(Please forgive the non-technical mail, but mandatory data retention should be a highly relevant issue for most ISPs. While this is not exactly brand new, it hasn't shown up on the list so far:)

"European Digital Rights" (EDRI) recently launched a petition against data retention, which you can sign to show your support (so far there are 22'500 signatures from all over europe). SIUG supports the campaign.

Campaign website: http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com/

More details are in this excerpt from the EDRI-gram newsletter - Number 3.15, 27 July 2005:

[...]

=========================================================== 2. EDRI launches petition against data retention ===========================================================

European Digital Rights, together with the Dutch ISPs XS4ALL and Bit, launched an international petition today against mandatory data retention. The petition is aimed at the European Commission and the members of the European Parliament.

EDRI argues that retention of telecommunication traffic data is an invasive tool that interferes with the private life of all 450 million people in the European Union. Secondly, the petition points out that data retention is illegal under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, because it is disproportionate. Thirdly, the petition explains that security gained from retention may be illusory, as traffic data may easily point to another user and finally, the means through which this policy is being pursued are illegitimate.

In the next two months, EDRI hopes to collect an impressive amount of signatures from all over Europe, to convince Commission and Parliament that data retention is no solution against terrorism and crime. Supporters are kindly invited to help distribute information about this petition, by placing the banner on their sites or homepages and spread the news through mailinglists.

The petition-initiative will be presented during the opening speech of the open-air hacker event What the Hack, Thursday 28 July. During and after the event, everybody is invited to contribute to the website by adding translations in many other languages and back-ground files.

The petition script uses confirmed opt-in to verify every signature. This means everybody has to provide the organisers with a valid e-mail address to receive the confirmation. The e-mail address will not be used for any other purpose. Only the name and country of every signer will be published publicly on the website and presented to Commission and Parliament. The specific privacy policy for this campaign guarantees that personal data will only be used for this specific purpose and all personal data will be destroyed after presentation of the list.

EDRI and ISP petition against data retention (available in English and French) http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com

[...]

=========================================================== 11. About ===========================================================

EDRI-gram is a biweekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe. Currently EDRI has 17 members from 11 European countries. European Digital Rights takes an active interest in developments in the EU accession countries and wants to share knowledge and awareness through the EDRI-grams. All contributions, suggestions for content or agenda-tips are most welcome.

Except where otherwise noted, this newsletter is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. See the full text at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Newsletter editor: Sjoera Nas edrigram@edri.org

Information about EDRI and its members: http://www.edri.org/