EDRi: Shadow evaluation report on the Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) (2011)

In advance of the European Commission the publication of its long overdue evaluation report on the Data Retention Directive, EDRi has published its own “shadow report”. This Directive currently requires long-term indiscriminate storage of records of every electronic communication of every person in the European Union. European Digital Rights (EDRi), concludes in a parallel ‘shadow report’ that European citizens have gained nothing from the Data Retention Directive, but lost their privacy. EDRi urges the Commission to respect the Charter on Fundamental Rights and reject data retention in Europe.

Nothing gained
In its evaluation report, the Commission fails to prove that data retention is a necessary instrument to fight serious crime. The statistics provided by Member States indicate that the vast majority of data used by law enforcement authorities would also have been available without obligatory data retention. The absence of data retention legislation in countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic (where national Constitutional Courts rejected transposition laws of the Data Retention Directive as an unjustified restriction on fundamental rights) has not led to an increase in crime or a decrease in the ability to fight crime.

Privacy lost
Meanwhile, 500 million European citizens have been confronted with an unprecedented and unnecessary infringement of their fundamental rights. In 2010, the average European had their traffic and location data logged in a telecommunications database once every six minutes. According to the European Data Protection Supervisor, the Directive constitutes ‘the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the European Union’.
In addition, several Member States fail to fully respect the data security obligations of the Directive. Some do not even have a process for deleting the data after the retention periods, nor of overseeing this deletion. The Commission has accused unspecified Member States of breaches of legal process by exploiting domestic telecoms companies to obtain data from other EU Member States, thereby circumventing agreed legal procedures.
European citizens, and Europe’s hard won credibility for defending fundamental rights, have paid dearly for this Directive, both in terms of a reduction in the right to privacy and also in the chaotic and lawless treatment of personal data. The Commission report and our shadow report show that the Directive has failed on every level – it has failed to respect the fundamental rights of European citizens, it has failed to harmonise the European single market and it has failed as a necessary instrument to fight crime.”

What next?
The Commission’s evaluation report will serve as the basis for an impact assessment of policy options to annul or amend the Directive. EDRi will send its shadow report to the European Parliament, calling on its members to stand for the fundamental rights of 500 million EU citizens and repeal the Data Retention Directive.

Published by Digital Civil Rights in Europe on 17 April 2011

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Pierre Clastres: Archeology of Violence (1980/1994)

“Pierre Clastres broke up with his mentor Claude Levi-Strauss to collaborate with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gattari on their Anti-Oedipus. He is the rare breed of political anthropologist—a Nietzschean—and his work presents us with a generalogy of power in a native state. For him, tribal societies are not Rousseauist in essence; to the contrary, they practice systematic violence in order to prevent the rise in their midst of this “cold monster”: the state. Only by waging war with other tribes can they maintain the dispersion and autonomy of each group. In the same way, tribal chiefs are not all-powerful; to the contrary, they are rendered weak in order to remain dependent on the community. In a series of groundbreaking essays, Clastres turns around the analysis of power among South American Indians and rehabilitates violence as an affirmative act meant to protect the integrity of their societies. These ‘savages’ are shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at ‘globalization.'”

Translated from the French by Jeanine Herman
Publisher Semiotext(e), 1994
Foreign Agents series
200 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)

Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality (1973–) [EN, DE]

“Ivan Illich has aroused worldwide attention as a formidable critic of some of society’s most cherished institutions – organized religion, the medical profession, compulsory education for all.

In Tools for Conviviality he carries further his profound questioning of modern industrial society by showing how mass-production technologies are turning people into the accessories of bureaucracies and machines.

Tools for Conviviality was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. Illich proposed that we should ‘invert the present deep structure of tools’ in order to ‘give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.'”

Publisher Harper & Row, New York, 1973
World Perspective series
SBN 060121386
xxv+110 pages

Reviews: Michael G. Michaelson (New York Times Book Review, 1973), John L. Elias (CrossCurrents, 1974), John Touhey (World Affairs, 1974), Romesh Diwan (Economic & Political Weekly, 1975), Galye Avant (American Political Science Review, 1975).

Tools for Conviviality (English, 1973, 4 MB, added on 2019-10-1; HTML)
Tools for Conviviality (English, 1975, 2 MB, updated on 2019-10-1)
Selbstbegrenzung. Eine politische Kritik der Technik (German, trans. Ylva Eriksson-Kuchenbuch, 1975/1998, added on 2019-10-1)