View from “Jausenstation Aschinger” close to St. Wolfgang. As the summer school’s director, Franz-Stefan Meissel, has been so generous to invite the faculty there each year, I have been taking the very same picture for more than 10 years now. Tiny details change, though :-).

This, for example, is the 2016-version.

I am on holidays, having left Strobl, with a few days Croatia lose to the Krka waterfalls, and at a sailing course now. Autumn is, however, coming closer and brings lots of political and legal debates .

NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song For the Week)

This week’s song is from Garish and Die Strottern - and possibly a challenge for all Non-Viennese readers/listeners. It’s a beautiful song, the ideal start for a new season and also a metaphor for legal fictions (or fairy tales).

Die Strottern are also the authors of possibly the best Viennese love song I know.

Garish is a new discovery for me (isn’t this terrible? I always feel a little depressed about all the music and all the books I don’t know and will possibly never hear or read - FOMO galore! Umberto Eco helps me here with books, but what about all the unknown music?) and is in my ears while I am writing this - in brutal summer heat, at the Croation sea, right ahead of another sailing lesson, during vacation. There is poorer music on this planet for such occasions.

Both bands have gigs around Vienna in autumn that I will try to see.

Retrospect

Strobl

The summer school ended with exams, a candlelight dinner, a midsummer night ball and a formal closing event. Again, lots of students were sad to leave but full with new learnings and experiences. The early mornig weather during my runs indicated, however, still very delicately, that #autumniscoming.

Internet surveillance

Austria is yet in another debate on whether and how internet messaging services such as Whatsapp, Signal or Telegram could be surveilled by state authorities. I have a strong opinion that this is a bad and dangerous idea and gave a TV-interview on Wednesday on this.

This was my “studio” (The beer on the right wasn’t mine, unfortunately):

The outcome looked like this:

Technically, I would have preferred to have more light - next to the Aputure MC that you can see - with me, the face too dark. I also hadn’t seen that the (gigantic) mic is in frame and the watercooker (?) in the background isn’t ideal either. Nore is my T-shirt.

But it was very hectic to get this done at all, as I needed to move to a new, unknown place and had less than 20 minutes to set everything up. Fortunately it worked out somehow, but some of the learnings are that internet can be really bad in Croatia (although the figures look good, cellular coverage possibly better than in Austria) and that a Panasonic SH1 can be really difficult to handle on a small tripod.

Contentwise, I would have appreciated to have a better answer on the comparative law question (does anyone have an overview on state surveillance laws in the EU? - I don’t, unfortunately) and I probably misunderstood the last question.

Prospect

Internet surveillance, again

Holidays are nice, but writing is nicer. I am therefore currently drafting a short commentary (“Kommentar der Anderen”) for Der Standard that will hopefully be published next week. Topic is - who would have guessed it - surveillance of messaging apps. I will most likely start by quoting Pippi Langstrumpf and will argue that lawyers are typically very little interested and therefore often poor in understanding whether and how legal norms are and can be transposed into reality - in particular in cases where the reality is technical.

The draft law that is somehow both the reason and the outcome of all the discussions was - after several months of silece - published on Wednesday afternoon and will be the legal basis of my analysis. I will be in particular interested in some of the explanations of the technical requirements.

Deadlines, Events, Gigs

#autumniscoming which is why I want to share some relevant dates for events I am somehow involved in that will happen in September.

Application deadline for next year’s LLM-programme in information and media law is Agust 31.

Full scholarships are avaiable.

This year’s Women in Law Conference will take place September 12-14 and I will give a keynote September 13th at 11.00. My topic will be “"Successfull Legal Professsions 2030+". I don’t think that I can tell the audience anything but “I don’t know either” but I will try to make it fun, at least. Adriana and Hande from the department will be on the panel as well.

If you want to practice GDPR litigation in practice, you should register for our Data Protection Moot Court until September 15th.

On September 18, we discuss data transfer outside Europe.

On September 19, Privacy Ring is in Vienna again.

On September 21 (Saturday), I have a gig at the “13. Dreiländerforum Strafverteidigung”

On September 23, Manz organises their yearly conference on data protection .

And on October 29th we will celebrate the 25th birthday of our LLM-programme in information and media law. It’s really heartwarming to see this programme bloom and thrive. Many of our students are younger than the programme now. Free registration for the party is already open, further details will follow.

Daisy

enjoyed the Krka-waterfalls a lot.

She was watching carefully that nobody fell into the water.

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)