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The European Parliament is debating a passenger name record (PNR) law that would store information collected by airlines about passengers, including email addresses, credit card details, phone numbers, and meal choices (halal, kosher, etc), for use by security services. The proposal was rejected last year, but it is now back with over 800 amendments, some of which call for the proposal to be scrapped altogether:
Europarl's resident "Mr Data" said there is no proof that data retention stops terrorism. In an impassioned speech, German Green MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht said it was "a scandal" that member states and the European Commission were still pushing for this law even after the European Court of Justice ruled blanket data retention illegal.
Mocking the position of the European People's Party, he said: "Criminals adjust to retention loopholes, so why don't we keep the data for 100 years? Or why don't we retain data on train passengers? I could travel throughout Europe by train, am I not then a huge security threat? Or by car? Why don't we track cars? Why don't we just tape everything everyone does all the time? That is your [EPP] agenda."
Britain's police forces retain the data of all persons arrested by them for 100 years, whether or not they are ever charged with a crime or found guilty.
Dutch MEP Sophie In't Veld also rejected EPP claims that storage of passenger data would have prevented the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris earlier this year.
However, Swedish MEP Kristina Winberg of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, which includes British political party UKIP, said she didn't "feel safe in my own country" and that PNR data retention was necessary. British Conservative MEP Timothy Kirkhope added: "I am still convinced of the necessity and proportionality of the instrument. The threats we face are real and we need to find solutions."
The EDRi (European Digital Rights) has sent postcards to all EU MEPs.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday June 08 2015, @01:37PM
Currently the main problems (but not the only ones) in the world come from followers of the religion of peach fighting each other over the right way to oppose what many of us in the west hold dear. They're the natural allies to the crazy bumfucks in the bible belt, except they have power, where as the anti-smokers at www.godhatesfags.com don't.
This has partly allowed to happen because the rest of the world gets involved in the quest for oil. You could argue that the bumfucks have managed to get power because of the dictatorships they live in were caused by the americans, it's a constant tale from the libtards, but I'm not entirely sure what they expected would have happened if the West had just pulled out of these areas post 1945 and run our economy on magical fairy dust.
in the last year, 4 conflicts reported more than 10,000 victims - Afghanistan (religion based), Syria/Iraq (ditto -- the intelligencia rebels lost years ago and really should have teamed up with Assad to get back to the status quo), and Boko Haram (religion)
In fact the only major conflicts that don't have Islam as a core or secondary part of the problem are
* Mexican drug war
* Ukraine separatist war
The other 13 major conflicts listed in Wikipedia are Islam based. In fact about 90% of the conflicts at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts [wikipedia.org] are Islam based, the rest look like hangovers from the cold war, and the DRC which is just a cluster of crap.
Whether this is because people in conflict zones tend to go to Islam due to their low levels of education, or whether it's because Islam leads to conflict isn't clear, however given that Islam was born in conflict [wikipedia.org] (unlike say chrstianity, which didn't really dig conflict for the first few hunderd years, and only really started with the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula after Islam had spread there.