EU Faces Data Battle

The EU faces an internal battle in the coming weeks and possibly months over proposals in the sensitive area of data retention.

The Commission, Council and Parliament are set to battle it out over the way forward in the battle against terror.
The telecommunication industry and civil rights groups are also expected to enter in to the melting pot in what could be one of the most testing times for legislators across the region.
At Council level, EU Ministers put forward a data-logging plan after the March 2004 Madrid train bombs, saying retaining such data would help tackle terror and other crime. The attacks in London in July revived the plan.
However, the Council plan makes no mention of who would pay extra IT costs, while the Commisison said in its draft proposal that governments should contribute towards compliance costs.
German industry bodies BDI, Bitkom and VATM said a solid and adequate impact study of the proposals has not been done and that any retention period must not exceed six months.
Those EU ministers had hoped to reach final agreement in October but the Commission is set to put a spanner in the works as it hopes it can persuade ministers to switch to its proposal for a directive next month.
The council text would only need member state approval, while the Commission’s idea would need the go-ahead from the European Parliament as well as member states. Parliament has already got its views on the subject, having turned down a proposal in the past.
Neither proposal seeks to log the content of email and telephone traffic. A draft of the Commission’s proposal was recently obtained by the European Digital Rights group, EDRI. In which Brussels wants calls and email traffic to be retained for six months to a year, while member states proposed up to 48 months.
The council plan wants all web addresses people use to be logged but the Commission draft makes no mention of this.
More than 27,000 people have already signed an EDRI online anti-logging petition.
"Large scale data mining will lead to many people's innocent behaviour becoming suspicious. There will be this whole climactic battle in September between the Commission and the justice ministers," according to Sjoera Nas, board member of EDRI.
Telecom firms outside the European Union also worry a lengthy retention period would become the norm for them as well.