Europe - new material (39)
01 June 2000
Review: "Making up the rules: interception versus privacy" Buro Jansen & Janssen (by Jelle van Buuren, edited by Eveline Lubbers) published on the internet at:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~respub/crypto/english
For some time now, the struggle against cyber-crime has enjoyed a prominent place on the political agenda. Three components crop up every time in the rhetoric on the threat of cybercrime, cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare; the vulnerability of the digital infrastructure, the use of the Internet to commit digital crimes and the use of encryption to communicate freely and to suppress evidence. No hard statistics on the actual dangers are given; instead, there is a lot of shuffling with statistics and anything remotely connected to hacking is consigned to the great pile of cyber-crime. The authorities emphasise the dangers of a perilous, uncontrolled cyberworld in order to obtain extensive authorisation to survey data, to track and to intercept. This dossier sheds some light on the attempts of the authorities to carry out interceptions at will on the internet, paying special attention to the ways in which they try to tackle the problem of cryptography. Bringing the Internet under control is an international affair. This dossier highlights organs like the P8, the Council of Europe and the European Council of Justice and Home Affairs, all of which are difficult to control. These are the forums where the industrialised countries discuss the harmonisation of technical standards that will enable the interception of Internet communication, the harmonisation of powers to track down and trace people and cooperation by crossborder investigations into cyber-crime.
European Integration and Migration Policy: Vertical Policymaking as Venue Shopping. Virginie Guiraudon, Journal of Common Marker Studies (Blackwell) June 2000, pp25 1-271. The article looks at the way in which transgovernmental "policy forums" in migration and asylum have been dominated by "securitarians". Guiraudon considers how the current decision-making structures have evolved, noting that intergovernmental cooperation was developing by the early eighties during very low levels of legal migration and a decade before the national reforms in migration and asylum criteria in the early nineties and the emergence of the "mass illegal immigration" phenomenon. She says that the pre-existing security forums, from Trevi onward, have "allowed law and order officials to set the agenda of migration as a European security issue". Within intergovernmental structures, she argues, these officials are less restricted than in national settings where "a number of institutions, levels of government or social groups can act as "veto points" and prevent reforms". Guiraudon suggests that the goals of national migration control officials have been fostered in three ways: through "avoiding judicial constraints", "eliminating adversaries" (parliamentarians, NGOs, activists and lobbyists) and "enlisting much needed cooperating parties" by "co-opting sending and transit countries".