[Chapter-delegates] German high court: law ordering phone, e-mail traffic data retention violates constitution

[Rudi Vansnick]

  German high court: law ordering phone, e-mail traffic data retention
  violates constitution

MELISSA EDDY Associated Press Writer

5:23 AM EST, March 2, 2010

BERLIN (AP) — Germany's highest court on Tuesday overturned a law 
allowing authorities to retain data on telephone calls and e-mail 
traffic for help in tracking criminal networks.

A law ordering data on calls and e-mail exchanges be retained for six 
months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' 
constitutional right to private correspondence and must be revised, the 
Federal Constitutional Court ruled.

In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the 
need for personal privacy against that for providing security, although 
it did not rule out data retention in principle.

"The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data 
security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data," the 
court said.

Nearly 35,000 Germans had appealed to the court to overturn the law, 
which stems from a 2006 European Union anti-terrorism directive 
requiring telecommunications companies to retain phone data and Internet 
logs for a minimum of six months in case they are needed for criminal 
investigations.

The court upheld the EU directive, saying the problem lay instead with 
how the German parliament chose to interpret it.

Under the German law, which went into effect Jan. 2008, information 
about all calls from mobile or landline phones was retained for six 
months, including who called whom, from where and for how long.

The following year, that law was expanded to include the data 
surrounding all contact via e-mail.

Although the laws forbid authorities from retaining the contents of 
either form of communication, they met with fierce opposition from civil 
rights groups.

"Massive amounts of data about German citizens who pose no threat and 
are not suspects is being retained," Germany's commissioner for data 
security issues, Peter Schaar, told ARD's morning show.

Experts argue the information is crucial to being able to trace crimes 
involving heavy use of the Internet, including tracking terror networks 
and pursuing child pornography.

_______

Associated Press writer Verena Schmitt-Roschmann contributed to this report.

http://www.fox43.com/business/sns-ap-eu-germany-data-retention,0,1005335.story

Rudi Vansnick
President Internet Society Belgium vzw

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