p2p news / p2pnet: Before sitting down to write this I sent emails to my students at City University, the other members of the editorial team at the Working for an MP website, my editor at openDemocracy.net and my girlfriend.

And in the last twelve hours I’ve made four phone calls on my mobile, two to pick up voicemail, one to a conference company in Caterham and one to my mum. I haven’t used my fixed-line phone.

You might as well know this, as the people providing my email and phone service already have it all logged, and the mobile phone provider I use even knows roughly where I was (at the cinema, at home) when I made the calls.

If proposals for retention of communications data which have just been approved by the European Union’s parliamentary committee on civil liberties are passed by the Parliament on December 13 and then approved by the Council of Ministers, soon the police will know too – if they can persuade a judge that I’m engaged in serious crime and worth investigating, anyway.

After a great deal of argument over whether it is reasonable for the law to require internet service providers and phone companies to store details of emails sent, web pages visited and calls made, it seems as if the Data Retention Directive will make it into law early next year.

And once national laws are updated to reflect the new European legislation, the police will have powers which the UK government believes are vital to combat terrorism.

There are lots of issues about data retention, and there has been some debate over whether the provisions breach the Human Rights Act, though since national security considerations override the act anyway this is probably not enough to derail it.

There are also grounds to doubt how effective the new laws will be in practice, as they assume a level of technical ignorance on the part of those planning or carrying out serious crimes that may once have been reasonable but is increasingly unlikely.

As we move into the digital age it isn’t just ageing technology writers like me who understand that using a secure shell to log in to a non-EU server might be a good idea. The bad guys know this too, and since they have a lot to lose by getting it wrong their incentive to take protective measures is a lot greater than mine.

For example my broadband provider, ntl, doesn’t know who I sent emails to because I don’t use their servers. I pay for web hosting from a company that also offers email, so all my sent mail goes through them. They are based in the UK, but as soon as the directive comes into effect I think I may find a non-European firm to use instead.

Sadly, US protection of freedom of speech doesn’t extend to communications data and the FBI has lots of ways of getting its hands on my email, so I won’t be going there, but I’m sure that an enterprising Swiss company will soon be offering the same sort of data confidentiality as they already offer for financial matters.

So my email will be off the grid unless the UK government wants to follow China and Cuba and make it illegal to use a non-British ISP, but I suspect even Charles Clarke would balk at that.

Whatever my disagreements with the proposals or doubts about their effectiveness, I can at least appreciate the grounds for proposing them.

Those planning to carry out bombings may use unsecured emails, and their phone records may be useful in finding contacts. At least the current proposals require judicial oversight and make the government pay the costs of complying with the rules.

However the media industry, in the form of the newly-launched ‘Creative and Media Business Alliance’, want to use this data to hunt down people who they think may be involved in the far less serious offence of sharing copyright material over the internet.

They have the gall to believe that their business is as important as the protection of our lives from acts of indiscriminate terror, and want the stored data to be available to the police when investigating any criminal offence, not just the serious ones it currently covers.

The CMBA has written to every member of the European Parliament saying that limiting the proposal to ‘serious’ offences would hamper enforcement activities for other forms of criminal offence. That, of course, is the point of the restriction, since we should only be asked to give up our freedom to go about our lives unobserved if the state can show a significant – ‘serious’ – reason for this.

One of the members of the CMBA is Sony BMG, who have a lot of experience of how an ill-considered attempt to protect their copyright material can backfire. Not only have sales of their records slumped since it was revealed that they were including dangerously insecure software on many albums but they are facing lawsuits in the US.

Yet they seem to think that the public will happily accept that their lawyers should get full access to email logs and phone records if they can persuade a judge that they are suffering economic damage through file sharing.

The record and movie industries need to realise that they are not special, they are not privileged and they do not have public support for the heavy-handed way they are dealing with the issues which increased access to digital content creates.

If they cannot come up with a business model which allows them to make profits without criminalising their customers, trampling over our civil liberties or installing malware on our computers then they do not deserve to stay in business, and new ways for artists to reach the public will have to emerge.

For Sony, Disney and EMI – all members of the CMBA – to argue that legislation intended to protect us from bombs should also be there to protect us from BitTorrent is offensive and unacceptable. We must hope that MEPs have enough sense to reject it.

Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based writer and broadcaster.]

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi

Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.

Also read:-
Big Music tries Europe hi-jack, November 23, 2005

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 7:49 pm 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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