EU Approves Data Retention

submanifold writes "The EU have ratified rules that will force ISP's and other telecommunication companies to retain data for two years. This data includes the time, date and locations of both mobile and landline calls (as well as whether or not they were answered) along with logs of internet activity and email. Apparently the content itself would not be accessible, merely the data concerning it. However, despite being touted as an anti-terrorist measure, the record industry has already admitted interest in aquiring such data."

Comments

Good point

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: "At the end of the day ISPs are not law enforcement agencies so they should not have to pay for it all"

Of course...

[omeg]

Of course the music industry is interested in that data. But that doesn't mean they can just obtain it like that. As long as this is kept an anti-terrorist measure, they have no foot to stand on.

Keep in mind that data will be kept for UP TO two years; most will opt for the minimum of half a year instead.

Press release from FFII

[Christian Engstrom]

FFII, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, has issued the following press release today regarding this matter:

PRESS RELEASE FFII -- [ Europe / ICT / Information Society ]

EU adopts Big Brother directive, ignores industry and civil society

14 December 2005 (Strasbourg, France) The European Parliament today adopted a directive that will create the largest monitoring database in the world, tracking all communications within the EU. "From today, all EU citizens are to be tracked and monitored like common criminals," says Pieter Hintjens, president of the FFII.

The Data Retention Directive was passed by 378 votes to 197, following deals between the Council and the leaders of the two largest parties in Parliament, the EPP-ED (Conservatives) and the PSE (Socialists). The Rapporteur for the directive, Alexander Alvaro (Liberals) had his name removed from the report in protest.

Jonas Maebe of the FFII says: "Among other harsh measures, the directive mandates recording of the source and destination of all emails you send and every call you make, and your location and movement during mobile phone calls. Additionally, the directive says nothing about who has to pay for all this logging, which will significantly distort the internal telecommunications market."

"Moreover, the directive disregards how Internet protocols work. For example, tracking Internet telephony calls is generally impossible without closely watching the content of all data packets. The reason is that such connections are not necessarily set up via a central server which can perform the necessary logging. On top of that you have techniques like tunneling (VPN's) which make it simply impossible to look at the content", he adds.

The gathered data can be made available without special warrants, and without limit to certain types of crime. There will be no independent evaluation, and no extra privacy and no specific security safeguards. The data will be retained for periods ranging from 6 months up to any duration a member state can convince the Commission of.

Hartmut Pilch of the FFII says: "This outcome proves that we have to remain vigilant at all times and work on every relevant directive from the start. Even now, the planned IPRED2 directive, also unanimously condemned by industry and civil society, threatens to turn everyone caught by a patent into a criminal."

Background Information

* Two-page overview of the effects of the most important amendments
http://www.ffii.org/~jmaebe/dataret/plen1/summary. pdf

* English video stream of today's plenary session
http://media.vrijschrift.org/ep_vote_datared_05121 4_en.wmv

* Original language video stream of today's plenary session
http://media.vrijschrift.org/ep_vote_datared_05121 4_or.wmv

* Data retention: legislative sausage machine in overdrive
http://wiki.ffii.org/DataRet0512En

* News, position papers on and analysis of the directive
http://wiki.dataretentionisnosolution.com

* Permanent link to this press release
http://wiki.ffii.org/DataRetPr051214En

About the FFII -- http://www.ffii.org

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-profit association registered in several European countries, which is dedicated to the spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports the development of public information goods based on copyright, free competition, open standards. More than 850 members, 3,000 companies and 90,000 supporters h

Background

[D4C5CE]

The European Parliament (which would have had a power of veto in the procedure) approved the draconian directive on first reading without much of a fight - putting 450 million people under massive surveillance with no justification whatsoever (other than the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse).

According to their own Press Service: Deal on EU data retention law; more comprehensive version in German: Ja zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung bis zu zwei Jahren - Keine Speicherung der Kommunikationsinhalte. Incidentally, even the latter "limitation" (allegedly no storage of the contents of communications) is void in particular with respect to URLs - these being identifiers for the contents transmitted anyway.

Loopholes aplenty have already triggered plans e.g. in Poland to extend the storage even further, to a staggering 15 years (!), and remaining safeguards (if any) are not expected to last: The media industry wants access to that data, too (and a further directive is in the works, cf. the EU Legislative Observatory).