German industry against data retention
Sorry I didn’t do anything for almost a month now. I whish it was due to my being on vacation, on a sunny, sandy beach. Unfortunately, my apparent inactivity was really due to my being extremely busy.
Fortunately, pretty much everyone else was on vacation, so I didn’t miss too much. Now things are slowly starting up again.
While some might deem data retention to be somewhat objectionable from a civil rights perspective – after all, it treats every innocent citizen like a criminal suspect -, a few days ago, German businesses spoke up as well. They rather clearly called for limits on obligations to providers, as they consider the idea far too expensive to implement.
The current EDRIgram has a nice, short summary of the position paper.
Data retention is a hot debate at EU level right now: Should ISPs, telephone companies and other communication businesses be obliged to accumulate and retain detailed data about their customer’s every activity?
This is something that paranoid “public safety” (read: police state) advocates have been on to ever since they realised how easy it is to store and analyse digital data. If you don’t have to move paper files around or place plainclothes observers on the street, it becomes so much easier to keep tabs on everyone. So if it’s possible, why not do it? (Lawrence Lessig provides a nice discussion of this in his book (yes, on paper) “Code and other Laws of Cyberspace”).
For some comic relief after so much Big Brother, you could check out South Park’s take on filesharing (.avi, 2MB).