EU Privacy Rights to be Taken Away

Most Americans are beginning to understand that they have lost all their rights to Homeland Security. While they were busying shopping with their credit cards and refinance mortgage money, the Congress and the Executive managed to deprive them of all their privacy rights and now even their right to free speech.

Now the EU is on the same track. A number of Draconian limitations of our freedoms are being quietly implemented without a whine or a whistle from EU citizens. A case in point is the subrosa deal being made between Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Bush which allows all electronically stored information on EU citizens to be shared with the Homeland Security Agency in the USA. And there is no system in place to deal with mistakes or abuses of Europeans data. The entire shocking article can be found here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/30/eu.privacy

Horrified after reading this article, I emailed my MEP concerning this issue (and others) complaining that this cozy data sharing deal was most certainly a violation of my privacy rights. After all, why bother with Data Protection Act enforcement if the most dangerous war criminals on the planet have access to all my details held by government and commercial organisations?

I was even more horrified to find out that very few of my fellow Europeans even knew that their privacy rights were about to go bye bye through a deal by an unelected EU bureaucrat, Sarkozy in this case. Thankfully, my MEP is doing her job and I have just received this amendment for the next EP session concerning this issue:

Joint motion for a resolution
PPE-DE, ALDE, UEN
Commission’s Legislative and Work Programme for 2009
Joint motion for a resolution
Paragraph 68 a (new)

Joint motion for a resolution Amendment
68a. Recognises that sharing data and information is a valuable tool in the international fight against terrorism, but also stresses the importance of safeguarding human rights and fundamental freedoms; regrets, in this context, that current negotiations between the EU and the US on concluding a data protection agreement, within the High-Level Contact Group, have taken place in camera without any transparency or democratic oversight and without any involvement of the European Parliament or of national parliaments and thus of European citizens; therefore insists that the Commission bring these negotiations to a natural close and make an appropriate legislative proposal to the Council and Parliament;

In effect, this is a call from the European Parliament for the Privacy Sharing to be brought before the voters and discussed and calls for the agreement in progress to be ended.
It is very important now for the Irish MEP to have support on the issue from other member state MEPs.

If you care about your privacy rights, I urge you to email your MEP TODAY and demand this item be put on the agenda. The time to do this is now: it will only take a few minutes and will keep the people connected to Brussels and protect you and your family's rights for generations to come.

Let's not go the way of the Americans. The url below lists the various MEPs for different member states.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/members/public.do?language=EN

Thank you for your support.