FYI: new STOA report

[Rigo Wenning <wenning2@rz.uni-sb.de>]

>From GILC, FYI

Rigo

>
>Today the Dutch newspaper NRC put an addition to the STOA
>report online:
>
>"An appraisal of the technologies of political control"
>An Omega Foundation Summary & Options Report For The European
>Parliament
>
>http://www.nrc.nl/W2/Lab/Echelon/stoa2sept1998.html
>
>This addition is of september preceded by the STOA report of
>januari. Most interesting part is a clarification on the
>issue of transatlantic electronic surveillance. It is in
>chapter 7.4.2. There seem to be two seperate sytems:
>
>(i) The UK/USA system comprising the activities of military
>intelligence agencies such as NSA-CIA in the USA subsuming
>GCHQ & MI6 in the UK operating a system known as ECHELON;
>
>(ii) The EU-FBI system which is linkeding up various law
>enforcement agencies such as the FBI, police, customs,
>immigration and internal security;
>
>The second one is a new initiative which the EU agreed upon
>secretly in 1995 to tap all european telephone and data
>traffic. Part of the plan is that network and service
>providers in the EU will be obliged to make their network
>tappable. The european or national parlements were not
>informed of the plan.
>
>Interesting enough the new Dutch Telecommunications Act (and
>similair acts through-out europe) is obliging exactly the
>same to network operators and ISP's. The new Act was adopted
>by Dutch parlemant just a few days ago. After opposition of
>the telecommunications industry (especially ISP's) and the
>Privacy Chamber the parlement went ahead with it for the
>sake of crime fighting.
>
>With this new STOA report it seems to me that in the
>Netherlands we can show the media how government had a
>hidden agenda behind introducing the Telecommunications Act:
>an european non-militairy surveillance system that will not
>and can not be accounted for. It will be interesting to see
>how parlement will react upon this news.
>
>Maurice Wessling
>XS4ALL
>
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