The German law on data retention is unlikely to be upheld. The Scientific Service of the Bundestag assumes this in an analysis of the effects of the new case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on data retention.

The local specifications von 2015 are currently suspended due to decisions by administrative courts and are being reviewed by the Federal Constitutional Court and the ECJ. They stipulate that telecommunications providers must store connection data for ten weeks and location information for four weeks without suspicion and, upon request, must hand them over to investigators. They are “unlikely to last,” says the report that has now been published. The retention periods are comparatively short. The metadata recorded should, however, “always be saved without a specific reason”. This does not correspond to the ECJ principles.

Exceptions The new ECJ rulings in the civil rights organizations La Quadrature du net and Privacy International initiated procedures describe exceptions. The experts state: “In the event of an actual, serious threat to national security, which is present or foreseeable, there remains a narrow margin for general and indiscriminate storage of telecommunications data.”

The Bundestag experts also point out the possibility of collecting IP addresses in advance. The ECJ classifies this as “a less intense impairment of fundamental rights”. The IP addresses make it easier “to assign data to a person”, but only provide limited information about who this person is communicating with and who is otherwise connected. Here too, however, “the strict requirements of the principle of proportionality must be adhered to”. Three CDU justice ministers of the federal states are already calling for appropriate precautions.

Wait or create new law Explain about the secret services the Bundestag experts that direct data retention or “unprovoked access to Internet nodes” without using private providers is not prohibited by EU law. They would only be subject to national constitutional law or “the restrictions of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

The German legislature is now “free to either await the decision of the ECJ on the German regulation or a new law now on data retention taking into account the requirements from the two new ECJ rulings “. The initiator of the report, FDP parliamentary deputy Stephan Thomae, appealed to the federal government to “finally end their dance around the golden calf ‘data storage’.” Traffic data should only be stored for specific reasons.

(anw)