True extent of State's phone tapping could remain secret
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Tuesday July 14 2009
THE extent of phone and internet monitoring by the State may remain secret under new laws being introduced by the Government.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern is bringing forward legislation which will give gardai, the Army and the Revenue Commissioners the power to discover who a person is calling, texting or emailing.
But the public safeguards governing the use of the new powers will only entail the compilation of a statistical report for the European Commission to show how many requests have been made by each state body.
The Department of Justice could not say if this report would be subsequently published by the European Commission.
The phone and internet monitoring will be overseen by a High Court judge and the Data Protection Commissioner.
But the Digital Rights Ireland lobby group said it was concerned at the prospect of no information on the monitoring of phone and internet activity.
"The UK Surveillance Commissioner includes a 20-page report every year, which includes detailed statistics on what went wrong and what sort of safeguards are being put in. Obviously we don't have anything comparable to that at the moment," its chairman TJ McIntyre said.
Under the Communications (Retention of Data) Bill, phone and internet service providers must store internet records for a year. Although Mr Ahern has cut the phone records storage period from three years to two years, Mr McIntyre said other countries had adopted less restrictive requirements for holding onto such data.
"In the Netherlands, it's only six months for email so there will be a competitive disadvantage for Irish businesses. The real incentive is to go off-shore entirely and if you're setting up in the US, you don't have disclosure requirements," he said.
Pressure
Mr McIntyre noted that the EU push to store phone and internet data was partly inspired by US government pressure, even though it had no such domestic requirements.
Mr Ahern pointed out that the constitutional right of citizens to privacy was protected because the bill did not allow for the content of phone calls, text messages or emails to be stored or retrieved.
"It does no more than provide information about the who, the where and the when of a communication," he said.
Gardai have the power to bug people's conversations under covert surveillance legislation but must get permission from a judge.
Sinn Fein TD Aengus O Snodaigh said the bill was short on safeguards for the privacy of citizens of the State.
"These powers should only be used for specific targeted investigations and must be sanctioned by a judge rather than a member of An Garda Siochana, as is proposed by the bill," he said.
- Michael Brennan Political Correspondent
