[kictanet] German Court- and Constitutionality of Data Retention Laws

[waudo siganga]

Thanks Aloo. The "Right to be Forgotten" as they say should
indeed be a basic constitutional right.

Waudo


On Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:57 -0800, "Leonard Aloo"
<l_aloo at yahoo.com> wrote:

This may be of interest to some listers.

Regards,
Leonard Obura Aloo

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

_______________________________________________
kictanet mailing list
kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke
http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman/listinfo/kictanet

This message was sent to: emailsignet at mailcan.com
Unsubscribe or change your options at http://lists.kictanet.or.ke/mailman
/options/kictanet/emailsignet%40mailcan.com

References

1. http://www.fox43.com/business/sns-ap-eu-germany-data-retention,0,1005335.story
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.kictanet.or.ke/pipermail/kictanet/attachments/20100303/c613d013/attachment.htm>