<story><title>Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs</title><url>http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>feral</author><text>The EU, which Germany is a major part of, passed the Data Retention Directive [0] in 2006.&lt;p&gt;That directive required every state in the EU to pass laws that all their citizens telecommunications metadata would be stored for at least 6 months, and often more, up to 2 years.&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, this means all &amp;#x27;metadata&amp;#x27; is required to be stored, including the source and destination for every phonecall and text message, including cell location for cellphones, and information mapping IPs to users for web+email (and perhaps also the source and destination of every e-mail; but I&amp;#x27;m not certain about that?). I believe that the data is stored by service providers, and only passed to law enforcement in the context of a particular investigation &lt;i&gt;in theory&lt;/i&gt; (in the Irish implementation, a court order is not required to access an individual&amp;#x27;s records; a request from a high ranking law enforcement officer or tax official is enough). But its all collected and stored.&lt;p&gt;Maybe that&amp;#x27;s a sufficiently big difference that warrants the EU retention laws not being mentioned in this article?  But it seems to me that they should still be part of this narrative.&lt;p&gt;There have been challenges to the EU directive, and countries dragging their heels about implementing it.  But, by and large, it is an established part of EU law.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know a lot about this area, but I feel that an understanding of existing European data retention laws seems to be missing from the coverage of the European reaction to the US data collection issues.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Data_Retention_Directive&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Memories of Stasi color Germans’ view of U.S. surveillance programs</title><url>http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>griffordson</author><text>A choice quote:&lt;p&gt;Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.&lt;p&gt;“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”</text></comment>