Piracy and Privacy

It seems that ever since the horrible terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, lots of new laws have been passed everywhere around the world that give law enforcement greater freedom in their investigations. The downside of this is that it weakens the freedom of individual citizens. When I visited the USA last summer, my photograph and fingerprints were taken and filed. I could accept that because I know what happened back in 2001 and if this helps to find the bad guys...

But it doesn't stop there... I don't know if the law has already been passed or not, but Dutch internet service providers are already or will be forced to log details of email correspondence of their customers. The new Dutch public transport access card is used to store start and destinations of all individual trips. This information is kept on file for six years. A system of toll roads is planned where movements of cars will also be recorded and filed. There are no clear rules describing how and when this information can be used by law enforcement. The Netherlands is a leader when it comes to the number of internet taps requested by law enforcement. It is totally unclear why this is or what the police are looking for...

On top of all this, the near future will probably bring us the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which also aims at enforcement of intellectual property rights by forcing internet service providers to provide detailed information about internet traffic from individual citizens without a need for reasonable suspicion. What this means is that internet providers have to log all the things a customer does with his internet connection. It may even mean pro-actively reporting 'suspicious behavior'. The negotiations about ACTA are held behind closed doors; very democratic...

Don't get me wrong: copying software or movies without paying for these goods is wrong. Counterfeiting is wrong. But I'm worried about our privacy. If it doesn't even require a judge to get all sorts of details about where I have been and what I have been doing on the internet, who will take care my constitutional rights are not violated? In the meantime, most people don't seem to know or care that this is going on.

Sorry about this rant; this has been on my mind for quite some time and after reading another update about ACTA I felt the need to write about this...

About the image: it's a plastic skeleton that we bought when Nienke showed an interest in what bones are and how they work. The eyes are my eyes (well, actually they are two copies of my left eye) which I put in the original picture using GIMP. After that, I changed the original red colour of the backlight to blue.

The image represents icons of piracy (the skull) and Big Brother (the eyes)