38C3

Thomas Lohninger

Thomas was a programmer and anthropologist in his former life. Digital rights had been his hobby until it became a job when he intensively accompanied the EU Net Neutrality Regulation as Policy Advisor for European Digital Rights (EDRi). Thomas was one of the driving forces behind the www.savetheinternet.eu campaign and has a strong work focus on net neutrality, data protection, and mass surveillance. Since 2010 he has played an active part at Epicenter.works and since 2014 he is the executive director of the organization. He also writes on Netzpolitik.org, is a regular guest in the Podcast Logbuch:Netzpolitik and a non-residential Fellow of the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School. He was in the board of the EU umbrella of 45+ digital rights NGOs (EDRi) and since 2024 he is Chair of the Governance Working Group of the UN dpi-safeguard initiative and member of the Jury for the German eIDAS Wallet and the Ad-Hoc Technical Advisory Group on eIDAS of the European Commission.


Sessions

12-27
20:15
40min
EU's Digital Identity Systems - Reality Check and Techniques for Better Privacy
Anja Lehmann, Thomas Lohninger

Digital identity solutions, such as proposed through the EU's eIDAS regulation, are reshaping the way users authenticate online. In this talk, we will review the currently proposed technical designs, the impact such systems will have, and provide an outlook on how techniques from modern cryptography can help to improve security and privacy.

Security
Saal GLITCH
12-29
00:55
40min
Net Neutrality: Why It Still Matters (More Than Ever!)
Thomas Lohninger, Raquel Renno Nunes, Jürgen Bering

Net Neutrality is a core pillar of the open internet. But we witness a coordinated, world-wide attack from the telecom industry on the very foundation that ties the internet together. The interconnection of autonomous parts of the internet used to be a non-political and non-commercial field that not many paid attention to. But through heavy lobbying activity we are on the brink of regulating interconnection in the EU, Brazil and India to establish a new payment obligation that would force everyone who wants to send a significant amount of data to customers. Telecom companies would end up being paid twice for the same traffic, from their customers and the content and cloud providers that want to reach them.

Ethics, Society & Politics
Saal GLITCH