EU directive spells end to e-mail, internet privacy

Net Results: It's official: your e-mail and internet usage information is now going to be stored for a minimum of six months, and probably for three years, joining all your mobile and landline call details in giant databases available to all EU member states.

Yes, you heard right: full details of who you sent e-mails to and received them from; the times and dates; the size of the e-mails; the websites you visited and for how long; whether you downloaded or uploaded anything - all to be put into storage for possible viewing by, well, who knows?

Government and law enforcement agencies will argue that such material, held under the new data retention directive, will only be viewed if it is useful in "serious crime investigations" (yet to be defined, of course).

But "serious crime and terrorist offences" restrictions on database usage have a tendency to crumble, allowing for access even for minor offences.

What? Didn't you hear about this? Probably because the EU rushed it through, in the fastest vote ever taken for such a serious form of legislation - a directive, which means it cannot be challenged in the courts of member states, even if it violates state constitutions.

Parliament also voted mid-December, when people tend not to be paying a lot of attention to lawmaking activities anywhere.

The directive was rammed through at the tail-end of the UK's presidency, after three months rather than the usual year taken to debate a directive, one of the EU's most powerful legislative tools and therefore deserving of the most scrupulous debate and consideration. For these reasons, Gay Mitchell courageously broke ranks to vote against the proposal. Most Irish MEPs were not present.

Such surveillance has been a pet project of the UK and Ireland ever since Ireland held the presidency. EU-wide data retention inclusive of e-mail and web surveillance was first put to the EU by Ireland, just as Minister for Justice Michael McDowell was struggling to introduce a domestic bill on it, under pressure from then data protection commissioner Joe Meade.

Meade had a problem with the fact that the Government had imposed three-year data retention on the Irish people in 2002 through a secret Cabinet directive and, naturally, wanted it forced into public debate and properly legislated for.

Of course, having a retention scheme - widely opposed by Irish businesses - mandated at EU level, would shift blame off the Government. The attempt during our presidency failed to go through, but McDowell got most of what he wanted soon after by dropping the most controversial bit - the e-mail and web surveillance part - and quietly rushing phone and mobile data retention into a last-minute amendment last year to the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Bill. Thus, after three years of stalling over introducing a bill on data retention, we got it through the back door.

An almost empty Dáil "debated" the issue, and the civil liberties and business organisations waiting for the introduction of the full bill had no idea an amendment had been substituted and passed until after the event.

When the amendment slunk through, I predicted the next step would be to bring back in the e-mail and web surveillance bits - and sure enough, less than a year later, we have EU-mandated storage of e-mail and web usage information.

Let's set aside the cost implications of storing such data for even six months. The EU allows for up to two years retention, and McDowell has indicated he will challenge the legislation to allow Ireland to keep its period of three years.

You have to ask why we need this draconian method of slipshod surveillance on citizens, this storing of evidence in advance of anyone doing anything wrong, on the anti-democratic assumption that because a handful of us will do something wrong, four million people should have their personal data squirreled away for future scrutiny.

Slipshod - because the directive (and our existing legislation) doesn't necessarily affect the smaller operators that are more likely to be used by terrorists and criminals, as calls are easier to hide. Slipshod - because while the law is supposed to "harmonise" retention across Europe it does nothing of the sort, allowing each state to have a different regime.

Slipshod - because we rush to bring in surveillance that the US would not dare to impose on its citizens.

Nothing to worry about if you've not done anything wrong, you say? How quickly we forget law enforcement and government breaches of privacy, such as the McBrearty case and that of lottery winner Dolores McNamara, whose personal files at the Department of Social Welfare were accessed more than 150 times hours after her win, mostly by curious civil servants. Someone passed those records on to the tabloids. One situation led to a tribunal; the other is part of a departmental investigation.

This is what Gus Hosein, senior fellow of UK-based watchdog Privacy International, told the new Irish privacy watchdog, Digital Rights Ireland: "The EU used to set the standard for privacy protection. Now because of pressure from the UK and Ireland, the EU is 'going it alone' and leading the world in surveillance of all of our interactions and movements in the information society."

Pressure from Ireland. What has happened to us? And why are we allowing our Government to turn us into this disgraceful surveillance nation?