A couple of countries (including Germany) want a biometric RFID tagged passport, which is a clear threat to both privacy and personal safety (Some references: The blog of security expert Bruce Schneier for serious background information and a nice story of Richard Stallman who brings together a RFID tag and an entire roll of aluminum foil – but read yourself – highly recommended!).

Today the great news of data retention! Wow! What is the benefit of collecting even more private data? Will this solve our problems? Sure :) I think the terror guys already won! Our “free” life is more and more controlled and regulated (having in mind Orwell’s 1984)

Where does all this lead to? I had a discussion today with Henning, and both of us think that even encryption like GnuPG will be illegal at some point – but as it works for most things right now … STEP BY STEP … so citizens are NOT AWARE of what is happening … so it won’t be right now :)

For background reading I recommend this website:

Citation of this website – for more click the logo above …

What’s wrong with data retention? The proposal to retain traffic data will reveal who has been calling and e-mailing whom, what websites people have visited and even where they were with their mobile phones. Telephone companies and internet services providers would be ordered to store all traffic data of their customers. Police and intelligence agencies in Europe would be granted access the traffic data. Various, competing proposals in Brussels mention retention periods from 6 months up to four years.

Data retention is an invasive tool that interferes with the private lives of all 450 million people in the European Union. Data retention is a policy that expands powers of surveillance in an unprecedented manner. It simultaneously revokes many of the safeguards in European human rights instruments, such as the Data Protection Directives and the European Convention on Human Rights.