The European Union's top court on Tuesday dealt a blow to law-enforcement agencies' spying on phone and internet records, saying the lives of citizens should not be "the subject of constant surveillance," according to Reuters.
The European Court of Justice scrapped EU legislation allowing the indiscriminate collection of such communication data in crime-fighting efforts, finding that the rules were too broad and offered too few privacy safeguards, Reuters reported.
Tuesday's verdict nullifies the EU data retention directive, rendering national laws very vulnerable to local court challenges, according to Reuters. The 2006 legislation required telecommunication firms to store phone calls or some online communication records for at least six months and up to two years.
"The judgment finds that untargeted monitoring of the entire population is unacceptable," said T.J. McIntyre, chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, who filed the original lawsuit, according to Reuters.
Other rights groups also hailed a landmark victory for privacy, but governments stressed they still need to access phone records to prevent or investigate serious crimes such as terrorism, Reuters reported.
Britain's Home Office, which handles issues of law and order in the country, said saving communication data "is absolutely fundamental to ensure law enforcement have the powers they need to investigate crime, protect the public and ensure national security," according to Reuters. Britain's GCHQ surveillance agency has close ties with the United States' National Security Agency.
The court said the rules must be narrowed down to ensure any privacy infringement will be restricted to "what is strictly necessary" for fighting serious crimes, Reuters reported.
Beyond invading privacy, Green European Parliament lawmaker Jan Philipp Albrecht said the data collection also "totally failed to lead to any noticeable improvement in law enforcement," according to Reuters.
In an apparent nod to the leaks disclosing U.S. surveillance agencies' alleged mass spying on communication overseas, the EU court also said the legislation's failure to ensure that the storage of communication data was retained within the EU represents a potential breach of the bloc's privacy laws, Reuters reported.
