EU Parliamentarians Justify Massive Telecommunications Surveillance - and they can hardly see their feet due to their pride in their own great achievement. It's just funny that critics keep saying things like this:
Patrick Breyer, a jurist from Elmshorn and one of the heads of the civil rights movement against data retention, is not satisfied with the justifications. He describes the restrictions achieved by the Parliament as "worthless". According to him, the stored information could indeed be released for other purposes such as espionage by intelligence agencies, untargeted search for crimes, or marketing, by referring to another data protection directive. There is no evidence that the crime rate has decreased by referring to partly already stored traffic data. Overall, the directive represents a "serious deterioration compared to the current legal situation".
But of course, we are certainly all wrong, because after all:
Reul, meanwhile, considers all concerns of citizens about a long and non-transparent storage of their personal data to be "dispelled" with the approved draft law.
So if they see that as dispelled, then we are not allowed to object at all. Why do we elect these people if they then stab us in the back? Also amusing are the really informed comparisons:
Gebhardt justifies his approval of blanket surveillance with two comparisons: Thus, anyone who sends a letter today also discloses the associated "traffic data" in the form of sender and recipient, for example, to the postman. Every driver must also be aware that his vehicle owner data has always been stored and, for example, determined when flashing at a red light and used for an investigation. These are "exclusively legal practices" that the authorities would also use in the case of data retention.
Well. If I were to bring that to a realistic comparison: every movement of the vehicle is registered and stored at the starting point and destination. Every conversation in the pub is noted regarding the people involved. Every letter is centrally stored in a database regarding sender and recipient. And the accesses can - provided a somewhat targeted argumentation of the authorities - be used for almost any purpose. Without a court order. And the data must be retained for two years - without any suspicion.
Strangely enough, this is not even the case with letters in reality. Yes, the postal secrecy can be lifted by court order - but nevertheless, there is no two-year history there that is only recorded on suspicion. With vehicles, the owner is indeed recorded - and noted accordingly in case of violations - but not necessarily stored for two years and accessible to almost every authority. And only the violations are stored - but not every movement.
The Internet connection data goes far beyond what is associated with normal wiretapping permissions. Filesharing clients may establish connections to any computers - with which the owner may have nothing to do. Email communications, which are based only on sender and recipient, cannot always be distinguished from spam - viruses and spam, however, falsify addresses, which is why there will be endless garbage in these data swamps.
By the way, in none of the previous data collection cases are such gigantic amounts of junk data collected as in the now decided attack on privacy.
And above all: who protects the citizen from the misinterpretation of these data swamps?