European Digital Rights

European Digital Rights ( EDRi ) is an international association of civil rights organizations dedicated to the protection of privacy and freedom of citizens in the information society.

It was on 8/9 June 2002 founded by ten groups from seven European countries in Berlin. Founding board members were Maurice Wessling from the Netherlands, the former CCC speaker and ICANN director Andy Mueller Maguhn from Germany and Meryem Marzouki from France. EDRi has its headquarters in Brussels.

Currently, the organization is the umbrella organization for 35 associations from 20 European countries. The organization decreed in October 2012 about three full-time employees. Major areas of work of EDRi are the retention, copyright, Internet censorship and the treaty to combat cybercrime. EDRi observed these issues at the level of the European Union and the 45 Member States of the Council of Europe. Since 2003 EDRi informed about these developments in a biweekly newsletter, the EDRI- gram.

Actions

On the hacker conference What The Hack EDRi launched in July 2005 an online campaign against the then planned by the European Union retention of telecommunications data on stock. The campaign was titled Data retention is no solution ( data storage is not a solution ).