Suppose that today's date is any time after January 1 2009 and that you are reading this column online. In that case, for the next 12 months, any prosecutor anywhere in the European Union who considers your reading this a "sufficiently serious crime" will be able to request all traffic-data regarding your visit to this website from your internet service provider (ISP), without having to get approval from a court, and see what other sites you've visited.

Whether you or I are involved in a crime or whether reading this column constitutes one is not even relevant.

This is not fiction. This will be Bulgaria in one year if the European data retention directive (1) is upheld and implemented locally, as published in Bulgaria's State Gazette on January 29 (2).
German protesters against the EU directive re-dubbed it Stasi 2.0. The former secret service under communist rule could not have had access to the kind and amount of private information that soon will be available to every prosecutor in the EU. All without court oversight.

The Bulgarian decree implementing the directive provides extremely little detail on who can access this data, under what conditions and for which purposes.
And the enormous costs involved in storing the mind-boggling amount of data will be carried by your ISP, which has no business interest in doing this.

While it speaks volumes for a democratically elected government to want to impose this kind of trace and tracking system on the very people that elected it into office, the arguments to do so are, to put it mildly, suspect, as crime and terrorism will hardly be affected.

In 2005, Heinz Kiefer, president of the European Confederation of Police (EuroCOP) sent out a media statement saying it would have "little more effect on criminals and terrorists than to slightly irritate them" (3).

Evading the trace system (4) is, from a technical point of view, relatively simple; an encrypted tunnel to a proxy server outside the EU would make the trace practically useless, as a specialist from the Dutch National Forensic Institute has pointed out (5). Lists of proxy servers are available online (6). Another technique, allegedly used by the Madrid bombers, is to share a free e-mail account. Never send any e-mail but save the messages in the drafts folder and wait for others to read them. The only data stored is your trip to the mailbox. For more thorough protection, one could install Tor (7) or use Freenet (8).

Only fools, and possibly politicians, believe that the system will be used to catch terrorists or hardened criminals. Instead, the system seems to be ideally suited to protect other interests. Among the data tracked by it, for example, is the internet service used; e-mail, web, peer-2-peer and so on.

Certain industry interest groups have had an extremely hard time in courts around the world in recent years, trying to sue John and Jane Doe on accusations of copyright infringement. In more than a few cases, courts have thrown out demands for the confiscation of log files from ISPs, needed to expose the identity of the accused, arguing that insufficient evidence had been provided to warrant such an infringement on users' privacy.

In a different take on the words of former chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy (9), you will be treated as a criminal anyway.
"Get over it."

1. http://www.ispai.ie/DR%20as%20published%20OJ%2013-04-06.pdf
2. http://lex.bg/laws/ldoc.php?IDNA=2135577924
3. http://www.eurocop-police.org/pressreleases/2005/05-06-02%20PRESS%20JHA%20Council_E.pdf
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Data_retention_in_the_European_Union
5. http://www.bof.nl/verkeersgegevens_3.html
6. http://tor.eff.org/
7. http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
8. http://www.freeproxy.ru/en/free_proxy/cgi-proxy.htm
9. http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538