Civil Liberties Watch: The EU is after your data

It takes two years to implement an EU Directive. If a member state has not implemented the directive within two years, and if the directive contains no time limits explicitly, it is treated as being implemented. An EU Directive supersedes national law.

In 2006, the European Union issued the Data Retention Directive. This directive laid the groundwork for the retention of all internet, mobile phone, and electronic data. Its purposes were traffic analysis and website surveillance.

By legalising such shadowing of citizens, and by setting long limits on how long the data could be held for or why, the Directive went far beyond anything that had been around legally before. Time limits for the implemention of the directive have not, because of the detail of the proposals, yet run completely out.

The fact that this directive exists, and was agreed not through the European community's majority voting-EC pillar but through the 'Justice and Home Affairs' council, suggests the significant benefits to governments of using the EU's regulatory powers to police civil liberties.

Like most directives, the law had its advantages. It will soon be very difficult to hide in cyberspace, and European governments will have a legal right, if not a requirement, to retain data from those whom they investigate. This is important in combating global crime, and networks of sexual abuse and sexual slavery. The latter crimes, of course, have real and viciously abused victims.

Organised crime, electronic harassment, and terrorism are already very seriously treated in the law of England and Wales, and this directive makes the laws against those crimes stronger.

However, it is but a short step from this directive to the 'protection' of online identity by forcing bloggers to register their blogs, outlawing anonymous postings, and, as the Levi-Prodi bill in Italy wanted, making bloggers pay for a licence. The Libertarian site, which contains incredibly strong and inventive language, The Devils's Kitchen, has been noting the dangers to the internet for some time. I also put up a post about this matter last month.

Mary Honeyball, the confused and apparently anti-catholic London Member of the European Parliament voted for the data retention directive. Here is a site which sums up her behaviour. So did the German Christian Democrats and socialists, as far as I can tell, which is a shame because I admire Germany. It does have this tendency to send its worst hacks to the European Parliament, stuff their mouths with gold, and then ritually abuse them on its television, however.

Watch out. The 'open and transparent' representatives seen on today's video at The Exile abusing and then removing a team of journalists who were in the lobby one morning at 7am to see who was claiming thousands of euros in expenses before skedaddling home, and this troubled woman, (apparently not a fan of the Catholic League) are now angling for charge of your internet.

UPDATE:
I was wrong in the post this morning. The EU has various ways of making a law. The directive was approved by the Justice and Home Affairs pillar, but obviously, as I wrote, after a vote of the European Parliament.

The reason for that seems to have been that, had the council simply pushed through the bill alone or just consulted the parliament--which is what I assumed had happened, because it was the correct procedure--the Irish government would have objected on civil liberties grounds within the council and used a veto.

Instead, governments 'shared' their decision with an eager European Parliament.

The Irish 'veto' on a Justice council matter that was not to be shared with anyone was thus sidestepped. Labour MEPs, eager for validation, happily followed Charles Clarke's orders to vote for the directive in the assembly. Once the directive was passed in that manner (and based on a Treaty Article not concerned with pesky privacy or liberties), no state was able to veto it.

This shenanigan then rolled into the European Court of Justice last month. Ireland's concerns seem set to be dismissed.

I note the UK government attempting to tighten data retention law today, but because the administration is barely competent at the minute no-one has got round to blaming Europe for this at the time of writing. You bet they will.

Apologies to anyone misled by my words this morning.