The Germans Are Getting Restless

German court overturns law on phone, e-mail data - Yahoo! News

BERLIN – Germany's highest court on Tuesday overturned a law that let anti-terror authorities retain data on telephone calls and e-mails, saying it posed a "grave intrusion" to personal privacy rights and must be revised.

The court ruling was the latest to sharply criticize a major initiative by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government and one of the strongest steps yet defending citizen rights from post-Sept. 11 terror-fighting measures.

The ruling comes amid a European-wide attempt to set limits on the digital sphere, that includes disputes with Google Inc. over photographing citizens for its Street View maps.

The Karlsruhe-based Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the law violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence and failed to balance privacy rights against the need to provide security. It did not, however, rule out data retention in principle.

The law had ordered that all data — except content — from phone calls and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities, who could probe who contacted whom, from where and for how long.

"The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data," the court said, adding that "such retention represents an especially grave intrusion."

The court said because citizens did not notice the data was being retained it caused "a vague and threatening sense of being watched."

Nearly 35,000 Germans had appealed to the court to overturn the law, which stems from a 2006 European Union anti-terrorism directive requiring telecommunications companies to retain phone data and Internet logs for a minimum of six months in case they are needed for criminal investigations.

Civil rights groups had fiercely opposed the law, arguing that even excluding the content of phone calls and e-mails could allow authorities too deep a view into their personal sphere.

"Massive amounts of data about German citizens who pose no threat and are not suspects is being retained," Germany's commissioner for data security issues, Peter Schaar, told ARD television.

Security experts argued the information is crucial to being able to trace crimes involving heavy use of the Internet, including tracking terror networks and child pornography rings.

While the court upheld the EU directive as necessary to fight terror, it took issue with how the German law had interpreted it and ordered further restrictions on access to the data.

Changes ordered by the court included granting access to the data only by court order and only in the event of "concrete and imminent danger." The court further insisted the information be stored in the private sector so it was not concentrated in one spot.

Germans, in particular, are sensitive to privacy issues, based on their experiences under the Nazis as well as the former East Germany's Communist dictatorships, where information on individuals was collected and abused by the state.

Can't see our courts taking that much interest in our rights, can you?

Balls Tosser

Enough said:

Germany Zaps Spawn World Saviour Amid Grecian Riots

So, Germany doesn't think much of the Spawn of the Manse's efforts to save the UK economy and that of the world.

Coming to Spain, soon, and then the UK (certainly if Labour get in at the next election): a little bit of public aggravation in Greece.

Which may have something to do with eu-conomic pressures, among other things. so, not a good idea to press for closer integration and joining the Euro.

And while we're at it, more shite about the EU: the reason the EU will find it difficult (nay, impossible) to launch proper public PR for itself is that as soon as it becomes visible, its faults become immediately apparent as well. And they are such screamingly obvious ones that even the dimmest of Europhiles cannot waffle them away. Chuck in the fact that plenty of people through Europe and especially in the UK don't like the bloody thing on principle and you can see their dilemma. Why else has the EU had such a low profile in the media the pas 10 years?

And while I'm at it, I'd like to say I'm heartily sick of the media and blogosphere's moral panic stampede all over welfare and dependency. Are there scum out there? Yes. Are they vile to live near? Yes. Are there generations of workless deadbeats? Yes. Of course. Are they 'legions'? Well, no they fucking aren't. They're a minority of the population and they're a minority of the people who live on benefits or are supported by benefits. I can tell you for a fact that getting money out of the benefits system is hard-work, time-consuming, intrusive and demeaning. And that's money you supposedly deserve.

Joining in this squalid mob doesn't help the majority of people who need benefits. The one group of people that you can never weed out is precisely the persistent element. There's no point screwing up a whole system and making it worse for the majority who need it just so that you can assuage your own biliousness nastiness by thinking you're targetting the scum.

Labour are just as disgusting as the Tories on using this as a PR election ploy. It's shit, it's dishonest and it doesn't work. Both parties are in some ways quite keen to have both an underclass and a group of unemployed/workless precisely for this reason, that they can wheel out fake policies to garner votes when necessary. That's why you end up with some ignorant middle-class twat like David Freud being commissioned to write a policy report on welfare reform for the government - in three weeks, knowing nothing about it.

We've had mass unemployment in this country for nearly 30 years now: even Labour's own figures show there have been over a million unemployed for the last ten years. Thatcher got in on the "Labour isn't working" ploy, doubled unemployment within 18 months of gaining power - and then the matter ceased to bother most of the electorate. In fact, they were happy enough with mass unemployment to vote the Tories in for 18 years.

And before I sign off...regarding the Baby P case, I noted that in a media report it was said that Sharon Shoesmith and her colleagues failed partly because they didn't have enough social work experience - because their background was in education. Not unexpected, when you think about it: Sharon Shoesmith had previously worked for Ofsted, which gave the Council a positive report in 2006 and Ofsted are now the government department in charge of all childcare as well as education. When did that happen? Didn't it occur to anyone in government that child welfare and education are not the same thing and require different skills and knowledge?

Still, education doesn't matter any more. It doesn't even appear in the title of the relevant government departments.