Regarding the EU Electronic communications legislative act COD/2005/0182. Norway is not a part of the EU (I hope they never will be) but we are debating whether or not to implement the legislative or not.
The whole thing boils down to that ISP and telecom providers must store the following for a minimum of 6 months to maximum 2 years
- Data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication;
- Data necessary to trace and identify the destination of a communication;
- Data necessary to identify the date, time and duration of a communication;
- Data necessary to identify the type of communication;
- Data necessary to identify the communication device;
- Data necessary to identify the location of mobile communication equipment.
The main purpose of this legislative is to fight terrorism, child pornography and other hard crime. I understand that this is a very useful legislative that will help the authorities in the ongoing war against crime but I am afraid that this will be the first step towards the 1984 future that George Orwell describes in his novel.
As you can see there is only going to be stored how you have communicated with, sites visited, when you did it and for how long. But I am afraid that if this legislative is passed that there is only a matter of time before they will add that the information in the communication also will be stored. One of the big selling points from the people that are for implementing the legislative is that the information in the communication won’t be stored and that they can’t see what you did, but what does that help? They have a record of the things that I have visited for 2 years or even more depending on how good of routine the ISP got when it comes to the deleting of the information.
Let’s say that the legislative is implemented and that I visited a terrorist webpage since I just had seen a documentary about them and 1.5 years from that day the police want to see if there have been any Norwegians on there…..Lo and behold, there comes my IP up among one of the visitors and they start putting me and my internet traffic under surveillance since they think that I am a terrorist. Now this is a very unlikely scenario but you get my drift.
I am neither a terrorist nor a pedophile so I got nothing to worry about, but I am worried about the increasing monitoring and recording of one’s life. As the legislative stands now and if it’s implemented they will see that I have no life and have spent 45 days of my life at MT.O and that I am on facebook quite often, visiting youtube from time to time and catching up on the news. No big deal there but what if I am politically active? What if I am a member of Greenpeace planning a demonstration against the ongoing Norwegian search for oil? Norway isn’t China but information like that can be abused even here.
I can see why the police want this legislative since it will be huge help in catching pedophiles since the police are underfunded and undermanned, but I believe that with the legislative that the authorities are pushing the cost and responsibility over to the ISP. The legislative will put every single person that has a telephone and/or an internet connection under suspicion of being a criminal.
Am I just being paranoid or is there some justified concern here?
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