Culture of surveillance
creeps across Europe, despite resistance
By JULIE SELL
Dec 18, 2008
Despite the fact that fascism and repressive state security services
dominated Europe - East and West - at different points in the 20th century, a
new culture of surveillance is spreading, slowly, across the region again, using
tools that the Nazis and the KGB never had.
The U.S. and Britain stepped up their internal surveillance networks after
suffering some of the West's deadliest terrorist attacks in the past decade, but
now other European governments are embracing some of the same tools and
techniques. The pace of adoption is slower on the Continent than it's been in
Britain because of public concerns about liberty and personal privacy.
Take Vanves, a community of 30,000 with ancient roots that has gradually
adopted 21st century security measures. The middle-class suburb that adjoins the
southern border of Paris was the headquarters for a Wehrmacht motorized division
during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
Several years ago, the mayor installed a couple of surveillance video cameras
to keep an eye on rowdy young men congregating at night, as well as a handful of
drug dealers. More were added over time. Now the town has nine cameras operating
near schools, in parks and shopping areas, all of them linked to the local and
national police.
France aims to triple the number of such cameras in public places to 60,000
by 2009, and while officials and residents express concern about individual
privacy and liberty, they are ambivalent about the use of such surveillance
tools.
"It's not the state that does this, it's the others," said Alain Winter, a
senior officer in France's national directorate-general of police, sounding
slightly defensive as he points to individual towns and villages. Winter
stresses that the number of public and private surveillance cameras in France is
a fraction of that in Britain, which has as many as 10 million.
Surveillance in the U.S. is limited mostly to large cities, such as Chicago,
which has more than 2,200 closed circuit cameras spread through the city, and
4,500 in its public schools.
"The state in France asks a lot, has lots of ideas, but has very little
money," says Bernard Gauducheau, who's been the mayor of Vanves since 2001.
The mayor, who said that he's merely trying to keep pace with the times, even
has a personal blog. Yet he says he initially was reluctant to install video
cameras in his town since their record in reducing crime elsewhere is mixed at
best, and funding assistance from the central government was limited.
However, he has no regrets.
He stresses that unlike Britain, where tapes are kept indefinitely, tapes
here are held only for 48 hours.
"There was a demand from the local population to do something," Gauducheau
explained. The cameras "haven't solved all the problems, but the population has
thanked me."
Manuel Santin, a fruit-and-vegetable vendor in a pedestrian shopping zone in
Vanves, supports the increased surveillance. The 60-year-old Spanish emigre
stood opposite one of the town's video cameras. "For me it's no problem," he
said. "The more security, the better."
Emmanuel Martinais, a French academic who's studied surveillance systems,
said "under Sarkozy, there is stronger repression" in France, a reference to
President Nicolas Sarkozy's election on a platform that included a crackdown on
crime. Martinais said that Sarkozy and his aides "are inspired by the U.S. and
U.K."
In fact, France has a long tradition of domestic surveillance and has
monitored its large Muslim community, including mosques, for years. Now, two
domestic spy agencies are being merged into one organization that will
reportedly have about 6,000 agents, much larger than Britain's MI5.
Even Sarkozy went too far, however, when his government unveiled a plan to
combine all intelligence files in a master database known as EDVIGE that
would've included the religious beliefs and sexual orientation of tens of
thousands of people in France, ranging from union leaders to officers in local
community associations. After a public outcry, the Ministry of Interior scaled
back its plans.
Winter defended EDVIGE as "a new name for an old program," but in the face of
public protest, admitted: "We have to find a balance, we have to find a
guarantee for liberty, we acknowledge the public expressions of the people."
That sentiment can be heard elsewhere in continental Europe, although
officials keep pushing for broader use of surveillance tools.
"Governments are becoming more and more eager to use surveillance more
widely," said Marianne Wade, an expert on European criminal law at the Max
Planck Institute, a research center in Germany.
Nils Zurawski, a surveillance expert who lectures at the University of
Hamburg, said there are about 500 public surveillance cameras operating in all
of Germany today.
There is "a German legacy of data protection and a resistance to snooping,"
Zurawski says, partly because of the Nazi past and a secret police network that
was only disbanded some 20 years ago in eastern Germany.
In the early 1980s, for instance, Germans boycotted a national census that
many thought was overly intrusive.
Yet since then, he said, "Technology, behavior and mindsets have
changed."
Recent polls have found that a majority of Germans favor increased use of
video cameras in public places.
Still, many Europeans are inclined to protest when they perceive that the
state is intruding too far in their lives. Other Europeans find it "abhorrent"
that the British police have collected DNA samples from people they arrested and
kept them indefinitely in a database, Wade said.
The European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, ruled in
early December that the database violates privacy rights, and ordered that
samples taken from people found innocent be removed.
There are other flashpoints in the surveillance vs. privacy debate. Data
protection is a hot topic in several countries in the region, partly due to a
European Union directive on data retention that requires all carriers of
electronic communications to retain the data for six months. Wade said that EU
countries are allowed to set stricter laws on data retention "as long as they're
not endangering free trade."
Germans have held a series of protests in recent months over what they
consider government overreach into private information.
There's a standoff in the Bundesrat, Germany's upper house of parliament,
over a proposed federal police act that would allow authorities to monitor
computers and tap phones without the prior consent of a judge, tap phones of
doctors, lawyers and journalists, and allow the federal police to launch
investigations without consulting police in individual states.
Meanwhile, Sweden has been in an uproar over a new law that would allow mass
surveillance on the Internet. Parliament passed the law over the summer and it's
due to be enacted early next year, but protests have prompted the parliament to
consider amendments.
Wade, at the Max Planck Institute, said she worries that there aren't
sufficient controls on the use of surveillance programs.
"The laws are always introduced under the guise of anti-terrorist activity or
fighting crime," she said, "but they're drafted so loosely that the police can
do what they want."
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