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- To: undisclosed-recipients:;
- Subject: Call for support - European citizen's initiative against data retention
- From: Anna Biselli <anna.biselli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:03:11 +0200
- Delivered-to: dfri@xxxxxxx
- User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120614 Thunderbird/13.0.1
Dear friends,
arising from a workshop during "Freedom not Fear" on 16th September in
Brussels we decided to explore a possible launch of a European Citizens'
Initiative (ECI) against data retention.
We come from a wide variety of organizations, such as working groups on
data retention, human rights associations, and individual people wanting
to raise their voice against data retention, against censorship and for
the protection of our personal data and rights in the internet and the
offline world alike.
With the EU data retention directive 2006/24, sensitive information
about social contacts (including business contacts), movements and
private lives (e.g. contacts with physicians, lawyers, worker's
councils, psychologists, helplines, etc) of 500 million Europeans is
collected in the absence of any suspicion. We believe that such invasive
surveillance of the entire population is totally unacceptable in an open
and democratic society and must be prohibited.
That is the aim of our initiative. To reach this goal we have to collect
one million signatures and reach specific quorums in seven EU member
states. [1] We want to start collecting these in the middle of 2013 to
be finished to the middle of 2014, when EU elections will take place.
And for this we need your help!
With this letter we want to explore the possible support of such an ECI.
We are currently planning a working meeting in Amsterdam in late
November or early December to coordinate cooperation, develop funding
ideas and plan further steps.
Please tell us if you are interested to work with us and whether or not
you would participate in a meeting about the ECI in Amsterdam. If you
need further information, do not hesitate to ask!
We are really looking forward to hearing from you.
Yours,
Anna Biselli
[1]: http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative/public/signatories
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