[Ecommerce] EU data retention vote: outcome and consequences

[James Heald]

The EU parliament has voted in favour of sweeping minimum provisions on
communications data retention, rejecting all mitigating amendments.

The vote supports a deal cooked up between the EU Commission, the EU
member states and the leadership of the two largest party blocs (the
Conservatives and the Socialists).

The recommendations of the Parliament's own Justice committee were
rejected, along with amendments from smaller party groups including the
Greens and the Liberals.

FFII's Jonas Maebe set out some of the key bullet-point consequences below:


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Consequences
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 13:29:13 +0100
From: Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@elis.ugent.be>

Some of the consequences of the approved text:

1) Source and destination of all your emails will be logged
2) Your location and movement during mobile phone calls will be recorded
3) Any number you call will be logged, whether it was answered or not
4) Consumer protection organisations are not invited to participate
in the evaluation committee
5) Any member state can get an extension to keep the recorded data
for as long as they like (there is an article which allows
circumvention of the limits in the directive).
6) Many Internet-related retention rules may implicitly require the
content of the communications to be logged as well
7) The directive is silent regarding who has to pay for everything,
which means that reimbursement for telecom providers can vary in
different member states (and thus distorts the internal market).

The result was so bad that the EP's Rapporteur for the directive,
Alexander Alvaro (Liberals), had his name removed from the report.