Battleangel

A Swedish newspaper broke the story this morning, indicating that Sweden and other EU states will have to open their databases of telecommunication logs to not only European authorities but American as well. The Data Retention Directive has gone from bad to worse and one must suspect that this was the plan all along. Seeing as the U.S. seems to decide much of our security concerns via its snivelling lapdogs and NATO fan boys.

At least the retained data in question is only a framework of date/time and destination and for the time being it excludes the contents of voice and data communication streams (we know this for a fact unlike in the case of the largely black operations in the US).

Interestingly, the summit that decided on open database access took place way back on March 2nd so we can safely assume that this was intentionally left out of the PR release at the time. Also poignant is that the desk jockeys and pencil pushers over at the Swedish justice department knew that Sweden had entered into international agreements outside of the EU that would enable the opening of any such databases upon request, were they ever created. But apparently they didn’t feel that this tidbit was worth mentioning.

So basically, shouldn’t Europe open up these databases to everyone? What about Russia, China, Israel … or Uzbekistan? Why just rubberstamp U.S. access? And would European authorities gain the same insight into America’s (illegally) cumulated data? Something tells me it wont be quite that easy.

As I recall it, the legality and propriety of sharing European air travel records with the U.S. was questioned, and yet it would seem we’re making the same mistake all over again.

In the meantime, the U.S. is found to have wiretapped (theoretically) 200 million of its own citizens based on the customer roster of compliant telecom companies. And it has been going on since before 9-11 (even if one does not count Echelon). They’re now busy building the largest database of all time, and will not rest until every call made is processed through NSA storage and screening. What exactly is collected and what the information is used for is anyone’s guess. Actual eavesdropping may or may not be involved and we’ll never know since the project is clouded in secrecy. What I can safely say however is that the U.S. is the last state on the planet that I would give access to retention databases and that abuse is pretty much a done deal given that they’ve already failed their own mandate and lied to their own citizens.

See also …
Kurt Nimmo: Congress Critters Lament NSA Snoop Agenda