The Register is running with a story that criminal lawyers in the Netherlands are pushing back against the country's data retention laws:
The Netherlands is the latest EU country to see pushback against excessive state surveillance of the Internet, with that country's criminal lawyers' association leading a court action against the state over its data retention laws.
The association (the NVSA) has joined forces with the Dutch Association of Journalists, Privacy First, NDP New Media, local ISP Bit, and Publiekstijdschriften. In light of the EU Court of Justice decision in April, which in April ruled that Europe's two-year data retention directive was invalid, the plaintiffs want the Netherlands' data retention regime repealed.
At the time, the EU Court of Justice ruled that the data retention regime represented a “wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data”, and went beyond was was “strictly necessary”.
I wonder how many other European countries are waiting to see the outcome of this particular attempt to redress the balance?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @11:53PM
How about we give it a provisional implementation and see how it works?
Lets do a limited roll out of these data retention requirements to just politicians, their appointees and officers of any company grossing more than €5 million per year. Try that for 10 years and then decide if we want to roll it out to all citizens.
(Score: 1) by G-forze on Tuesday December 09 2014, @06:57AM
I could get behind this. Those are the people which are the most likely to make backroom deals and conspiracies that hurt the public, anyway. Terrorists? Meh. Try monitoring the communications of the banking sector for once.
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday December 09 2014, @12:15AM
At the time, the EU Court of Justice ruled that the data retention regime represented a “wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data”
The EU is so hopelessly hamstrung by their own Charter, that the courts seems nothing more than a haranguing meddlesome neighborhood busybody, one which the various states simply ignore.
Why not admit that they re-invented the Articles of Confederation [wikipedia.org], and start over, as many other "countries" had do do before they finally came up with a workable formula.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by monster on Tuesday December 09 2014, @05:50PM
I think you are wrong with this one.
The real matter with all this legal wrangling is that the Charter is from a time when the EU was seen as a project for people and not just for companies, so it has a lot of safeguards that keep the autoritarian impulses of governments on check, and sometimes even roll back some of the more egregious legislation passed because it's clearly unreasonable.
"But the terrorists!", you may say: Well, since the difference between being labelled a terrorist or a warrior of freedom seems to be just a matter of who backs them, it doesn't look like a great deal to be deprived of your rights because of such nebulous concept. There's already a way to deal with criminals, and that's combining police work and disaster response.
It really amuses me how disconnected from reality one can be (not speaking of you, just in general) that one country can be ok with nullifying habeas corpus (Guantanamo et al) and the right to trial in a public court (NSLs and the abuse of "too secret to even tell, but he's guilty, promised" withheld evidence). It makes the whole tea affair look like it was just about the price, after all.
(Score: 3, Funny) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday December 09 2014, @06:49AM
Is it only for non-native English-speakers that this term has a funny ring to it? Or is it only me in particular? My first thought was "nice tautology..."
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Tuesday December 09 2014, @11:57AM
I read it as just "criminals" :-)