Reflection of the Tucker Carlson – Vladimir Putin interview in Romania

Exactly thirty years ago, shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain, the late president George H.W. Bush was urging German citizens and political leaders (including chancellor Helmut Kohl) gathered in Mainz, on May 31, to build a ‘Europe Whole and Free’.

Fast forward to mid-2019, when the new EU leadership takes office after elections to the European Parliament, and Europe is still neither whole, nor free. This issue of EasternFocus focuses on the Union’s ability to continue to nurture democracy and rule of law within its own borders and to help engender it in its neighbourhood.

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Think Cambridge Analytica is the worst it gets? No, it’s only the top of the iceberg!

Personal data collection and individual profiling lead – as we have seen so far – to elections interference and effective propaganda. But state and non-state actors, from Russia to illiberal governments, from Daesh to far-right movements similarly profile our collective structural weaknesses and internal divisions, and seek to amplify them to reach a tipping point. A new GlobalFocus Center study by a multidisciplinary, multinational team, of the permeability of countries in the Black Sea region to malign influence and propaganda and the associated Propaganda Permeability Index provide the first in-depth, extensive analysis of what makes us vulnerable to hostile influences from within and from without, with a focus on the Kremlin agenda. Read more

By Oana Popescu

January 2016

Aspen Institute

Romania did indeed take a long vacation after its 2007 EU accession. A process, which literally absorbed the whole creative and executive energy of the country at political, administrative, and social level, the EU/NATO integration was a monumental endeavor and THE national project for at least a generation.

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By Rufin Zamfir

May 2015

Academia.edu

This year is of great importance for the evaluation of cyber security role within the global fight against terrorism. Nearly 15 years after Patriot Act and the inception of a new era for the surveillance of electronic communications by mass-collecting the traces this type of communication leaves in the cyberspace, it is mandatory to assess the efficiency of this surveillance method, the benefits it brings for global security environment and the unwanted effects it has over individual liberties.

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