Letter from Privacy International:

Dear Data Retention Campaign supporter…

I‘m sending you this message to thank you for your recent support on Privacy International‘s campaign on communications data retention.

In case you have not heard, the European Parliament yesterday approved the Directive on data retention. A deal was established between the Council and the two largest political parties that made it almost inevitable that the directive would go through.

For more information on what happened and how the situation arose, please see our resource page

https://www.privacyinternational.org/dataretention

WHAT WE‘VE ACHIEVED

Through this campaign to date we accumulated and developed a number of essential reports that will be useful as this debate moves forward. We have a legal assessment of the ECHR-compliance of data retention, analyses by privacy commissioners, industry officials.

With your help in a matter of days we were able to collect more than 80 endorsements for our statement on data retention. These endorsements came from around the world and across sectors of society.

And more is coming. Most recently PI released a study comparing the anti-terror policies in the U.S. and the EU, including data retention, to show that in most cases the EU has gone well beyond what the U.S. was willing to accept. We will keep on monitoring these developments.

WAYS FORWARD

This policy battle is by no means done. And we need to build on what we have done so far. We have managed to bring together diverse communities, ranging from industry, non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, international institutions, and government officials. We will need to make use of these networks when the Directive comes home to national parliaments and when data retention spreads to other countries.

In the short term, if you are interested in data retention discussion and news issues, please feel free to join the low-volume email list at

https://mailman.edri.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/edri-dr

If you are interested in the wider implications of this type of policy-making please see the Policy Laundering Project that PI runs

alongside with Statewatch and the American Civil Liberties Union at

https://www.policylaundering.org

and PI‘s own site at

https://www.privacyinternational.org/policylaundering

So, again thank you for your incredible support at such short notice, and thanks for your support over the past few days, months, and years. I look forward to working with you all in the future as we continue work on these important policies and issues.

Keep well…

gus.

n.b. Just for you trivia buffs, today is the 115th anniversary of Warren and Brandeis‘ infamous Harvard Law Review article on The Right to Privacy. And today is also the 214th anniversary of the U.S. Bill of Rights.

__________________

Gus Hosein, PhD, B.Math (Hons)

Senior Fellow

Privacy International

6-8 Amwell Street

London, EC1R 1UQ

https://www.privacyinternational.org