Previous Politech messages: http://www.politechbot.com/2005/12/05/european-data-retention/ http://www.politechbot.com/2005/09/23/european-commission-proposes/ http://www.politechbot.com/2005/06/16/feds-contemplate-forcing/ -------- Original Message -------- Subject: EU Parliament agrees to data retention Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 16:20:00 +0100 From: Ralf Bendrath <bendrath@zedat.fu-berlin.de> Reply-To: bendrath@zedat.fu-berlin.de To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Declan, something for Politech? Very bad news from Europe. The European Parliament this morning voted in favour of a backroom deal that had been made between the two big parties in Brussels and the Council of Ministers, currently chaired by the UK. The deal completely ignored the amendmends proposed by the Parliament's Rapporteur and by the Justice and Civil Liberties Committee that was (well - officialy) in charge of the process. After a hot debate and a number of signs of cracks in the party blocks, a majority of 378 parliamentarians voted in favour of mandatory retention of telecommunications data, 197 against, 30 abstained. This is in short what we will get now: - retention of telephone and internet connection data (including email addresses) and location data for mobile phone calls - no harmonisation of the retention period (6 to 24 months but longer is allowed: Poland wants 15 years) - no harmonisation of cost reimbursement for the needed investments on the providers' side - no limitation to certain types of crimes for which access is allowed - retention of unsuccessful call attempts - no independent evaluation - no extra privacy safeguards - follow-up committee without representation from civil rights organisations Civil liberties organizations, consumers organizations and all the telco industry associations as well as journalists associations had been fighting like hell against this major and unprecedented surveillance plan until the last minute. We did not win (the outcome is in fact the worst possible, exactly what the UK home affairs minister Clarke wanted), but we at least raised a lot of awareness and disturbed the conservative and social-democrat party lines. But the UK council presidency had pushed so hard after the London bombings that this directive will enter the EU history as the one which took the shortest time ever from the first Commission draft to the final vote (less than three months - normally they need years). The next steps will be the adoption by the Council of Ministers (before christmas) and then the implementation process into national laws. There will be challenges to this plan before the constitutional courts. I am pretty sure that the German constitutional court will not like it, as it recently had ruled unconstitutional a major eavesdropping plan on phone calls - and that one was only directed at suspicious persons, whereas the EU directive applies to every single communication of all 450 Million inhabitants of the EU. More information, including recordings of the EP debate, is available at <http://wiki.dataretentionisnosolution.com/>. Ralf (European Digital Rights, www.edri.org) _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]