The EU Parliament has just passed the Directive on Data Retention by 378 to 197 votes. It will then be obligatory for each country in the EU to pass national laws implementing the Directive. The result will be that the telephone calls, emails, internet usage, and even location and movements of all 450 million citizens of the EU will be subject to state surveillance. Everything will be recorded and kept for up to two years. This scheme was forced through the EU by Tony Blair.
How do the citizens of the UK feel about this? Well, they probably don’t even know it has happened because the story has received hardly any coverage in the British national media.
I did a search for "data retention" on the BBC web site. There have been a total of three items on data retention in the past three months. Why wasn’t there more coverage? Maybe the BBC was too busy with cat up a tree stories. Maybe they had a call from the Downing Street Press Office.
I then did a search on LexisNexis for mentions of data retention in any national newspaper during the last three months. I found a total of fifteen items as follows -
Financial Times - 6 items
Independent - 2 items
Times - 2 items
Guardian - 3 items
Telegraph - 1 item
Observer - 1 item
No other UK national newspaper even mentioned the story.
What is the matter with these numptys? Is the story too technical for them? Don’t they think imposing a draconian surveillance regime on 450 million people is important? Don’t they bother to check on what Brussels is doing?
Clearly they have not worked out that journalists and politicians will be the prime targets when the secret squirrels start doing traffic analysis on the retained data.
No wonder Britain is sleepwalking into a police state when these clowns are our press guardians.
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