[Wild Oscar]

I got a reply from the office of one of my MEP's .. Caroline Lucas of the Green party.

Dear Kevin

Thank you for your recent email, which Caroline has asked me to respond to on her behalf.

Greens are fundamentally opposed to the idea that ISPs should be monitoring activity by users to prevent fraud, copyright breaches, illegal file sharing and so forth. We uphold the right of all users to privacy and security whilst using the internet. We also strongly oppose the monitoring of internet activity so as to target advertising.

The European Parliament has been debating proposals to better support cultural industries across the EU, and some Christian/Liberal Democrat MEPs have used this as an opportunity to promote the idea of 'spying' on users of the internet.

In January, the European Parliament's Culture and Education Committee voted on a report into Cultural Industries in the context of the Lisbon Treaty. Green MEPs on the Committee, and the majority of their colleagues, opposed those amendments to the report that sought to force ISPs to cooperate in the fight against online piracy via eg filtering technologies or blocking of content. A priority for Green MEPs is to ensure that consumers are not criminalised and to urge the European Commission to play a role in defending an open society via the internet, with reference to eg Burma and China.


The text of the draft report can be seen at
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdo...6/684266en.pdf

The report was adopted but the amendments calling for ISPs to monitor users were rejected. It will now come before the full Parliament, where Caroline and her fellow Greens will again vote against any attempts to oblige ISPs to work with governments, law enforcement agencies, corporations and so forth to tackle online piracy. They will also resist any efforts to facilitate the gathering of data for advertising purposes, although this is not currently under discussion in the Parliament.

Please be assured that Caroline is doing her utmost to protect the internet from corporate control and Greens in the Parliament also led the European campaign to oppose software patents in 2006.
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics...oftware@en.pdf

Thank you for taking the time to write to Caroline and please do not hesitate to get back in touch if you require any further information.

Kind regards,

Cath Miller
Constituency Coordinator and Researcher

Office of Dr Caroline Lucas
Green Party MEP for SE England
Suite 58, The Hop Exchange
24 Southwark Street
London SE1 1TY
Tel: 020 7407 6281