Policy Observatory
The Romanian Constitutional Court has declared the second data retention law to be unconstitutional on 7 July 2014. The decision will be published in the Official Monitor soon. This is the second data retention law to be declared that it breaches the right to privacy, as stipulated in the Romanian Constitution.
As previously reported in the EDRi-gram, the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) ruled in its decision no. 440 on 8 July 2014 that the second Romanian data retention law (no. 82/2012) was not constitutional. The full reasoning for this was published in the Official Journal on 4 September 2014 in Romanian. EDRi-member ApTI is working on the translation of the text, and an English version will follow soon.
Paraguay understands the dangers of pervasive surveillance. The newly proposed data retention bill, currently being debated by its politicians, would compel local ISPs to retain communications and location details of every user for a period of 12 months. No wonder it’s been described as creating a new gang of “pyrawebs”: online informers that the authorities can ask to pinpoint the movements, connections, and associations of any Paraguayan citizen.
On 11 July 2014, the Spanish Council of Ministers adopted the Bill on the Protection of Citizens’ Security. The Government’s proposal has been strongly criticised. Restrictions to the freedoms of assembly and expression in protests received a lot of attention in the media, but EDRi says some provisions of the bill have barely been discussed. Measures which have been overlooked in the media include Article 25, which would oblige cybercafés and similar establishments to keep records of their clients’ IDs because these establishments “exercise activities which are relevant for citizens’ security”.
Journalist John Naughton wonders whether the reason there has been so little public fuss about the Snowden revelations (with some notable exceptions, mainly Germany) is because everybody feels compromised, to a greater or lesser extent, by their online behaviour. In principle, people think it’s creepy that Google reads our mail, that Facebook monitors our relationships and that the spooks have a log of everything we’ve ever read on the web, but the services are free and the security services are unlikely to be interested in little old us.
Assistant commissioner Tim Morris says ombudsman would prevent pirates being targeted, but ombudsman says his office would have no formal oversight role in proposed scheme
Authorities are not interested in using the Abbott government’s proposed data retention scheme to go after internet pirates and would be prevented from doing so by the commonwealth ombudsman, the assistant commissioner of the Australian federal police, Tim Morris, has said.
Morris also said any changes to the way metadata is collected and used would have to be approved by the ombudsman.