Tag Archives: communications data

When the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act was just a Bill being rushed through Parliament with indecent haste, the pros and cons were hotly debated on this site.Today, the European Court of Justice ruled that the general and indiscriminate collection of data was illegal.

Now, this was a Bill passed by the Coalition Government with Liberal Democrat consent So shouldn’t we be feeling a bit embarrassed by this ruling? I guess we need to look at the position we were in at the time. Even if we’d told the Tories that we wouldn’t support the legislation, there would have been a majority in the House of Commons for it. In fact, Labour would have been falling over itself to make it even more authoritarian.

We also know what the Tories wanted to do with communications data – because they did it with the much more pervasive and illiberal Investigatory Powers Act passed, again with Labour support, as soon as they had a majority.

Back in 2014, we secured some important concessions from the Tories in return for our support on the DRIP Act.  Julian Huppert wrote at the time that it was what we already had but with additional safeguards as he set out the context to it all:

There is an issue we have to deal with now. The European Court of Justice threw out the European Data Retention Directive, which underpins all collection of communications data in this country. I sympathise with the reasons, but we must acknowledge that it causes real problems – we do need to have some way to keep some communications data, but under very careful control.