Germany’s highest court on Tuesday overturned a law that let anti-terror authorities retain data on telephone calls and e-mails, saying it marked a “grave intrusion” into personal privacy rights and must be revised.
The court ruling was the latest to sharply criticize a major initiative by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and one of the strongest steps yet defending citizen rights from post-Sept. 11, 2001, terror-fighting measures.
The ruling comes amid a Europe-wide attempt to set limits on the digital sphere in the name of protecting privacy. That includes disputes with Google Inc over photographing citizens for its Street View maps and a vote against letting US authorities see European bank transfers to track down terror cells.
The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the law violated Germans’ constitutional right to private correspondence and failed to balance privacy rights against the need to provide security. It did not, however, rule out data retention in principle.
The law had ordered that all data — except content — from phone calls and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities, who could probe who contacted whom, from where and for how long.
“The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data,” the court said, adding that “such retention represents an especially grave intrusion.”
The court said the fact that citizens did not notice the data was being retained caused “a vague and threatening sense of being watched.”
Nearly 35,000 Germans had appealed to the court to overturn the law, which stems from a 2006 EU anti-terrorism directive requiring telecommunications companies to retain phone data and Internet logs for a minimum six months in case they are needed for criminal investigations.
Civil rights activists who had fiercely opposed the law welcomed the ruling.
“The government must not only refrain from collecting data, it must also protect citizens from the excessive gathering of information and building of profiles by the private sector,” Germany’s federal data protection watchdog, Peter Schaar, said in a statement.
Germans are sensitive to privacy issues, based on their experiences under the Nazis as well as in the former East Germany’s communist dictatorship.
Ignacio Czeguhn, a professor with Berlin’s Free University, said that while Tuesday’s ruling was limited to the government, it could have an impact on the private sector as well.
“This [ruling] raises the question, of course, what happens if a company does this?” he asked.
Security experts argue the information is crucial to being able to trace crimes involving heavy use of the Internet, including tracking terror networks and child pornography rings.
Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, expressed disappointment at the ruling and said the government would propose narrower legislation quickly.
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