Poor Irish showing at Brussels vote a severe blow for e-privacy

New EU measure means electronic data may be held indefinitely and spied upon

The irony could not be deeper. Hot on the heels of a national election in which all political parties and independents spoke about the importance of the strength and will of the people, of the value of the democratic process and of the importance of protecting the growth of the national economy, the majority of our MEPs have shown that, actually, they care about none of these things.

On May 30th, in a disgraceful vote, the European Parliament threw out the most basic protections on privacy and civil rights - protections it had spent the previous decade reinforcing through its data protection directives. Now, all electronic data you generate can be held indefinitely and spied upon.

That includes all your e-mail, all your land and mobile phone calls, all your faxes, all the details of websites you've visited. The cost of doing this will be borne by the telecommunications industry itself.

Until now, such data could only be retained for up to six months, for billing purposes. In order to conduct the levels of surveillance now allowed by the new vote, agencies in the past had to justify and acquire highly specific warrants.

The lone Irish MEP who voted against this appalling directive was Green MEP Ms Nuala Ahern. Green MEP Ms Patricia McKenna has also spoken out against it consistently, although she apparently failed to make the actual vote.

The few remaining Irish European representatives who made it to Brussels for this hugely important issue - Fine Gael's Ms Avril Doyle, Mr John Cushnahan and Mr Joe McCartin, and Independent Ms Dana Rosemary Scallon - incredibly voted for the measure. The remainder who did not even bother to show up for the vote includes, to their shame, the entire crew of Fianna Fáil MEPs, who also effectively voted directly against our own clearly stated national policy on these issues, much of it already fixed in law in the State's Data Protection Act and E-Commerce Act.

Let me repeat that, just for the benefit of the Fianna Fáil MEPs, who seem rather ignorant of the issues at the heart of this vote. Through the absence of every single one of you, you effectively voted against your own party's carefully developed, and internationally admired, policy in this area. Your absence has put in doubt the key provisions that underpin the light regulatory approach and pro-e-business environment of the E-Commerce Act.

Your non-vote thus threatens the viability of the pro e-business climate your own party leader and Taoiseach sees as central to the Republic's continuing economic health.

Those who voted yes, and those who didn't bother to show, voted against the concerns of a broad range of human and civil rights groups. They acted against the officially stated worries of the data protection commissioners of every single EU state, who wrote a formal letter to the president of the EU Council of Ministers in opposition to this measure. They acted against the basic protections on the privacy of correspondence that businesses take for granted in order to function.

They abandoned the long-standing Irish position on these issues, under pressure from the British government, which, through surveillance measures introduced in its Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act and a use of closed-circuit television cameras unmatched by any other nation, spies on its citizens more thoroughly than any Western democracy. And, bizarrely, they joined the majority of their MEP colleagues in completely flipping the European Parliament's previous stance on this issue.

In several earlier votes, the parliament had strongly opposed the European Council's previous attempts to slide this secretive surveillance measure through. The European Council has been roundly criticised in the past 18 months by human rights groups, privacy advocates and the data protection commissioners' own parliamentary group for trying to alter fundamentally protections on the collection and use of an individual's data. These are enshrined in data protection directives issued by the parliament in the 1980s and 1990s.

In November 2001 the plenary session of the European Parliament adopted a first reading on the surveillance measure, strongly opposing data retention and surveillance. A vote in the Committee on Citizens' Freedoms and Rights on April 18th this year again opposed the measure by 340 votes to 150.

But the final, May 30th, vote introduced an amendment to allow for data retention and surveillance, and the vote went 351 for and 133 against with 13 abstentions. The original measure was only a proposal to clean up some small issues surrounding the last data protection directive. Instead, European law-enforcement and clandestine surveillance agencies persuaded MEPs to overturn the central provisions of that directive.

Once these basic citizens' rights are lost, they are unlikely ever to be reinstated.

In the Republic, we have three small rays of hope. First, that the Government will negate the ignorance of the majority of Irish MEPs on this issue and refuse to bring this directive into Irish law. Second, that the directive will be challenged and overthrown in the European Court of Human Rights as soon as any European government tries to bring it into state law. And finally, that the financial and administrative burden of actually retaining the extraordinary amounts of data required under this directive will prove utterly impossible in practice.