Digital Surveillance for EC Governments

Joel Rowbottom writes: "The Council of the European Union (the 15 EU governments) is about to back the demands of EU "law enforcement agencies" for full access to all telecommunications data to be written into all Community legislation in the future, and for existing laws to be re-examined - a move that is even more far-reaching than the decision to sign up to the FBI plan for the interception of telecommunications. At the centre is the issue of a seven-year period of data retention. There's a lot more about it at statewatch.org including an up-to-date store of relevant documents." The BBC and the Register have articles about this. Both news articles mention this seven-year data retention period, but I don't see it in any of the recent documents, which only discuss general "requirements" for law enforcement, such as tapping and access to calling records. From what I'm reading, law enforcement seems to be concerned about getting rid of the requirements to erase data about communications traffic (under the EU privacy laws) rather than creating affirmative requirements to store such data.