I'm actually surprised this is my first post about this topic: freedom, security, data-mining, content-industry... summed up: privacyI have my own opinion about all these things and I'm very liberal, if not even left concerning those. I do believe in the right for pricavy and informational self-determination of the individual. I think noone - not the government, the police and certainly not the content-industry should have the right to invade my privacy and spy on me without reasonable suspicion. I don't think the government or any affiliates should be allowed to preemtively collect sensible-information like fingerprints or DNA-data of innocent citizens. Not for the purposes of crime-prevention, nor anything else - and definitely not for "protection against terrorism".
That said, I guess my attitude towards things like mass-surveillance or fingerprints are more than clear. It's not surprising that I got furious when I read the following article (sorry, german only): http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/28/28146/1.html
Not too long ago, the german parliament passed a bill that now requires the ISPs to keep data about all internet-traffic stored and available for 6 months! The critics were silenced with the usual "this will help the police and the crime-rate will go down and ... it will help against terrorism!". Always a nice argumentation: make the ones being against the law responsible for murder, child-rape and terrorist-attacks. The doubts and worries of the people who also see the drawbacks of such mass-surveillance, like the commissioner for privacy protection, Peter Schaar, were dismissed with arguments like "the access to this data will be highly restricted and only possible with jurisdictional approval through a court-order, so the possibility for abuse will be minimal".
Why to have such mass data mining and storage of all internet-traffic anyway? Good question. I know the EU requires countries to have these methods in effect, and I honestly am not well-informed enough to really know why the EU wants that - I have my theories but I don't wanna sound too paranoid.
I know one big lobby though that has always had a big interest in that data: The content industry. They were the ones to cry out the loudest that it's so difficult to retrieve the connection information from the providers in order to identify and sue people illegally sharing copyright-protected material. Back then, the providers only had to keep the data for 24 hours - so the content industry had to be quick to address the ISP to hold the data longer, since it might be evidence. Now, they can look at it much more relaxed. But there's still one problem: In order to get insight into these data-files, they have to address the jurisdictional system and prove that there was indeed an illegal act. While proving that (or at least stating it in a way to make it sound believable enough for a court) is not that difficult, it certainly takes time and involves alot of additional effort from the prosecution... especially when you think about how many many mass-complaints are filed by the content-industry these days.
And that's where the article I linked to comes in... something noone could've thought of is actually happening now: the attorneys are completely overloaded. The jurisdiction simply can't handle all the cases. And so the attorney generals thought of a solution: "Why not simply give the content industry direct access to the data instead? That would take the work off the jurisdiction."
... so we actually arrived where the Content Industry wanted to be at all along. They will be able to approach the ISPs directly and simply start suing whoever they like, based on the information found in the data recorded by the ISPs. Without having to consult a court, without having an initial suspicion, without evidence.
And it might not end there. Who knows what's next? Maybe they can soon access the data without having to address the ISPs? Maybe other groups of interest might want to have similar access aswell? Why not? It's all about keeping us safe and secure, isn't it? And if you don't have anything to hide, then you have nothing to fear, right?
image taken from and © www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de
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