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> First of all, the EU is not a single entity, but rather a hydra with many heads. The competency and resources of "intelligence agencies" varies a lot by count
by gioele 13y ago
> First of all, the EU is not a single entity, but rather a hydra with many heads. The competency and resources of "intelligence agencies" varies a lot by country, the privacy laws and the wire-taping/surveillance culture too.
Not that much.
The is a single EU privacy directive, (95/46/EC), and an extension to provide better privacy for online data (2002/58/EC). All the member state have implemented the same directive. What changes among states are just implementation details (as a programmer would say).
The thing to note here is that the EU directive provides a blanket exception for almost all governmental organizations and for all the police branches. This means that something like PRISM, if architectured in a proper way, would be completely legal.
Truth be told, in EU most telcos and ISP are forced by the law to keep track of all the communications and forward them to the relevant authorities either in batch or on demand.
- bad_user 13y agoEU directives are in general just guidelines. The EU is a culturally and politically diverse part of the world and there are differences between countries like night and day.
- gioele 13y agoThe EU directives are legally binding acts that force every member state to implement them in 2 years and in the proper way. Big fines have have been levied in the past against member states that tried shortcuts. The EU directives are also more powerful than local laws: if a state law conflicts with a directive, the directive takes precedence. The state of the political part of the EU is not the mess many politicians say. However, my main point is that in EU a program like PRISM would be totally legal under current laws. And it is probably already in place if you think about the SIREN program and you make it access the wealth of data harvested through the data retention directives.