--- this is an edited version of an article I have written for today's Irish Daily Mail17 June 2009 10:52 AM
The lives of ... all of us
http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk/2009/06/the-lives-of-all-of-us.html
You know what they say about restaurants: there is no such thing as just one rat in the kitchen. It is the same here in Brussels. This week the Irish have finally seen the draft of assurances Brian Cowen's government want from the other EU members before they make the Irish vote again on the Lisbon Treaty. The draft is a rat, but I'l deal with it later, after I've seen what is going to happen to the 'assurances' tomorrow and Friday at the European Council. Today I will deal with one of the other rats in Brussels, the Stockholm Programme.
It is unlikely you have ever heard of the Stockholm Programme. It has only just been published. However, a committee known as the Future Group, organised by the justice commission, started planning it in January 2007. The full name of the Future Group is 'the Informal High Level Advisory Group of the Future of European Home Affairs Policy.' The British had no representative on it, merely an 'observer.'
The group's findings have been bundled up as the Stockholm Programme. Here is how it works. The Lisbon Treaty gives new legal powers to the European institutions over, among other things, cross-border police co-operation, counter-terrorism, immigration, asylum and border controls. The Stockholm Programme outlines how the justice commission will implement these new legal powers for the next five years.
The commission claims the programme covers policy on 'freedom, security and justice serving the citizen.' Look closer and you will see it actually covers policy for restrictions on the citizen, surveillance by the European state -- yes, your fingerprints, credit card charges, email traffic and health records are now going to be available from Galway to Bucharest -- and the destruction of British judicial independence by the European institutions. Stockholm is a rat, and a big one.
If you don't want to take it from a right-wing libertarian like me, you can take it from a whole pack of left-wing libertarians, the European Civil Liberties Network. The ECLN is made up of groups drawn from across Europe. One of the founders was Gareth Peirce, solicitor for the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, and more lately for one of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Here is what they have to say about the Stockholm Programme: the policies outlined in Stockholm 'constitute an attack on civil liberties and human rights.' The warn against 'dangerous authoritarian tendencies within the EU.'
They are right to do so. Under EU legislation, state agencies are already implementing comprehensive surveillance regimes and beginning to build up what the ECLN calls a 'previously unimaginably detailed profile of the private and political lives of their citizens.' This is often done in the absence of any data protection standards, judicial or democratic controls.
'The EU has gone much further than the USA in terms of the legislation it has adopted to place its citizens under surveillance. While the Patriot Act has achieved notoriety, the EU has quietly adopted legislation on the mandatory fingerprinting of all EU passport, visa and residence permit-holders and the mandatory retention -- for general law enforcement purposes -- of all telecommunications data (our telephone, e-mail and internet usage records).'
The Future Group and their Stockholm Programme say they foresee a 'digital tsunami' that will revolutionise law enforcement. Add this to the fact that, as the ECLN says, 'EU data protection law has already been left behind, with surveillance all but exempted. Individual rights to privacy and freedoms are being fatally undermined.'
One of the most rat-like things about these new proposals is the plan to set up a 'Homeland Security' industry. Billions of euros may be given as subsidies to European corporations to help them compete with US industries in developing security equipment and technology. If you knew how many thousands of uncontrolled, unregistered corporate lobbyists there are in Brussels, you would recognise the hand of European technology corporations in the drafting of this programme. Brussels will give the military-industrial corporations billions in European taxpayers' money, and in return the corporations will deliver technology that helps all the new European security forces track every one of us.
What is coming out of this will undoubtedly be an EU identity card and population register. Even Dick Cheney didn't dare try that one. There will be the power of security forces (forget 'cops,' what you are going to be hearing more and more about is 'security forces') to search computer hard-drives. But the security forces won't be coming through your door with a warrant. The searches will be 'remote,' online. This will be a particular threat to lawyers, journalists and any politicians opposing these growing EU powers. The policy of remote hard-drive searches was first proposed for the EU by the German government in June 2008. Yes, the German government want a euro-Stasi. It really is so satisfying when politicians live up to their national stereotype.
Statewatch, another organisation monitoring civil liberties in Europe, is also warning against the Stockholm Programme. In an analysis of the Future Group's report by Tony Bunyan, he writes: 'European government and EU policy-makers are pursuing unfettered powers to access and gather masses of personal data on the everyday life of everyone -- on the grounds that we can all be safe and secure from perceived "threats."'
'There is an assumption, on this and wider issues in the U, that "if it is technologically possible, why should it not be introduced?"'
He notes that the EU's Schengen Information System (SIS) is to be upgraded to hold more categories of data (including fingerprints and DNA), access to all the data is tobe extended to all agencies (police, immigration and customs).' The commission has proposed a system to track the names of all passengers in and out of the EU, but some governments 'do not like limiting the use of data to terrorism and organsied crime and want to extend the proposals' scope from just in and out of the EU to travel between EU states and even within each state.' They want to extend it to sea travel and car travel, too: all those specialised cameras developed for reading car registration plates make it possible.
Ah, but ordinary people will be told that if they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear. Ordinary people who believe that will then never realise, as Mr Bunyan says, 'why they did not get a job interview because their employer had access to a criminal record based on a "spent" conviction or why their application for an insurance policy failed because the company had access to their health record.'
The final agreement on all this is due to be adopted by heads of state and government at a meeting in Stockholm in December. Between now and then there is nothing any of us can do to stop it -- except force David Cameron to give Britain a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, no matter how many other countries have already ratified the treaty. Remember, the legal powers to establish this new techno-surveillance are only delivered to Brussels by the Lisbon Treaty. So demand a referendum, then vote No: or your secret ballot on Lisbon may be the last secret left to you.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
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