EU monitoring of communications

The following is from The Freedom Association, linked here:

The long sleepwalk to serfdom

Have you used the internet, sent an email, made a phone call or sent a text message in the last week? Almost certainly. Did it seem any different? Probably not. But there has been one major change behind the scenes over the last week. For 15 March 2009 was the deadline for EU member states to implement EU Directive 2006/24/EC.

"What is that?" you say. This is the Directive concerned with the retention of communications data relating to Internet Access, Internet telephony and Internet e-mail. It is the EU charter agreed by member states to afford governments the right to scrutinise your electronic communications activity as a matter of routine. There is no need to go to court for a warrant to monitor details of the people you have been in contact with, this EU Directive makes it necessary for your service provider to log all your activity and hand over the full details when asked to do so.

"What about my rights?" you ask. After all, does the European Convention on Human Rights - which does so much to protect people who break our laws and undermine our safety - not safeguard us too and prevent the state from intruding in our private activities? Well as we know it is supposed to do that. But there is a convenient get-out clause which basically tosses our rights out of the window. You can see it explained early in the EU Directive itself in paragraph 9:

Under Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), everyone has the right to respect for his private life and his correspondence. Public authorities may interfere with the exercise of that right only in accordance with the law and where necessary in a democratic society, inter alia, in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

So there you have it. You have the right to a private life and the state can only interfere with that in accordance with the law or in the interest of national security and public safety. So the member states claim this is all about protecting us from a dangerous enemy, change the law and et voilà, they hand themselves the right to trample over our privacy and individual freedoms. Do not count on our Parliament to reject this measure, the EU has taken the power from us to determine laws of this kind. This is one small element of the infamous 70% of our laws and regulations handed down to us from Brussels/Strasbourg that we must implement.

Do you feel comfortable knowing that your visit to this blog to read this posting has been logged, and will be kept for at least one year, for government agencies to look up should they ever decide that you or I represent a threat of some kind? Or that the next phone call you make will be logged for checking should an agency decide you need investigating? Or that your SMS messages and emails this morning are all on record? More importantly, do you think it is right for the state to have such power to invade our privacy?

This is what passes for freedom and democracy in the United Kingdom in the year 2009.