Communications Data Retention
Communications Data Retention
Chapter 20
Contents
20.1 20.2 A New Age for Surveillance and Liberties? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410 Data Retention as a (Valuable?) Surveillance Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411 20.2.1 Communications and Trafc Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412 20.2.2 Interception, Preservation, and Retention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413 European Regulatory Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414 20.3.1 Cybercrime Convention of the Council of Europe . . . . . . 414 20.3.2 Privacy and Electronic Communications Law in the European Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 20.3.2.1 The E-Privacy Directive: Data Retention as an Option . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 20.3.2.2 Mandatory, Routine Data Retention: The New Directive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416 20.3.3 Data Retention as Interference with the Right to the Respect of (Communicational) Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . 418 Privacy and Electronic Communications Law in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
20.3
20.4
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20.4.1 The Legal Framework: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 20.4.2 The Fourth Amendment and the (Un)reasonable Expectation of Communicational Privacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420 20.5 New Challenges, Old Instruments: The Shortcoming of Content-Envelope Distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422 20.5.1 The Blurring Lines of Content and Envelope . . . . . . . . 422 20.5.2 A False Distinction? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 20.6 Data Retention versus Fundamental Freedoms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 20.6.1 An Unnecessary and Disproportionate Measure? . . . . . . . . 424 20.6.1.1 Criteria of Acceptable Interference . . . . . . . . . . 424 20.6.1.2 A Disproportionate Dataveillance . . . . . . . . . . . 425 20.6.2 Communications Surveillance as Interference into the Rights of Anonymity and Freedom of Expression . . . 426 20.6.3 The Question of Independent and Adequate Oversight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427 20.6.4 Common Information Pools for Public and Private Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428 20.7 An Information-Based (Pre)prevention of Risks or a Threat to Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
20.1
The internationally increased attention on organized crime, cyber-crime, as well as terrorismreinforced by the terrorist attacks, especially in New York, Madrid, and Londonhave created a fertile ground for governments and international organizations to speed up the adoption of legislation that will strengthen the investigation and prosecution powers of enforcement authorities. The shock of terrorist attacks puts the subject of security thoroughly back on the political agenda and the public debate. In the wake of each attack, earlier proposals, which had no chance to be accepted [25,27], were reintroduced, and new policies with similar objectives were drafted to extend state surveillance authority. In the past ve years, the legal and political landscapes have shifted signicantly in many countries and at the international level, in order to face the new risks and threats and, in general, the problems that arise from the changing nature and type of criminal activity and terrorism. The legal apparatus reects new powers, investigative methods, and procedures that are supported, when not created, by a new technological environment. Technology has always been used to safeguard collective and individual security. However, new sophisticated technologies have
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led to a profound increase in law enforcement surveillance, as they have given governments an unprecedented ability to engage in powerful mass surveillance [43]. The events of September 11 have facilitated and accelerated the move toward an intelligence-gathering form of policing [27]. The so-called soft security measures mainly seek to exploit the interactivity of information communication technologies in order to identify the riskposing individuals and their networks [31]. The freedom of the individual and the security of all, i.e., the states tasks of guaranteeing individual, constitutionally protected freedoms, and of attending to and providing for the communitys security, are inevitably in a relationship marked by tension and even contradiction [17]. Surveillance measures raise signicant concerns in relation to the respect of privacy and other fundamental rights and freedoms. This contribution deals with the question of data retention as a method of mass communications surveillance. In this chapter, I discuss the retention of communications data as a security measure, which interferes with the right to privacy. Privacy is perceived not as merely a right possessed by individuals, but as a prerequisite for making autonomous decisions, freely communicating with other persons, and being included in a participation society. In Section 20.2, I examine communications monitoring as a law enforcement tool, by presenting the notions of interception of content, data retention, and data preservation. I consider critically the choices of legislators in the European Union and the United States (Sections 20.3 and 20.4), by referring to the legal framework and assessing the respective jurisprudence. Emphasis is given on the recently (2006) adopted EU Data Retention Directive and its effects on freedom of communication and privacy. In Section 20.5, assessed is the distinction of content and communications data, which forms the groundwork for the legislative options and judicial approaches. Further, I examine in Section 20.6 whether, and to what extent, the new legal landscape takes into account the values and fundamental rights deeply embedded in democratic societies and legal orders. Section 20.7 concludes the chapter by considering the far-reaching effects of mass surveillance on the relationship and the adjustment of freedom and security and consequently on the nature of state and society.
20.2
Access to communications data and its content has always been one of the most commonly used ways of gathering information for criminal investigations and the activities of intelligence services. In the emerging information society, more and more social interaction as well as business
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relationships are conducted via electronic communications networks. As a result, traditional procedural measures of information collection through law enforcement authorities, such as search and seizure, have to be adapted to the dynamic nature of data and information ows and more generally to the new technological and societal environment [13]. If communications content is intercepted only in exceptional and specic cases, providers store the communications or transactional data routinely for the purposes of conveying and billing of communications. In the context of prevention, investigation, detection, and prosecution of criminal offenses and/or terrorist attacks (committed or supported by means of electronic communication networks), data relating to the use of communications are valuable in tracing and locating the source and the route of information as well as collecting and securing evidence. The retention of this data is pivotal to reactive investigations into serious crimes and the development of proactive intelligence on matters affecting not only organized criminal activity, but also national security [8].
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by a computer system that formed a part in the chain of communication, indicating the communications origin, destination, route, time, date, size, duration, or type of underlying service (Art. 1 d). This denition lists exhaustively the categories of trafc data that is treated by a specic regime in this convention (Explanatory Report, 30). The basic idea of this denition is that trafc data is data used by the telecommunications service providers to allow them to supervise the network. This type of data does not need to be personal [33]. In United States law (Stored Communications Act), transactional data lists certain customer record information: the customers name, address, phone numbers, billing records, and types of services the customer utilizes. The USA PATRIOT Act (2001) expanded this list to include records of session times and durations, any temporarily assigned network address, and any credit card or bank account number used for payment [43,34].
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by Crump, data preservation demonstrates the utility of Internet trafc data as evidence of criminal wrongdoing; whether data retention, by making it easier to link acts to actors, aims at the change of the communication context [15].
20.3
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data so as to identify that other service providers were involved in the transmission of the specied communications. The measures in Articles 16 and 17 apply to stored data that has already been collected and retained by data holders, such as service providers. They do not apply to the real-time collection and retention of future trafc data or to real-time access to the content of communications. The Convention neither requires nor authorizes the signing States to impose supplementary data conservation obligations upon providers and certainly not to operate such conservation as a general regime for all uses of their services [35]. However, Articles 20 and 21 provide for the real-time collection of trafc data and the real-time interception of content data associated with specied communications transmitted by a computer system. The rst drafts of the convention were strongly criticized, as they initially introduced a general surveillance obligation consisting of the routine retention of all trafc data, an approach abandoned due to the lack of consensus [13]. The Art. 29 Data Protection Working Party (DPWP), a committee composed of representatives of supervisory authorities designated by EU Member States (Art. 29 of the Framework Data Protection Directive), had expressed serious concerns regarding the vague and confusing wording of the Convention [3]. However, the DPWP had recognized that the Conventions preservation model, by contrast to the mandatory, routine data retention, is entirely adequate for the prevention or prosecution of criminal offenses [4].
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According to the directive, trafc data generated in the course of an electronic communication should be erased when it is no longer necessary for the purpose of the transmission of the communication. Exemptions to this principle are limited to a small number of specic purposes, such as billing purposes (Art. 6). A general obligation concerning data retention and any form of systematic interception would be contrary to the proportionality principle [21]. The vigorous debate about the mandatory retention of trafc data ended in 2002 with a compromise solution: Member states were allowed to adopt legislative measures for the retention of data for a limited period, if these are necessary to safeguard national security, defense, public security, and the prevention, investigation, detection, and prosecution of criminal offenses, etc. (Art. 15 1). Such measures were required to be necessary, appropriate, and proportionate within a democratic society and, explicitly, to comply with the general principles of Community law, e.g., those recognized by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (right to privacy, protection of personal data, freedom of expression, and communication) as well as with the fundamental rights guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of the Council of Europe (ECHR). Even if this provision was supposed to constitute an exception to the rules established by the E-privacy directive, the ability of governments to oblige communication providers to store all data of all of their subscribers could hardly be construed as an exception to be narrowly interpreted [37]. Furthermore, this provision was widely drafted and it was criticized for making little distinction between the action, which may be taken in response to extreme terrorist activity and more routine criminal behaviour [38].
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crime (instead of the initial proposals reference to ght against terrorism and organized crime) leaves a very wide margin of appreciation [6], allowing extending the scope of measures, which might not have been taken outside the specic context of terrorism [26]. According to DPWP, serious crime should be clearly dened and delineated in order to comply with the principle of nality (purpose limitation) laid down in all relevant data protection legislative texts [6]. Providers are required to retain data necessary to identify and trace the identity of the source and the destination of a communication, the date, time, duration, type of the communication, as well as data necessary to identify the communication equipment and its location. Covered also is data relating to unsuccessful call attempts, if the relevant data is already stored or logged. The directive requires that the providers retain only such data as is generated or processed in the process of supplying their communications services. . . It is not intended to merge the technology for retaining data. . . (Recital 23). The directive is applicable to electronic communication services offered via the Internet, but it does not apply to the content of the communications (Art. 5). Article 29 DPWP considers that since the content is excluded from the scope of the directive, specic guarantees should be introduced in order to ensure a stringent, effective distinction between content and trafc databoth for the Internet and for telephony [5]. If such a distinction is feasible is a highly controversial issue. By no later than September 15, 2007, EU member states have to adopt legislative measures to ensure that the data retained is provided to the competent national authorities in specic cases and in accordance with national law, while member states are allowed to postpone until March 15, 2009, the application of the directive to Internet access, Internet telephony, and Internet e-mail. National legislators have to specify the procedures to be followed and the conditions to be fullled in order to gain access to retained data in accordance with necessity and proportionality requirements(Art. 4). These requirements have to be taken into account especially for the designation of law enforcement authorities, who will have access to the retained data. With regard to the retention period, the directive requires member states to ensure the data is retained for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years from the date of the communication (Art. 6). Member states facing particular circumstances are allowed to extend the maximum retention period, provided that the commission approves the national measures that deviate from the directives provision (Art. 12), a possibility that raises signicant concerns relating to the harmonized application [48,28] and mainly to the power afforded to a community institution lacking democratic legitimization.
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20.3.3 Data Retention as Interference with the Right to the Respect of (Communicational) Privacy
Communications data retention interferes with the right to condential communications guaranteed to individuals by Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which states that everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home, and his correspondence. The convention establishes basic rules regarding fundamental rights and liberties that are applicable throughout the contracting states. According to Art. 6 (2) of the Treaty on European Union, the ECHR is binding not only for member states, but also for the European Union as well. The right to the protection of privacy is recognized also by Art. 7 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The notion of privacy could be dened as freedom of unwarranted and arbitrary interference from public authorities or private actors/bodies into activities that society recognizes as belonging to the realm of individual autonomy (private sphere) [23]. The European approach to privacy is largely grounded to the dignity of the person, who operates in self-determination as a member of a free society. (German Federal Constitutional Court, Census case, 1983). Dignity as related to privacy is a concept summarizing principles, such as protection of individuals personality, noncommodication of the individual, noninterference with others life choices, and the possibility to act autonomously and freely in society [36,16]. The European Court of Human Rights has not viewed privacy only as a condition of total secrecy and/or separateness. On the contrary, the court has clearly interpreted the reference to private life expansively. In its jurisprudence, the court admitted that the scope of Art. 8 extends to the right of the individual to establish and develop relationships with other human beings (Court of Human Rights, P.G. v. United Kingdom, Niemitz v. Germany). The Court considers the mere storing of personal information as an interference with the right of privacy, whether or not the state subsequently uses the data against the individual (Court of Human Rights, Amann v. Switzerland). Even public information (i.e., public available information about an individual) can fall within the scope of private life where it is systematically collected and stored by public authorities (Court of Human Rights, Rotaru v. Romania). The communication with others as well as the use of communication services falls within the zone of (communicational) privacy [14]. In the case Malone v. UK, the court asserted that trafc data is an integral element on the communications made by telephone. Therefore, the metering (use of a device that registers automatically the numbers dialed, time, and duration) of trafc data without the consent of the subscriber constitutes an interference with Art. 8 [12]. Trafc data retention, as laid down by the Data Retention Directive, interferes with the fundamental right to condential
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communications [5]. The fact that the data is retained by private parties (providers) is not decisive. Signicant for the classication as interference, it remains that the authorities have the right, as specied by domestic law, to access the data at any time [8,28].
20.4
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subscriber-identifying information, transactional data, and the content of electronic communications that are maintained either incident to transmission or stored in the account. The Pen Register Act regulates the governments use of pen registers and trap and trace devices, which create lists of ones outgoing and incoming phone calls. A pen register is a device that records the numbers of ones outgoing phone calls (numbers, date, time, and duration). The Patriot Act amended the denition of pen register to include information on e-mails and IP addresses [43,7]. The court must issue an order permitting the installation of such a register based upon a certication of the government ofce that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation [34]. All three statutes generally prohibit unauthorized interception and/or access to communications and information, and provide for prospective and retrospective surveillance, permitting specied exceptions [34]. Preliminarily, it is interesting to note that, although President George Bush encouraged the president of the European Commission to [r]evise draft privacy directives that call for mandatory destruction to permit the retention of critical data for a reasonable period (Letter of January 16, 2001), U.S. statutory provisions permit data retention only in respect to specic investigations that are already underway.
20.4.2 The Fourth Amendment and the (Un)reasonable Expectation of Communicational Privacy
The legal array relating to the surveillance of electronic communications has been adopted against a backdrop of constitutional uncertainty [7]. In the United States there is no express right to privacy embedded in the Constitution andwith the exception of several highly specic regulations (as ECPA, the Genetic Privacy Act, or the Video Privacy Act)there is no comprehensive legal framework providing for the protection of privacy. However, in certain situations, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution to protect the privacy of the individuals: In the 1960s and 1970s, the Court reasoned that the Constitution protected a zone of privacy that safeguarded individual autonomy in making certain decisions, traditionally left to individual choice, such as whether to have children (Supreme Court, Row v. Wade). In Whalen v. Roe (1977), the Court held that the zone of privacy extends to the independence in making certain kinds of decision and the individual interest in avoiding disclosure of personal matters. Several U.S. scholars have maintained that privacy is a form of freedom built into social structure andsubsequentlyinadequate protection of privacy threatens deliberative democracy by inhibiting people from engaging in democratic activities [44,40,47].
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The critical constitutional framework for communicational privacy consists of the Fourth Amendment and its interpretation by the courts, mainly the U.S. Supreme Court. The Fourth Amendment afrms the right of the people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure. It generally prohibits searches or seizures without a warrant. A rst important issue concerns the notion of search for Fourth Amendment purposes in relation to the framing question, whether a subscriber/person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in data transmitted and retained by providers. In Katz v. U.S. (1967), the lodestar of Supreme Court surveillance cases, Justice Harlan articulated the two-part requirement for a government action to be considered a search: First, that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable. In Katz, the Supreme Court decided that an electronic eavesdropping device, commonly referred to as a wiretap, placed on the outside of a public phone booth to detect the contents of the phone conversation implicated the Fourth Amendment and was presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. Departing from its previous narrow denition of a search, the Court stated that protected are people, not places. According to the Court, also protected are communications, which the individual seeks to protect as private, even in an area accessible to the public. However, since the end of the Warren Court era (1969), the Supreme Court, generating exceptions and exclusions, has interpreted the Fourth Amendment in a way that leaves communications surveillance largely free from constitutional restrictions [24,39]. Twelve years after Katz, in Smith v. Maryland (1979), the Court reasoned that there is no Fourth Amendment interest in the telephone numbers one dials: A rst argument, set out already in another famous case (United States v. Miller), concerns the nonprivate character of data retained: A person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily revealed to a third party and conveyed by it to a public authority, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose. Since people know that they must convey numerical information to the phone company and that the phone company records this information for billing purposes, people cannot harbour any general expectation that the numbers they dial will remain secret (Smith v. Maryland). The underlying principle is that technological possibilities determine the reasonableness of privacy expectations. Furthermore, the Supreme Court subdivides a technologically enhanced communication into content and other parts, which are not protected under the Fourth Amendment: [A] pen register differs signicantly from the listening device employed in Katz, for pen registers do not acquire the contents of communications. . . These devices do not hear sound. . . [24,44,39].
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One particularly insidious characteristic of the reasonable expectation of privacy approach is that the more individuals rely on technology, the more government intrusion into personal information seems reasonable. If we remain isolated in our homes, with the curtains tightly drawn, the phone and the computer unplugged, we are within the core of Fourth Amendment protection [10]. It is highly questionable if the Fourth Amendment and the statutory provisions, as currently interpreted, continue to be an adequate regulatory tool for privacy protection in the Internet space and era.
20.5
By adapting traditional procedural requirements to new technological environments, a critical question concerns the terms used to dene and regulate the communications surveillance. The choice of appropriate terminology has profound impacts on the extent of power granted to state authorities and respectively on the level of protection afforded to citizens. By failing to provide specic denitions or guidance, the law could lead to major interpretation problems relating to the provisions, guarantees, and checks applied, leaving the public authorities a wide discretion to opt for the convenient legal instrument [42]. This remark, among others, refers to the notion of search and seizure, to the differences of transmission and storage, but mainly it concerns the basis distinction of content and trafc/ transactional data. Both the European and the American regulatory approaches rely on the traditional distinction of content and envelope. While recognizing that both types of data may have associated privacy interests, the dominant assumption, explicitly or implicitly shared by legislators and courts, is that the privacy interests in respect to content data are greater due to the nature of the communication content or message [13]. However, in the modern network environment, this separation is not quite as obvious. Moreover this distinction does not reect necessarily a distinction between sensitive and innocuous information [43].
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E-mail messages contain information sequences that include both address and content [42]. An e-mails subject line and the name of the le attached (e.g., Communist manifesto.doc or BinLaden. doc) are also arguably content [15]. Content and trafc data are often generated simultaneously. A fundamental question relates to the nature of URLs: even in the basic level a domain name (such as www.aegean.edu or www.aryan-nations.org) provides information on the content of what the user will nd on the Web page [19,7]. In the case of a request operated with a search engine, such as Google or Altavista, a result like http://www.google.com/sites/web?q=aids+ medical+treatment reveals not only data necessary for the conveyance of an electronic communication, but also elements of content, indicating at least the interests of the user [12], and information that is automatically logged together with the IP address of the user and the time of the search [28].
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Technological changes transform rapidly the parameters of the distinction of content and external communication elements: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), relying on Internets packet-switched network, creates the potential for telephone conversations to be trivially stored by the parties involved as well as at the network level [7]. The imminent growth of VoIP is likely to have profound implications on the content-trafc data approach. Such a routine storage would result in the restriction of users privacy protection, especially where the access to stored data and communications requires less procedural and substantial guarantees as the interception of content. As Swire [46] points out, the spread of VoIP and pervasive caching of telephone communications could create a reductio ad absurdum (reduction to absurdity), in which the reasonable expectation of privacy would concern only a few telephone calls that do not happen to be stored anywhere [46]. This last remark relates to a major challenge, which lawmakers and courts have to meet in the information era, which is to keep pace with the advance of surveillance technologies, practices, and purposes of the respectively changingsocietal needs and expectations.
20.6
Given the expanding use of the Internet and the creation of a new (cyber) space, individuals have a both subjectively and objectively reasonable expectation of privacy and a claim to control the acquisition or release of personal information, which statutes such as ECPA or the Data Retention Directive fail to reect, let alone to protect. Quite the reverse. Their mostly vaguely formulatedprovisions constitute a threat to the right to privacy. The new communication surveillance measures, adopted both in the European Union and in the United States, have been strongly criticized by parliamentarians, academics, and privacy advocates. Criticism in Europe has put strong emphasis on the disproportionality of measures adopted in relation to the rights and liberties affected [8,38], while in the United States, the criticism has been largely focused on inadequate and insufcient judicial oversight of communication surveillance procedures and measures, partly as a result of the restrictive approach to reasonable expectation of privacy [43,24].
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conformity of the measure with the legitimate interests of national security, public safety, or the economic well-being of a country, prevention or disorder of crime, protection of health or morals, or protection of the rights and freedoms of the others. The provision reects the tension between individual and community and the need to take into account the interests of society without infringing upon the intrinsic value of privacy in a democratic society. The catalog of justied restrictions on the right to privacy seems to be extensively large. However, the European Court of Human Rights in its case law has specied the requirements to be met. The law authorizing the interference in the communicational privacy has to meet the standards of accessibility and foreseeability inherent in the concept of the rule of law, so that persons can regulate their conduct according to the law (Court of Human Rights, Malone v. U.K., Kruslin v. France). Conditions, safeguards for the individuals, and implementation modalities must be sufciently summarized, in order to succeed the quality of law test [12,15]. Proportionality, a key principle in European constitutional law, requires a further assessment of the necessity of the measure and its suitability to achieve its aims. Even if necessary is not synonymous with indispensable. . . it implies a pressing social need (Court of Human Rights, Handyside v. U.K.). The objective pursued must be balanced against the seriousness if the interference, which is to be judged taking into account, inter alia, the number and nature of persons affected and the intensiveness of the negative effects [8]. Restrictions must be limited to a strict minimum: Legislators are required to minimize the interference by trying to achieve their aims in the least onerous way (Court of Human Rights, Hatton v. U.K.). The necessity and proportionality have to be clearly demonstrated by considering that privacy is not only an individual right of control over ones information, but moreover a key element of a democratic constitutional order (German Constitutional Court, Census Decision).
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European-based electronic communications. The comprehensive storage of all trafc data gives rise to an indenite and ongoing interference with the privacy rights of all users, not just those who are suspected of committing a crime [14,12,18]. It makes surveillance that is authorized in exceptional circumstances, the rule [5]. Additionally, generalized data retention conicts with the proportionality, fair use, and specicity requirements of data protection regulation: Personal data may not be collected, processed, or transmitted with the sole purpose of providing a future speculative data resource. The adoption of such an invasive measure could result in opening a Pandoras box of universal surveillance, where every person is treated as a potential criminal [33]. The generalized storing of communication/trafc data is wildly disproportionate to the law enforcement objectives and, therefore, could not be deemed as necessary in a democratic society. Routine retention of trafc and location data concerning all kinds of communications (i.e., mobile phones, SMS, faxes, e-mails, chatrooms, and other uses of the Internet) for purposes varying from national security to law enforcement constitutes what Clarke [11] refers to as dataveillance, i.e., the routine, systematic, and focused use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons. Considering the increased use of electronic communications in daily life and the fact that, especially, the Internet is unprecedented in the degree of information that can be stored and revealed, the storage of this data could be seen as an extended logbook of a persons behavior and life [12]. Encroaching into the daily life of every person, routine data retention may endanger the fundamental values and freedoms that all (European) citizens enjoy and cherish [6].
20.6.2 Communications Surveillance as Interference into the Rights of Anonymity and Freedom of Expression
The feature of the electronic communication networks and the interactive use of networks increase the amount of transactional/trafc data generated [1]. As electronic communications leave a lot of digital traces, communication surveillance impedes or even eliminates the right to anonymity [43,15]. The ability to maintain ones anonymity in certain contexts, as in using technology without having to reveal ones name forms part of privacy [10]. Anonymity has to be assessed not only as a component of private sphere and intimacy, but also and mainly in the context of its signicance for the right to freedom of expression, which includes the right to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authorities (Art. 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights). According to the landmark decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court on the census law, unrestricted access to personal data imperils
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virtually every constitutionally guaranteed right: Neither freedom of speech nor freedom of association nor freedom of assembly can be fully exercised as long as it remains uncertain whether, under what circumstances, and for what purposes, personal information is collected and processed. Blanket data retention, by making communication activity potentially traceable, has a disturbing effect on the willingness to voice critical and constructive ideas, and on the free exchange of information and ideas, which is of paramount importance in a democratic society [8,29]. Identication and fear of reprisal might discourage participation to public debate (U.S. Supreme Court, Talley v. California). On the contrary, anonymity allows information and ideas to be disseminated and considered without bias. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas and, more specically, that the First Amendment extends to anonymous speech activity. The claim to anonymity, inherent in the right to privacy, is essential to freedom of communication via electronic networks, but, at the same time, it runs against public policy objectives. From a law enforcement perspective, anonymity is perceived as the main reason for increasing cyber-criminal activity [12]. However, there is no sustainable argument for abandoning the principle that where a choice of ofine anonymity exists, it should also be preserved in the online world (Ministerial Declaration of the Ministerial Conference on Global Information Networks, Bonn, 1997). Proportionate restrictions to this right, in order to face the specic nature and risks of cyberspace activities, must be permitted in limited and specied circumstances. The Supreme Court, acknowledging the instrumental value of anonymity in enriching public discussion and maximizing freedom of (anonymous) association [15], has held that this constitutionally guaranteed right must be reconciled with compelling public interests. According to the Court, identication is held to be constitutional only if there is no other effective way for the government to achieve law enforcement objectives (Buckley v. Valeo).
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specify the particular data required for the specic cases at hand. Effective controls on the original and any further use should be provided: (1) by judicial authorities within and for the purposes of a criminal procedure and (2) by data protection authorities concerning data protection, regardless of the existence of a judicial proceeding [5,6]. Independent supervisory authorities have become an essential component of the data protection supervisory system in the EU. The Data Retention Directive requires member states to designate one or more public authorities, acting with complete independence. However, in this case, the EU legislators have a narrow perception of their competence, as it seems to be restricted to monitoring the application of the national law provisions adopted by Member States regarding the security of the stored data (Art. 9). In the United States, the Wiretap Act requires the government to meet very high standards in order to obtain authorization to intercept communications (specic description, type, duration, etc.). However, the most signicant deciency is that the majority of the statutes permits governmental access to third-party records with only a court order or subpoena, which falls short of the Fourth Amendments requirement for warrants supported by probable cause and issued by a neutral and detached judge. Regular warrants are required only to obtain the contents of electronic communications in electronic storage for 180 days or less. If they are stored over 180 days, the government can access them with an administrative subpoena, a grand jury subpoena, a trial subpoena, or a court order. In the case of the Pen Registers Act, the courts must take the governments certication that the information is relevant to an ongoing investigation. Judges are not required to review the evidence and assess the factual predicate for the governments certication. Several scholars have stressed the need for a higher threshold to obtain the court order and for the guarantee of judicial review of the governments application [43]. Another point of criticism has been the fact that the ECPA contains no statutory exclusionary rule for wrongfully acquired electronic communications, which means that it does not prohibit the use as evidence of any communications obtained in violation of these requirements [7].
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the private sector, ranging from banks and insurances (SWIFT case, ChoicePoint case) to airlines (EUUSA PNR data case), to governmental agencies. Privatization and diversication of traditionally state-controlled sectors (like telecommunications), interoperability, and technological synergy have as consequence the so-called function creep, which can result in a mission creep [37]. For example, not only are the same data-mining techniques developed for proling consumers being used by security and intelligence services to prole potential terrorists, often the very data from which these proles are created is the same [45]. Regardless, the national rules being developed to regulate access to trafc data by law enforcement agencies, will mean that mandatory retention would effectively create a massive database, putting at the disposal of the state an unprecedented amount of information about the everyday activities ofindiscriminatelyeach and every user. The increasing amount of personal information owing to the government poses signicant problems with far-reaching effects [44]. The (even potential) availability and accessibility of vast amounts of data, collected by private entities for entirely other purposes, constitutes a threat to informational self-determination and it can chill not only politics-related, but also personal activities.
20.7
The terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, and the expansion of organized crime/cyber-crime, have altered the balance of security interests and freedom in a way that deeply affects the fundamental values, which form the basis of democratic and constitutional states. Surveillance-susceptible infrastructures and data-retention schemes supply the governments with new privacy-intrusive surveillance tools. As life in the information society depends upon information and communication, data retention extends beyond a potential search basis: Not only does it rigidies ones past [43], but it records citizens behavior and social interaction [34,8]. Pervasive surveillance affects the self-determination and the personality of individuals, inclining their choices toward the mainstream [41,43]. Potential knowledge is present power, emphasizes the Report of the [U.S. Department of Defense] Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, adding, awareness that government may analyze activity is likely to alter behavior as people act differently if they know their conduct could be observed [49]. Data retention symbolizes the disappearance of the disappearance, which seems to become a dening characteristic of the information age [31]. In this sense, the freedom of movement, another historically fundamental freedom right, is currently jeopardized in virtual spaces.
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The decision to routinely retain communications data for law enforcement purposes is an unprecedented one with a historical dimension [6]. It reects the transformation from the traditional constitutional model of gathering conclusive evidence of wrongdoing of suspect individuals toward intelligence gathering, which may be carried out against individuals at random [31,17]. The individual itself is no longer perceived as a principally law-abiding citizen, rather as a potential threat or as an exchangeable element in a principally dangerous environment [30]. Further, even after the deletion of prevention from the aims allowing access to retained data according to EU law, generalized, and indiscriminate data retention, as such, mirrors the shift from a constitutional state guarding against the threat of specic risks in specic situations toward a security-orientated preventive [17] or even prepreventive state, which acts operatively and proactively. The imperative to ght new threats through preprevention measures and policies blows up the cornerstones of the rule of law state [25]. The rapid reaction to the expectation of the people that the government will keep the security promise, reveals certainly the states readiness to suspend freedom [26], merely catalyzed, yet not caused, by the latest terrorist acts. The invention of a fundamental right to security did nothing to resolve the problems of security, but was only used as an argument to justify everwider powers of state intervention [17,26]. Prevention and removal of risks have become a social and political imperative in the risk society. Curtailment of rights and reduction of scrutiny seems to be in large extent tolerated by majorities [15]. A decisive question is if and to what extent the society is ready to take risks in freedoms interest. Governments must respond to the new challenge in a way that effectively meets the citizens expectations without undermining individual human rights or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it (European Court, Klass v. Germany). Absolute security could not exist because it could be achieved only at the price of freedom. The legitimization of the democratic state depends upon its success in balancing the various public objectives, i.e., freedom and security, under the terms and within the limits of core democratic values. Levi and Wall [31] propose as guidance for future directions or thoughts Benjamin Franklins famous quote: Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
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