Legal Invasion

The EU has voted to end data privacy . Despite opposition from civil liberties groups worldwide, the European parliament bowed to pressure from individual governments, led by Britain, and approved legislation to give police the power to access the communications records of every phone and internet user.

The measure, which will be approved by the 15 EU member states, will allow governments to force phone and internet companies to retain detailed logs of their customers' communications for an unspecified period. Currently, records are kept only for a couple of months for billing purposes before being destroyed.

As part of the UK's Terrorism Act, the UK can monitor email and admit as court evidence transcripts of telephone conversations bugged by MI5. This is called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIP act for short. The RIP act allows your online privacy to be invaded.

The UK is part of a global spy-network that can eavesdrop on telephones, faxes and computers and can track bank accounts is in place. This spy-network is called Echelon and was created by the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in a secret treaty in 1947. The five countries divided up the world to share the product of global eavesdropping.

Officially, however, Echelon doesn't exist. Although evidence of Echelon has been growing since the mid-1990s, America flatly denies that it exists, while the UK government's responses to questions about the system are evasive. According to an article on The Register the UK doesn't have much of a choice whether to admit its existence or not... they've been found out!

Carnivore is a surveillance system FBI agents typically install on the networks of Internet Service Providers, where it intercepts all communications and records sent to or from the target of an investigation. Some critics say "it's the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody's phone calls to see if it's the phone call you should be monitoring."

The best way to combat these infringments on our freedom is to keep an eye out for technology and software that can counter this violation. M-O-O-T aims to beat spying powers by storing encryption keys and other data overseas, beyond the reach of investigators. No data will be stored on the computer's hardware. It should be released soon.

Next time you are asked "what are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide?" Ask them "do you walk through the street naked letting people know what turns you on? Do you hold personal conversations with a megaphone?" Without privacy protection online, you might as well be doing just that.

Some groups are fighting these developments. Privacy International Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. PI is based in London, England, and has an office in Washington, D.C. PI has conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security ctivities, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and medical privacy.

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Last update: Sunday, February 23, 2003 at 11:47:26 AM.