Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to confine myself to making a few comments to the Commission. As you know, a year ago the Echelon Committee tabled its final report. The work was also widely praised. Even when we were still drafting the report, however, it was already clear that the Commission was treating the matter like the famous three monkeys who, in the Buddhist tradition, are supposed to report on mankind at the Koshin festival in accordance with the dictum, ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’. One year on we might almost add, 'and do not do very much either', because so far the Commission has not acted to remedy very many of the shortcomings or implement many of the tasks described in the report. Commissioner, you will be aware of what we call on the Commission to do in items 27 to 44 of the report. The question that is still outstanding is: what have you done about informing the public and companies of the dangers posed by Echelon? What have you done to ensure that e-mails within the Commission are systematically encrypted? And what has been done about training Commission staff in new technologies and encryption? It is not enough to introduce new technologies; you have to provide further training for staff as well. Your data protection directives, which are very important and very far-reaching, are actually only of limited interest here. There too the question is: what has happened within the Commission? You said that you had adopted a decision. Nevertheless, I see no evidence that the Commission has in the meantime carried out the security analysis that we requested, which actually also requires the development of a comprehensive system for classifying people and documents so as to protect secrets. That was clear from what you said. My question, then, is: who is responsible for this in the Commission? I remember very well the time that you sent Mr Perkins to see us. He was the head of the Commission's encryption service. He could certainly tell us how advanced the cryptographic hardware was, but could not tell us anything about general security standards in the Commission. Clearly there was nobody who was really responsible for this, and – at least this is my feeling – there is still nobody today either. Or, Commissioner, are you or one of the Directorates-General responsible for ensuring that documents are continuously classified? Do you intervene in personnel issues and classify people so as to guarantee security in the Commission? Nowadays, every national institution has someone who is in charge of protecting secret information and does precisely these tasks. Do you now have such a person in your Commission, someone who is also responsible for raising awareness of possible attacks by the Echelon system? Or are you actually still working with a British fax encryption system, Commissioner? I almost fear that the answer is yes, because you did not say anything about this. That is why we are going to give you a helping hand by adopting a new resolution and, Commissioner, should progress on this continue to be as disappointing as it has been so far, and should our points continue to be almost ignored, then we would also have to reach an understanding on the basis of the forthcoming Commission discharge. Our instructions to you will be on the table very shortly. I urge you to act on them! (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE