p2pnet.net News Opinion:- The new European law concerning the mandatory retention of telecommunication data (including internet data) is about to kick in. I thought we had privacy laws to protect us, right?

Wrong.

I had grave concerns about regulations concerning access by the police. My fears have now been confirmed.

Privacy International and European Digital Rights have published their joint answer and here are some excerpts from their paper:

“the indiscriminate collection of traffic data offends a core principle of the rule of law: that citizens should have notice of the circumstances in which the State may conduct surveillance, so that they can regulate their behavior to avoid unwanted intrusions. (…) Laws that offer citizens no reasonable means of avoiding surveillance of their private affairs by the State are the hallmark of the police state.”

“Blanket data retention also fails the meet the requirement to be necessary in a democratic society. The European Court on Human Rights has explained this requirement in terms of the need for any interference in Article 8 rights to correspond to a pressing social need and to be proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued. “Mandatory data retention laws fail on this score. The distinguishing feature of a blanket data retention requirement is the absence of any reasonable relationship between the intrusion on individual privacy rights and the law enforcement objectives served.”

Finally PI and EDRI argued:

“that retention is illegitimate, because of the ever-expanding list of possible purposes, both in national law and in international co-operation. While the EU on the one hand forces member states to harmonise the retention of data, on the other hand it leaves the regulation of access to these data to national law. “If the EU insists on creating this massive regime for surveillance, it has to devise ways to curtail the monster’s powers at the same time,” say PI and EDRI. According to the proposal from the UK, Ireland, Sweden and Spain, even if a member state were to reject the mandatory data retention ‘following national procedural or consultative processes’, member states must revisit this rejection every year, thus gravely insulting democratic procedure.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Raymond Blijd – fk2w

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See:-

mandatory retention – Invasive, Illusory, Illegal, and Illegitimate: Privacy International and EDRi Response to the Consultation on a Framework Decision on Data Retention, September 11, 2004

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 12th, 2004 at 1:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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