Clarke: Europe must trade civil liberties for security

Clarke: Europe must trade civil liberties for security
www.theregister.co.uk... (full story)

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke has warned that European citizens will have to accept that civil liberties may have to be bartered away in exchange for protection from terrorists and organised criminals.

Proposed new data retention laws that would require communications providers to retain communications data are top of the agenda for the meeting, despite that fact that the proposals have been declared illegal by lawyers at the European Council and Commission.

However, Clarke has acknowledged that the government has failed to make a case for the necessity of the proposals.

Critics argue that the proposed laws would not solve any existing problems. They point out that not having the powers proposed in the data retention bill did not seem to hamper the investigation into the Madrid bombings, nor did it stop the police in the UK from tracking down and arresting in short order the four suspects in the 21 July attacks.

The Home Secretary has also come under heavy fire from European politicians, particularly the Greens and Liberal Democrats.

OK, I'm all for disassembling the EU. We don't need this BS, there's already enough of these ridiculous EU directives and laws.
I at least, don't want to loose my civil liberties and live in fear and under tyranny.

Man this pisses me off.
Everybody sign the anti-dataretention petion! (click on the banner in my signature). What an idiots.

The war on terror, is a war on a muslim extremist idiology, it cant be won by 'liberating' countries, and fighting terrorists with weapons.
The data retention plans are completely useless, the logs will become SO incredibly huge (I've read estimates of 1 pentabite (1,000 TB, or 1,000,000 GB) for The Netherlands alone. There is no way they're gonna prevent terrorists by storing internet data.

But hey, there are good people in the EU too; earlier this week, a German Minister said "George Bush ought to be shot" because of the Hurricane Katrina failures

wow they said that openly? i could quote an american who voiced a similarly worded opinion that says the exact oposite. but you guys are european.

my question is exactly how they would use this information? its far to large to be useful? are they purposley trying to enact useless expensive time consuming measures to both slow down the internet and put themselves in a position to regulate companies?

uk.news.yahoo.com...

news.yahoo.com.../nm/20050824/wl_nm/security_britain_preachers_dc

both of these sound eerily like america's hidden patriot , patriot 2, bank secrecy , and current idealogies.

***oops forgot this part
it seems your boss is part of this society. With his connections in this society the raw data laws are seemlingly making a lot more sense.

www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk...
www.rss.org.uk...


[edit on 2005-9-10 by NuTroll]

Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.

Here is a link to a CNN article about the German Minister: edition.cnn.com...

[...] He later retracted the remark, saying he meant Bush should be shot down "in a political sense"

I wonder if he even realizes how closelly he mirrored the quote by benjamin franklin. Excuse my paraphrasing of said quote but here goes:

He who is willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserves neither.

Originally posted by SwearBear

Clarke: Europe must trade civil liberties for security
www.theregister.co.uk... (full story)

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke has warned that European citizens will have to accept that civil liberties may have to be bartered away in exchange for protection from terrorists and organised criminals.

Proposed new data retention laws that would require communications providers to retain communications data are top of the agenda for the meeting, despite that fact that the proposals have been declared illegal by lawyers at the European Council and Commission.

However, Clarke has acknowledged that the government has failed to make a case for the necessity of the proposals.

Critics argue that the proposed laws would not solve any existing problems. They point out that not having the powers proposed in the data retention bill did not seem to hamper the investigation into the Madrid bombings, nor did it stop the police in the UK from tracking down and arresting in short order the four suspects in the 21 July attacks.

The Home Secretary has also come under heavy fire from European politicians, particularly the Greens and Liberal Democrats.

OK, I'm all for disassembling the EU. We don't need this BS, there's already enough of these ridiculous EU directives and laws.
I at least, don't want to loose my civil liberties and live in fear and under tyranny.

Dont know if you noticed mate, but it's OUR Home Secretary whos saying this, not the EU.

Charles Clarke is worse than David "didn't do anything wrong" Blunkett and the fat, little, bearded sycophant would happily have everyone in their homes by 1900hrs and logging their every move with the Government if they dared to venture outside.

If anything, the EU laws on human Rights and civil liberties serve to protect us from a Government hell-bent on curtailing our rights at home.

Originally posted by Sugarlump
I wonder if he even realizes how closelly he mirrored the quote by benjamin franklin. Excuse my paraphrasing of said quote but here goes:

He who is willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserves neither.

The true quote is:

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - BF

Source

Originally posted by Zion Mainframe
Everybody sign the anti-dataretention petion! (click on the banner in my signature).

Already signed that a few weeks ago I urge others to do the same, even if you're not European.

It's true that the amount of data storaged would be enormous, the costs that telecommunication companies would have to pay for the storage devices would also be very big, it's possible the internet would slow down, and internet connections would become more expensive, data retention would most likely not catch any terrorists (especially because some gov'ts/elites probably engineered the terrorist attacks themselves, like back in the 80s, operation Gladio) or then it could result in catching some "terrorists" that aren't really terrorists, just to satisfy the public.

Originally posted by stumason
Dont know if you noticed mate, but it's OUR Home Secretary whos saying this, not the EU.

Yes I'm aware of that. However Jack Straw has the same opinion as Clarke.
news.bbc.co.uk...

Anyway, if we really live in the reality where everything is as "they" say it is, when data retention and surveillance is discussed this publicly, wouldn't the terrorists figure out other ways of communication to avoid being detected by authorities? I mean, they can't be that stupid, they planned and carried out 9/11? For christs sake I think even I could come up with ways of avoiding being detected, like encrypting everything, using privately owned SMTP and POP email servers, or perhaps hiring some programmer to program some other communication software that's not publicly in use etc.

So this data retention they are suggesting can't be only for stopping serious terrorists and other serious criminals, there has to be something else. Psyops? More control over average people?
Or then these guys suggesting it are just plain stupid, which I doubt.

Humm... never though the British would take things farther than us, but this is an interesting turn of events.


[edit on 10-9-2005 by WestPoint23]