Subject: [Raven] EU and Australia - Separated at Birth?

From: "Richard Payne" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:03:40 -0500

As pointed out previously, anyone who examines the EU directive on
interception (which has no force of law on its own and which requires
national laws to implement it, which apparently the Netherlands has done)
and its Australian analog will notice that the text is substantially the
same.

This is not a coincidence, as Duncan Campbell pointed out in the Guardian on
April 29, 1999:

http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/The_Paper/Weekly/Story/0%2C3605%2C45981%2C00.
html

which contains the following gem:

"Ministers were told two months ago that an international committee of
experts regarded new European policy on tapping the internet "as an urgent
necessity". But they will not be told that the policy has been formulated at
hitherto secret meetings of an organisation founded by the FBI. Known as the
International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminar (Ilets), police and
security agents from up to 20 countries including Hong Kong, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand have been meeting regularly for seven years."

It's pretty hard to fit this kind of surreptitious lobbying by LEA's into:

a) any model of separation of powers between legislative and executive
branches of government, or

b) any democratic theory of government,

don't you think? And even harder to see why Country A's determination to spy
on its citizens obligates the IETF to make it easier and cheaper for
Countries B & C to do the same...

Richard Payne

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