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Anti-terror cooperation with ISPs ‘essential’ in wake of Paris shootings, EU ministers say

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12 January 2015

Such a database could also be illegal in the light of a European Union Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling in May last year that invalidated EU laws requiring communications providers to retain metadata in much the same way as flight data would be retained because they interfered with fundamental privacy rights. What’s more, the European Parliament referred a deal to exchange passenger data with Canada to the CJEU, asking it to determine whether such a deal is in line with fundamental rights.

It now remains to be seen whether the Paris attacks will change political views in Brussels. The ministers want to move forward, adopting a “constructive approach with the European Parliament,” they said.

Barriers
Intelligence services often claim that privacy laws form barriers, making it hard for them to connect databases, which in turn costs them precious time when trying to save lives – a point of view re-iterated to Dutch TV news channel RTL Nieuws by Pieter Cobelens, former director of the Dutch Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) after the Paris attacks. Cobelens proposed to connect tax databases with traffic cameras and surveillance cameras.

The question remains, though, how effective more surveillance would have been in preventing the Paris attacks.

The two brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo killings were known to the French intelligence services, yet they weren’t stopped, said privacy advocate Paul Bernal, a lecturer in information technology, intellectual property and media law, in a post on his personal blog two days before the ministers released their statement.

Those who killed British soldier Lee Rigby in London in May 2013 were also flagged in seven different intelligence and security agency investigations. This knowledge however could not have prevented the murder a UK Parliament committee concluded. However, the same committee found that a tech company could have prevented it if it had monitored its platform for terrorist content.

Calls for more, and more invasive, powers of surveillance for the police and the intelligence services in the wake of a terrorist attack are predictable, but these calls are misguided at best, said Bernal. “We knew who they were. We didn’t need Big Data-style mass surveillance to find them – and that’s supposed to be the point of mass surveillance, insofar as mass surveillance has a point,” he said.

“The fundamental problem is that terrorism, by its very nature, is hard to deal with. That’s something we have to face up to – and not try to look for silver bullets. No amount of technology, no level of surveillance, will solve that fundamental problem. We shouldn’t pretend that it can.”

Loek Essers, IDG News Service

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