the coronavirus,” Rudan wrote.

“If you started behaving differently than you did during the winter months, during the flu epidemic, for example, collecting food supplies or wearing masks on the streets, this is not the kind of behaviour that reflects the actual magnitude of the danger.”

The post has been shared 2,500 times.

The Covid-19 outbreak originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December.

According to the World Health Organisation, there are now more than 82,000 confirmed cases in 45 countries.

In the Balkans, there are three confirmed cases in Croatia, one in North Macedonia and one in Romania. More than 180 people are under supervision in Montenegro. In Serbia, 20 people have tested negative for the virus, while several Serbian citizens who recently travelled to affected areas are in quarantine in Belgrade and the nearby town of Sabac, the public broadcaster reported.

INSI: Decline in 2019 Media Workers’ Deaths as They Pull Back from Deadly Conflicts

Posted on February 25, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

According to the annual report “Killing the Messenger,” published last Friday by London-based International News Safety Institute, INSI, a total of 48 journalists died in 2019 in incidents and accidents directly related to their work, the lowest number in 16 years.

That does not, however, mean journalists are now safer while doing their jobs, said INSI director Elena Cosentino.

“The decline in casualties was simply because fewer journalists reported from conflict zones in the first place,” Cosentino said.

“Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan were deemed simply too dangerous for either local or international media to cover and were dropped from many outlets’ news agenda.”

The deadliest country for media workers in 2019 was Mexico, with 12 reporters killed, followed by Tanzania (5), Afghanistan (4), Syria (4), Honduras (3) and Somalia (3).

Last year also marked the first time in 21 years that no journalist was killed in a foreign country, which comes as a result of media organisations pulling back their staff from the most dangerous places.

All 48 causalities in 2019 were local journalists reporting from their home countries, and the majority of them died while reporting on crime, politics and corruption by unknown perpetrators.

The past year proved partially successful in terms of investigations into the murders of some prominent journalists, including “significant legal developments in the killings of Ján Kuciak from Slovakia; Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Kashoggi; and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta,” the report said.

Slovak investigative reporter Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, were shot dead in their home in February 2018. The trial of four people accused of the brutal killing started in mid-January, while in December another accused was sentenced to 15 years in jail in a separate trial.

Jamal Kashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist, entered the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul in October 2018 and never came out. At first, Saudi Arabia denied having anything to do with the reporter’s disappearance, but then the authorities finally acknowledged that their own officials were behind the murder. The whereabouts of his body is still unknown.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese journalist, writer, and anti-corruption activist who was killed in a car bombing near her home in 2017. Last November, the case saw an important development when the main suspect and alleged sponsor of the crime was arrested. He then accused Keith Schembri, the chief of staff of former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, of ordering the assassination.

The murder, like that of Kuciak in Slovakia, sparked mass protests that forced the prime ministers of both countries to resign.

However, INSI said that the legal developments happened thanks to the enormous pressure brought by Caruana Galizia’s family and international media coverage.

“Daphne’s case proves that with enough time and pressure even the most powerful could one day be held to account,” Cosentino said.

“As happened in Malta, raising the cost of killing a journalist is the ultimate aim for everyone in the news industry. Despite the progress made in 2019, that still feels like a long way off.”

Serbia Urged to Come Clean on Journalists’ Surveillance

Posted on February 20, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, RSF, has called on the Serbian authorities to investigate how much surveillance goes on in the country – after the Serbian news agency Tanjug on February 16 published a response written by the Defence Minister to a never-published opinion piece by a former defence minister.

The former defence minister and current opposition politician Dragan Sutanovac emailed his article on defence issues to the editor of the weekly Nedeljnik, Veljko Lalic, which decided not to run it.

RSF noted its concern that current minister Aleksandar Vulin felt able to respond to the unpublished material – and that he had said in his article that he was replying to the article Sutanovic had published in Nedeljnik.

On February 19, RSF’s European bureau chief, Pauline Adès-Mével, called on the Serbian authorities to investigate whether opposition politicians were being spied on.

“We are concerned that emails between opposition politicians and independent media outlets are being spied on and intercepted by the government,” Adès-Mével said.

“We call on the authorities to shed all possible light on this matter,” the press release added.

After the news broke, Vulin apologized to Nedeljnik and said he would ask the relevant bodies to look into the matter. Vulin’s staff later said its PR team had mistaken Nedeljnik for Kurir, a Belgrade-based tabloid that recently published an interview with Sutanovac.

But in his response article, Vulin only referred to Sutanovac’s comments about Serbia-Russia cooperation, which the unpublished piece contained, and was not mentioned in the Kurir interview.

Nedeljnik also said the authorities needed to find out whether any officials used the resources of the secret services to intercept emails between Sutanovac and Lalic.

“It is hard to believe that a person working constantly with the media, for example, someone in the defence ministry’s public relations department, would confuse the daily Kurir with the weekly Nedeljnik,” the weekly said.

This, however, is not the first time that concern about surveillance of politicians and journalists has arisen in Serbia.

In March 2016, the tabloid Informer published some of the findings of an investigation into the assets of Aleksandar Vucic – now president of Serbia, who was then prime minister – which the investigative website Krik had carried out but never published.

Serbia has been falling for years in the rankings of the World Press Freedom Index. It was ranked in 90^th place out of 180 countries in the 2019 Index.

EU Drafts ‘Human-Centric’ AI Plan to Match US, China

Posted on February 20, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The European Commission on Wednesday unveiled the white paper as a part of a European digital strategy on developing artificial intelligence, designed to compete with US and Chinese sector leaders while also addressing potential human rights abuses associated with this emerging technology.

“Europe’s digital transition must protect and empower citizens, businesses and society as a whole,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote in an op-ed that outlined the key points of the proposed blueprint.

“To make this happen, Europe needs to have its own digital capacities – be it quantum computing, 5G, cybersecurity or artificial intelligence,” Von der Leyen explained.

She said the Commission should make available the necessary funding to “draw in national and private sector funds” to develop these technologies within the EU, and ensure what she called “tech sovereignty” for the bloc.

According to the white paper, investment in artificial intelligence will be channelled through the Horizon Europe programme, which is to be allocated 15 billion euros in the coming 2021-2027 Commission budget.

The white paper provides also for further investment in adopting new legislation and building safe data spaces, in order to consolidate the EU’s leading role in data protection and assure “the development of AI in Europe whilst ensuring respect of fundamental rights”.

The cornerstone of the new legislation, to be gradually enforced in the EU space, the draft says, might be the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. This is a set of recommendations drawn up by a panel of experts that was tested by companies in 2019.

The proposed strategy aspires to promote “a human-centric approach” to AI in line with “European values”. In order to ensure that, the paper advocates tough legislation to counter the risks to human rights of some of the more “intrusive” applications of AI, such as facial recognition and its use for remote identification.

Facial recognition is currently banned in the EU. The white paper aims to promote a “broad debate on which circumstances might justify exceptions in the future, if any,” the Commission noted in a statement.

Moreover, the document commits to putting in place a mechanism capable of identifying and banning any AI algorithms used in “predicting criminal recidivism” that “can display gender and racial bias, demonstrating different recidivism prediction probability for women vs men or for nationals vs foreigners”.

The white paper pledges to ensure that victims of abuse of artificial intelligence and other digital technologies do not encounter any more difficulties in getting compensation than victims of abuses of more traditional products and services.

The document also presents a proposed European Data Strategy, harmonized with the existing General Data Protection Regulation and intended to “create a genuine single market for data, where personal and non-personal data … are secure and where businesses and the public sector have easy access to huge amount of high quality data to create and innovate”.

Tips for a Strong Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence Application

Posted on February 18, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence provides financial and editorial support to professional journalists who have strong ideas for cross-border stories. This year’s theme is the Rule of Law.

Mid-career journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia are eligible to apply.

Each year, 10 journalists are chosen through open competition to receive a €3,000 bursary, close editorial supervision and mentoring, and the chance to attend international career development seminars and be published in the most influential regional and international media. In addition, the top three articles chosen by an international jury will receive awards.

So how do you maximise your chances of winning a place on the programme? Here are some tips from our editors, based on reviewing hundreds of applications:

Look at Fellowship stories from previous years.If the theme of your story has been covered by the Fellowship in the last three years, make sure your story has a sharp, new angle. In other words, your story should present the familiar theme through a fresh lens, perhaps even forcing us to question what we thought we knew. (You can find previous years’ stories online in the stories archive)
Be as specific as possible. Don’t just say you want to look at a broad subject; say what in particular you want to explore. For example, not just “migration” but “changes in migration between country X and country Y in the last five years”. And tell us howyou plan to do it and why that matters.
Do your pre-research.You’re not expected to research your entire story but do as much as you can to give a sense of what you expect to show. A proposal that says “I want to find out what’s happening with X” is not as strong as one that says “I want to find out what’s happening with X and my research so far suggests this is the answer and this is why”.
Tell us what’s new. Make sure to include what’s new about your proposal, compared to other media reporting on the subject. What do you hope to reveal or highlight? Why will this be interesting/important to readers?
Remember the investigative/analytical element. Your story does not have to be a hard-core investigation but it should be more than just descriptive. It should show not just what’s happening but why it’s happening. Make clear what you will investigate or analyse — and how. For an investigative story, this might mean obtaining documents. For an analytical story, it might mean analysing data and/or talking to academic experts. But…
Keep it journalistic. The Fellowship features seminars and mentoring and insists on the highest standards of accuracy but it is not an academic programme. It exists to help journalists improve their skills and produce a high-quality piece of journalism, not an abstract academic article. Your story should hold the attention of inquisitive readers all over the world, and not just in your country or region.
Whatever happens, don’t be downhearted. Every year there are more outstanding proposals than there are places on the Fellowship. Don’t take it personally or regret the work you put in if you’re not selected. The Fellowship is such a great opportunity that it’s worth giving it your best shot. If your proposal is strong but isn’t chosen, you may be able to publish the story elsewhere.

The application form, guidelines and further information about the Fellowship are available online at https://balkaninsight.com/fellowship-for-journalistic-excellence/

For more information about the programme and the application process, write to us at fellowship@birn.eu.com

EU Court Rules Against Romania In Cyber Domestic Abuse Case

Posted on February 12, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

A judgment issued on Tuesday by the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, ordered Romania to pay a victim of domestic abuse 10,000 euros for failing to protect her when police refused to investigate her husband for breaching her internet privacy. The court recognised this as one of “the various forms that domestic violence may take”.

On 18 March 2014, the ruling recalled, newly divorced Gina-Aurelia Buturuga told the police that her ex-husband had accessed her email and Facebook accounts without permission. She had previously filed complaints against him, identified only as M.V. in the sentence, for domestic violence.

According to the judgment, Buturuga wanted the family computer examined after her former husband allegedly “made copies of her private conversations, documents and photos” that he found on her personal accounts.

But in June 2014, the police in Tulcea, eastern Romania, rejected the request, saying “that the information that might have been obtained was unrelated to the threats and violence charges formulated against M.V.,” the ruling reads.

In September 2014, Buturuga reported her husband to the police again for a “secrecy of correspondence violation”, and the complaint was registered and included in the investigation against her husband for alleged domestic violence.

However, the prosecution dismissed the case in February 2015, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove M.V. had subjected Buturuga to the physical violence she said she had suffered.

Alleged death threats were considered “not serious enough to qualify as a crime”. As for the “secrecy of correspondence violation”, prosecutors said it was not reported on time.

Before addressing the ECHR, Buturuga appealed to a Romanian court, which confirmed the prosecutors’ conclusion and also ruled that the material retrieved by her ex-husband from her social media accounts was already public when he accessed it. The case was closed without a court hearing and M.V. received a fine of 250 euros.

The ECHR concluded that the Romanian authorities failed to properly investigate the woman’s allegations of domestic abuse. It established that part of the information the ex-husband copied from her digital accounts was not public, as the Romanian judges had claimed. It said the authorities should have conducted a proper investigation to determine the nature of that information.

“The court considers that the authorities have shown excessive formalism in rejecting any connection with the acts of domestic violence which the applicant had already brought to their attention,” the ECHR said. “They thus failed to take into consideration the various forms that domestic violence may take.” According to the ruling, Romania has to pay Buturuga 10,000 euros in compensation for moral damage.

Questions Marks over Official Data on Turkish Economic Decline

Posted on February 4, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The official data makes for uncomfortable reading: central bank reserves down 11 billion euros over three years, 150 per cent knocked off the value of the lira, inflation at nearly 12 per cent, unemployment roughly 13 per cent and output contracting.

Yet some observers of the Turkish economy – rocked since 2016 by repeated political crises, strained relations with the West and military adventures in the Middle East – say the reality may be even worse.

“Economists are becoming increasingly suspicious about the economic data of the Turkish government,” said Caner Gerek, professor of economics at Kirklareli University near Turkey’s northwestern border with Bulgaria.

“The official numbers do not match the facts on the ground and in our lives.”

The Turkish Statistical Agency, TurkStat, and the Finance Ministry under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, are in charge of the data, “but the way the data is gathered and analysed is becoming very suspicious,” said Gerek.

Lessons from Greece

A seller writes new prices at a local bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: EPA-EFE/ERDEM SAHIN

Take inflation: shortly after TurkStat reported record high inflation in 2018, the agency’s head, Enver Tasti, was dismissed. Under his successor, the official rate fell significantly to 13 per cent.

Yet Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at John Hopkins University, said last year that the real figure was over 43 per cent.

The prices of the main commodities alone rose more than 30 per cent last year; electricity and gas were up 32 per cent and prices of food in supermarkets soared 50 per cent.

Enes Ozkan, an economist at the University of Istanbul, said Turkey would be wise to learn from the mistakes of neighbouring Greece, which plunged into crisis in 2010 when it revealed a massive budget shortfall. The European Union criticised “severe irregularities” in Greek accounting.

“The Greek economy is still recovering and Turkey must take lessons from it,” Ozkan told BIRN.

“Unfortunately, government officials at every level are manipulating the economic data and using it for their own political propaganda.”

Ibrahim Kahveci, an economics columnist at the Turkish daily Karar, said there had been a significant drop in consumer spending and that it did not match the government’s official data on inflation.

“Perhaps TurkStat official do not believe that economist can cross check the data,” Kahveci wrote.

Unemployed or not

Faik Oztrak. Photo: Wikimedia commons/Hilimi Hacaloglu

According to TurkStat, the number of unemployed Turks increased by 817,000 between September 2018 and September 2019 to a total of 4.56 million. The unemployment rate rose 2.4 per cent to 13.8 per cent; even worse among the young, at 26.1 per cent.

But again, experts believe that official figures downplay the problem given the extent of the economy’s contraction.

The economy contracted 2.6 in Q1 2019 and 1.5 per cent in Q2. There was a slight recovery in Q3, but the economy remains in recession and the downward trend is expected to continue in 2020.

According to Deutsche Welle Turkish, almost 900 companies, including a number of Turkish industrial giants, filed for bankruptcy in 2019 alone. More than 2,000 have done so in the past two years, according to the January report.

Critics have also picked up on the method of measuring unemployment: according to TurkStat, 630,000 women who were previously counted as part of the labour force opted to stay at home in 2019, excluding them from unemployment figures.

Only in December 2019, 145,000 women left the labour force, leading to questions from experts and opposition parties. The number of people who have ceased actively seeking work also increased to 668,000, again removing them from the unemployment rate.

Faik Oztrak, deputy leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party told a news conference in January that the data made no sense.

‘If you can’t measure it…’

Gerek, the economics professor, also questioned the data on Turkish Central Bank reserves, which were used to defend the lira. Gerek cited “serious economists” suggesting reserves had hit “a very low level”.

A poll conducted by AREA Research Company found that 61.6 per cent of Turks believe the state of the economy will worsen further in 2020, potentially putting further pressure on Erdogan after the loss of Istanbul and other cities to the opposition in local elections last year.

Ozkan said trust was key to a healthy economy, but that the gap between the official data and the facts on the ground was widening.

“The current manipulation of the data causes irrevocable damage to the Turkish economy,” he said.

“You can escape from facts but you cannot escape from its consequences.”

“Even people who never follow any economic data now do not trust the data of the Turkish government.”

“As Lord Kelvin said, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” Ozkan said, referring to the 19th century Scottish mathematician and physicist William Thomson.

“If you measure the deteriorating figures wrong it means that you will also apply the wrong policies to recover.”

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