A black day for democracy in Europe
Remember this day.
This is the day when the European Parliament voted to store all telecommunication and internet traffic flowing through the networks. How they will store this vast amount of information is still to be determined, but it is truly outrageous that this kind of behaviour is even legal.
The new EU law will help national authorities to track down possible criminals and terrorists by granting them access to a list of all telephone calls, SMS or Internet connections made by suspects during the previous few months.
This is truly the start of the downfall of the European Union. Soon, it will probably look like it does in the United States, and even further down the road, like the dictatorship of China. There has even been some parallels made with Germany, when the Nazis were in control.
So, how do I keep my communication secure? For e-mail, the GNU Privacy Guard is the obvious answer, which is an open source PGP implementation. In conjunction with Enigmail and Mozilla Thunderbird, I can send fully encrypted and signed e-mail to anyone who also uses PGP.
For telephony, Skype may be an adequate solution. They use the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) cipher, but since the implementation is proprietary it is hard to estimate the real security. Also, the policy about cooperating with governments needs to be investigated.
More information:
Update: It seems that they will “only” store the actual IP headers, meaning that the impact is not so great as first expected. In Sweden, an site called Stoppa övervakningen has launched, which deals with this new law. You can also use Tor to use the internet anonymously.
Update: Data retention is no solution