rik
February 24th, 2006, 22:02 PM
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/69952
At their meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, the Ministers of Justice and Home Secretaries of the EU have paved the way for the retention of telephone and Internet data without grounds for suspicion. Without any further discussion, they approved a directive already passed last December with votes from the main people's parties in the EU Parliament. This directive makes it mandatory for telecommunications providers to retain data from the last six to 24 months for some 450 million EU citizens. Ireland and Slovakia voted against the guideline because they question some legal technicalities of the directive and believe that there is no legal basis. However, a qualified majority of the Council votes sufficed to pass the law.
The monitoring plan drawn up in Brussels by the EU Council and the EU Commission as part of the war on terrorism basically concerns the retention of connection and location data created to process such services as telephone calls, SMS, e-mails, surfing, and file sharing. These data archives would then be used to create profiles of the communication behavior and movements of suspects. For years, the EU Council tried in vain to get support for data retention by means of a framework resolution. But only when the EU Commission had taken the alternative legislative route of a directive and the heads of the Christian and Social Democrats had reached a "compromise" despite previous agreements to the contrary in the committee handling the matter was the then-British presidency able to get the representatives of the member states to agree to the idea of implementing blanket surveillance.
Industry associations, data protectionists, civil-society organizations, and politicians from the left have long been fiercely criticizing the paradigm change that this data retention entails for penal law: everyone is guilty until proven innocent. They feel that the directive and the giant piles of data it requires constitute a breach of privacy and that the terrorists and criminals the measure allegedly aims to track down could easily use anonymization services, prepaid mobile phone cards, or phone booths to get around the authorities. Nonetheless, the grand coalition in the Bundestag adopted a motion it itself proposed last week that declares that this data retention is principally constitutional. The motion calls on the German government to implement the directive "prudently" and only store data for six months. However, security authorities will not only be able to access the data records in case of felonies as required in Brussels, but for any cases in which the law is broken "by means of telecommunications".
At their meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, the Ministers of Justice and Home Secretaries of the EU have paved the way for the retention of telephone and Internet data without grounds for suspicion. Without any further discussion, they approved a directive already passed last December with votes from the main people's parties in the EU Parliament. This directive makes it mandatory for telecommunications providers to retain data from the last six to 24 months for some 450 million EU citizens. Ireland and Slovakia voted against the guideline because they question some legal technicalities of the directive and believe that there is no legal basis. However, a qualified majority of the Council votes sufficed to pass the law.
The monitoring plan drawn up in Brussels by the EU Council and the EU Commission as part of the war on terrorism basically concerns the retention of connection and location data created to process such services as telephone calls, SMS, e-mails, surfing, and file sharing. These data archives would then be used to create profiles of the communication behavior and movements of suspects. For years, the EU Council tried in vain to get support for data retention by means of a framework resolution. But only when the EU Commission had taken the alternative legislative route of a directive and the heads of the Christian and Social Democrats had reached a "compromise" despite previous agreements to the contrary in the committee handling the matter was the then-British presidency able to get the representatives of the member states to agree to the idea of implementing blanket surveillance.
Industry associations, data protectionists, civil-society organizations, and politicians from the left have long been fiercely criticizing the paradigm change that this data retention entails for penal law: everyone is guilty until proven innocent. They feel that the directive and the giant piles of data it requires constitute a breach of privacy and that the terrorists and criminals the measure allegedly aims to track down could easily use anonymization services, prepaid mobile phone cards, or phone booths to get around the authorities. Nonetheless, the grand coalition in the Bundestag adopted a motion it itself proposed last week that declares that this data retention is principally constitutional. The motion calls on the German government to implement the directive "prudently" and only store data for six months. However, security authorities will not only be able to access the data records in case of felonies as required in Brussels, but for any cases in which the law is broken "by means of telecommunications".