EU Snoop Law invalidated:

IRISH VICTORY AGAINST
EU SNOOP LAW:

An Irish lobby group, Digital Rights Ireland, which began a case  in the Dublin High Court in 2006 against EU data retention law succeeded in the European Court of Justice last week in having the law invalidated.

The court ruled, 8 April 2014, that the directive was a breach of the right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

“The Court finds that the directive does not provide for sufficient safeguards to ensure effective protection of the data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of the data,” said the judgement.

“Those data, taken as a whole, may provide very precise information on the private lives of the persons whose data are retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, activities carried out, social relationships and the social environments frequented.”

“The Court takes the view that, by requiring the retention of those data and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.”

“Furthermore, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the persons concerned a feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance.”

“The Court is of the opinion that, by adopting the Data Retention Directive, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality.”

The Court argued that the law was disproportional and excessive in following its stated objectives:

 “The Court is of the opinion that, by adopting the Data Retention Directive, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality.”

"Although the retention of data required by the directive may be considered to be appropriate for attaining the objective pursued by it, the wide-ranging and particularly serious interference of the directive with the fundamental rights at issue is not sufficiently circumscribed to ensure that that interference is actually limited to what is strictly necessary.

Firstly, the directive covers, in a generalised manner, all individuals, all means of electronic communication and all traffic data without any differentiation, limitation or exception being made in the light of the objective of fighting against serious crime.

Secondly, the directive fails to lay down any objective criterion which would ensure that the competent national authorities have access to the data and can use them only for the purposes of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions concerning offences that, in view of the extent and seriousness of the interference with the fundamental rights in question, may be considered to be sufficiently serious to justify such an interference.

Thirdly, so far as concerns the data retention period , the directive imposes a period of at least six months, without making any distinction between the categories of data on the basis of the persons concerned or the possible usefulness of the data in relation to the objective pursued.

The Court also finds that the directive does not provide for sufficient safeguards to ensure effective protection of the data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of the data.

Lastly, the Court states that the directive does not require that the data be retained within the EU. Therefore, the directive does not fully ensure the control of compliance with the requirements of protection and security by an independent authority, as is, however, explicitly required by the Charter. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data".

What's really significant about that is not just that it criticises the fact that data might leave the EU, but that it implicitly criticises the protection offered to data elsewhere. A very interesting  and important comment in the light of the current efforts to bring in meaningful data protection laws in the EU - and to enforce them in places like the US, which currently ride roughshod over users' rights in this sphere.

This is a massive defeat for the Brussels Dictatorship and Digital Rights Ireland must be congratulated for their victory. All EU countries must now revise their data protection laws to comply with the Court's decision. Civil Liberties in the EU are better protected as a result.

The growing tendency for total surveillance which perverts democracy in so-called "rule-of-law" countries needs further safeguards for citizen's rights to be promoted and blanket laws challenged and even though the servers like Google-Yahoo are cock-a hoop at this decision they need to be supervised and regulated too as they indulge in their own kind of spying on internet users.

Cyprus Says NO! to Brussels Dictatorship

CYPRUS SAYS NO!
TO BRUSSELS
DICTATORSHIP:


 

After several days of negotiations at the summit of EU leaders in Brussels, a deal on Cyprus was agreed by the Finance Ministers, including Ireland's Michael Noonan, on Saturday last, which was nothing less than a blackmail ultimatum of the type usually associated with the worst Mafioso Gangsters. The Cyprus government was told to come up with €5.8bn funds by literally robbing the private bank accounts of its citizens before getting a €10bn bailout loan from the EU and IMF. Banks in Cyprus were closed and are still closed as the shock wave of this monstrous imposition on the people of Cyprus spread across Europe.

The blundering gobshites of the Brussels Dictatorship, Barosso, Draghi and Rumpoy, had however miscalculated badly thinking they had intimidated a compliant Cyprus Government desperate for a bailout and were unprepared for the outraged reaction of the Cypriot people which forced the Cyprus Parliament to reject the blackmailers of Brussels and demanded an alternative solution to the financial crisis in Cyprus which is a direct result of the failure of the Brussels Dictatorship to properly handle the Eurozone crisis especially in relation to Greece.

In a historic event, for the first time in this prolonged crisis of the Euro currency and world Capitalism, an entire people have risen up against the Dictatorship of the thieving financial elite represented by the Three Stooges of Brussels and said an emphatic NO!

 

This is a profound political shock to the Stooges as they have succeeded in imposing their austerity agenda on the rest of Europe with vicious intensity and the actions of the Cypriot people is an example which they would fear more than anything else in the coming months. The Euro-Parliament, if it had any guts in the majority, should demand the resignation of these three bunglers and a complete reformation of the Commission and the other EU institutions which, since the Lisbon Treaty, have become seriously undemocratic and unaccountable as the opponents of the Treaty in the only country allowed to have a referendum on the document, Ireland, warned in the two referenda held here in 2009/10. Remember the lying slogans of the pro-Lisbon campaign? "For Stability, Growth and Jobs". We got no growth and no jobs and continued instability of the Eurozone.

 

Draghi, in two separate speeches Thursday last, addressed the 27 leaders of the EU and the 17 members of the Eurozone on the need to further drive down their labour costs and increase productivity. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared that Draghi’s “very interesting” reports made clear that it was “productivity levels and wages in a number of countries that were responsible for the high unemployment today.”

This brazen lie that "high" wages are the cause of unemployment is typical of the propaganda which accompanies the forced austerity agenda being imposed on Europe and elsewhere in trying to blame working people for the crisis of the financial system which has been authored by the Elite themselves with insatiable greed, corruption and fraudulent deals on fake credit which has been their regular practice since the banking deregulation of 1999 in the USA.

The delusion that productivity can be increased by lowering wages is again being peddled by the Elite and their Brussels Stooges. As if anyone would work harder for less money and longer hours!

Draghi, with brazen effrontery, has now given the Cyprus Government another ultimatum to comply with his extortion policies or be expelled from the Eurozone on Monday next. If the Cyprus people can hold their courage and continue to resist they can defeat this brutal dictatorship. Russia may yet step in and assist Cyprus to solve its financial problems. At a meeting in Moscow yesterday, attended by Barosso, Russian Premier, Dimitry Medvedev, delivered a scathing public rebuke to the Brussels Dictatorship calling their schemes absurd and unworkable. The spectre of increasing Russian influence in Cyprus may cause more sober reflection in Brussels over this weekend and force the Dictatorship to moderate its demands on the people of Cyprus to the benefit of us all.

 

Barosso, Draghi and Rumpoy Must Go!

 

Down with Brussels Dictatorship!

 

Restore European Democracy and Social Progress!

 

No to Austerity and Neo-Liberal Thievery!

 

( Austerity is not inevitable: see here:
 http://blagaroon2.blogspot.ie/2013/03/paul-dillon-at-recent-launch-of.html)

FearFeasaMacLéinn

Áth Cliath/Dublin

Márta/March 22/ 2013

 

 

 



Cameron EU Speech Flops

CAMERON SPEECH ON EU-

BOX-OFFICE POISON IN 

BRUSSELS:

This week in the House of Commons, and later at the Global Elite gathering at Davos, In Switzerland, Brit Premier, David Cameron, made his long-awaited public statement on Britain's position in the EU and his vision of the British Conservative Party way of pursuing it in the future.

His speech committing the Conservative Party to a "IN-OUT" referendum on EU membership in 2017, had been postponed for a week, supposedly due to the hostage crisis in Algeria. But,In fact, it was a speech that had been brewing for years, ever since  his taking over leadership of the Tories, for fear that it would rip the party apart. In the end, it is primarily the fact that the Tories are already being pulled apart by  more rabidly expressed opposing positions on the EU  in recent times that forced his hand. This was well demonstrated by the hoots and hollers of the Tory Neanderthals on the back benches of the Commons chamber.

The "Financial Times" Philip Stevens, commented that this was “politics on a tightrope”, motivated by Cameron’s hope that his commitment to a referendum would “forestall a historic split in his own party comparable to its 19th century ruptures over the Corn Laws and imperial trade preferences in the early 20th”. Raucous support from the back-benches didn't hide the dismay in other quarters at Cameron's guff. The Lib-Dem half of the coalition government at Westminster attacked the speech and disclaimed support for it.

More worryingly for Cameron, and the British ruling class as a whole, has been condemnation of the prospect of a British referendum by other EU members and, more especially, by  President Obama in Washington. Although the referendum is not scheduled for another four years and is dependent on the Tories winning the 2015 general election, a dim prospect at the moment with the Tories on only 33% compared with Labour on 39%, Cameron has been attacked for injecting further uncertainty into the European project when it is already in crisis. Philip Gordon, US assistant secretary of state for European affairs, publicly made clear Washington’s displeasure recently when he stressed that Britain’s continued membership of the EU was “in the American interest”.

Cameron’s remarks were intended to try and appease constituencies none of which can be described as progressive; the back-bench Tory Eurosceptics and the UK Independence Party,  who have been yapping more loudly at Cameron's heels since he became Prime Minister, each of which just as reactionary as the other. To his EU partners, Washington and a substantial section of British and international  big business opposed to such a risky move, Cameron pledged that in such a referendum he would campaign for British membership with all his “heart and soul”, a mealy mouthed pledge which went down like a lead balloon.

Cameron presented his move as a means of saving the European project, rather than damning it. Europe’s crisis, he stated, stemmed from its lack of competitiveness and flexibility in the “new global race of nations” now underway, and the challenge posed by the “surging economies in the east and south”.

"With “Europe’s share of world output … projected to fall by almost a third in the next two decades”, Cameron condemned “complex rules restricting our labour markets” and “excessive regulation” on business as “self-inflicted” wounds. Cameron cited German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s earlier pronouncement that Europe’s system of welfare and social provision is unsustainable and has to go.

His proposals essentially consist of a demand that the austerity measures that have created a social catastrophe in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy  and elsewhere must be extended and deepened across the continent, in line with the levelling down of wages and working conditions to the levels of sweatshop Asia.

This is why that, even while demanding a “loosening” of the EU so as to protect the City of London, the citadel of British Finance Capital, Cameron supports further fiscal and political consolidation within the Euro zone. He claimed that the Euro zone countries needed “the right governance and structures to secure a successful currency for the long term”— that is; it must have the economic and political mechanisms in place to enforce the diktats of finance capital, while stressing that Britain had no intention of adopting the Euro-currency itself.

On the continuing decimation of the living standards of the working class across the EU, Cameron, the EU, Washington and Monopoly Capital are all united. All of which makes Cameron’s posing as the defender of “democratic accountability and consent” hypocritical cant. Cameron hypocritically referenced “growing frustration” with the EU across the continent that has led to “demonstrations on the streets of Athens, Madrid and Rome” In Britain too, he said, “democratic consent for the EU … is now wafer-thin”. Whereas, democratic consent for the vicious austerity programs being enforced across Europe by Cameron, Merkel, Draghi, Barosso and Rumpoy doesn't exist at all.

But, Cameron’s proposed referendum has nothing to do with establishing the democratic right of working people to oppose and defeat the vicious austerity that has brought millions onto the streets. The opposite is the case. He, with the others, wants to consolidate a right-wing bloc pledged to even more draconian economic measures, in which the interests of Finance Capital, both domestic and foreign are protected while abolishing the remaining legal rights of ordinary workers. Hence his attack on legislation limiting working hours.

This is the kind of  EU to which Cameron is committed. While various European foreign ministers criticised Cameron’s speech, it was not on its substance that they did so, but, for his lack of a united approach with the EU -Wall St. elite and for opening up another nest of worms with his dodgy referendum pledge.

Referring to Cameron’s demand to renegotiate the terms of EU membership, German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, said that “cherry picking was not an option” while his French equivalent Laurent Fabius complained, “If you join a football club, you can’t say you want to play rugby.” Merkel, however, said that Berlin would listen to “British wishes” over EU membership in the hope of finding a “fair compromise”. Only on Tuesday, Merkel and French President, Francois Hollande, had vowed to speed up Euro zone integration and promote European "competitiveness" (code for low wages) in terms similar to Cameron’s. Quoted on the 50th anniversary of the Franco-German Alliance, both stressed the need for “budget discipline” and "labour reforms", more coded language for the further reduction of workers' rights throughout the EU.

Cameron did succeed in creating a dilemma for the British Labour Party, whose leader, Ed Milliband, opposed the idea of the referendum but had no concrete proposals to substitute for the austerity mania currently sweeping Europe. This, itself, is indicative of the inability of European Social Democracy as a whole, including the Irish Labour Party here, of mounting any kind of challenge to the rampage of neo-liberalism led by Wall Street and its cronies in London and Frankfurt. The Global Financial Elite don't need Social Democracy anymore to act as a semblance of democracy and social justice in the Capitalist World. They have decided to use the economic crisis brought on by their own insatiable greed and power mania to gut the organised workers' movement and abolish what has been described as the "European social model" in short order. There is only one reply to this audacious power-grab; massive popular resistance and internationalist solidarity of the working class everywhere.

Also on YouTube :   

http://youtu.be/KXLX40kYGcs

FearFeasaMacLéinn 

 Áth Cliath/Dublin

Eanáir/January 27 2013