by srutis
Thu Dec 15th, 2005 at 01:24:40 PM EST
While the US congress is fighting over the extension of the Patriot Act, today a similar provision has already been passed by the European Parliament.
Data law passed in EU seen as restrictive
The European Parliament on Wednesday passed an anti-terror law requiring Internet service providers and telephone companies in the 25-nation European Union to keep phone and Web site records on their customers for as long as two years.
Furthermore, the data is not stored for retrieval after a decision by a judge to pursue a certain person, but,
Police officers and the secret service will be able to use data mining technologies to find links between communication partners in the mountains of data that the 450 million citizens of the EU create. Potentially, the data will allow the authorities to reconstruct who communicated with whom for how long and, for instance, who was on the Internet when. When these actions take effect, everyone will be considered suspicious and potentially become part of the investigations of security authorities.
(
EU Parliament approves widespread surveillance of telecommunications)
Before, also the EU Commission was happy to finally implement this measure:
The EU Commission welcomes agreement on the storage of telecommunications data
Basically, Brussels is concerned with the storage of connection and location data created during the processing of services such as telephone calls, SMS, e-mails, surfing, and file sharing. These data archives will then be used to create profiles of the communication behavior and movements of suspects. The Christian and Social Democrats are calling for such data to be kept along with IP addresses for at least six and up to 24 months. The Greens and others reject
the directive altogether or are at least calling for the re-inclusion of the stipulation that companies must be reimbursed for the costs thus incurred.
Frankly speaking, I'm appalled that this directive has been passed with such little resistance (and with the support of the Social Democrats).
In Switzerland, only 15 years ago, the "Fichenskandal" broke. It turned out that the federal and cantonal gouvernment surveilled and kept documents ("Fiches") about nine hundred thousand Swiss citizens which were deemed to be close to the unions, left-leaning or supportive of communism. It seems that the European Parliament wanted thouroughly and decided that everybody is a suspect.
This time it's not because of the communists but because of the terrorists. The desire to watch its own citizens closely stays with the powerful.
Apparently there is still time to at least minimize the damage done in the parliaments of the member countries, but I'm sure somebody more versed in European politics than me can follow up on that.
