ENGLISH

The purpose of this blog and the associated actions do not only concern one particular law or political treaty. It is more about revealing and explaining a process, which has been going on for at least a decade, while increasingly affecting our civil and enlightened self-conception .

ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is just the point where we decided to no longer sit and wait since the development of the security policy of the last eleven years is alarming. In order to describe the necessity of our actions and the explosiveness of the issue, we decided to put together a collection of articles from popular media concerning the topic.

We listed a few renewals, which set alarming standards and could interfere with the freedom of our future lives.

An open society should have the right and the opportunity to be informed in order to become aware of its actual development. Democratic control cannot succeed without a public and fundamental discussion characterizing our ongoing political system and its consequences for the future society.

Following the links you will find a time-line, chronologically documenting the most important juridical stages and putting the actual situation in a historical context. By describing the symbiotic connection between the particular events and their impact on the next ten to fifteen years, the time-line shows a greater picture of the complexity of the process.

Please take some time to look around. Do your own research, talk to friends and relatives, ask your teachers and professors. Always keep in mind how fast the last ten years went by, what happened, what has become possible and think about what will soon or once become possible. Reflect your personal experiences, especially those born between 1980 and 1990 should remember the time before the digital breakthrough: A time without cable television, without cell phones, internet or computers.

We have to admit that the generation before 1980 was also a part of this change, such as those after 1990 born into the beginning of a digitized world. But no generation experienced the immediacy of the change like the generation of the 1980s.

They are therefore capable of a proficient and skeptic view, enabling an understanding of the situation instead of just being present during the process.

Looking at the speed of the fundamental renewals, development and processes including the concentration and the long-term consequences, there is only a little amount of time and space left to resist the status quo sustained by the mainstream-media.

The ignorance of their reason of being, questioning current developments, is enabled by the fact that themselves are not aware of the current lack of information.

Everyone of us has his or her political interests. For some it is world peace, for some the environment and industry and for some others it may be the social divergence or human rights.

To a lot of us the internet policy is a foreign, new and maybe even uninteresting issue, especially as a new and undefined political area. But the development of the internet politics will soon affect every part of our public and private lives, leaving no area untouched.

While keeping the society uninformed about the upcoming restrictions and how they could affect the people’s lives, new laws and measures are being imposed by our governments.

Their overall impact can only be revised in retrospective. An almost impossible challenge we do not want to face.

If one realizes the consequences of current development for the personal life, one may feel overwhelmed. If all the recent changes are just the beginning, where will we stand in fifteen years? What will we tell those wanting answers to their questions? How will we look back at our lost decade?

No matter what topic you may be interested in, this concerns you too.

Decisions affecting upcoming generations are being made by people who are not aware of the impact to our lives, especially regarding the fact that they will be absent when the laws and measures add up to a fully functioning control system.

We, as European citizens of our time have the possibilities to demand our right to discuss and be part of political decisions. But above all we have the right to exhaust our possibilities and prevent the worst case: having to realize we wasted our possibilities when it is too late.