Your rights off-line

From What The Wiki?!

Being all political during the festival is a fun thing to do - but your rights extend beyond the festival. So you'd better do something about preserving and maintaining those rights IRL and act fast, because things are getting serious in the outside world.

During WhatTheHack, two on-line petitions were launched. We urge you to sign them and to spread the url (and more importantly, the story behind those petitions) to all your friends, colleagues and contacts. One affects all European citizens: the data retention plans.

http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com

The European Commission is preparing plans to order all telco's and ISPs to preserve and extract traffic data. That means that logs of who you phone, when you phone, how long your telephone conversation lasts, (for mobiles) where your phone was and the time, addressee and length of your sms messages need to be kept for six months up to four years. Telco's indeed already have this information, which they need for their billing system, but under the current privacy laws they are obliged to discard these data after a couple of months. Soon, no more.

For the internet, the plans are even more pervasive. Logs should be created about whom you mail and with what subject, when and where you chat, which newsgroups you browse, and the exact url of all web pages that you visit should be logged. For ISPs, this a major problem. First of all, it concerns data that they simply do not have. Secondly, if they are indeed able to amend their systems to log all your activities on-line, the amount of data that will be produced is gargantuesk. That in turn means huge investments in machines, storage, back-up, administration, and so on. Of course, the financial investments involved are huge, estimated to surpass the net profit of many ISPs.

Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of all 450 million people in the European Union. It expands powers of surveillance in an unprecedented manner: police and intelligence agencies in Europe would be granted access all the traffic data involved.

Data retention means that governments interfere with your private life and private communications regardless if you are suspected of a crime or not. Hence, these plans involve a fundamental change in our legal system. All 450 million European citizens will be spied upon by the authorities. No more 'innocent until proven guilty': enter 'suspected until proven innocent, and even then we will keep tabs on you.' The plans simultaneously revokes many of the safeguards in European human rights instruments, such as the Data Protection Directives and the European Convention on Human Rights.

According to the proposed European constitution, getting 100.000 signatures on a petition means that the European Commission and the European Parliament will be oblige to re-examine these plans. More importantly, it tells them that we do not want to live under a legal system that automatically changes a citizen into a suspect. So please sign the petition. So far, mostly Dutch and Finnish people have signed. We badly need people who will promote this petition in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, and all other European countries.

Do not leave WTH before having signed http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com, and telling at least ten other people about the petition. Warning: we WILL check your e-mail before you are allowed to leave the premises to check whether you have complied. This is NO JOKE.

The second petition affects Dutch citizens only. It is a call to the Dutch government to take open source more seriously, and to review the current policy of buying into proprietary software. Although the Dutch Parliament has accepted a motion to switch to open source where possible (motion Vendrik), the government is not taking this into account and insists that proprietary software is 'cheaper'. What they tend to forget is that in all government administration, it is mandatory that documents will remain accessible, even in the future. This means that open standards are pivotal. Try opening your ten year old .wp document nowadays and you will start to understand the problem.

Open software is also the only way to achieve communal reviewing of source code for bugs, loopholes and backdoors - viz. The Diebold voting machines. Well, you all know that story.

Go sign. Dammit.

story submitted by Karin Spaink

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