Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-23-Speech-2-314"
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"en.20030923.10.2-314"2
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"Mr President, I should first of all like to pursue in greater depth the news to which Mrs Boogerd-Quaak has already referred. It is about the airline company Jet Blue that recently had the dubious honour of being the first American airline company to be able to provide data about its airline passengers to the Pentagon. The latter had requested this information so as to be able to make a risk assessment of passengers based on the CAPS II programme. When this piece of information was leaked, a huge outpouring of indignation in the United States ensued. Apologies were made and the data tap was turned off immediately. Especially serious was the fact that passengers had not been previously informed of the violation of their privacy, but the wrath of public opinion was also directed at the very fact of registration on a massive scale. As already stated, the influential UCLA, the American Civil Liberties Association, qualified this as ‘a highly un-American system’ and condemned the fact that, in this way, every passenger is turned into a suspect.
I am giving this account of American indignation to press home to the Commissioner that he should not be fixated on striking a compromise between us and Minister Rich and company in the current negotiations with the United States, because the playing field is much wider and it is up to us to make it wider still. Apparently, the American public does not deem the actions and measures viable, and we must therefore also raise our objections.
Commissioner, I should like to ask you to try out an alternative route using an alternative strategy. You have easy access to the Anglo-Saxon press, and I therefore count on your written powers of persuasion, via American public opinion, to put the administration effectively under pressure. Consider it to be a kind of hearts and minds campaign
What are our specific problems? It would be useful to clarify this, because I think that we will find a ready audience in this respect, also among the public in the USA.
Mr President, the second point that I should like to bring to your attention is the proposals that are circulating to develop a passport with advanced electronic chips in which biometric data, including somebody’s past travelling history, can be stored. If this travelling history is stored on this chip and somebody travels to America, then Bush will still have unfettered access to the information which is the subject of our bickering. My question to the Commission is therefore: how can we ensure that we are not fighting a rearguard action today? How much progress has been made with the discussion about these passports, and are you considering how this might affect the privacy of our citizens? This is, after all, how we can avoid being faced again with
in a year’s time and being indignant on a massive scale."@en1
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