U.K.-based Statewatch, a civil liberties monitoring organization, has published a special report charging that members of the European Union (EU) are planning to mandate that European telephone carriers and Internet service providers store information related to their customers’ net activity, email, and telephone calls for up to two years. The information collected under the mandate would be made available to law enforcement and other government agencies. Current EU law, the 1997 EU Directive on privacy in telecommunications, requires that such information be retained only for billing purposes and deleted promptly after that authorized use.
Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, commented on the draft Framework Decision leaked to the publication:
“EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on Member States—each national parliament would have to decide. Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, ‘compulsory,’ across Europe.
“The right to privacy in our communications—emails, phone-calls, faxes and mobile phones—was a hard-won right which has now been taken away. Under the guise of fighting ‘terrorism’ everyone’s communications are to be placed under surveillance.
“Gone too under the draft Framework Decision are basic rights of data protection, proper rules of procedure, scrutiny by supervisory bodies and judicial review.”
The Statewatch analysis indicates that European citizens’ civil liberties are at clear risk because there are no limits on what information can be exchanged or copied between member states and there is apparently no supervisory authority. To make matters worse, Statewatch’s analysis shows that there is no individual right to correct or delete inaccurate information and no penalty for misuse of the information.
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