German privacy activists cry foul
Found on The Register on Tuesday, 01 January 2008
Privacy activists have filed a constitutional complaint against Germany's data retention laws.
Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung argues that the data retention law treats all citizens as potential terrorists or delinquents. "The pervasive logging of communication patterns without reasonable suspicion resembled a serious encroachment upon the basic values of constitutional legality," it said.
Organisations and individuals that rely on confidentiality to do their work - lawyers, journalists and even crisis lines - are deprived of free and open communication because of the data logging, the group claims.
Governments across Europe brought in the measures, which backers argue are necessary in the fight against terrorism and organised crime.
Even police admits that this monitoring won't help, but politicians want to force it go get some votes, because they "did something". According to a study released by the German Federal Criminal Office, in only 381 cases there was a lack of information which would now be monitored; amongst them were only 2 cases related to terrorism. And none of those cases had to do anything with crime prevention what is a major argument of the backers. This does not justify the total monitoring of more than 82 million citizens. Also, officials tend to allow more and more access to the data over time: for example, access to bank master data was granted by law to monitor and prevent cash flow funding terrorism. Today, the IRS, social welfare and more have access to this for their everyday work. And do politicians really think that a trained terrorist (not the neighbour wanna-be) doesn't know how to use eg. TOR?