Slashdot Mirror

Could you please see this law in perspective for a moment:
1) This law requires the ISP to hold identification data for only 6 months - most ISPs keep it longer than that.

[ citation needed ] Before the data retention directive, this time was limited by the privacy directive. That one specifies that such data may only be kept as long as strictly necessary for billing and general administrative purposes.

Moreover, it's not just about identification data, but also about who emails/calls whom when and from where.

And collecting all of this data costs about £45.8m for the UK according UK government estimates.

2) The only way to have access to this data is to have a court order.

That depends on the Swedish proposed implementation (with which I'm not familiar). The data retention directive mandates nothing of the sort (which was one of the strong points of criticism against it).

in the end we just want our privacy and not make it impossible for police to do their jobs.

The point is that this directive is not required for the police to do their job reasonably well, and that the costs and privacy invasions of the directive are completely disproportionate compared to the potential gains in effectiveness for the police.

The Commission referred in its proposal to exactly one (yes 1) single study on this topic. That one concluded that it was not clear whether or not data retention would help a lot in investigations.

So the big complaints are: no demonstration of necessity, hugely disproportionate, major costs, big dangers of abuse and other negative effects. Of course, in addition to the way it was pushed through.

There are a lot of negatives when it comes to nuclear power but I am convinced that we needed to cut our carbon emissions yesterday

I agree carbon emissions need to be cut, but I don't think nuclear does it. Here's an article that questions whether nuclear power cuts emissions. As that one does, this one points out mining and processing of uranium emits CO2 as well.

the coal industry is going to take advantage of loopholes or changes so that (a) they get to go on polluting, (b) the legislators will act like they did something

I'm with you there.

Falcon