American and EU security officials are claiming that they need closer ties in order to fight terrorism.  To accomplish their goals, officials say that they need to be able to freely share information contained in their various databases.

The group’s controversial proposals are certain to trigger major disputes, not least its calls for Europe to create an expeditionary corps of armed gendarmerie for paramilitary intervention overseas.

Such a pact, which should be finalised by 2014 at the latest, would entail the transfer of vast volumes of information on European citizens and travellers to the US authorities. Negotiations have long been under way to agree such a pact, but have been bedevilled by divergences in privacy law and data protection regimes.

“The European Commission and the US homeland security department are also trying to iron out discrepancies in privacy laws to allow the wholesale exchange of data.”

While urging a comprehensive transatlantic electronic pact, the Future Group focuses mainly on boosting police cooperation and integration between EU states, policies which would reinforce the powers of European agencies and institutions bearing acronyms such as Europol, Eurojust, Frontex, and Sitcen and perhaps see new agencies established to deal with security and intelligence operations.

Several member states, not least Britain, will have deep qualms about the proposals, with the British likely to balk at automatic pooling of national intelligence.

Big Brother Britain would just like to keep all the details about their citizens in their own hands.

The Government will store “a billion incidents of data exchange a day” as details of every text, email and browsing session in the UK are recorded under new proposals published yesterday.

The information will be made available to police forces in order to crack down on serious crime, but will also be accessible by local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office.

Why do local councils and the post office need access to this data?  For that matter, why do health authorities need to know that your mom sent you a text to remind you to pick up some milk on the way home?  Oh, that’s right.  It’s because Big Brother needs to know every minute detail of your life.

Figuring out how the UK, EU, and USA are going to store, mine, and sort the massive amounts of data is going to be so huge, it could just be financially unviable.

Better go learn The GNU Privacy Guard, FireGPG, Encrypt This!, Fire Encrypter, GPG, and truecrypt.

If you don’t want the governments of the world knowing what you’re doing, regardless of legality, then you need to start scrambling and hiding what you do.  Governments are already snooping and want to expand further.  Don’t make it any easier for them.