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Deutsch: Proteste gegen Abhöraktionen und das Vorratsdatenspeicherungsgesetz i...
A protest will take place in Bulgaria on 14 January 2010 in front of the Parliament against the data retention law that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry keeps on pushing ahead with obstinacy.
On 10 December 2009, the Parliamentary Committee on internal security and public order approved, behind closed doors, the amendments proposed by the Interior Ministry to the Electronic Communications Act (ECA) and on 22 December 2009 the amendments were passed in first reading in an emergency meeting by the Parliament despite the large public and media opposition.
The proposed amendments contain provisions that allow the Ministry of Interior and other agencies to permanently monitor, without control, the behaviour, movement and other information on any Bulgarian citizen, whether guilty of a crime or not. These provisions breach the innocence presumption principle stipulated by the Constitution as well as human rights European legislation.
Thus, the Ministry of Interior will have access to the data for the calls and the mobile devices of every citizen through a direct interface. Although a court order is required in order to obtain access, there is no obligation to provide a reason for the access. Through the interface, the agencies have direct and untraceable access to the general national database of all telecom records.
One of the main provisions is that traffic data should be retained for crimes sanctioned with more than 2 years of imprisonment. These traffic data can be used also in relation to computer crimes, which might, in the near future, include the still vague notion of computer piracy.
Even the Ministry of Interior Tsvetan Tsvetanov accepted that: "There is no other European Union member state that provides such access to its police force, it violates article 8 of the European Convention for Human Rights, as well as the Bulgarian constitution" andalso admitted: " under the current proposal, citizens have no right to request information about whether or not their communication data has been subject to investigation."
EDRi-member Bulgarian Internet Society head Veni Markovski criticized the amendments, warning about the lack of control over the bodies that will have access to the retained data. "Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said they are looking to use court approval before using retained data, but the problem is the police will have constant access, without the knowledge of the service provider, to the data that goes through their system. In other words, if they want to use this in court they will get permission from the court. But if they want to use it for something else, be it control, blackmailing, economic interests, they don't need the court's permission," said Veni.
An official protest letter was publicly drafted and discussed online and posted to the Facebook group "We do not want the Interior Ministry to eavesdrop on us online without control."
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