The Council of the European Union has unanimously agreed to a
proposal which would allow individual Member States to force ISPs
and telcos to store personal data for the benefit of law
enforcement agencies, according to civil liberties group
Statewatch. However, the European Commission will ask the
Parliament to reject the controversial proposal.
On Wednesday, the Council of the European Union (the 15 EU
governments) agreed their position on the new Directive on data
protection and privacy in the telecommunications sector. This would
mean inserting a "Recital" to the existing Directive which will
allow Member States to adopt laws at national level to require
network and services providers to retain traffic data for use by
the law enforcement agencies.
Current EU law says that traffic data may only be kept for
billing purposes (i.e. to meet the needs of the customer). The
European Commission opposes the change of this law and, according
to Statewatch, now hopes that the European Parliament will defend
the existing law to protect citizens from surveillance and to avoid
an enormous burden on ISPs and telcos. Under the co-decision
procedure all three EU institutions have to agree on the new
measure.
Statewatch reports that the Council could not agree on new
wording for the relevant Article 6.1 on traffic data but the
strength of lobby by some Member States, apparently led by the UK,
to dilute existing privacy and data protection rights in the
interests of "law and order" persuaded the rest of the Council to
adopt a recital.
The EU's Data Protection Working Party recently stated in a
letter to the President of the EU Council that new proposals could
contravene the European Convention of Human Rights as “systematic
and preventive storage of EU citizens’ communications and related
traffic data would undermine the fundamental rights to privacy,
data protection, freedom of expression, liberty and presumption of
innocence.”
The Data Protection Working Party’s letter can be downloaded in
PDF format from the Statewatch
site
The
full text of the draft Directive (without Wednesday’s recital)
can be downloaded in PDF format.
