Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-05-Speech-3-018"
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"en.20010905.2.3-018"2
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"Mr President, we welcome the fact that the report recognises and accepts that Echelon exists. This is something that the Green Group stated a long time ago in this Parliament and we have now been vindicated. However, the report fails to draw any political conclusions. It is also extremely hypocritical in that it criticises the Echelon interception system, while at the same time we are planning to establish a European secret service. In other words, it is not that there is a problem with this system as such, it is just that the EU wants to be able to do the same and have its own system. The report naively gives the impression that if you have some sort of democratic control, all will be okay.
It is a well known fact that there is no effective public control mechanism of secret services and their undemocratic activities anywhere in the world. By their very nature, secret services cannot be controlled and therefore we, as Members of this Parliament, who claim to be concerned about human rights and basic civil liberties, should be questioning their very existence. But, on the contrary, the report serves to legitimise a European secret service which will inevitably infringe fundamental rights in the same way as the Echelon system.
The temporary committee and the report focus mainly on the threat to European industrial competition and the threat posed by industrial espionage. But this is not the vital and fundamental issue. The real issue at stake, which is totally lost in this report, is that nobody can communicate in confidence any more. This is the real threat to us all. Political spying is a greater threat than economic spying. Recently there have been reports in British newspapers which point out that European leaders have ordered police and intelligence agencies to coordinate their efforts to identify and track anti-capitalist demonstrators. This will give a green light to secret services to put under surveillance people whose activities are entirely democratic and legal. Whole political and social scenes will be criminalised. Very private information about people will be accessible to police and secret services without those people having any say or control.
The report goes to great lengths to push these kinds of dangers under the carpet. It also ignores the plans that are forging ahead on the Enfopol interception system in the EU. We, as Members of the European Parliament, should be demanding that people’s freedoms and the right to privacy, as enshrined in Article 8 of the European Convention and Article 6 of the EU Treaty, are protected and that people are not forced to live under permanent control where the possibility exists that every communication they make will be accessible to unknown forces.
Finally, the report lets the UK off the hook. It should have requested at the very least that the UK dissociate itself from the management of the Echelon system and it should also have asked Germany to close down the interception base which is located on its territory. These Member States, which are collaborating, were let off the hook totally."@en1
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