European Human Rights Court Rules Mass Surveillance Illegal (theregister.co.uk)

Kekke sends this report from El Reg: The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that mass surveillance is illegal, in a little-noticed case in Hungary. In a judgment last week, the court ruled that the Hungarian government had violated article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to privacy) due to its failure to include "sufficiently precise, effective and comprehensive" measures that would limit surveillance to only people it suspected of crimes. Under a section of the 2011 National Security Act, a minister of the government is able to approve a police request to search people's houses, mail, phones and laptops if they are seeking to protect national security. ... The court said the Hungarian government should be required to interpret the law in a narrow fashion and "verify whether sufficient reasons for intercepting a specific individual's communications exist in each case." Or in other words, every individual case must be looked at carefully and a decision made on each. Which is clearly impossible if the law is taken to carry out mass surveillance, i.e., hoovering up information over the internet and then searching in it."

Comments

Re:Why is Europe helping terrorists?

[GrahamCox]

I assume you're trolling. But on the offchance that you're actually swallowing this BS, there's only one response: you big wussy pussy.

Great for individuals.

[AHuxley]

Much of the EU has its own deep dark history with German Nazi occupied Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., Soviet occupation, decades of NSA, CIA and GCHQ operations.
Mass surveillance was used on a lot of the different nations and individuals for different party, political or trade reasons.
Legal teams can draw on the past generational experiences under fascist, communist and now EU/US/NATO rule and tell the press about what they found.
Recall the vaults filled with audio tape opened in the 1990's. The vast amounts of files the East Germans collected and then tried to destroy. The German legal views on opening East German files re East or West German collected content. Now the NSA whistleblowers.
Looks like the EU just found out about the wisdom of the US 4th amendment to be secure in their persons, houses, papers vs big government or a politico-economic union tyranny.

Re:Great for individuals.

[Kkloe]

you mean the 4th amendment that the us widely ignore and have mass surveillance of their own citizens?

Mass Surveillance Illegal in EU

[HTH NE1]

Except of course for all those cameras surveilling every public inch of major cities, because that's "public space" and you still have the option to self-impose house arrest to avoid it.