EP rejects initiative on data retention

Via Europhobia, and one of his commenters called John Some good has come out of the EU, finally.

The European Parliament rejected a plan to retain data on the traffic of calls, short message services and e-mails processed by telecommunication providers to investigate and prosecute terrorists. MEPs feel the proposal from the UK, France, Ireland and Sweden to keep data about who is contacting whom and from where, for up to 3 years, is a threat to the privacy of citizens.

Of course the European Parliment as the democratic fig leaf of the EU has no real power and can, and probably will be, overruled by the less democratic Council of Ministers or the totally undemocratic Commission. So these data retention proposals will still get forced on Britian by Blair despite him knowing, probably because of him knowing, that they would never have made it past a proper democratic Parliment which actually had some power rather than being a meaningless fig leaf. However as Nosemonkey says

but will at least hold them up a bit