PRESS RELEASE
EU Police-State On the March
Oct. 5, 2017 (EIRNS)—The failing European elites are enforcing police-state measures in the hopeless attempt to stop the tide of what they call a "populist" upsurge. This is a partial picture of measures which have been implemented in the last period.
Italy: Two days ago, Google shut down the YouTube page of scenarieconomici.it, the widely followed anti-euro site, with the following motivation:
"We’d like to inform you that due to repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines.... Your YouTube account has been suspended. After review we determined that activity in your account violated our Community Guidelines, which prohibit spam, scams or commercially deceptive content."
Scenarieconomici, run by Prof. Antonio Maria Rinaldi and his collaborators, reported that they had never been notified of any violations, and that their protest of the shutdown was rejected without explanation. The YouTube page included the videos of a conference in Rome on "A ‘Plan B’ for Italy" with, among others, Rinaldi and Jacques Sapir.
The Italian Senate is going to vote on a bill, already approved by the Chamber of Deputies, which introduces mass surveillance methods called "deep pack inspections" by Internet providers. The communications authority can then pre-emptively block users without a court order. The bill won’t even be debated, because it was introduced as the implementation of a EU Law.
In mid-September, a prosecutor in Genoa seized bank accounts of the Lega Nord in several northern regions, threatening to collapse the political activity of the Lega altogether just a few months before general elections. The action was taken on the basis of a verdict for misuse of public financing. On Sept. 26, a judge ordered the accounts released, but it is not clear how much money had been seized.
Germany: A new law has come into force aimed at regulating social media platforms to ensure they remove hate speech within a given period of receiving complaints—within 24 hours in straightforward cases, or within seven days where evaluation of content is more difficult.
The name of the law translates as "Enforcement on Social Networks." It’s also referred to as NetzDG, an abbreviation of its full German name.
Fines of up to EU50 million can be applied under the law if social media platforms fail to comply, though as Spiegel Online reports, there is a transition period for companies to gear up for compliance—which will end on Jan. 1, 2018. However the ministry in charge has started inspections this month.
Great Britain: Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced that viewers of terrorist sites online could face up to 15 years in prison. Rudd said that this will not apply to users who visit those sites only one time, and to media operators, but who knows.
