Thomas Lohninger

Thomas Lohninger is the executive director of epicenter.works since 2014, the Vienna-based Austrian digital rights organisation, and the corpus's Austrian / German-language public voice on net neutrality, EU digital identity infrastructure, and state surveillance (see Person entry). He is tracked here as a Voice because his sustained named public output — the driving-force role behind the savetheinternet.eu campaign that secured EU net neutrality protections in 2016; the surveillance-package campaign whose culmination was the June 2019 Austrian Constitutional Court ruling against government spyware; the recurring named-byline authoring register across netzpolitik.org; the regular guest register on Logbuch:Netzpolitik; the January 2024 DIGHUM lecture "Please Identify Yourself!" on Europe's digital identification infrastructure risks; and the recurring CCC and re:publica conference talk register — anchors the German-language and Austrian domestic digital rights register that the corpus's voices slice had not previously covered.

The Voice anchors three movement-area registers that the corpus's voices slice had previously left underweight.

• The Austrian voice anchor and German-language activist-media register. The corpus's existing Continental European Voice anchors are Matthias Spielkamp — anchoring the German national-civil-society algorithmic-accountability register through AlgorithmWatch's Berlin-based automated-decision-making watchdog and multi-country reporting work — and Ella Jakubowska — anchoring the Brussels / EDRi secretariat pan-European policy-spokesperson register on biometric mass surveillance and the EU AI Act. Lohninger's register is structurally distinct from both: a Vienna-based Austrian NGO director whose public voice runs primarily through the German-language activist-media circuit (netzpolitik.org, Logbuch:Netzpolitik) and the CCC / re:publica hacker-community convening register, bridging the Central European civil-society audience that English-language Brussels-institution advocacy and German-language algorithmic-watchdog research each reach only partially. The Voice gives the corpus its first Austrian-anchored Voice and its first voice entry whose output runs predominantly through German-language activist media.
• The EU net neutrality movement-architecture voice. The savetheinternet.eu campaign — launched December 2013, achieving its European Parliament vote in April 2014, and reaching 500,000+ public comments to BEREC in August 2016 that secured binding EU net neutrality protections — is among the most explicitly successful digital-rights grassroots campaigns in the corpus's scope. Lohninger is the named driving force behind the campaign from epicenter.works's own institutional record, and his policy-advisor role to European Digital Rights (EDRi) on the EU net neutrality regulation and Senior Fellowship at the Mozilla Foundation were both centred on the same campaign. No other Voice in the corpus holds this specific public-voice anchor — the EU net neutrality movement architect whose named output runs from the campaign's launch through its legislative victory and into the 38C3 2024 defence of the win against renewed telecom-industry challenge. This register is structurally distinct from the AI Act and biometric-surveillance focus of the corpus's existing Continental European Voice anchors.
• The EU digital identity and eIDAS critical voice. Lohninger participated directly in the 2.5-year EU eIDAS Regulation negotiations as a civil-society participant, and his January 2024 DIGHUM lecture "Please Identify Yourself!" — delivered at Vienna's Digital Humanism series — named the risks of Europe's expanding digital identification infrastructure from the standpoint of surveillance capitalism and authoritarian use. His December 2024 38C3 talk on "EU's Digital Identity Systems — Reality Check and Techniques for Better Privacy" (with cryptographer Anja Lehmann) brought the technical-design critique of eIDAS to the CCC community, and his membership on the EU Commission's Ad-Hoc Technical Advisory Group on eIDAS and the UN dpi-safeguards Governance Working Group (which he chairs since 2024) position him as the civil-society voice simultaneously inside and critical of EU digital identity governance. No existing corpus Voice holds this distinct eIDAS-and-digital-identity register.

Public output and venues

Lohninger's public-facing work runs through four overlapping channels.

• German-language activist-media authoring and podcast register. The most sustained documentation of Lohninger's public voice is his named-byline authoring on netzpolitik.org — the principal German-language tech-policy publication covering internet governance, surveillance, and digital rights. His articles run from 2014 through at least 2019 and span net neutrality enforcement (German regulatory blocking of Telekom StreamOn; 5G threats to net neutrality; EU guidelines analysis), Austrian surveillance legislation (critical analysis of the State Security Law, the data-retention directive, and the government-spyware bills), and EU copyright (Article 13 automated filtering). The Logbuch:Netzpolitik podcast — the recurring German-language digest of internet-policy developments, running hundreds of episodes — lists Lohninger as a regular guest, making him one of the more consistently cited Austrian voices on the German-language tech-policy media circuit. Together, these two channels place his voice at the intersection of the Austrian domestic-rights field and the German-language EU tech-policy audience that English-language Brussels advocacy reaches only via translation.
• CCC and re:publica conference speaker register. Lohninger has presented at the Chaos Communication Congress multiple times, including two talks at 38C3 in December 2024: the technical-civil-society hybrid "EU's Digital Identity Systems — Reality Check and Techniques for Better Privacy" (with cryptographer Anja Lehmann, examining how modern cryptographic methods could enhance privacy in eIDAS-mandated wallet systems) and the political-framing talk "Net Neutrality: Why It Still Matters (More Than Ever!)" (with Raquel Renno Nunes and Jürgen Bering, framing renewed telecom-industry pressure on interconnection principles in the EU, Brazil, and India as a coordinated, worldwide attack). At CCC Camp 2023 he gave two further talks: "Digital Identity and Digital Euro — what is the EU up to now?" (an accessible introduction to the two EU legislative packages for the hacker and digital rights community) and "DearMEP: Free Software infrastructure for Online Campaigning in the EU" (co-presented with scy; the civic-tech tool for connecting EU constituents with their elected representatives — a direct application of the savetheinternet.eu campaign experience to reusable infrastructure). His portfolio also includes re:publica, 34c3, and Mozfest appearances documented on his personal site. The CCC register places him on the hacker-community circuit as a policy-expert-inside-technical-circles voice — a structurally distinct register from the Brussels-institution and academic-conference spokesperson roles carried by other Continental European corpus Voices.
• Parliamentary testimony and policy-forum register. Lohninger's public portfolio documents testimony before both German and Austrian parliaments on net neutrality implementation and digital rights — the named legislative-engagement register through which the epicenter.works voice enters national political debate on both sides of the German-Austrian border. The RightsCon speaker register (including an appearance in Taipei on the state of EU net neutrality) extends this into the international digital rights conference circuit. His January 2024 DIGHUM lecture "Please Identify Yourself! What to expect of Europe's ubiquitous digital identification infrastructure" — delivered at Vienna's Digital Humanism conference series, an interdisciplinary forum on the human dimensions of digital systems — carried the civil-society critique of eIDAS into an academic-policy interface venue, framing Europe's digital identity expansion as having proceeded without adequately drawing on the hard-won experiences of other regions with surveillance risk in digital-identity infrastructure.
• Campaign spokesperson and governance-body register. The most movement-facing channel of Lohninger's voice is his named role as driving force behind the savetheinternet.eu campaign that secured EU net neutrality protections — a campaign that generated over 500,000 public comments to BEREC and whose victory became one of the canonical reference points in European civil-society digital-rights advocacy. On the surveillance track, his campaign against the Austrian government-spyware provisions was vindicated when the Austrian Constitutional Court ruled the hacking law unconstitutional in June 2019. His governance-body register — Chair, UN dpi-safeguards Governance Working Group (since 2024); Jury, German eIDAS Wallet; EU Commission Ad-Hoc Technical Advisory Group on eIDAS; EDRi Vice President (since 2020) — represents the institutional translation of that campaign track into ongoing digital rights governance.

Signature framings

Two framings recur across Lohninger's public output and carry the most analytical weight in the European digital rights field.

• "A coordinated, worldwide attack from the telecom industry." The framing Lohninger and co-presenters deploy in their 38C3 2024 net neutrality talk — reading renewed telecom-industry pressure on internet interconnection rules across the EU, Brazil, and India not as separate national lobbying campaigns but as a coordinated multi-jurisdictional offensive — displaces the conventional framing of net neutrality debates as domestic regulatory-reform questions and situates them inside a global industry-vs-civil-society contest over the fundamental architecture of internet access. The framing connects Lohninger's original savetheinternet.eu campaign work (which the European civil-society field treats as a reference victory) to the continuing fight: the EU victory is real but not permanent, and the industry coordination has not dissolved. The argument that the telecom industry's attack is "worldwide" is also the argument for why civil-society responses to it must be transnational — the structural logic behind his co-presenting with Brazilian and German co-speakers.
• Surveillance vulnerabilities as risks for everyone. In the Austrian government-spyware campaign, Lohninger and epicenter.works centred the public argument on the security risk that device-infection vulnerabilities create for all users of the same operating system or application — not just the targeted individual — refuseing the framing the government used that state hacking is a narrowly targeted law-enforcement tool. The argument that exploitable vulnerabilities in commercial software are collective risks, not targeted measures, became the substantive ground on which the Constitutional Court challenge rested and prevailed. This framing has migrated into the broader EU civil-society debate about commercial spyware (Pegasus, FinFisher, state hacking legislation) as a persistent argument against the "targeted surveillance" framing that most government-spyware proponents employ.

Organisational vehicle

Lohninger's public output runs primarily through epicenter.works — the Vienna-based Austrian digital rights organisation, founded in 2010 as AKVorrat (Working Group for Data Retention) following student protests against the EU Data Retention Directive, and rebranded to epicenter.works in December 2016 to reflect its expanded policy scope. He has been executive director since 2014. The org's history records the campaign lineage through which his voice runs: the data-retention petition (106,067 signatures — the largest Austrian citizen initiative at the time), the CJEU annulment of the EU Data Retention Directive in April 2014, the savetheinternet.eu net neutrality victory in 2016, and the Constitutional Court ruling against government spyware in 2019. Beyond epicenter.works's own publishing channels, his voice carries through the Logbuch:Netzpolitik podcast and netzpolitik.org authoring register in the German-language activist-media field; European Digital Rights (EDRi) where he has served as Policy Advisor, board member since 2019, and Vice President since 2020; the CCC conference circuit; parliamentary testimony in Austria and Germany; and the policy-governance positions (UN dpi-safeguards, EU Commission eIDAS advisory group, German eIDAS Wallet Jury) through which civil-society expertise enters technical standard-setting. His background in IT and cultural and social anthropology — documented in his Stanford CIS profile — anchors the dual register that characterises his public output: a technical literacy in system-level vulnerabilities and network-architecture questions alongside a social-science framing of digital rights as structurally about power, democracy, and the reach of surveillance.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Lohninger's public-facing output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the savetheinternet.eu campaign driving-force role and the EU net neutrality victory it anchored; the Austrian government-spyware constitutional challenge and the June 2019 ruling that vindicated it; the sustained named-byline authoring register on netzpolitik.org and the Logbuch:Netzpolitik regular-guest register through which his voice reaches the German-language digital rights field; the 38C3 2024 and CCC Camp 2023 talk register carrying net neutrality, digital identity, and civic-tech to the hacker community; the DIGHUM lecture "Please Identify Yourself!" carrying the eIDAS civil-society critique to the Digital Humanism academic-policy interface; and the governance-body register (UN dpi-safeguards, EU Commission eIDAS Advisory Group, EDRi Vice President) translating campaign work into ongoing institutional oversight. The corpus's Continental European Voice anchors previously covered the German algorithmic-accountability register (voice-matthias-spielkamp) and the Brussels / EDRi-secretariat pan-European policy-spokesperson register (voice-ella-jakubowska); this entry gives the corpus its first Austrian-anchored Voice, its first net-neutrality-movement-architecture anchor, and its first voice entry whose output runs predominantly through the German-language activist-media circuit and the CCC hacker-community conference register. Affiliation, career history, and biographical detail are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.