EU Data Retention Directive passes

[BoyOfDestiny]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051215-5780.html

This EU gives me a feeling of déjà vu...

[floppy]

Time to buy storage device and media stocks.

And move to the third world, too.

[WildTangent]

Ya, sounds a lot like the Patriot Act to me. *shakes head* What a paranoid world we live in.

-Wild

[Kvark]

It certainly doesn't feel funny that every single phone call I make, every single email I send or recieve and every single website I visit will be logged. The worst part is that it's not just going to be archived and put away, the info will be looked at too. The TV news showed a pattern finding program that can dig through all that info and find dangerous or otherwise interesting persons based on for example patterns in their phone calls as an example of how useful it is.

Think I'm gonna move somewhere outside of EU if and when I can afford it, until then it might help to use encryption whenever possible.

[poptones]

Ummmm... encryption doesn't mean much when you're not using proxies - and if you DO use proxies, well, they can call that "suspicious" too and use it as an excuse to impound your stuff.

Is there a law where you live protecting you from being forced to incriminate yourself? Without that all the encryption in the world won't protect you - if you're a suspect and you refuse to give up your passwords they'll just throw you in jail for that.

[BoyOfDestiny]

Ummmm... encryption doesn't mean much when you're not using proxies - and if you DO use proxies, well, they can call that "suspicious" too and use it as an excuse to impound your stuff.

Is there a law where you live protecting you from being forced to inciminate yourself? Without that all the encryption in the world won't protect you - if you're a suspect and you refuse to give up your passwords they'll just throw you in jail for that.

Yup. How about steganography?

[BWF89]

They should sell tshirts with the slogan "George Orwell was right".

[ow50]

Damn, I hate these "terrorist laws". And who's this going to stop. Terrorists will use VoIP, some prepaid, anonymous cell phone deals and whatever else there is that's not tracked. But I bet this law will come in very handy to entertainment industry when looking for copyright infringers.

The weird part about this is that all that data is to be held by private companies. Internet and phone companies will have to manage information that should be secret and for government use only.

And what do you think, will companies use all the information they have to further their business? Here in Finland a while ago a company called Sonera used telephone records (who called who and when) a least on a couple occasions, most notably when trying to track down if someone from their staff was leaking information to the press. This same company is my current ISP.

By the basic structure of capitalism, companies do not care about ethics, always not even about law. It's all about profits. We're trusting way too much information to parties who are bound to misuse it.

[23meg]

The EU needs an Internet 3 now.

[Lovechild]

The word retarded comes to mind... then again that happens quite often when it comes to the EU.