Today’s guest is Markus Beckedahl. Markus is a network political activist and journalist. He completed his training as an IT clerk and founded the company Newthinking Communications together with Andreas Gebhardt in 2003. A year earlier he started netzpolitik.org, which is still the most important contact point for all internet policy debates. Markus is also a co-founder of re:publica, one of the largest digital conferences in Europe.
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Markus stands for network politics in Germany like no other. You usually see his face on radio and television when it comes to network policy issues. And he’s been through a lot in his career. In 2015, for example, he was investigated for treason because netzpolitik.org had published a report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Markus Beckedahl
(Image: Gregor Fischer/ re:publica / cc by-sa 2.0)
Defend civil rights online too
If you research Markus on the net, you will find very little about him. He consciously controls it that way, he says. He doesn’t want any information about him to be used against him one day. But you can still find out a little bit about him – for example, that he assembled PCs when he was young and made a small business out of them.
Here you will find an overview of our three podcast formats: the weekly news podcast “Weekly” and the monthly podcasts “Unscripted” and “Deep Dive”.
We talked about when he actually realized that the internet is a space where civil liberties need to be defended just as much as they do in real life. And he told me how his first ideas for netzpolitik.org came about.
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When talking to Markus, you always notice how important it is for him to put his person on the back burner and talk about the matter – about state trojans, data retention or AI regulation. And there are few in Germany who do it as competently as he does. Nevertheless, he has resigned as editor-in-chief of netzpolitik.org. In the next 60 minutes you will find out why he did it and what he is doing now.
More on this in the whole episode – as an audio stream (RSS feed):
=== Ad / Sponsor Notice ===
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“Unscripted” appears on the MIT Technology Review podcast feed as one of the three podcast formats of the science and technology magazine. In “Deep Dive” the editors deepen a topic from the magazine once a month. The monthly interview format “Unscripted” focuses on exciting personalities from science, technology and society. The “Weekly” format completes the offer. You can find an overview of the podcasts here.
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