Sunday 1 October 2006

Air data going nowhere

Information overload

Sometimes I wonder where all that accumulation of information goes apart from feeding the voyeuristic and controlling tendencies of the state and its apparatus in the pretence of fighting the war on terror.

Months ago when the highest European Court declared the data exchange, or rather the whole scale one-way data transfer of confidential data of European citizens who deign to travel to America illegal, that was triumph to be celebrated by all liberty seeking persons who do not want to sacrifice their freedom for temporary safety.

It so happens that the court asked that a better arrangement with legal grounding be negotiated between Europe and American authorities.

A bloody inconvenience

That negotiation seems to have broken down, and so it should, there is no valid reason for sending all that confidential information to America within 15 minutes of take-off only to find that more than halfway into the flight, the airplane has to be turned back because the computers throw up some innocuous and suspicious information which ends being a red herring.

Having never been to America, it does not really bother me, but, I have a newfound interest to visit and tour kindled by the arrival of this month’s National Geographic which had a foldout with a large map of the United States of America.

Extradition on a whim

The next thing to be resolved is that rotten extradition treaty that lets countries throw their citizens to American “justice” and sometimes gallows without court-tested evidence and with nothing of reciprocal equivalence from America.

The whole concept should be declared, unfair, unjust and illegal, the treaties should be annulled and made of non effect.

The poorest standard

The question is why America’s paranoia should become the poor standard of protecting our freedoms, that we end up serving America’s security ends at the expense of protecting and enforcing the rights of our own citizens.

It should not be so; the reciprocation of bad treaties is not the solution, rather the principles of justice, fairness, liberty, freedom and democracy that respects our privacy and protects our confidentiality grounded in good laws and enforce by good government globally is the way to go.

I do not want to know anything about American private lives; neither do I want Americans brought over to Europe on a whim without adequate legal and due process to determining proper cause.

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