Under Surveillance: comic on digital civil rights in Europe

European Digital Rights (EDRi) has released the digital comic Under Surveillance as an information and awareness tool for young adults.

In an unspecified European city, a group of young people works, studies, travels, publishes on forums and blogs, exchanges on social networks and meets at concerts... A "difficult" situation in the life of a young photo-journalist and his friends' mobilization to help him out of this situation illustrate the breaches of personal data protection facilitated by the use of new technologies. The comic book underlines the consequences but also possible remedies. A glossary and links to useful websites come with the comic book. The comic book "Under surveillance" is available in Catalan, Czech, English and French. Online versions are made available on the project partners' websites. 20,000 hard copies are available in each language and are disseminated for free.

PDF link to the English version, others available (and in other formats) here. Background here.

The graphic novel was produced through the European project "Sensitization and information of young European citizens on the protection of their personal data", in which EDRi was one of the partners. Other participants: The French League of Human Rights (LDH), the European Association for the Defense of Human Rights (AEDH), European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Czech association Iuridicum Remedium (IuRe) and the Spanish association Comunicació per a la Cooperació (Pangea).

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: Art and Design • censorship • Comics • human rights • International • Kids • Make a Difference • privacy

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

devophill

A prime example of the thing that bugs me most about European comics: the lousy word balloons and lettering. I know the reasons, but it still gets on my nerves. Otherwise, good comic.
Anonymous

I wholeheartedly agree with develophill re: the lousy word balloons; as for the comic, it’s basically a graphical depiction of Richelieu’s “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him” in our paranoid, over-surveilled and techno-infested society.