Digital rights issues don’t always get the crowds out onto the streets - but it does happen. This Saturday, Germans will be demonstrating under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin against the rise of the surveillance state in that country - including the German implementation of the EU’s Data Retention Directive, an EU-wide law that compels ISPs and phone companies to track and stockpile every user’s call, email destination and web-access for later access by law enforcement.
The Data Retention directive was passed by the European Parliament in 2005: all the countries of the European Union were supposed to implement it in national law by last week. Few have; and, country by country, the resistance against this ill-concieved piece of legislation is growing.
The Berlin protest is organised by a coalition of more than 50 groups, including Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung (the Working Group on Data Retention) , who are also taking their grievances to the German Federal Constitutional Court. These groups believe the Data Retention directive’s requirements fundamentally breach not only the privacy principles laid down in the ECHR , but also the German Constitution .
Germany has, like the U.S., a Supreme Court that can declare national legislation unconstitutional: it is yet undecided whether the court can challenge European Union law. That’s what Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung is seeking to discover in their complaint. It’s a legal showdown that could shake implementations of the directive in many other countries in Europe, as well as change how future directives might be permitted to undermine established civil liberties.
In the United States, the recent resignation of ex-Attorney Alberto Gonzalez have put his plans to steer data retention legislation to the US on the backburner. These popular moves against the European data retention regime should give his replacement serious pause before following Europe’s lead.
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