Christian Engström, newly elected MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party arrived in Brussels and spoke with New Europe’s Andy Carling.

Christian Engström, newly elected MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party

There are several groups interested in you, which one are you going to join?

I don’t know, we haven’t really been talking to them yet.

There’s been some pretty oppressive legislation passed recently by national governments and the EU. What do you think you can bring to the debate and will people listen to you?

I hope they will listen. There has been quite a lot of oppressive legislation, but I don’t think the reason is that politicians are evil, I think it is because they don’t understand the new technology. They see the internet as some kind of toy that they can take away from the children if they’ve been naughty. I’m sure there are members here who wouldn’t dream of censoring letters or things like that, but when it’s on the internet the normal sound reflexes don’t click in because they don’t see the internet as an important part of society’s infrastructure, they think its a computer game, like World of Warcraft and human rights don’t apply there,  but that idea is wrong because the  internet is the most important information infrastructure we have today.

The internet is a double edged sword, on the one hand its the greatest instrument for democracy, but on the other we had a press conference beforehand with some Iranian activists who were waving a document that they called a smoking gun, proving electoral fraud on a grand scale. After talking to them, they eventually admitted that they had downloaded it from the internet and taken it at face value.

If that’s all you can say about a document, then it’s the equivalent of saying it arrived through the mail, but you don’t treat the mail in that way. Important documents do come through the mail, but we look at who sent them and did they really send it? Exactly the same thing happens on the internet. Again many people don’t understand the internet because they don’t really live there. They just see a random collection of pages, whereas in reality, for example in the Swedish blogosphere, anyone can write anything, but the highest ranked blogs have that ranking because they are credible. People forget that the internet is also a community and anyone who can write sensibly and back it up with links and references will attract an audience and get a high ranking and this mechanism is something people forget about.

We’ve had the election results in Iran and a lot of public unrest and protests. The opposition has been using a lot of internet based technologies.

Regimes like Iran or China are trying to block, censor or filter the internet. Filter is the new term that sounds nicer, but it is the same as censor, but they’re failing. some people said it was the fax machine that brought down the Soviet Union and I’m sure the internet will bring down some totalitarian regimes in time, hopefully in a reasonably peaceful way.

What can you achieve here?

I don’t know yet, but Europe should be a beacon of light, a place where civil liberties are respected.

I see the beginning of open source politics. For example many of the documents produced here are hard to read and examine, especially if you’re a lone MEP, but using the internet and technical communities you can get a group of people to analyse documents.

Exactly. That is the basis of the project. My own view of the EU and what you can achieve was founded when I was an activist fighting software patents and I realised two things; The EU is very complicated and virtually impossible for one person to understand and follow even a single directive. That was quite depressing and quite undemocratic. The good thing was that activists working over the net can get results because, for example, we did beat the software directive and it was done by activists from all over the member states. That’s how I see the Pirate Party, as representing that movement on the internet.

We’ve got Margot Wallstrom, whose been trying to use the internet to bring people closer to Europe, what do you think about her strategy?

They have a central point for people to access. That’s not how the internet works, you’ve got to get people involved and actually start changing or affecting decisions. Then it gets interesting. It’s incredibly boring to just listen to reports about this happened in parliament, but when you feel you can actually change what is happening in parliament it becomes fun and that’s how you bring people closer to the EU.

So you’re going to bring some fun to the parliament?

Exactly! Yes!