Is Europe Building Big Brother?

As technology increases in speed and variety, governments seek easy access to citizens' electronic data for security purposes. The United Arab Emirates is banning BlackBerry encryption capability and the US proposes greater access to citizen browser histories and e-mail addresses without judicial oversight. One EU proposal would require Google to retain information on millions of users. Yet across Europe, “a backlash against the storage of private data is growing,” reports Jason Walsh for the Christian Science Monitor. Some critics contend that easy access constitutes “a breach” of an article of the European Convention on Human Rights guaranteeing privacy. Citizens must combat corporations intent on gathering and storing all sorts of customer details and their own governments that want to peer at that data. A legal scholar warns that large-scale monitoring could result in “automated crime detection” schemes and abuse. Another official is convinced that the most dangerous criminals figure out how to circumvent the controls. – YaleGlobal