Passenger screening - controversial plan for Europe - by Matthijs Nieuwenhuis
On Tuesday, the European Commission will court controversy by proposing that everyone who arrives in Europe by plane should be screened using lists of personal details including addresses, credit card numbers and telephone numbers. Brussels argues that the measure is needed to track down suspicious persons as part of the fight against terrorism. The system has already been introduced in the United States and Canada.
This European Commission proposal is steeped in controversy. Sophie in 't Veld, a Euro MP for the Netherlands' D66 Democrat party, argues that the effectiveness of a similar system already in place in the United States has yet to be proved. "Your details are fed into a massive database and on this basis a number of people are labeled as suspect. Not because they have actually done anything wrong, but because they fit the profile of a suspect. This means it is up to the citizen to prove that he or she is innocent. That isn't right. We don't even know whether the system is effective, there is no guarantee of confidentiality and there is no democratic control. Europe's independent privacy watchdogs also object to the proposal. The main problem, as they see it, is that the need for such a measure has yet to be demonstrated.
Note EU-Digest: the other problem with this program is that this data is not held only by the EU, but is also part of a giant US data base and that it can be kept there for 13 years. European privacy watchdogs and the EU population must not accept that EU Citizen's personal data is held by any one and certainly the US. This is against the privacy laws of most EU member states. The EU parliament and national parliaments in the EU must make sure this law does not sneak through, without a vote on its legitimacy.
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