I must confess, if I found out that the postal service was making a copy of each letter I sent, and keeping it for several years to be available for police inquiries, I would never use snail mail. Well, to be honest, I don?t use it much anyway. I am so dependent on email that I hardly write letters any longer--I type them and hit the send button. So do many of you, I suppose.

There is no known provision which allows the postal service to snoop into my correspondence. But there could be one obligating ISPs to archive Internet and email files for up to seven years so that the police may examine them should they suspect any information about a cybercrime would come out of it. And this is really worrying me. I thought only I and a well-selected few could ever have access to my emails, not to mention my wild wanderings through the vast territories of the Net. Gosh, there are some sites out there that I love, but I wouldn?t tell my mother about them.

So what I am so worried about? It?s those European governments and their constant preoccupation with making the Net a 'safer' place. Safer it will be, but will it be a free space anymore? Give law enforcement the right to snoop into anyone's private files, and the Internet will surely turn into a space not so different from an authoritarian state, with people afraid to ever speak, write, post or surf freely because of what might come out of it. Call me paranoid, but coming from a post-communist state, I'm starting to sense a dangerous deja-vu here....

And I'm not the only one worried. A Statewatch report paints a picture of an Orwellian future.

Statewatch, a human rights group, speaks of an 'EU-FBI telecommunications surveillance system.' The organization claims the EU adopted 'requirements' developed by the FBI placing demands on network and service providers to make data from intercepted communications and real-time access to transmissions available to law enforcement agencies. In September 1998 the EU?s Police Cooperation Working Party proposed that the ?requirements? be extended to cope with Internet and satellite phone communications.

But only recently has the issue of surveillance become really hot, after a new initiative by the EU nations? governments surfaced in the media. These nations feel pressure from police to mandate 'data retention'laws--that is, the recording and storage of telecommunications data.

According to Statewatch, this would mean that 'every phone call, every mobile phone call, every fax, every email, every Web site?s contents, all Internet usage, anywhere, by anyone' would be recorded, archived and made accessible to law enforcement for at least seven years.

A rather chilling thought.

Worried reactions arose quickly. 'Europe has been at the forefront of protecting individual privacy,' David Banisar, deputy director of Privacy International, told CNET. 'It would be tragic to turn it into a law enforcement directive.'

Officials from the EU countries, and of course the ISPs themselves, also voiced objections to the idea of keeping personal data for longer than 30 days, which is the current accepted business practice.

The 'seven-year initiative'has been most discussed in Britain. But now, even the British government is backing up, due to reactions from the media, the ISPs and politicians who sensed the implications of this issue. 'Serious consideration would have to be given to such a move, taking into account not only law enforcement, but also the needs of ISPs and civil liberties issues,' said the British Home Office.

Some experts say that such a move is unlikely. It poses serious privacy issues, and there are enough European laws and treaties to protect those rights.

However, I?m not sure European law enforcement agencies will give up the idea so easily. The 'seven-year rule' would provide them with a tremendous tool to fight cybercrime, despite eroding individual?s privacy.

In fact, even though the final draft of the European Treaty on Cybercrime was altered to emphasize privacy rights, it did not ease the requirements for preserving data that could be linked to a crime.

And, let?s face it, almost anything can be linked to a crime. The Web is full of surprises, and you may-- even unwillingly--end up on a site that's committing fraud, for example, which could automatically make your Internet records Police material. Giving law enforcement unlimited access to Web traffic data would transform the Internet into the electronic equivalent of a police state.