And Another One Bites The Dust: Mass Surveillance Ruled Unconstitutional In Slovak Republic
from the time-to-take-the-hint dept
As we noted a few weeks ago, data retention laws continue to fall in Europe. Then it was Bulgaria, following in the wake of Netherlands. Now we learn that the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic has similarly struck down the country's data retention provisions, as reported by the European Information Society Institute:
An act, which ordered large-scale mass surveillance of citizens (so called data retention) is now history. Today the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic proclaimed the mass surveillance of citizens as unconstitutional. The decision was rendered within proceedings initiated by 30 members of the Parliament on behalf of the European Information Society Institute (EISi), a Slovakia based think-tank.
Those judgments are all in line with the ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the over-arching EU Data Retention Directive was "invalid." Even the European Commission seems resigned to the fact that there will be no new data retention laws at the EU level.
However, that still leaves the possibility of national laws, provided they do not fall foul of the CJEU judgment, which implicitly offered guidelines how that might be achieved. Germany still seems determined to try, while legal action in the UK will determine whether the recent Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has managed the trick.
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Filed Under: mass surveillance, slovak republic, surveillance, unconstitutional
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Wait, what!?
Oh, yeah, now that we are the only super-power left, it's way easier to be a military dictatorship.
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But another point of view is that the US is the only country left whichs foreign policies rely on violence and threats.
Meanwhile, Slovakia does something? Wow thats a surprise, what is it election time?
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If law enforcement needs more than that, they can go to a judge and make a case for obtaining a warrant.
While they are there, it should be made very clear that evidence too secret to be revealed to the defence at trial is not evidence at all, and will not be accepted by the courts. It should also be redundant to point out that any material errors in the evidence presented should automatically invalidate the warrant, and make any evidence collected under that warrant inadmissible in court.
Police and security organizations have been abusing the trust placed in them for decades now. It's high time police should be trusted no more than the defendants they bring before the courts. At best, the sworn word of a police officer should not be given any more weight than the sworn word of a witness who has nothing to gain from the outcome of the case.
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If law enforcement needs more than that, they can go to a judge and make a case for obtaining a warrant.
That's it. And do the investigative work, wiretap the target or whatever.
The data I mentioned would be used under such warrants to help build the case. And I think they shouldn't be stored for too long. I think they should be stored for no longer than 5-7 days and kept longer if a judicial order asks for it but always with a clear limit. The time limit can be debated of course, I just took numbers out of my head.
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"When I think data retention I mean putting clear limits both to the Govt and to the private actors mandating the destruction of said data after the deadline imposed."
We could have limits for how long companies can retain data without having a data retention law. Mandatory destruction would be extremely nice, but it doesn't address the problems with mandatory data retention.
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It's for our own good, you know. /s
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Money, power and control
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