Êaramanou (PSE).
– (EL) Mr President, it is a known fact that, when the Cold War ended
and the system of the two superpowers broke down, numerous national secret
services extended the scope of their activities to commercial and industrial
espionage. The United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and our own United
Kingdom excelled in this sort of espionage by setting up Åchelon, as our committee has confirmed thanks to the excellent
work carried out by the rapporteur, Mr Schmid, and the coordinators.
In my opinion, Åchelon is one of the
greatest scandals of all time. It is a political scandal, it is an economic
scandal and it is a scandalous mass violation of human rights and the rules of
democracy, which is why any strategic plan dealing with Echelon-type espionage
systems should force governments and international organisations to face
squarely up to their responsibilities.
Globalisation
needs to go hand in glove with legal guarantees that both privacy and the rules
of healthy competition will be protected. We need to improve the security of
information technology infrastructures and the application of efficient
parliamentary and judicial controls on how secret services operate at national
and European level, otherwise our citizens will lose all confidence in the
information society.
Finally, European
companies need to develop ways of protecting themselves by reviewing their
internal procedures, informing and training staff and using firewalls to
protect their electronic communications. Healthy competition between companies
should be the cornerstone of the global economy. In all events, intelligence
services should operate on the basis of respect for fundamental rights, as set
out in the Charter and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It
is high time we gave European citizens an answer to their question: quis
custodiet ipsos custodies?