European Union taking Nanny State to a whole new level

NY Times: Europe’s Plan to Track Phone and Net Use
By VICTORIA SHANNON
Published: February 20, 2007
PARIS, Feb. 19 — European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.
In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.
A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.
Even now, Internet service providers in Europe divulge customer information — which they normally keep on hand for about three months, for billing purposes — to police officials with legally valid orders on a routine basis, said Peter Fleischer, the Paris-based European privacy counsel for Google. The data concerns how the communication was sent and by whom but not its content.
But law enforcement officials argued after the terrorist bombings in Spain and Britain that they needed better and longer data storage from companies handling Europe’s communications networks.

Really, what can be said about this that isn't already being ranted about all over the blogosphere? I imagine that the libertarian and objectivist bloggers are foaming at the mouth, chewing their keyboards into little plastic splinters.

And you thought the culture of fear was a purely north american phenomenon.

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