Prague, Dec 20 (CTK) – Czech Pirates have lodged a proposal to cancel some sections of several laws allowing a wholesale wiretapping of people in communication networks with the Constitutional Court (US), Mikulas Ferjencik, a deputy for the Pirates, told journalists on Wednesday.
The proposal was signed by 58 deputies from six parties, Ferjencik said.
The collection of the data on whom people call and when they are attached to the Internet do not have any major impact on investigation into crime and the practice is often in conflict with the rulings of the European Court of Justice, he added.
Thanks to the current legislation, it is possible to store the data on the phone numbers called by people and to which they send e-mails and text reports, on how long the conservations last and from which device they are attached to the Internet. This can be described as wholesale wiretapping, Ferjencik said.
“We believe that the US will cancel the principle,” he added.
Lawyer Jan Voboril, from the company IuRe, who drafted the complaint, told journalists that last year, the police had filed requests to store the data from cell phones in 470,000 cases, according to the data of the Czech Telecommunications Office.
“When it comes to the crime clear-up rate, there was no major shift. The police are evidently able to clear up crime on the same level as if they had not the data at their disposal,” Voboril said.
The European Court of Justice decided in the past that countries had no right to store in a wholesale way the data on users of communication networks. This is why the Czech practice contradicts European law, he added.
