Things that caught our eye
A broad coalition of privacy advocates has sent an open letter to the Dutch Minister of Security and Justice today, asking to suspend any activity on bills that: ‘lead to tracking of citizens without any specific and concrete suspicion against them,’ until the government has developed a ‘vision’ about privacy protection of citizens in the Dutch information society. This vision should then be the subject of a public debate facilitated by the Dutch Government, so that the Dutch people may have the fundamental discussion about privacy and technological development it never had. Preferably the debate would be held not only in Parliament, but also outside of Parliament.
The current bills of which they would like to see legislative action suspended until the public debate has taken place are:
This open letter is signed by a large group of privacy researchers, interest groups and groups such as Amnesty International (Netherlands), Bits of Freedom (the Dutch equivalent of the EFF), Dutch Association of Criminal Lawyers, Dutch Association of Journalists, Privacy First Foundation and many others. There is also a website where individuals may sign the letter.
Some of the aforementioned groups were also a party to the recent interim proceedings in which the Dutch Data Retention Act was struck down, (for more on that see our earlier post, with a translation of the ruling attached).
We will update this post with the response of the Government.
Read the open letter in Dutch here.
Things that caught our eye
Today the District Court of The Hague ruled the Dutch Data Retention Act inoperable in summary proceedings. You can find the Dutch judgment here. And for those not reading Dutch, we have made a quick unofficial (!) English translation of the judgment, which you can download here.
For many EU Member States it was clear that since the EU Court of Justice on 8 April 2014 had ruled the Data Retention Directive invalid, with retroactive effect, the national implementation laws would also be invalid. The Dutch government opted for a different strategy. It retained (pun intended) the law as is, while thinking about amending the law in the future.
This was deemed an unacceptable course of action by Privacy First, The Dutch Lawyers Committee on Human Rights, The Dutch Association of Journalists and three companies that are providers of telecommunication services and public telecommunication networks. They sued the Dutch State, and today they won. More…
Blog
Data retention may well be a valuable resource to fight serious crime and terrorism, but it’s not, when, if you decide to be a terrorist, you can also decide to evade the whole system by using Gmail.
(this post appears in The Conversation and is expanded upon here to offer new details – and a bit more emotion)
The purpose and implementation of the Australian government proposed metadata retention scheme is making less and less sense – but the political knives are coming out to get it passed. So what’s going on?
More…
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Today the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the Data Retention Directive to be invalid, based on the fact that ‘the EU legislature has exceeded the limited imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality’. How did the CJEU come to this decision, what are the governmental responses and what does this mean for harmonisation? More…
