The Green Group in the European Parliament is reaching out to the Free Software community to join in a project to use trustworthy email encryption.

Greens/EFA co-president Rebecca Harms explains the "laptop-project" as first step:

"Thanks to Snowden we are beginning to understand the full scope of what it means to live in a digital environment polluted by pervasive surveillance. Commercial and governmental surveillance is undermining trust in our democratic institutions and corrupts the very fabric of democracy. This is now a global problem of such scale that each individual effort will fail, yet without taking small concrete steps from accepting where we are, no progress is possible. Therefore, the Greens/EFA is now reaching out to the Free Software community to join in a small project to use trustworthy email encryption in cooperation and dialogue with the European Parliament IT services.

"As the Green Group in the European Parliament we want to make an effort to ensure that nobody but the intended recipient of an email can read it. Such emails need to be encrypted, travel over the internet, and then be decrypted on the receiving computer -- and nowhere else. In this project, me and colleagues in the Greens/EFA will use a selection of Free Software from Debian and run it on computers dedicated for this purpose. We will start small scale with 10 regular consumer laptops. This is not special hardware running special software, but general computers running software available for everybody."

As Greens in the European Parliament we are very pleased that we are supported by Debian. Debian is a community of programmers and developers abiding to a social contract to share and maintain their common resource which they call Free Software.

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For further information, please contact Ruth Reichstein at +32-472-702996 or ruth.reichstein@europarl.europa.eu