As some of you know, I’ve kept a keen eye on the internet censoring in East Asia, but now it is time to look at Europe too:
It has now become urgent to adopt harmonised provisions at EU level on this subject. A certain number of Member States have adopted, or plan to adopt, national
measures requiring some or all operators to retain given types of data so that they can be used for [preventing and combating organised crime and terrorism] when necessary.
EU Directive on public electronic communication services surveillance (pdf)
Please note Article 1 (my italics):
1. This Directive aims to harmonise the provisions of the Member States concerning obligations on the providers of publicly available electronic communications services
or of a public communications network with respect to the processing and retention of certain data, in order to ensure that the data is available for the purpose of the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of serious criminal offences, such as terrorism and organised crime.
2. This Directive shall apply to traffic and location data of both private and legal persons, as well as the related data necessary to identify the subscriber or registered user. It shall not apply to the content of electronic communications, including information consulted using an electronic communications network.
Oh, but I’m no terrorist, you might say with sigh of relief.
Well, read the definitions:
a) ‘data’ means traffic data and location data, as well as the related data necessary to identify the subscriber or user;
b) ‘user’ means any legal entity or natural person using a publicly available electronic communications service, for private or business purposes, without necessarily having subscribed to this service.
This essentially means that not only are service providers allowed to, they are lawfully obliged to keep information tracking on who you are and what you are doing, even when using services you yourself haven’t applied for. What are they? Stupid? If you pull out an information regime on publically available communication systems, any "bad guys" will turn to unmonitored solutions. Ever heard about morse code? But in turn they get to monitor "the good guys". Gees!
This is fucked up right here. Hack the planet!