For whatever heaven’s sake you care to believe in! Please try to not express the most moronic thing you can read form a post at least once.
EU law applies to government and non-government bodies alike. The police (in the EU and US alike) are allowed to look in the phonebook, or tax ledger, or the local newspaper, or any other public record like all other fucking people and institutions. The police in said two entities are heavily restricted in their rights to collect and store information though.
The IRS and the tax authorities in the EU (which are not federal) are allowed to collect data about their taxable subjects (you and me).
All that being said the US authorities have more lenient rights to wiretap you, register your beliefs, and or data about other things pertaining to your person than they have in the EU. US corporations and institutions have less rules as pertains to how, where and what information they store about you.
More importantly as pertains to your idiotic ramblings: just because a registration with local administration is under the organizational care of law enforcement agencies this does not mean that it is the law enforcement.
Once again: YOU DO NOT GET REGISTERED WITH THE POLICE ANYWHERE IN THE EU WHEN YOU MOVE, IF YOU ARE NOT A CONVICTED CRIMINAL OF THE MOST SEVERE KIND.
so, the State is prohibited from disseminating info it gathers from
“the phonebook, or tax ledger, or the local newspaper, or any other public record like all other f***ing people and institutions”.
Okaayyy.
I personally, would prefer that law enforcement have other sources of info, but I do not like getting screamed at, so we won’t go into whether the Interpol can share data without the consent of those it considers suspects. Sheesh. Strident much?
The concept of “registration”, as you describe it, is foreign to the US - sorry I asked.
If I follow correctly, not so much anymore. We have the whole sex offender thing.
Generally, civil rights are under assault here by folks who cannot trade freedom for security* fast enough. The police are moving into all sorts of new areas. I recently saw a thread which dealt with the utilization of computer programs to classify people as security threats based on purchases, etc. (basically anything leaving a ‘paper’ trail). “Paper” is electronic more often than not now.
Geez, Sparc, have a (intoxicant).
*authoritarian obedience = security in this instance.
I don’t know what the laws could be in other EU countries. Here, I’m under no requirement of informing anybody that I’m moving, except probably the tax office. I certainly would be well advised to inform too other agencies, like say social security, or to register if I want to vote. But I’m under no requirment to inform the police.
I heard what you said told about Italy. I doubt it’s true, but I don’t know for sure.
It probably depends on the country. In France, the laws about databases (and that would include data stored on pieces of paper as much as computer-stored datas…there has been a famous recent case about a bank agency keeping hand-written comments about their customers in their files) are very stringent.
The main points :
-The law applies to all databases, governmental or not. Your bank, for instance, has the same restrictions than a governemental agency concerning the datas they keep about you
-You’ve a permanent right of access to all the datas collected about you by any organization, agency, company, association, etc…at all times
-You may require erroneous or unnecessary datas to be corrected or deleted
-The datas must be relevant to the activities/needs of the organization which keep them.
-Some datas can’t be stored in any case or circumstances. Essentially datas concerning your race and religion. As a result, for instance, there’s no way to get statistics about crimes commited by people from a particular ethnicity.
-You can of course sue the owner of a database who refuse to compell with his legal obligations or who stored datas he shouldn’t have.
-There’s a national commission in charge of this issue. For instance, they issue general advices, control the contents of databases, study the existing or planned databases of governmental agencies, settle some disagreements about the interpretation of the laws, etc…
There are some exceptions to the rules above which I don’t know the details of. For instance, I doubt the datas about you would be communicated by an intelligence agency (though some years ago the “renseignements generaux”, an internal security agency released part of their files to the concerned persons who asked for it…It was told at this time that many people have been very dissapointed because there was no files at all about them…). And there quite often disputes between a private citizen and a governmental agency about the communication of documents concerning him.
EU law trumps national law. The requirement to register with the tax authorities is the only one a EU member state is allowed to enforce and in fact they are required to under the bilateral taxation agreement.
Privacy and data protection is also homogenized in federal EU law. Clairobscur summarizes pretty much what the effect of the law is. I would only add that it is absolutely forbidden to record any opinion by individuals without their immediate consent, however innocuous that opinion is. So for instance if I have a customer database and I wish to register whether or not my clients like golf I would have to ask them specifically if they do and if I may keep note of that. Obviously this only applies to structured databases (in any media) for commercial, institutional or other mass application. Hence. if I want to keep note of what my friends like to have for dinner, or what sports they enjoy for my own personal use and pleasure that is my prerogative.
The way you are allowed to use the data collected in a database will vary slightly across the EU. In Sweden for instance all government databases including tax returns are considered to be in the public domain, The state is required by law to actively publish all information that is in the public domain. Hence a summary of everyone’s tax returns is available to everyone either at the local tax bureau or for previous years at the local library (the content details of the tax return are protected against proliferation by EU law though, thank God for that at least). In most countries you are allowed to purchase address data and basic demographic data for direct marketing purposes, but in Germany this is so heavily curtailed by anti-telemarketing laws and other privacy protection measures that it is in net effect forbidden to sell a private persons phone number, while you may sell their address, but only with their consent.
European censuses are not homogenized, so there would 48 answers to the question if you mean Europe the continent and 15 if you mean the EU. As regards perceived race, this is not at all as clear a social concept in Europe as in the US. When I filled out the US Census 2000 (I live part time in the States and happened to be living mostly in the US at the time) I was mightily entertained at the idea of a bunch of Europeans getting their heads around the concept of being Hispanic for instance. The obvious question arises as what a Languedocian in France should answer to that. Concepts of race are more local and have less wide strokes.
ID papers and passports are issued by the state against application. Usually you need a birth certificate and some other proof that you are you like old ID papers with photo or same such stuff. The actual details of the procedure vary across the EU, even across regions in some states. Most people use their driver’s license as ID, these are issued the same all over the Union and are in fact EU driver’s licenses. Always having a passport is pretty normal since until recently traveling across state boarders required it, and even after Schengen traveling on the continent without a passport is pretty impractical. The passports are also EU, but issued by the member state where you hold your citizenship.
Once again. The only way for the police to be aware of anything about an individual would be to observe and note under the restrictions imposed on the law enforcement’s right to do so. Obviously if they are pursuing a criminal the would be allowed to note the suspects perceived race, but as I have said before and others have confirmed, the police is not allowed to store any data about you, so it wouldn’t matter what anyone answered in a census. For that matter this applies to the US as well.