Anti-European Snoop Law petition
p2pnet.net Campaign News:- If you`re in Europe and you`re reading this, your one of the 450 million people the conglomerates and corporations desperately want to know about. In depth and in detail. And the Framework Decision on Data Retention exists to make that happen.
It would force ISPs and telcos to collect data on you ——- but you can help to stop it in its tracks.
By 10:14 am, Pacific, on August 1, 12,820 people had already signed the EDRI and XS4ALL petition against mandatory data retention.
By 10:14 am today (August 18) that number had more than doubled to 26,787 and the petition is supported by 45 organisations and companies, p2pnet among them.
The petition is now available in 13 languages, including Bulgarian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian and will remain open for signatures until October 2005.
At the time of writing, The Netherlands was leading with the largest number of signatures – 9,266. Germany was in the #2 spot (4,794) with the much smaller Finland only just behind with 4,737 signatures. Then came Austria (1,197), Bulgaria (1,129), Italy, (942), France (717) Belgium, (673) and Sweden (602).
To engage more supporters to contribute to the campaign against data retention, EDRI has opened a special WIKI, based on the technology used by the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, it says.
Everybody is invited to contribute background information and localised banners. The WIKI also contains a link-back list, to allow people to indicate they have put a banner to the petition on their homepage. Everybody interested in joining the fight against data retention may also subscribe to the open EDRI mailing list on data retention.
With the campaign, EDRI hopes to support the members of both the national parliaments and the European Parliament that systematic data retention is not the right way to protect our open society against crime and terrorism. Without any evidence for the necessity and benefits for law enforcement, the proposal undermines fundamental human rights values, such as the right to be held innocent until proven guilty.
Given the very broad scope of the Commission proposal, which includes the prevention of criminal offences, the proposal inevitably allows for large-scale data-mining on the communication behaviour and GSM location data of innocent citizens.
This concern is aggravated by the fact that both the ministers of Justice and Home Affairs and the Commission wish to create an open-ended list of data, to be updated continuously in back-doors procedures without any thorough democratic consultation. Now that web-surfing data and location data of GSMs in standby-mode are excluded from the initial Commission proposal, the European Parliament might be tempted to agree to the directive. In that case, law enforcement could easily add all their other long-standing wishes within a few months after adoption, without every having to meet the strict proportionality and subsidiarity criteria of human rights law. And those wish-lists are just too long and too widely distributed to be ignored.
Sign up here.
If there’s something you think we should know, contact us – tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
12,820 people – Oppose European Snoop Law, August 1, 2005
EDRI – 21.000 signatures against data retention, August 10, 2005
WIKI – Data Retention Petition Campaign
