The European parliament could reject proposals next week for laws to retain the data of telephone and internet service providers (ISPs) for three years.
Legal and civil liberties committees in Strasbourg have already slammed the proposals after German Free Democrat MEP Alexander Alvaro published a report urging EU countries to veto the recommendations.
The proposals were put forward by France, Ireland, Sweden and the UK to aid in the "prevention, investigation and prosecution of terrorist acts".
In the report, Alvaro wrote: "There are sizeable doubts concerning the choice of legal basis and the proportionality of the measures. It is also possible that the proposal contravenes Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights... Should the Council's proposal unexpectedly obtain a majority, the requirement for a review of the measures in the form of an evaluation after three years in force should be incorporated into the text, so that the actual effectiveness of the measures can be established and the act of data retention justified."
Under the initiative, ISPs and phone service providers would be forced to retain data between 12 and 36 months. This would include details of time and dates as well as the location of communications, although the content of communications may not be retained. The laws would govern how companies operate SMS, telephone - including voice over IP - and internet services.
The European parliament will debate the matter on Tuesday.
Talkback
Apart from the privacy issues this will raise (eg: anybody interested in having their full communication logs available to administrator so and so looking for extra money?) storing huge amounts of data costs real money. Guess who will have to pay for that in the end.
Another question is what good it will do. So you have this huge amount of electronic data. Who may access it when? How to ensure that? How to access it? How to search it? How to draw conclusions from it that will hold up in court? And how to undo damage done in case things don't hold up in court?