The European Union is rethinking how it logs citizens' telephone calls and internet use data for law enforcement purposes.

Since the attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, the EU has required telecoms companies in its 27 member states to record the sender, receiver, time and place of any telephone call or email message.

The practice has been criticised by privacy advocates as overreaching.

EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said the law does not in itself guarantee citizens' right to privacy and that member states' interpretations have varied.

"Data retention has proven useful in criminal investigations, but there is need for improvement as regards the design of the Directive so that it better respects both the security and the privacy of our citizens," Malmstrom said in prepared remarks to reporters.

The European Commission plans to present amendments later this year after consulting with member states, lawmakers, industry and civil society.

The data retention rules have given European law enforcement officers wide-sweeping access to telephone and email logs that officials say helped bring down the likes of a €40 million heroin smuggling ring in the UK in 2009.

But the EU law, which requires telecommunication companies to keep data logs at least six months and up to two years and provide them to police if requested, has also clashed with privacy concerns.

European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx has called the law "without doubt the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the EU," and deemed it a "substantial interference" to the right to privacy.

Smaller telecom companies have also complained of the costs of logging the data. Some member states reimburse operators for the cost, while others do not.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/366868/eu-r ... y-services

About friggin' time

Why not debate the proposed law properly before imposing such regulations?

Because the mechanics of the EU. Since the countries within the EU are still nation states, the EU cannot in fact pass 'laws' - only national governments can do that, within their respective areas of governance. IIRC the EU has two levels of regulation - there are the major directives, which are passed to the national governments, who are expected to interpret them according to existing local laws and them implement them as new laws to the greatest extent possible. Then there are minor proposals - I think they may also be called directives, I'm not sure - which are seen as amendments to existing 'rules' and are therefore communicated directly to the people who are implementing them, bypassing local governments on the way. The distinction is that the major ones, the ones that have to be new national laws, are debated by the european parliament whereas the minor 'updates' aren't, they're done entire by the EU's equivalent of the civil service. This was basically what the Maastrict (sp?) treaty was about - nations agreed to allow the EU's bureaucracy to function within their borders without required oversight from their local legislators at every turn.

It sounds like a pretty bad system but in fact it's not that different to how our government works anyway. New laws are debated by the HoP as are major amendments of old laws but there's a wealth of stuff that's basically re-interpretation of existing legislation which is done by the civili service without MPs ever approving the changes.

Of course the actual problem with this system is it's immediately open to being used as a power grab by the civil servants in question - if you have a change to want to make and you can either do it as a new regulation, which requires debate in many parliaments, approval at many levels etc etc, or you can implement it as a change to an existing regulation no matter how tenuous the link between the two is, which will therefore require none of those things, which option are you going to pick?

Jon

Maybe the problems are closer to home. If our government wants the data they should pay for it. Though I can see it breaching the rights of privacy of individuals.