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In the struggle against child pornography and terrorism, the Internet surveillance has been intensified. What used to be part of the agenda of totalitarian governments has, since the terror attacks on the USA on September 11th 2001, increasingly spread to democratic countries: increasing restrictions on the rights of Internet users, website owners and journalists.

Worldwide efforts are made to impede cybercrime by censorship, Internet blocks and data retention. However, these measures have proved in the past to have limited success in achieving their objectives and have not been particularly accurate. Instead, more and more innocent individuals have fallen under suspicion. This has serious consequences: the privacy and the right to free expression fall by the wayside. Both civil rights and liberties of the individual are torpedoed.

However, the right to free expression in particular has a vital – perhaps the most vital – role in the development of the Internet as a medium for a continuously growing worldwide community. It is therefore of fundamental importance to fight cybercrime but also to protect the rights and liberties of the individual.

Dialogue

The stated aim of naiin is to maintain the Internet as a free, democratic medium for international understanding. With this in mind, naiin conducts an intensive dialogue with the policy makers in a very wide variety of countries to strengthen civil rights and liberties, and works with national and international organizations with the same objectives.

In addition, naiin is developing legal and technical measures against cybercrime, to offer policy makers as more efficient alternative concepts, in order to prevent the introduction of ineffective measures that restrict civil rights and liberties.