[WSIS CS-Plenary] Merry Xmas brought to you by the NSA

[Ralf Bendrath]

mclauglm at po.muohio.edu wrote:
> FYI:  Almost anything you might want to know about Echelon may be found
> here: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

The Report by Duncan Campbell for the European Parliament "Interception
Capabilities 2000" that kicked off the EU Echelon debate (that in the end
led nowhere) is available here: 
<http://www.spiegel.de/statichtml/stoa/ic2kreport.htm>

The surveillance aspects of the information society have of course been 
dealt with in the CS Privacy and Security Working Group, chaired by Karen 
Banks and myself. But we already had a hard time to convince the 
governments to at least mention the fundamental human right to privacy in 
the WSIS documents. It would have been hopeless to try to make them speak 
about Echelon and NSA surveillance, when even the European Parliament 
could not push anybody here (and that was with much more public interest 
and news coverage then)...

But if you look at the recently endorsed EU plans to store all Internet 
and telephone connection data for 2 years and longer, and think about the 
NSA's and others' datamining programmes, you can get really scared.
More about this EU "data retention" directive: 
http://wiki.dataretentionisnosolution.com:81/index.php/Main_Page

Best, Ralf