EU Snoop Law invalidated:

IRISH VICTORY AGAINST
EU SNOOP LAW:

An Irish lobby group, Digital Rights Ireland, which began a case  in the Dublin High Court in 2006 against EU data retention law succeeded in the European Court of Justice last week in having the law invalidated.

The court ruled, 8 April 2014, that the directive was a breach of the right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

“The Court finds that the directive does not provide for sufficient safeguards to ensure effective protection of the data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of the data,” said the judgement.

“Those data, taken as a whole, may provide very precise information on the private lives of the persons whose data are retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, activities carried out, social relationships and the social environments frequented.”

“The Court takes the view that, by requiring the retention of those data and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.”

“Furthermore, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the persons concerned a feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance.”

“The Court is of the opinion that, by adopting the Data Retention Directive, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality.”

The Court argued that the law was disproportional and excessive in following its stated objectives:

 “The Court is of the opinion that, by adopting the Data Retention Directive, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality.”

"Although the retention of data required by the directive may be considered to be appropriate for attaining the objective pursued by it, the wide-ranging and particularly serious interference of the directive with the fundamental rights at issue is not sufficiently circumscribed to ensure that that interference is actually limited to what is strictly necessary.

Firstly, the directive covers, in a generalised manner, all individuals, all means of electronic communication and all traffic data without any differentiation, limitation or exception being made in the light of the objective of fighting against serious crime.

Secondly, the directive fails to lay down any objective criterion which would ensure that the competent national authorities have access to the data and can use them only for the purposes of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions concerning offences that, in view of the extent and seriousness of the interference with the fundamental rights in question, may be considered to be sufficiently serious to justify such an interference.

Thirdly, so far as concerns the data retention period , the directive imposes a period of at least six months, without making any distinction between the categories of data on the basis of the persons concerned or the possible usefulness of the data in relation to the objective pursued.

The Court also finds that the directive does not provide for sufficient safeguards to ensure effective protection of the data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of the data.

Lastly, the Court states that the directive does not require that the data be retained within the EU. Therefore, the directive does not fully ensure the control of compliance with the requirements of protection and security by an independent authority, as is, however, explicitly required by the Charter. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data".

What's really significant about that is not just that it criticises the fact that data might leave the EU, but that it implicitly criticises the protection offered to data elsewhere. A very interesting  and important comment in the light of the current efforts to bring in meaningful data protection laws in the EU - and to enforce them in places like the US, which currently ride roughshod over users' rights in this sphere.

This is a massive defeat for the Brussels Dictatorship and Digital Rights Ireland must be congratulated for their victory. All EU countries must now revise their data protection laws to comply with the Court's decision. Civil Liberties in the EU are better protected as a result.

The growing tendency for total surveillance which perverts democracy in so-called "rule-of-law" countries needs further safeguards for citizen's rights to be promoted and blanket laws challenged and even though the servers like Google-Yahoo are cock-a hoop at this decision they need to be supervised and regulated too as they indulge in their own kind of spying on internet users.