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About me / contact

Digital freedom fighter and Member of the European Parliament since 2019. I am a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and a substitute member of the Committee on Legal Affairs.

The European Pirates are members of the Greens/European Free Alliance group. I am co-coordinating my group’s Digital Working Group. In the European Parliament I have been/am involved in negotiating the following digital legislation: Terrorist Content Online (TERREG), Digital Services Act, ePrivacy Regulation, European Digital Identity, transparency and targeting of political advertising, European Health Data Space (EHDS), Rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (“chat control”). The VoteWatch Influence Index ranks me as socially most influencial Member of the European Parliament working on digital policy.

In court I am currently challenging the secrecy of EU surveillance research “iBorderCtrl”, the German law on data retention, the indiscriminate retention of internet access logs and indiscriminate chat control.

From 6 May 2012 to 6 June 2017, I was a member of the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament for the Pirate Party, and temporarily chaired the parliamentary group.

I am an active member of the NGO Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung (Working Group on Data Retention), author of the blog ‘Daten-Speicherung.de – minimum data, maximum privacy’ and I live in Kiel.

European Parliament profile

Curriculum vitae

Wikipedia article (in German)

My motivation

Fighting for more freedom and self-determination for all people is the main goal of my political work. My dream is a society that keeps us safe by strengthening the respect for each other’s rights. A world without mass surveillance, in which we live more safely than we do today, is possible.

We need to reduce state surveillance of citizens, independently evaluate existing surveillance laws, eliminate new surveillance plans, invest in targeted crime prevention and focus on people’s real problems in everyday life rather than on fear-mongering.

Why Pirate?

When I learned in 2006 that the German Pirate Party was to be founded in Berlin, I became a founding member especially because of the Party’s strong commitment to privacy and data protection. The Pirate Party declared war right in its first policy programme on excessive state surveillance. It recognised that government surveillance of citizens who are not suspected of any crime is a fundamentally unacceptable violation of the fundamental right to privacy. It is high time that the changes sought by the civil liberties movement, for example at the protest marches “Freedom not Fear”, are finally implemented politically.

My political work

Memberships and sponsorships

Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), Greenpeace, Mehr Demokratie, netzpolitik.org, noyb, Reporter ohne Grenzen

Press photos

These are high resolution photos for free media use. Unless stated otherwise underneath the photo no attribution is required.