Big Brother and The surveillance society is an EU-wide issue
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Big Brother and The surveillance society is an EU-wide issue*
The EU's new five-year plan for justice and home affairs will export the
UK's database state to the rest of the EU
o Tony Bunyan
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 14.07 BST
Every five years the EU adopts a five-year plan for justice and home
affairs affecting many areas of EU citizens' civil liberties – policing,
immigration and asylum, criminal law, databases and data protection. The
Tampere programme (2000-2004) was followed by the Hague programme[pdf]
(2005-2009), which included the commitment to bring in biometric
passports and ID cards, and a new programme will be adopted in Stockholm
in December.
The process of deciding the content of these five-year plans is long and
complicated and rarely makes it into the mainstream news until they have
been adopted – when, of course, it is too late for the public to
influence its content or direction. The Tampere programme was drawn up
and negotiated by officials of the council of the European Union and the
European commission, without any consultation with national or European
parliaments, let alone civil society, and adopted in closed
sessions[pdf] by the European council (EU prime ministers). This time we
know a little more. In January 2008 the council set up a future
group[pdf], who produced a report on home affairs last summer.
Its proposals are examined in a special Statewatch report: The shape of
things to come[pdf]. These include the new "principle of convergence",
described as "the pooling of sovereignty" by enforcing standard
training, equipment and information technology across all the law
enforcement agencies (police, immigration and customs) and backed by
legal harmonisation to remove "obstacles" (such as the need for judicial
authorisation and data protection) to gathering, accessing and
transferring data and intelligence. This will allow unregulated
automated access to data and intelligence by hundreds of national state
agencies across Europe, bringing into practical effect the "principle of
availability" (all data and intelligence held has to made available to
all the other state agencies in the EU) in the Hague programme.
Second, to harness the digital tsunami[pdf]: "Every object the
individual uses, every transaction they make and almost everywhere they
go will create a detailed digital record. This will generate a wealth of
information for public security organisations", leading to behaviour
being predicted and assessed by "machines" (their term) which will issue
orders to officers on the spot. The proposal presages the mass gathering
of personal data on travel, bank details, mobile phone locations, health
records, internet usage, criminal records however minor, fingerprints
and digital pictures that can be data-mined and applied to different
scenario – boarding a plane, behaviour on the Tube or taking part in a
protest.
Third, it is proposed that by 2014 the EU needs to create a
"Euro-Atlantic area of cooperation with the USA in the field of freedom,
security and justice". This would go far beyond current co-operation and
mean that policies affecting the liberties and rights of everyone in
Europe would not be determined in London or Brussels but in secret EU-US
meetings.
The formal process will start when the commission adopts proposals in
June. The European parliament will be consulted when it re-assembles in
September. The commission's draft can be re-written at will by the
European council and adopted in closed session. This will set in stone
the measures to be put forward by the commission and determine the
agenda for the new European parliament.
Statewatch has set up an observatory tracking all the documents as they
appear so that you can find out what is going on and the European civil
liberties network[pdf] is seeking to alert civil society to the dangers.
We can either leave these decisions to our leaders (and an elite group
of civil servants) or we can insist on an open and meaningful debate now
before it is too late. The idea that the surveillance society and
database state is just a UK issue is naive: it is a European one in
which our government plays a very active role.