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EU Sues Sweden, Demands ISP Data Retention
Death Metal writes "The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems). But Sweden never passed it into national law, and the European Commission has now sued the country to make sure a bill appears."
Sues Sweden? And what if they don't obey?
Data retention is just a Big Brother tool.
You don't catch terrorists with this, nor pedophiles.
And yes, I emailed Osama. Now what? They don't log the contents of an email.
And if I gpg/pgp the email, what then?
Now lobbyists only have to bribe a handful of central political bastards to affect the whole of Europe.
democratic of them. Who would have thought a collection of nations creating a supranational government wouldn't infringe on the individual countries' rights?
I mean, does the government understand how much storage it would require to actually retain all the data that flows through a large ISP? Why not ask cell phone companies to record all voice calls, after all, terrorists and criminals use phones!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
The data retention directive is to be implemented in law on January 1, 2010.
It was supposed to be implemented on March 1, 2009 but was postponed.
So why sue now when it's coming anyway?
Is this the first time the EU has sued a member state for not passing a law? If so this will be an interesting case.
Think Deeply.
Hehe, a bit funny considering the background. This is because the EU now noticed that ISP's are actually now not wanting to do any retention in Sweden, in turn due to the new IPRED law. This is a way for them to partially dodge that law by getting less chances of being able to report users sharing copyright infringing work. The idea is that as their users are reported, they have hopefully already deleted the log entries. Why they are wanting to do that is in turn out of competition reasons. No ISP in Sweden want to be "the ISP where you can more easily get caught for copyright infringement when sharing files". You can read more about the case for one of those ISP's, Bahnhof, here.
OK, I went off on a tangent there. What I think is funny is that the EU is only now paying attention and noticing Sweden didn't adopt that law. :-p It's so apparent that this is in response to all the more ISP's not caring for it, not because they have a check on what Sweden is doing. Or maybe they just don't care until certain laws are dodged in practice out of minimizing bureaucracy. It's hard to tell if it's due to incompetence or bureaucracy, but it's either of them.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need police. People would be nice to each other and crime wouldn't happen.
But we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world with walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who's going to do it? They have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You have the luxury of not knowing what they know. Their existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want to know the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at Piratpartiet you want them on that wall, you need them on that wall. They use words like honor, code, loyalty. They use them as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline.
So enjoy your freedom to cry about the police, but realize that these men are the thin blue line between freedom and anarchy. Freedom entails risk. The law and police mitigate that risk. Hobble them at your own risk.
...the three strikes law!
Wow!
Equality was the name of EU, wasn't it?
Sweden should show the middle finger to EU.
Its a pity it doesn't have any Rush Limbaughs there, one would be enough to shout hoarse about swedish nationality and violation of the same.
If i were the PM, i would take EU's action under advisement and in Brussels directly question the French about 3-strikes law which violates EU laws...
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
isn't sweden a soviergn country which can make it's own laws? i guess they would have made agreements when joining the EU and possibly face being kicked out if they don't comply, short of that whats the EU going to do besides cry? you can't invade sweden, they are just as nuts as the swiss.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
In his customary wordy and circular style.
As an European citizen I just want to point out to all non-EU friends of /. that this is just a completely normal and standard procedure - it doesn't depend on which law or which country, but if a European law directive is not formed into national laws by the governments/parliaments, the EU automatically sues the non-conforming member states. Happens all the times, on all issues, punishment is normally the fine for each more day passing by.
The interesting thing is that Sweden was one of the 4 countries that proposed the law (together with Ireland, France and the UK). It really drove its adoption hard, even though the first drafts of the text proposed by these countries were completely unworkable.
It took almost two years before the final text was drafted. The current version is much more readable and understandable than the first version. In the end a couple of unlikely countries took the lead in drafting the text. Even though some of these countries weren't very positive on the idea of having a data retention law, the civil servants sat down to create something that was what their political masters wanted and was technically realizable in practice.
Things that were for instance excluded were the requirements to log on a per packet basis the source and destination or to identify for http which adresses were visited.
How do I know? I was there and took part in the negotiations in the EU Council Working Group from day one to day last.
do, or indeed what LUBE OR WE SELL 7he bottoms butt development. BSD do, or indeed what volume of NetBSD
isn't sweden a soviergn country which can make it's own laws? i guess they would have made agreements when joining the EU and possibly face being kicked out if they don't comply, short of that whats the EU going to do besides cry? you can't invade sweden, they are just as nuts as the swiss.
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Under the EU treaties a european directive has to be implemented as national law by all members to whom it is adressed, normally within a year after it has been passed, member countries can be excepted from this rule, so that they have more time to implement it as a national law. Bu they do not have a choice after that. The strange and noteworthy thing is, that a european directive as such has a direct effect for all member countries (regardless of national implementation) and courts, especially the higher courts, should consider it in their rulings. The national implementation is only an integration in the respective national legal systems.What happens here is nothing unusual, its standard procedure "On 1 May 2008 1,298 such cases open before the Court" s.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Directive So: nothing to see here, move on.
The benefits seem to be getting to subsidize public projects in other countries and uncontrolled immigration. I'm all for us leaving the EU and resuming war with France.
What part of democracy don't you understand? Oh you thought democracy benefits everybody?! Haha how very childish of you. No son, it only benefits half the population, just like in good ol' America.
I am the lawn!
Can the ISPs protest this during the trial? I suspect there are numerous thugs in the Swedish parliament may want to pass this bill anyway. So maybe the ISPs can fight this one for Sweden?
Can Sweden implement a toothless version of this bill? A single exception for protecting say users engaged in civil disobedience would nullify the directive. A similar line saying the ISP may charge extortionate prices for their logs might effectively nullify it.
If Sweden implements the directive, ISP still have technical recourses :
1) Build two sql tables (IP,IP_rid) and (user_id,user_rid) which associate the ID address and user with a random identifier number (rid). All long term logging is preformed using only IP_rid and user_rid. We change each IP's IP_rid and each user's user_rid a couple times per hour/day/etc. After changing them, the old one is printed on a printer and erased from disk. So the information is available, but only by humans doing a manual table join over thousands of rows. You might throw some OCR prevention tricks into the printer too. A problem here is you can selectively release your logs.
2) Just encrypt the logs using pgp but rotate the key every hour and destroy the old private keys. So anyone accessing the logs must first crack one pgp key per hour of logs viewed.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I think the actions taken by the EU are ok. What does the "U" in EU stand for if every country has it's own arrangements? If you do not agree with such stuff you should not be in the EU, and that is excaclty the reason why some European countries are actually not.
In addition to laws about data retention, the EU also has treaties regarding nice treatment of asylum seekers.
When not all countries were implementing those, Sweden was one of the countries pushing for the EU to use their stick to force them to.
Now Sweden gets sued themselves for noncompliance.
I guess you can't always have your cake and eat it too.
Perfect example of why the US, Canada and Mexico citizens need to rise up against the NAU.
a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems).
Whatever you're smoking, it deserves to be illegal, if it isn't already. "not long enough to cause privacy problems" - excuse me? Storing my entire browsing and search history for six months does not cause privacy problems?
Privacy is not a question of storage durations, never has and never will be. If you keep a record of me visiting, say, "www.alcoholicsanonymous.com" at all, then that's a privacy problem right there. Six months or six hours doesn't make any difference to the fact that there's a privacy problem, only to the size of the problem - with six months you'll probably see more "interesting" URLs than with, say, one month.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This was a big area of debate before the EU formed: Just how much of autonomy and national identity must a country give up to be a member of the EU? What happens when an EU member (say, France, for instance), or a small coalition of countries, have a major influence on the EU Parliament and try to impose their values in conflict with the national traditional values? What happens if Turkey tries to impose it's values concerning drug use on the Netherlands? Why should France's or GB's values on privacy (or lack thereof) be imposed on Sweden?
In the United States of America, the individual States are supposed to be "sovereign" and all rights not specifically granted to the Federal Government are the province of the individual States. Over the years "creeping Federalism" has undermined the individuality, power and authority of the individual States. This has also been happening in in the EU. Sweden is technically a "Constitutional Monarchy". Did Swedes know that by joining the EU they gave away their Constitution?
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
The EU, which is largely beyond the influence of individuals but not lobbies to influence, is passing laws that trump the laws of nations, and even their constitutions.
This is why we must NEVER allow the United States to end up in such a thing, which a lot of the internationalist statist types would like to see.
We must remain vigilant that we don't wake up one day and find that by treaty, the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights can be overridden by a foreign bureaucracy.
Corporatism != Free Market
IAAS (I Am A Swede)
This directive will soon be passed. The reason this has taken so long is because it's an initiative taken by the previous party in lower (Social Democrats) and the current part(y|ies) (AKA The Alliance, moderates) in power doesn't like the leftists and the head of the judicial branch has been wining over this directive ever since day one. Nonetheless she is obligated to enforce the directive and says so herself. Even though she proclaims herself to be a integrity watchdog she's just as bad as the leftists.
Battle lost on that front.
The Pirate Party will however make it to the EU parliament this year and we can hope for some real change on these integrity issues.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
Not possession of it per se. But they pass a lot of nuisance-level laws that essentially add up to the same thing for anything stronger than double ROT13. Under the disguise of things like obstruction of justice, etc. And even simple, honest use of it is loaded with implications of wrongdoing.
The "you must have something to hide" line of bullshit argument.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The retention law is for a subset of the email headers, not contents.
Headers aren't encrypted.
The privacy concerns aren't really that great, but still bad for a purist.
Obviously, anyone can get a non-EU-based email account and use that instead if they like, but any email headers transmitted to another EU-based ISP will be retained.
The law is less specific as to who can get access to this data and what checks are used to ensure it isn't abused.
Politicians have it tough. Most people don't care about privacy concerns, but they do care about "doing something" to slow terrorists. Some terrorists are not that technology savy, but most are and will avoid EU accounts completely or just setup servers outside the EU and use webmail for their people over SSL. Email that doesn't go thru another server and uses TSL is secure provided the webmail URL doesn't give anything away to a proxy. Companies insist on internal email system use only for this reason.
Go Sweden!
Indeed, and the UK have already made it illegal to refuse to unencrypt data. And if you've forgotten/lost your key, tough luck.
I knew it... the hidden hand/hook behind EU is finally making its presence known. Arrrrr!
Indeed, and the UK have already made it illegal to refuse to unencrypt data. And if you've forgotten/lost your key, tough luck.
So much for the theory that you don't need to codify the natural rights of man.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That's a really good question. I'm guessing there's something for this in those 10000+ pages of international treaties that form the EU.
See, if the EU was smart, they would first use the power of the purse to ensure that the individual countries are completely dependent upon Brussels for funding. Then when the individual countries refuse to do what you want you just threaten to cut off their funding.
And what do you know? Eventually you've managed to completely destroy the sovereignty of your member states without firing a single bullet.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The point is that all EU countries agree to pass laws locally under certain procedures.
This is necessary if you want a common market: if the law is not the same (or at least very similar) in all member countries then artificial imbalances are created by sneaky protectionist legislation.
Basically it is a way to level the playing field.
Such intrusive laws should be repelled EU wide, but as long as EU citizens don't get off their asses and give the EU elections the attention that they merit, they will continue to get supranational bad laws.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The problem is, the Bill of Rights can be circumvented too.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Because it's worked sooo well for the Americans, oh wait...
What theory? Who claimed that? And how does the Bill or Rights stop anything (since the US has problems with new laws too, as often discussed on Slashdot)? I'm not sure how that relates to my post...
Ok, so you really don't know what the Supreme Court of the US does do you?
They destroy or cement laws, acts, statutes, etc. based on the Constitution. Now, they may have a conservative view of the constitution, they may have a liberal view, they may be a litteralist or they be a "living breathing document" type of justice. It doesn't really matter, they still have to work within the confines of the Constitution. It is the primary document they work with on anything related to the Bill of Rights. And, since you seemed to have had your head in the sand the last 200+ years, it comes up a LOT.
In fact, SCOTUS rulings are so powerful, the only way to over-turn them are with another SCOTUS ruling, or with an amendment to the Constitution. Those are so rare, only seventeen amendments have been made to the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights is powerful stuff, it protects us from government controlled news (though doesn't protect us from commercially controlled news, damnit), government mandated religion, the right to not incriminate yourself, etc.
That last one is the fifth amendment, and it would apply to the encryption case here directly. In the US, if law enforcement demands your encryption keys, you have only to plead the 5th and they can't touch you. You have the absolute right not to incriminate yourself, and it will hold up in any court in the land.
I guess the parent is saying that in the UK the idea was that such things were so basic, they did not need to be codified. Either that or we codified them to protect against such injustices. Well, now look what happened? They have no defense against that, but in the US it would be hell to take that all the way through the courts.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Also meant to mention the simple fact that our court system moves slowly and carefuly. You can request a speedy trial and it must be granted (also in the bill of rights), but most don't, so it lumbers.
New laws can take years before they are tested, with the trickiest subjects having to go all the way to the SCOTUS.
Something related to the 5th amendment (it is the right to not incriminate yourself, the right to not speak, among others), however, would probably get tossed at the lowest level. In fact, laws like that tend not to get written, so all we end up with are tricky ones.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It's on the to-do list. ;)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I can't help seeing the word SCROTUM every time SCOTUS comes up.
Squirrel!
That's an over-generalization. They've actually only made it illegal to refuse to unencrypt when the government demands that you do so. If a criminal trying to MitM your SSL connection to Amazon demands that you provide your credit card number, you're allowed to refuse and you won't have broken any laws.
See through the smarminess of my above paragraph and maybe you'll get it. Frame encryption as criminals-vs-government and you're going to bias people a certain way on that topic. Frame it as criminals-vs-you-and-me, and things are different. A lot different. And best of all, it's perfectly honest and accurate.
Get government out of the encryption debate, because once you do, then there's no debate at all; it becomes glaringly obvious (to everyone) that anyone who doesn't encrypt is being careless with their privacy and data. Once everyone is always encrypting everything, then we can listen to government's complaints. That would sure beat listening to identity-theft victims' constant complaints.
one more reason to vote pirate in Sweden in the upcoming EU elections.
We do have a constitution - the European Convention of Human Rights (ironically, given the topic, it's the EU that gave us this).
I know all about what the Supreme Court, I just fail to see how that is related to my post or the issue. I am aware of the US system, but it seems you were unaware of the European system. Sure, the SC is a good system - I don't see anyone claiming that the UK does it better. Please take your straw man argument elsewhere.
That last one is the fifth amendment, and it would apply to the encryption case here directly. In the US, if law enforcement demands your encryption keys, you have only to plead the 5th and they can't touch you. You have the absolute right not to incriminate yourself, and it will hold up in any court in the land.
Ah, now this one is relevant, sure. As I say, no one is claiming that the UK is better. In some cases, the UK is being more authoritarian - however, there are other areas where the US is doing badly. There's no magic solution that the US has found, and there are only specific things that help in specific cases (such as the fifth amendment).
I suspect that the OP just wanted to start up a UK vs US argument, as I suspect you do too, but no one here is actually making that argument.
I voted for "piratpartiet" (The Pirate Party). Who did you vote for?
The problem is, the Bill of Rights can be circumvented too.
That's why there's a second amendment. So when all else fails, you can use a line like 'circumvent this!'.
There's no place like