Laws that allow for spying on European citizens continue to fall across the continent. First it was Bulgaria, which followed in the wake of the Netherlands. Yesterday the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic has similarly struck down the country’s data retention provisions, a move reported by the European Information Society Institute:
The act, which ordered large-scale mass surveillance of citizens (so-called data retention) is now history. The Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic clearly and unequivocally proclaimed that mass surveillance of citizens is unconstitutional. The decision was given after 30 members of the Parliament raised the issue on behalf of the European Information Society Institute (EISi), a Slovakia based think-tank.
The judgment is in line with the ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the over-arching EU Data Retention Directive was “invalid.” Even the European Commission seems resigned to the fact that there will be no new spying laws at the EU level.
However, national laws can and still being enacted, so long as they do not fall foul of the CJEU ruling, which implicitly offered guidelines on how that might be achieved. Germany is still determined to try, while a lawsuit in the UK will determine whether the recent Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has managed the trick.
Germany this weekend was revealed to be helping the NSA spy on both German citizens and also key EU industries. Airbus was shown to a victim of the German spying, with top secret plans being stolen and then given to American rival Boeing.
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