
© Unknown/KJN
When the GDPR [EU's General Data Protection Regulation] was being debated, we
warned that it would be a
disaster for free speech. Now that it's been in effect for about six months, we're seeing that play out in all sorts of ways. We've talked about
how it was used to disappear public court documents for an ongoing case, and then used to disappear a discussion about that disappearing court document. And we wrote about how it's been
used against us to hide a still newsworthy story (and that leaves out one other GDPR demand we've received in an attempt to disappear a story that I can't even talk about yet).
When I wrote about all of this both here on Techdirt and on Twitter, I had a bunch of "data protection experts" in Europe completely freak out at me that I had no idea what I was talking about, and how any negative impact was simply the result of everyone misreading the GDPR. I kept trying to point out to them that even if that's true in theory, out here in the real world,
the law was being used to disappear news stories and was creating massive chilling effects and burdens on journalists. And the response was the same: nah, you're reading the law wrong.
And now we have an even more horrifying story of the damage the GDPR is doing to journalism. There's a Romanian investigatory journalism publication called
RISE Project that has reported on corruption in Romanian politics. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about that. OCCRP -- the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project -- a partner to
RISE Project has the worrisome details about how the very Romanian government that
RISE Project has been breaking corruption stories on has
magically found the need to use the GDPR to demand the journalists turn over their sources.
Comment: Is it a pullback for a scheme never intended to go this far? Or one not working out as planned? Lowering tensions between superpowers would be a welcomed sign.