Ireland’s Data Retention Law Slips In Under The Wire

Data Retention of mobile and fixed line phone records is now clearly part of Irish law. It made it into an amendment to a Criminal Justice bill that was passed in January and signed into law on March 5th by the president of Ireland. And nobody in the mainstream media noticed.

The best analysis of the matter is an article on the website of Privacy International. The amendment itself is also cited on the Privacy International website.

The news of this amendment becoming law belatedly made it into the Irish media with an article in the Irish Examiner detailing the new legislation on March 4th. An article by Karlin Lillington in Saturday’s Irish Times which she later quoted on her blog summarised the post legislation situation. A Sunday Tribune article by Fergus Cassidy provided more back ground and more interesting questions. Bernie Goldbach also picked up the growing storm in the Irish blogosphere over the matter.

The law now requires mobile and fixed line phone companies to retain call and location data records for three years. Thus it would be possible to identify a target’s social network from the call patterns and potentially map mobile phone usage. This is stuff that is being done already. Phone companies use this kind of analysis to suggest the best tariffs to subscribers. What the legislation did was to clear up the questions about whether the companies should retain the data for three years or six months. The amendment puts data retention on a firmer legal basis but it does exclude the content of the calls.

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Written by John McCormac on March 21st, 2005 with comments disabled.
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