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"EU
surveillance plans go too far", business tells ministers
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| You've got mail
- but is Big Brother watching? |
Paris,
4 May 2004 -
The International Chamber of Commerce is dismayed at a proposal to the
Council of Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs to introduce communications
data retention throughout Europe, and has written to each European minister
of justice to ask that the proposal be dropped. The proposal was made
by France, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
According to the proposal,
governments would require communication service providers -- such as telecoms
companies and Internet service providers -- to store information about
every communication made by each of their customers. This could include
location data of mobile phones, lists of websites visited, all details
of phone calls made including the caller and recipients, and details of
emails and text messages sent. In addition, companies that temporarily
retain indi
vidual customer information for billing purposes would be required
to keep it in a form accessible to law enforcement and other government
agencies for between one and three years.
Business supports
and assists law enforcement efforts to fight crime and terrorism in a
legally compliant way, but inconsistent and disproportionately heavy implementation
requirements will drain limited industry and government resources without
strengthening cooperation between law enforcement authorities and communication
service providers.
Last year, ICC was
part of a coalition of industry organizations - including the Union of
Industrial and Employers' Confederations of Europe, The European Information
and Communication Technology Association and the International Telecommunications
Users Group - that urged governments to consider data preservation as
an alternative to the wide scale, mandatory rules imposed by communications
data retention. Data preservation allows for specific data to be 'frozen'
until law enforcement agents can access it using a legal warrant. The
measure was agreed upon in the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime.
Philippe Wintrebert,
chair of the ICC Task Force on Telecoms Policy, said: "It is extraordinary
to see council members calling industry to retain traffic for one to three
years or more when senior member state experts to the European Commission
have repeatedly cautioned governments about the legality of any whole
scale traffic data retention measure of greater than 12 months. It is
also striking that two of the countries proposing this measure (Sweden
and Ireland) stated in 2002 that they saw no clear need for it. Where
is the business case for data retention on this scale? We need to fight
terrorism and serious crime - but not by crippling the communications
sector and destroying public confidence".
Business is deeply
concerned that the costs and technical difficulty of data retention and
subsequent access to data, and the damage to user confidence, make data
retention a far less effective alternative to data preservation. Business
is also concerned that the wide-ranging definitions of data included in
the proposal could include any type of communications-related device.
ICC maintains that
data storage requirements should not exceed what is necessary to achieve
law enforcement objectives, and should exhaust less intrusive measures
such as data preservation first. An open dialogue between governments
and industry is paramount to ensure that law enforcement authorities get
the support they need from communication providers while avoiding exorbitant
technical and financial burdens on business.
For further information,
please contact:
Maria Farrell,
ICC Commission on E-Business, IT and Telecoms
Tel. +33 (0)1 49 53 28 07 e-mail: Click here to send a mail.
ICC
Commission on E-Business, IT and Telecoms
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