Letter from the Committee Director
Dear Delegates,
Hello and welcome to Yale Model Government Europe 2017! I am Muriel, and I am very excited to serve as your Committee Director for the Cabinet of the United Kingdom and also as the Under-Secretary-General of Branding. I look forward to making your overall YMGE experience as enjoyable and as rewarding as possible. During the conference, I hope to facilitate engaging debate, encourage innovative solutions, and examine some of the most pressing issues facing the United Kingdom, Europe, and the world today.
I am a sophomore at Yale University from Singapore and Boston, Massachusetts. I have also lived in Shanghai, China and in Concord, New Hampshire. I have visited Budapest once before but only as a tourist. While I have not decided on a major yet, I hope to focus on History, Global Affairs or Political Science. As a member of the Yale International Relations Association (YIRA), I was also involved with SCSY, YMUN China, and YMUN. Outside of YIRA, I am involved with Yale Children’s Theatre and Elm City Echo, a periodical published by New Haven’s homeless community. I also work in the Admissions Office as a Recruitment Coordinator. In my free time, I like reading, catching up on TV shows and movies, and creative writing. I am not much of an outdoors person, so I prefer activities that keep me in an air-conditioned or heated room.
As your Director, I am more than happy to help you in any way I can. If you have any questions or concerns about this topic guide or YMGE in general, please feel free to contact me at muriel.wang@yale.edu. I will get back to you as soon as I can.
I look forward to seeing you all in Budapest!
Sincerely,
Muriel Wang
muriel.wang@yale.edu
Committee History
The Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council (TTE) is the European Union council tasked with the mission of establishing “modern, competitive and efficient markets and infrastructure.” To be more specific, the TTE works to create transport, telecommunications, and energy networks to adapt to the ever-changing and pressing needs of the European community. This council is composed of ministers who meet three to four times a year, depending on the items on the agenda.
The countries involved in this council will work to craft and enact framework for legislations regarding the transport, energy, and communication fields in order to promote European interests on the global stage. For transport, the TTE works to standardize and incorporate transportation concerns across the continent. This may include adopting a common transport policy by setting laws that regulate international transport. Measures that have been enacted in the past tend to focus on improving passenger rights, transport safety, and work conditions for transport operators. A huge priority for the council going forward is to create ideas of sustainable transport systems. In 2017, the TTE hopes to craft new framework for transportation that enhances passenger experience while keeping energy consumption low. This may include ideas surrounding alternative sources of energy, promoting public transport as opposed to personal vehicles, et cetera.
In terms of telecommunications, the TTE is responsible for the adoption of legislation and guidelines to improve cyber security, competition, and generate new ideas. This may include getting rid of the bureaucratic red tape currently present in telecommunications. Work has been in the past to use internet and digital technologies to enhance the European market. Completing the digital single market could help the EU boost its growth, in addition to transforming industry and creating new jobs and products in the global market.
In the field of energy, the TTE is in charge of the functionality of energy markets. This not only means that energy supplies are secure, but also that efficiency and renewability are emphasized. The council works to promote the “interconnection of energy networks,” meaning that the process of generating energy must be transparent, efficient, and must deliver the best services to the people of the EU.
Together with the European Parliament, the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council works to combat new roadblocks in order to streamline processes within the EU.
Topic History
Terrorism is a multi-pronged, extremely complicated topic, with many stakeholders, lots of tragedies, and not a lot of solutions. How can you, the Council of Ministers in charge of Transport, Telecommunications and Energy, ensure that national security is upheld and terrorist efforts are thwarted?
Frequently, the news reports that terrorist efforts are carried out through attacks on transportation. Ever since 9/11, a veritable paradigm shift that changed how we saw our world order and the non-state actors that could threaten our peace and security, the world’s transportation hubs -- airports, train stations, bus stations -- have been more vigilant of national security. Europe responded accordingly in a radical manner, shifting many of its policies on security checks at each transportation hub, placing a heavy and needed focus on terrorism prevention. Although there is no real point in trying to identify every possible opening for terrorists, especially since it is extremely expensive and demonstrably ineffective, the Council has been working on new strategies to layer various defensive measures to provide enough safeguards in the case of a terrorist attack by way of transportation. Even though some safeguards are weak by themselves, they reinforce each other in order to best protect the citizens of the EU.
The European Commission worked with the TTE to enact the “laptop ban.” In March 2017, the United States and several European countries worked to ban larger electronics from being carried onto flights. The TTE helped to legislate and carry out this ban, which included upping the European Aviation Safety Agency’s safety recommendations. Examples of these stringent safety recommendations include the restriction of lithium batteries on flights.
When talking about national security, the TTE must also focus on cyberattacks. In fact, the council has dedicated a large amount of time and energy into defending the EU digital landscape from hackers and cyberattacks. After the WannaCry cyberattack, which was one the first that the EU shared cybersecurity information under the network and information security (NIS) directive, the TTE has worked hard to continue using the NIS directive to combat similar cyberattacks. The directive basically works to increase cooperation and information sharing within the EU member states, so threats of cyberattacks or violations of national security can be defeated swiftly and efficiently through clearer channels of communication. This also includes stronger private-public partnerships when dealing with cybersecurity breaches, which helps with preventing future incidents that threaten national security.
On the topic of energy, the TTE works primarily to discover new ways of conserving it and finding new renewable sources that help combat climate change. In terms of national security, coordinated global terrorist attacks on energy infrastructure is a huge problem that has not yet been dealt with in the council, but should be in order to preserve our existent energy framework.
Current Situation
In this council, we ask all ministers to focus on the issue of national security and terrorism through three different lenses -- that of transportation, telecommunications, and energy. In other words, all solution may incorporate all three sectors, or just touch on one. Each sector is unique and faces problems of its own, so solutions have the chance to target just one aspect of combatting terrorism. The current situation is that we live in a world with threats of terrorism prominent in our media conscious. From the attacks allegedly conducted by the Islamic State, to other acts of terrorism carried out by hate groups, the European community must band together to find solutions to diminish the constant threat of terrorism looming over citizens’ heads. To accomplish this mission, we have to understand the current situation of terrorism -- one that involves more non-state actors than ever before, and one that relies heavily on digital communication to gain supporters.
National Security and Transport
On the transport side, according to several memos collected from TTE meetings, terrorism and unexpected attacks have been important topics of discussion in terms of road vehicles. The Swedish delegation, for example, briefed the TTE ministers of a terrorist attack in Stockholm carried out by a lorry driving into a crowd a people, killing five and injuring fifteen. These attacks through ground transportation are too commonly seen, as evidenced by similar incidents in Nice, Berlin, and London. The Swedes then emphasized their initiative for ways to increase security measures in the field of road transport. The transport sector is imperative in helping reduce these attacks and ensuring national security, so other member states also stood in support of the Swedish initiative. Some of these ideas include improving geo-fencing capabilities, and using the existing legal framework and infrastructure like the Land Transport Security Expert Group (LANDSEC) to mitigate such attacks.
The question still remains - how can a council focusing on transport regulate every single vehicle on the ground? What type of framework can be created in order to lessen the threat of ground transport terrorism? At this moment in time, the answers are scarce. There are, however, new technologies cropping up every single time that attempt to tackle this problem.National Security and Telecommunications.
National Security and Telecommunications
In regards to telecommunications, the council must focus its attention on cyberspace, especially the usage of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to rally up supporters of extremist terrorist groups. Without resorting to outright censorship, how can the council of telecommunications work with intelligence agencies to monitor the creation of terrorist communities on the internet?
With dangerous hashtags and viral pages, terrorist organizations have a stronghold over the internet, as they post ideas and share hateful ideology with people all over Europe, inciting violent actions that threaten our national security. It is evident that the council must create a coalition between private and public telecommunications companies in order to negotiate a partnership that better monitors dangerous activity online and that tackles the issue at its root.
Furthermore, cyberattacks have become more and more frequent. In terms of the EU’s national security, these hackers have breached intelligence documents and have put the common citizen’s life on public view. More importantly, top secret and highly confidential state documents have the potential of being poached and released without the consent of the government. The Telecommunications council must also convene to direct a solution in order to minimize the harmful impact and cyberattacks and discourage hacking as whole.
National Security and Energy
Coordinated terrorist attacks on energy networks have also been conducted in the recent past, and will likely continue as a trend. In fact, there are significant vulnerabilities in energy networks that allow terrorist attacks to massively affect both oil and renewable energy production. In fact, attacks by violent nonstate actors almost always harm the EU and global economies due to price spikes in oil. These crises affect international energy policy greatly, as terrorists use their influence on the global energy infrastructure as leverage.
The council’s goals are relatively simple, and has a very low tolerance for risk. Therefore, as an acting body working with the EU, the council hopes to maintain reasonable and stable energy prices, along with ensuring reliability of supply. This means implementing internal measures on several energy projects to reduce the impact of terrorist attacks on energy infrastructure.
Questions to Consider
● What does it mean for national security to be upheld?
● When talking about transport, telecommunications, and energy, how does the EU context differ from that of other countries?
● How can terrorism affect these three sectors in the EU?
● What are the most effective ways to destroy terrorist groups at their root when employing resources of transport, telecommunications, and energy?
Suggestions for Further Research
● For more information on each sector of the TTE, we highly recommend getting acquainted with the TTE's official EU website:
○ Transport: https://europa.eu/european-union/topics/transport_en
○ Energy: https://europa.eu/european-union/topics/energy_en
○ Telecommunications: https://europa.eu/european-union/topics/digital-economy-society_en
● To read more about coordinated terrorist attacks that affect global energy supply:
● To learn more about transport as it relates to global terrorism:
○ http://issues.org/18-4/downey/
● For more information on how terrorism is the new frontier for the telecommunications sector:
○ https://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/09/terrorism-the-new-frontier-for-telecoms-sector/
