Remember PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West)? It’s been eight years since their heyday, although it seems like a lot longer, given all that has happened in the interim. I haven’t heard anything about it for awhile, and I’m not sure if the organization still exists. There were multiple franchises in various European countries, and some of them may still be extant.

Anyway, the reason I bring all of this up is that I received the following email this morning:

Dear Gates of Vienna Team,

We are contacting you regarding the following URL for your website: https://gatesofvienna.net/2015/01/an-israeli-addresses-pegida/

We are submitting this request to report the breach of Mr. Rotem Avituv’s privacy. Your website is found to be in violation of the European GDPR regulation.

We kindly request that you take steps to remove the URL completely for the following reasons:

• The information is displayed from 2015, i.e., more than 8 years ago, and is, therefore no longer true. Thus, this information has lost its social relevance and is irrelevant today. As a result, the personal data of Mr. Rotem Avituv are no longer necessary for the purposes for which they were originally collected or otherwise processed.
   
  Please note that the Federal Data Protection Act(BDSG), Section 58, states: (2) The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without delay where processing such data is unlawful, knowledge of the data is no longer necessary for the performance of tasks, or the data must be erased to comply with a legal obligation.
• Personal information was gathered and disclosed without the explicit consent of the data subject.
• This information is considerably damaging Mr Rotem Avituv, on a personal, family and professional level, as it continues to expose him to this situation via the Internet and people who come to read this article are left with the wrong profile. Therefore, it is not fair that his full name remains linked to this URL, which affects both his daily life and that of his family.
• This situation prevents him from having a normal use of the Internet, because his name is exposed and associated with these events, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it becomes a painful and complicated reality for him and his family.

This request is legally founded on the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union (hereinafter referred to as “GDPR”) and the Legislative Decree 10 August 2018, No. 101, which encompasses provisions for the alignment of national legislation with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council, dated 27 April 2016. This regulation deals with the protection of individuals regarding the processing of personal data and the free movement of such data, while also repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation).

Your cooperation is highly appreciated, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I look forward to your response. If you require any clarification or information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

[Logo for WeLawyers law firm]

legal@welawyers.net

The information contained in this email is confidential and intended for the recipient specified in the message only. Sharing any part of this message with a third party without the written consent of the sender is strictly prohibited. If you received this message by mistake, please reply to this message and delete it to prevent any future mistakes.

I feel compelled to point out that I have violated the stern warning at the bottom of the email against sharing it with anyone without WeLawyers’ written consent. It is absurd to assert that the sender of an unsolicited email has the right to forbid its being shared. Especially given Gates of Vienna’s policy on unsolicited emails, which is posted prominently on the sidebar just below the email link, and is where the esteemed gentlebeing of the bar acquired my email address.

For your edification, here is the text of the caveat:

Our policy on unsolicited email is the following: The general rule is that we keep it confidential. This rule has two exceptions: 1) If the sender indicates otherwise; and 2) The content of an email is threatening, malicious, obscene, insulting, or vituperative, in which case it may be published in full or in part, including the name and email address of the sender, at our discretion. You have been warned!

Exception #2 definitely applies to the above email. The sender failed to heed my warning.

This was my reply to the email:

To whom it may concern:

I am afraid I must respectfully decline your request, for several reasons. The first and most important is that you and your client lack jurisdiction to compel me to take any actions. I am an American citizen who resides in the United States, and Gates of Vienna is hosted in the United States. Therefore the laws of the European Union and any of its member states are irrelevant to this blog and its contributors.

A second important reason is that I place a high value on freedom of speech. To submit to bullying — for that is clearly what your email comprises — would require me to preemptively surrender my God-given right to free speech, and I refuse to do that.

And now I will address some of your bullet points.

You say that the information is eight years old. What relevance does that have? How does its being eight years old make it “no longer true”?

The only factual assertion in the post is that your client spoke at the event, which was true then and is still true. Do facts lose their factual nature with the passage of time?

Furthermore, there is no “personal data” on your client in the post other than his name.

It is unfortunate if the use of the Internet has become “a painful and complicated reality for him”, but that circumstance has nothing to do with me or Gates of Vienna. If his speaking at the event caused him personal or professional difficulties, that is a consequence of his decision to participate, rather than anything published at Gates of Vienna.

Finally, since the embedded video is now gone, there is essentially nothing left in the post, which contains very little text. I fail to understand why you have any interest in it.

You say, “please do not hesitate to contact me”, but have not deigned to leave your name or signature. Therefore I will just send this message along to the relevant address and hope that it is read by a human being.

Cordially,

Ned May
a.k.a. “Baron Bodissey”
https://gatesofvienna.net

For those who are interested, the full text of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is here. It consists of 99 articles arranged in eleven chapters, which is about 98.9 more articles than I am willing to read. I wonder how many pages it would take to print it all out?

Before you all jump on me in the comments: Yes, I’m aware that “WeLawyers” is almost certainly a scam. I did a little searching on it, and the “.net” version has almost no existence on the web. The “.com” version has a little more, but I was reluctant to click through to any of the results — some of which were in Chinese — for fear that I might encounter some sort of virulent malware.

I doubt I’ll hear anything further from the esteemed eminences at WeLawyers, but if I do, I’ll put up another post about it.