International Law

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith - EU G6 plus USA Ministers discussing "remote searches of computer hard drives"

Before we try to decipher Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's speech which she made on Wednesday, there are a couple of clues to some more potential repression of innocent people, which she seems to be endorsing in the near future.

In the perfunctory "going through the motions without actually informing Parliament of any details", Ministerial Statement on her "informal" meeting with a select few of her European Union police and "security" Ministers, the so called G6 group, together with the USA.

This supposedly "informal" G6 group usually seem to manage to "policy launder" their decisions via the wider, full membership of the European Union, and then they can pretend that their latest Orwellian control fantasy which they are inflicting on our freedoms and liberties, has somehow been imposed on them by the EU, and is necessary to meet "international commitments", even though they themselves instigated the original policy.

Why the US Government gets a say in such European Union policy making, is a mystery - there is certainly no reciprocal vetting or influencing of US Federal laws and policies, by the European Union, is there ?

Written Ministerial Statements Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Home Department G6 and United States Counter-Terrorism Symposium

Jacqui Smith (Home Secretary; Redditch, Labour)

The informal G6 group of Interior Ministers from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom met in Bonn, Germany on 26 and 27 September 2008, along with the United States State Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. This was the third G6 plus US counter-terrorism symposium meeting (previous meetings took place in Venice in May 2007 and Schwielowsee in November to December 2007). I attended on behalf of the United Kingdom.

The symposium was divided into four substantive discussion sessions:

[...]

remote searches of computer hard drives;

[...]

Is this a further development of what the German government has been attempting recently ?

Presumably this involves intrusive access to remote computers, by means of some sort of spyware, computer virus, trojan horse backdoor etc., or by on the fly deep packet inspection and sniffing of passwords or other security credentials,

Officious or corrupt bureaucrats will, presumably, be made exempt from criminal prosecution, or from having to pay financial compensation for disruption or loss of legitimate business, or the invasion of the privacy of innocent people, simply by uttering the magic spells "national security" or "for the prevention, detection or prosecution of crime" etc.

Remember that we do not have any Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution style protection against unlawful searches, the results of which are then not admissible in court as being "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree"

Full post as published by Spy Blog on October 18, 2008 (boomark / email).