This year, we are once again publishing the transparency report for last year, thus marking the end of the 2023 network policy year. As a nice tradition, we are reviewing the year for you once again and summarising in compact form the topics that our team worked on and some of the things that will still or once again be on our minds in 2024.

As the time of the pandemic and the associated legislation came to an end, we were slowly able to get back to our business as usual. The policy team delved back into major European legislative projects (dismantling net neutrality, eID, chat control, etc.) and began working on the UN Cybercrime Convention together with a global civil society network. Colleagues were able to physically attend more conferences and meetings again to meet many stakeholders from different areas. Many discussions were held, political alliances forged, legal texts analysed as well as statements and open letters drafted to voice criticism and propose solutions.

Thanks to the help of civil society through supporting memberships and individual donations, as well as foundation grants and project funding, the association's financial situation remained stable in 2023. Although the entire team is always very frugal with the association's money, the inflation was very noticeable in our association's coffers. There is still no state funding for the net-political NGO sector and we have also renounced pandemic funding. With the withdrawal of the Open Society Foundation from Europe, one of the largest sources of funding for net-political work has also been lost. This hit us hard and intensified competition between NGOs for the remaining funds. As a result, we are now much more dependent than ever on supporting members and individual donations.

Our Work and Successes

As a public watchdog, we focus on laws relating to digitalisation that have an impact on people's lives and fundamental rights. We uncover abuses, warn the public of potential dangers and call for political responsibility. We do this in equal measure at national and international level. Here are some highlights from our national and international work in 2023.

Video Surveillance in City Centres

There are strong efforts to legalise video surveillance for the purpose of traffic calming in Austria's city centres. Starting with Vienna City Councillor Ulrike Simma and the Association of Cities, attempts are being made to amend the StVO to allow the installation of comprehensive video surveillance. We first expressed our views on this issue in a joint letter with climate protection and environmental organisations. Subsequently, we received leaks from the City of Vienna about the enormous costs and low expected efficiency of the surveillance project. We analysed the issue with our foreign sister organisations, highlighted the problems of such systems and pointed out more data protection-friendly alternatives that would even be cheaper and more efficient. The work culminated in street campaigns to illustrate what a camera forest in a densely populated area would mean alongside frequent demonstration routes. After discussions with the Minister for Climate Protection, our position seemed to have reached those responsible. However, we must remain vigilant on this issue.

epicenter.academy - Platform for Digital Competence

A highlight of 2023 was definitely the successful completion of our major educational project ‘Digital Self-Defence’. Supported by the Lower Austrian Chamber of Labour's ‘’ Labour 4.0 Project Fund‘’, we were able to develop a comprehensive and free e-learning as well as a workshop design for students aged 14-19 and hold classes in Lower Austrian vocational schools. The project was so successful that the association's general assembly decided to found epicenter.academy GmbH in May 2023. With the pilot project by State Secretary Tursky, we were also able to teach in Viennese federal schools, which also earned epicenter.academy GmbH the ‘Futurezone Award 2023’ for digital competencies.

Whistleblower Protection

Our work to protect whistleblowers began with the extradition of Julian Hessenthaler from Germany to Austria in 2021. Only through an international coalition of many NGOs were we sufficiently protected to publish our analysis of the politically motivated prosecution against the director of the Ibiza video, which led to the fall of the far-right government of Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) with Heinz Christian Strache (FPÖ) in 2019. Despite trial monitoring and intensive media work, a guilty verdict was reached. In the meantime, however, public opinion on the case has changed in Austria. This might not have happened if we had not spoken out in favour of Hessenthaler first.

We are already working on the next similar case with the intimidation lawsuit brought by the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office against the cabaret artist Florian Scheuba. The work on these cases showed the importance of protecting whistleblowers. That is why we have been working on the implementation of the EU Whistleblower Protection Directive in Austria since 2022. With our legal statement in 2022 and several meetings with the ministry, we were able to achieve a few improvements in the law. The human rights situation in Austria has recently led us to write joint letters to protect freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

Right to Analogue Life

The issue of digital identity has occupied us since 2017 and became the centre of political debate in 2023 with the spread of ID Austria to broad sections of the population. We were featured several times in the media about discrimination against people without smartphones or people who do not want to use the state system. We have demonstrated how ID Austria can also be used without biometrics or without a Google mobile phone. Our demand made it into the election programmes of the ÖVP, SPÖ and FPÖ in 2024.
 

In terms of our work at European and global level, we would like to highlight the issues of net neutrality, eIDAS, chat control and the UN Cybercrime Convention.

Net Neutrality

After EU Commissioners Vestager and Breton surprised us with new attacks on net neutrality in May 2022, our fight for compliance with European net neutrality safeguards continued in 2023. Under the guise of ‘fair share’, the telecoms industry is trying to impose telephone-era business models on the internet. The consequence would be less freedom of choice on the internet and poorer quality of service, because suddenly both communication partners (content provider and end customer) would have to pay the telecoms operator money to keep the line working.

Such a ‘line protection right’ is inspired by the ancillary copyright for press publishers and was rejected from the outset by civil society and consumer protection organisations. As we have been working on the topic of net neutrality since 2013, we have also coordinated the entire work of the European network EDRi on the issue in this debate. In countless open statements together with other NGOs, consumer advocates, industry and media representatives from Europe, we once again warned of the far-reaching consequences of this threat to net neutrality. We had to admonish the EU Commission several times to stick to its own rules for fair legislative procedures.

Our theory of change on this topic is to bring the large number of people affected by a restriction of net neutrality into the debate. With the exception of the telecoms companies, everyone stands to lose if equal treatment on the Internet is weakened. In the end, internet exchanges, public media organisations, private media, copyright representatives, media regulators, SMEs, smaller ISPs, members of national and European parliaments and government representatives from several countries were on our side. Eventually, the EU Commission had to back down and we were able to prevent a law from being passed during this legislative period.

However, we anticipate further attacks on net neutrality and are now coordinating with other affected regions such as India, Brazil and the USA. Our work on the topic of net neutrality is therefore increasingly extending beyond Europe. This became apparent when we were invited to testify as experts at the Colombian Constitutional Court hearing on the legality of zero-rating. A judgement is still pending.

Digital Identity: eIDAS

The reform of the eIDAS EU Regulation, which was launched in June 2021, establishes a universal infrastructure for legally binding electronic identification of all people online and offline. This means that any characteristics of people can be electronically verified to companies and government agencies. The so-called European Digital Identity Wallet poses a major threat to anonymity online, the right to use pseudonyms for services and ‘over-identification’ in everyday situations. This is why we have been working intensively on this topic for over three years now and have also drafted all civil society policy papers on this topic at EU level. Our aim has always been to raise awareness of the enormous dangers of such a system and to minimise the risk to people with concrete proposals for safeguards.

After many position papers, open letters, analyses of the various versions of the law, countless hearings and discussions in parliament, presentations, blog posts and international media work, 2023 was the peak phase of the negotiations. The final result is now available. Many of our demands have made it into the law. However, our work on this issue continues in the form of analysing the technical specification of the European Digital Identity Wallet. After all, what counts in the end is how effective the data protection is, how well it is received by people and whether the wallet passes the practical test in a world of surveillance capitalism. For us, however, the focus does not end in Europe, as we are now continuing our work at UN level, where global human rights standards are being developed for such systems.

Chat Control

We were among the first and most vocal critics of the CSA Regulation (chat control). Our protest on this issue and our experience with the chat affair involving former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz led to an all-party consensus against this law in Austria. This binding vote in the EU subcommittee prevented the federal government from approving the law without drastic changes in the EU Council. This first vocal veto was helpful in establishing the current ongoing blockade of the law with a blocking minority in the Council.

However, our work did not end there. If a trilogue result is reached, it will have to go through the plenary of the European Parliament again. This is exactly where we want to start with our campaign software DearMEP.eu. This free software tool was built with our organisation's 10 years of experience in EU lobbying. We combine our knowledge of EU processes with experience from online campaigns with mass mobilisation. Licensed as free software, the tool is designed to make it easy for NGOs in the fields of climate action, migration and LGBTQI* to effectively connect their supporters with decision-makers in the European Parliament. Our presentation at CCCamp 2023 was complemented by a workshop at 37c3.

UN Cybercrime Convention

2023 was also the year we worked intensively on a dossier at UN level for the first time. As the only European net policy NGO, we are supporting the negotiations on the UN Cybercrime Convention in Vienna and New York. This convention has the potential to rewrite criminal law codes worldwide. Based on mandatory criminal offences and surveillance measures, it regulates cross-border cooperation between law enforcement authorities in particular. Together with an alliance of EFF, Article 19, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, PI, D4 and R3D, we were present at the plenary sessions of the negotiations in New York and Vienna and delivered statements in favour of human rights. We analysed the various versions of the law and made concrete proposals for amendments, organised civil society press conferences and had countless meetings with ambassadors. We were again at the negotiations in New York in January 2024 and will continue to support the issue until the final resolution is passed at the UN General Assembly as well as at the national implementation level.

The Finances

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported our work this year! Without your support, our work would never be possible.

Despite rising prices, almost all sponsoring members and donors have remained loyal to us and continue to support us with regular donations (47.47%). Thanks to the OSF foundation grant and final support from the Labour 4.0 project fund of the Lower Austrian Chamber of Labour for the education project, as well as many other institutions, the source of income from ‘grants, foundations and prize money’ is similarly high in 2023 (46.90%). We generated the remaining funds from lectures and workshops (5.28%).

The efficiency of human resources for statutory work was 81.26%. In 2023, expenditure was divided into 76.68% for statutory purposes and 25.19% for administrative expenses. We used 0.86% for public relations work, such as OTS mailings and campaign implementation. We closed 2023 with a small loss, which was offset with the reserves from previous years (-2.73%).

Since the end of 2019, our association has also published a monthly cash flow report on the website and on social media in the interests of transparency.

Our Media Work

Although network policy issues and digitalisation remain very present politically, the ‘normality’ in the media following the pandemic can be seen in our reach. Event-related health policy and the focus on the associated sensitive data of the population have decreased. In 2023, we reached a total of around 42.1 million people across all media channels (313 mentions). As reported in the highlights, we are also increasingly being recognised and requested as experts at European level and in the UN. We conducted 71 interviews, 16 of which were with international media. Our public appearances increased again in 2023 (217 in total). We gave lectures (33), took part in panel discussions (7), gave a total of 121 workshops (109 with the epicenter.academy in educational institutions) and attended community events (53). We took to the streets to protest against city centre surveillance and for the protection of whistleblowers (3).

We wrote 32 blog posts on complex technical topics in German and English. Our work in the national and international legislative process is particularly important to us. We therefore submitted 29 statements, wrote 15 policy papers and wrote 26 open letters to stimulate political discourse.

As digitalisation progresses, interest in our fortnightly newsletter is also growing. If you don't have a subscription yet, you can sign up for free here. We appreciate every subscriber, as it shows that more and more people are interested in digital fundamental rights issues.

Busy Bees

A vibrant democracy thrives above all on active dialogue with all stakeholders. That is why we had a total of 463 meetings. Of these, 350 were held at international level alone, because strong fundamental rights in an open and free Internet require European or global solutions.

As you can see from these figures, we make every effort to use the resources available to us as efficiently and purposefully as possible, which is why we avoid advertising and prefer to invest the money in content-related work.

Want to support us too? Find out all about our supporting memberships.

The entire Transparency Report 2023 is available for download in German and English.