ruling it unconstitutional. (We wrote one in the 70s because of all the dictatorship that'd been going on. Secret police (PIDE) and their informants, knowing who was talking to whom, was an important tool for repression.)
The controversial situation started when the Constitutional Court made public a decision stating that the 2008 metadata law is against the Constitution because it goes against the privacy of all citizens and this violation of the citizens' right to privacy does not only apply to criminal suspects, but to everyone.
The court warned that the retention of network traffic data and location data for all "limit the privacy rights" of individuals.
Member States must comply with European rules. However, in order to remove doubts, the Constitutional Court has also addressed this problem by saying that even if a law comes from a European directive, it may be against constitutional law. Therefore, “a constitutional court decision is always above any European rule”.
The Court of Justice of the European Union itself eventually ruled in 2014 that this specific directive on Metadata was invalid because it "violated the fundamental right to a private life and the protection of personal data”.
Detentions and prosecutions that rested on metadata evidence may now be overturned.
I've got little to hide that the police would care much about unless I were specifically being persecuted, but I think this is the right call. Blanket harvesting of who talks to whom and why is creepy and unhealthy in a liberal democracy.
If I'm using my Portuguese sim card in the UK to commit crimes, can UK plod cyberstalk me legally? (I know they'd do it anyway, but it's sometimes handy to know what's admissable.)
What about my portuguese number on whatsapp over UK wifi?
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Bird on a Fire wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 2:30 pm
Dunno how it works in practice, though.
If I'm using my Portuguese sim card in the UK to commit crimes, can UK plod cyberstalk me legally? (I know they'd do it anyway, but it's sometimes handy to know what's admissable.)
What about my portuguese number on whatsapp over UK wifi?
As far as I know UK police would need to send a specific request to your UK mobile provider to provide data as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
UK intelligence agencies have, as far as I remember, been involved in large scale trawling of communications data from all round the world. They have also shared that data with UK police in the past.
So, UK plod can't cyberstalk you legally unless you are part of a criminal investigation. UK spies can cyberstalk you anywhere they have access, and they might give that information to UK plod.
Bird on a Fire wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 2:28 pm
... Blanket harvesting of who talks to whom and why is creepy and unhealthy in a liberal democracy.
I think metadata means they'd (maybe) harvest who talks to whom, and the where*, but not the why.
* - which cells the phones were in, or indeed, which cells a given phone hooked up with whether or not there were any calls or messages.
having that swing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it meaning a thing
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Bird on a Fire wrote: Wed Jun 01, 2022 2:30 pm
Dunno how it works in practice, though.
If I'm using my Portuguese sim card in the UK to commit crimes, can UK plod cyberstalk me legally? (I know they'd do it anyway, but it's sometimes handy to know what's admissable.)
What about my portuguese number on whatsapp over UK wifi?
I don't think Portuguese privacy law would be relevant in either of these cases, although IANAL.
In the first case, you would be roaming on UK networks, so if the UK authorities had reason to collect any metadata relating to your phone activities they could do it through those networks.
In the second case, Whatsapp has nothing to do with your Portuguese phone provider. Your phone number just acts as a user ID. So the data would come from Facebook/Meta or the internet provider you were connected to.
If UK authorities wanted your phone provider to provide the personal details linked to that number, then Portuguese law would become relevant. But I doubt that refusal to give that data would be a huge impediment to their investigation.
