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Comment by eis | Hacker News Reader

Great news, though I guess politicians will find loop holes in this decision that will let them do it anways, albeit slightly differently.

I also wonder if this could have implications on drag net data collections by intelligence agencies.

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By now the ISPs/Telcos had to save the data. When the directive came into action the ISPs/Telcos protested as they had additional costs nobody covered. So loop holes will not help if the data is not stored in the first place.

Unless there's some sort of "full feed copy" wiretap forwarding everything to a spy agency. Isn't this the way it's done in case of NSA and GCHQ, not by stealing archived traffic data off telecom servers?

Are there any leaks about European (except UK-GCHQ) governments spying on their citizens? By now they did not have to because it was done by the ISPs anyway.

Not all of these about 'self-spying', but it is sure as hell they got some tips on their own people from the US.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/swedish-intelligence-service-sp...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/11/french-official...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/30/spain-colluded-...

http://cphpost.dk/news/snowden-leak-confirms-denmark-spying-...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...

http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_11_20/Norwegian-surveillance-s...

http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/impact-of-the-leaks/334/swede...

as of yesterday, add Austria to the list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7552356

If the ISPs already complained about extra costs, I wonder if most EU national secret agencies could pull it off on their own. Even if they had direct access, the infrastructure for the storage and querying of all (header) data of all the ISPs.

They don't all have billion dollar budgets like the NSA+GHCQ (which is the main reason I think it's fair to be infuriated with people that are okay with the global privacy breaches as long as it's not US citizens because "the secret agency in my country is doing just the same"--except they're not, they'd love to[0], but they don't have the resources to pull it off on the frankly insane and megalomaniac scale as NSA+GHCQ do).

That's the benefit of decentralizing, I guess.

[0] for the Dutch-reading HNers, in case you thought our AIVD are really basically just nice guys, check Louis Seveke's story http://www.vn.nl/Standaard-Media-Pagina/Louis-Seveke-kwelgee... (and no Seveke was absolutely no saint either, but they went too far and back in those days you had to physically tail someone, so at least it didn't scale very well)

Most likely the individual countries will keep doing it - even if EU may no longer require them to.

Yes, exactly.

Sadly, it has come to the point where I can't even imagine the UK government willingly give up this option.

This is a worry. At least some decent decisions are being made.

Does this stop forcing the ISP/telecoms from monitoring, or can they still monitor if they want?

Can they do this though? It would be against EU law after all.

Some countries (such as France) shit on EU laws and prefer to pay fines with the citizen taxes. Yay.

Same here in Holland. We have an extra tax (called BPM) on all new cars. It is so high (25K on a BMW X5) we are fined by the EU every year. But it is so profitable our government pays the fine smiling.

Probably paying the fine using the BPM; thus going in a full circle.

Nah. The CFREU (Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU) is binding on EU bodies, and national bodies only when they are implementing EU law. It doesn't directly bind other things national bodies do. That's the job of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights), which is not part of the EU.

The CJEU ruling relies on proportionality and the competence of the EU to legislate what it did. We're not about to get a ruling from the ECtHR that keeping telecoms data for two years violates the ECHR.

tldr: (!mandatory) =/=> (illegal)

Which law?

I guess it does not work like in Germany where rulings by the Constitutional Court have the power of law.

So if they say "this law is invalid, you can't just spy on everyone", the second part of the sentence would be law from then on.

This is my understanding at least, but I am nowhere near an expert in matters of law so take it with a huge grain of salt :)

That's false.

Only the "law is invalid" part carries the force of law. The second part is just obiter dictum.

Look at http://www.bverfg.de/entscheidungen/rs20100302_1bvr025608.ht...

The four bold points after "Urteil" and before "Gründe" are the legal holding. The rest is just explaining the holding.

Not even the "Leitsätze" on top are binding in any way. But with those, at least, you can argue that the court indicated pretty clearly that it considers those sentences important, making speculation about future verdicts at least a little bit fruitful.

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