Finally, reason prevails: the EU data retention directive has been overturned

In a historic decision, the European Union’s Court of Justice has ruled that a directive authorizing the retention of data from eight years ago is invalid. The ruling, which had already been rejected by many member states, required some companies to store huge amounts of information that could be used in judicial investigations.

With immediate effect, internet service providers and other companies can now erase all information that they had until now held about their customers.

This was always an absurd directive, an affront to our most basic rights, requiring such companies to keep information about our telephone calls, emails, and internet use for six months: in other words, every cellphone conversation we had, who we had it with, and where we were when we had it; which IP addresses we used, and every single web site we visited: in short, a brutal invasion of our privacy. The idea was that the information would help in police investigations into serious crimes. In practice, it was used by record companies and performing rights societies to show who had been downloading content from the internet, as though this were sufficient justification for putting every web user under suspicion. The twisted logic of this directive saw the internet as essentially a place where crimes are committed, mainly the crime of downloading movies and music.

In 2010, the German Constitutional Court accepted a complaint made by more than 35,000 internet users that the directive was an infringement of their rights. The overturning of the directive doesn’t, however, prevent the authorities for making a request to a jude for a specific person or group of people suspected of serious crimes to be monitored in this way, not does it affect companies whose customers accept data retention policies. What it does prevent is the setting up of monitoring systems of the kind that exist in China or Iran.

Aside from being a flagrant violation of our most basic right, the data retention directive was not fit for purpose. It generated huge amounts of information that could not usefully be analyzed; meanwhile, people intent on doing wrong simply use alternative channels. All that data retention achieved was to store huge amounts of information about people who done nothing wrong: instead of protecting us and making us safer, it was simply a major step toward creating a Big Brother society. In the same way that it would make no sense to have somebody follow our every movement, it is unacceptable that what we do online be monitored.

I have been talking about this topic since 2005. Sometimes the battles in defense of our rights in the new society we find ourselves living in are long and hard. But sometimes they can be won. There’s no doubt about it; for his immense contribution to the good judgement on this topic, Edward Snowden deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

(En español, aquí)