1984

Perhaps a bit of a cliche title, but Mr Orwell did have a point :) The same thing seem to be happening here now in Europe after the horrible attacks in London last week, as were happening in the US after the 11-9 attacks: it is used as an excuse to take away civil liberties.

The European Commission, and also the national parliaments, have been discussing for some time the idea of forcing ISPs and telecom companies to store traffic data - records that contain the websites your visited, the email addresses you send mail to and whom you called at which time from which cell tower - and this all in the name of fighting criminality. Although that's a noble cause, they forget a couple of things (examples from the Netherlands):

The governments are not paying for the huge investments that ISPs need to make to store this traffic data for three! years. The costs for this are millions of euros per ISP which they will never see back, and will likely cause them to charge more to their customers.

All research that was done on this subject in the Netherlands show that collecting this data does not buy the autorities anything.

In the news today I read that "UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke" now wants to accelerate this hole process because of fighting terrorism. But with these regulations, the European People will also get stripped of important civil liberties, for something that is proven to be useles. Luckily the European Parliament's civil liberties committee doesn't agree with these new regulations either. One MEP said that "...introducing measures which sounded tough did not mean they would be effective. Fears were also raised about intrusion into privacy."

Besides this, it seems that some countries are giving up on the Schengen treaty, that allows freedom of travel inside the treaty's area.