WRITTEN ON July 15th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

What’s the word for something sickening and oppressively boring in equal measure? And isn’t that how bad stuff coming out of Brussels makes you feel? No, not the story about the Belgian journalist who bragged about abusing Moroccan women, I mean . the piece about them putting the security directorate (which is conducting a war on data protection) in charge of data protection

It sems this happened in February and nobody except Statewatch noticed.

Surely people want security and justice, and yet insist on being treated with dignity and their personal data respected. Surely people would be livid about seeing these two roles confused? No, says the Commission casually:

“It is not relevant to them how the competencies are divided (and information distributed) between the different authorities to achieve that result.”

How does Tony Bunyan cope with all this stuff? Is he a fearless superhero? Or does he make it sound worse than it really is? More below…

There are a number of measures going through the EU at the moment on “law and order”…which provide no protection whatsoever for the individual. The draft articles in the draft Framework Decisions on exchanging information and intelligence between law enforcement agencies and on the mandatory retention and exchange of telecommunications data simply refer to the secure transfer of the personal data between the agencies. No rights are provided in either for the individual to be told what information is held nor who it has been transferred to (which can include non-EU states). This approach is backed by the so-called “principle of availability”, namely that all information and intelligence held nationally by law enforcement agencies in all 25 EU member states should be available to all the other agencies…
The report ends by suggesting that the end-game is not just for all EU law enforcement agencies to have access to personal data regarding law and order (including DNA and fingerprints data) but that they should also have: “direct access to the national administrative systems of all Member States (eg: registers on persons, including legal persons, vehicles, firearms, identity documents and drivers licences as well as aviation and maritime registers.”

Oh great…