Tribune. Wikimedia France and European Digital Rights are sounding the alarm. A new serious attack on the rights and freedoms of users on the Internet is likely to emerge. The discussions on the European E-evidence regulation, which have been resumed in Brussels, risk resulting in a text conferring more powers on the police authorities. In the light of the Pegasus affair, it is urgent that lawmakers limit these new repressive powers.
The Pegasus case is 50,000 phone numbers belonging to human rights activists, journalists and opponents around the world infected with surveillance software. This software has been used illegally by several governments including Europeans. It allows remote access to messages, photos, contacts, and even to listen to calls and voice notes from targeted smartphones.
Yet despite the turmoil over this affair, European lawmakers are ready to give law enforcement authorities a new tool for collecting data. The stated objective of the draft regulation is to provide law enforcement authorities with better access to personal data (e-mails, messages, civil identity, etc.) held by Internet service providers in the context of police and judicial investigations. .
An increase in the possibilities of abuse
With this regulation, any European government will therefore be able to order companies, located anywhere in the European Union (EU), to transmit data to it. Usually, and according to the current rules of European judicial cooperation, when the authorities seek to obtain evidence against a suspect but the latter are located in another Member State of the Union, they must first contact to their colleagues in this country.
The objective of the E-evidence regulation is to circumvent this procedure and all the protective measures attached to it, increasing the possibilities of abuse. The adoption of such an instrument is all the more worrying in view of the state of law situation and the attacks on the independence of the judiciary in several EU member states.
The European Parliament will nevertheless have tried to introduce safeguards to this provision by means of a notification mechanism. This notification would have enabled the Member State in which the service provider is established to be able, if necessary, to reject abusive requests for access to data.
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