EU ministers move forward on controversial data retention proposals

EU justice ministers meeting in Brussels on Thursday (2 December) took further steps on controversial proposals to retain data about telephone calls and e-mails as part of an overall fight against crime and terrorism. The new proposals, which were originally pushed by the UK and France amongst others, were prompted by the terrorist attacks in Madrid earlier this year as well as the September 2001 attacks in the US, and are expected to be in place by 2005. The Dutch EU presidency gave member states two options: that service operators retain the information that they would gather anyway for commercial purposes or go beyond that to keep a list of specific data – as yet to be defined. Despite opposition by Germany and others for data privacy reasons, the second option has been chosen. Dutch Justice Minister Piet Donner said this "goes rather further and involves service providers of data communications being required to retain certain data for a certain period". A small working group will now look into the issues surrounding such legislation – mainly cost, which will depend on the data retained, and privacy questions.