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DATA RETENTION IS NO SOLUTION!
Created: 5 Sep 2005
Data retention is no solution!

The European ministers of Justice and the European Commission want to keep all telephone and internet traffic data of all 450 million Europeans.
If you are concerned about this plan, please sign the petition.

What's wrong with data retention? The proposal to retain traffic data will reveal who has been calling and e-mailing whom, what websites people have visited and even where they were with their mobile phones. Telephone companies and internet services providers would be ordered to store all traffic data of their customers. Police and intelligence agencies in Europe would be granted access the traffic data. Various, competing proposals in Brussels mention retention periods from 6 months up to four years.

Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of all 450 million people in the European Union. Data retention is a policy that expands powers of surveillance in an unprecedented manner. It simultaneously revokes many of the safeguards in European human rights instruments, such as the Data Protection Directives and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Data retention means that governments may interfere with your private life and private communications regardless if you are suspected of a crime or not.

Data retention is not a solution to terrorism and crime!

In July 2005 the European Parliament adopted a report by Parliament member Alexander Alvaro on the mandatory data retention plan. The report concludes that the proposal is disproportionate. The report also questions the necessity, effectiveness and high costs for industry and telecommunication users.

No research has been conducted anywhere in Europe that supports the need and necessity of creating such a large-scale database containing such sensitive data for the purpose of fighting crime and terrorism.

The attacks on London are an attack on human rights. The protection of those human rights matters most when governments and societies face times of crisis. The worst possible response would be to jeopardise those carefully wrought rights by a panic-inspired response. A mass surveillance response to terror would result in a resounding success for the perpetrators of these attacks: a fundamental undermining of our most fundamental values.

What can you do to stop this plan?

If you are concerned about the European plans for data retention, please sign the petition and alert as many people as you can to support this campaign.
The signatures will be sent to the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Petition

I believe that:

- Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of everyone;
- Retaining personal data on everyone is an illegal practice in terms of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as it is disproportionate;
- Security gained from retention may be illusory, as it is likely that traffic data that is associated to one individual may actually be linked to activity taken by
another, or by a process that is unrelated to the activities of that user;
- The means through which this policy is being pursued is illegitimate, as some member states who have failed to pass this policy through their own
Parliaments are now trying to push it through the EU instead in the name of harmonisation and international cooperation.

I call upon the European Commission and the European Parliament to examine the proposal for data retention very critically and uphold the protection of human rights, including privacy, in these difficult times.
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