Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-14-Speech-3-088"
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"en.20051214.11.3-088"2
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"Mr President, it is an irony of fate that, immediately after having voted through the ‘directive on monitoring’, Parliament awards the Sakharov Prize for transparency and human rights. On the same day that we are building walls to restrict our fellow citizens’ freedom, we give prizes to those who break down these walls in the surrounding world. According to the spin doctors, this directive should give us freedom from murder, terrorism and organised crime but, in reality, it frees us from the democratic ideal more than from anything else.
The good thing about democracy is being able to communicate with whomever one wishes whenever one wishes, without feeling anxious about such communications. The advocates of the directive maintain that the relevant monitoring is necessary for combating the most serious crimes, but they are wrong. The directive would apply in practice to all the crimes listed in the European arrest warrant, that is to say it could be used to pursue those who share files illicitly too. That is why the big media companies are now rejoicing at this new directive. It will allow them to retain their old technology, and they will not need to change over to more modern technology that would enable consumers to save money.
According to the directive, data is to be retained for between 6 and 24 months. In fact, 80% of all e-mails are what are called spam. This is a junk directive that leads to the retention of junk mail, a practice that is scarcely the most effective way of combating organised crime. It costs money and diverts resources away from more effective measures. It is also easy for professional criminals to avoid getting caught in the net.
In the United States, the police quick-freeze data. It is much simpler and more efficient and only affects those specifically suspected of committing a crime. Where were you on 17 March? Whom did you meet? Whom did you sit beside? Did you sit beside a known criminal? How can you prove that you had no contact? How do you know that those whom you regularly e-mail are not hunted by the police as sharers of illicit files on a large scale? How do you prove that it was not material protected by copyright that you sent? Are you aware of the dark sides of those with whom you communicate?
States governed by law will continue to exist and, more often than not, people will only be convicted when guilty, but perhaps the burden of suspicion will only be lifted from them following abusive interrogations and house searches. The Greens voted against this directive."@en1
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