The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) confirmed on Tuesday the illegality of the “generalized and undifferentiated” conservation of traffic or location data, allowing, however, a “selective and/or rapid” conservation in the fight against serious crime.
In a ruling this Tuesday, in order to clarify the doubts of the German Supreme Administrative Court, the ECJ allows exceptions to the general conservation of internet metadata “in the event of a serious threat to national security.”
The CJEU also considers that EU law allows “for the purposes of safeguarding national security, combating serious crime and preventing serious threats to public security, the selective storage of traffic and location data that is delimited, on the basis of of objective and non-discriminatory elements, according to the categories of interested persons or by geographical criteria, for a period limited to what is strictly necessary, but renewable”.
On the contrary, the generalized and undifferentiated storage of IP addresses is allowed, as well as -for the purposes of fighting crime and safeguarding public security- “the generalized and undifferentiated storage of data relating to the civil identity of users of electronic communications media.
In Portugal, the Constitutional Court (TC) considered, in April, unconstitutional rules of the metadata law that determine that telephone and internet service providers must keep data related to customer communications, including origin, destination , the date and time, the type of equipment, and the location. – for a period of one year, for eventual use in the criminal investigation.
To respond to this ruling, a government bill was presented, as well as the PSD, Chega and PCP bills on the same subject, which were discussed in the specialty without a vote on June 3.
The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has already said that he will ask the TC for a preventive inspection of the new law that will be approved by Parliament.
Source: TSF
