EU super spies to get right to snoop on your emails, website visits, medical data and police records
Robert Verkaik writes in the Daily Mail about a draft European Directive on Cyber-security:
At the heart of the plan is the little-known European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). It will co-ordinate a network of specially created security agencies in each EU member state who will have unprecedented powers to demand data from public bodies and internet companies.
In the UK these will include NHS trusts, police forces, councils, Google and Facebook. This information could then be shared with other European agencies but without the safeguards that protect British citizens.
The plans, published on Thursday and backed by Labour’s Baroness Cathie Ashton, the EU Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, make clear that the powers are being demanded in the name of cyber security.
Under the proposals, agents working for the new cyber-crime agencies will be able to force disclosure of personal data where they suspect a company or public authority has been the victim of or is unable to prevent online hacking or any other cyber crime. Privacy groups say that such a broad definition will cover almost every company or public authority in the UK.
They also argue that the powers will allow police to use cyber crime as a justification to ask the super-spying agencies to make data orders to force companies or public bodies to disclose an individual’s private emails, social-network activity or even medical records.
Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and former adviser to the Government on cyber security, said: ‘The draft directive grants draconian powers to ENISA and to member states, which would greatly exceed those granted under [existing EU law] and which now have been challenged successfully in the constitutional courts of several member states.
‘ENISA and the national agencies will have access to “sufficient information” from almost everyone online. That is completely unacceptable as it would violate the constitutions of many member states.’
ENISA’s own press release on the draft directive is here.
February 12th, 2013 at 14:05
Anyone who uses the term “cyber”-anything, except of course cybernetics, should be tarred and feathered. The problem can be traced back to William Gibson, who coined the fine-sounding word “cyberspace” in his excellent SF novel “Count Zero” back in 1986 (from memory).
Gibson openly admitted that he had no idea what a modem was at the time, and understood nothing at all about the technical aspects of networking. His cyberspace was a technicolour, haptic virtual reality world whose realisation still lies decades in our future.
People who lard their speech and writing with “cyber-this” and “cyber-that” are just trying to sound clever. Happily, all they are really doing is revealing the depth of their ignorance.
There is no such thing as cybercrime. Just crime.
February 12th, 2013 at 14:50
Irrespective of the language used, this is what we have to expect of secretive agencies of an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable organisation, i.e. the EU. No doubt the CIA, etc. are already up to the same tricks without even having the courtesy to tell us.