Freedom?

Good morning, Europe!

I've got some news for you - very soon everything you say, everything you see, everywhere you go on the Interenet will be recorded and stored for government use.

Congrats!

What's the buzz?

The buzz is the "Directive 2002/58/EC" which says that all the data for all us, Europeans, must be "retended" because of the greater good of "prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime,
such as terrorism and organised crime". Call me paranoid but inthe country I live in I really don't know in whose hands will those records fall and therefore to me there is no difference between this "retention" and a plain, old-fashioned spying except for the fact that it will utilise cutting-edge technology which will make it thorough for the government (or whoever happens to lay their hands on that data) to know my every move, my every online conversation (and as a developer spending at least 10 hours a day in front of the PC that is a major part of the conversations I conduct), my email contents... Hello? Did you even notice it? Yes, that last thing - my email contents? On the American influenced Slashdot discussion on the subject some people say that no rights are actually taken away - just the "luxury of privacy". I won't discuss whether or not privacy is just a luxury. I'll just point your eyes to the actual 'here-and-now' loss of one of our human rights - the right of privacy of the correspondence. In the U.S.A. it is a federal crime, spying on somebody's mail. In the Europe it is going to be legal for the governments to spy on your mail.

Any bells ringing? ...