The Importance of the 95/46/EC Directive, Essay Example

Introduction

It was the European Parliament and Council of the EU that issued directive 95/46/EC on 24^th October 1995.  This being aimed on the rights of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and the legitimate free movement of such data.  Section IX Notification Article 18 provides the obligation in order to notify supervisory authority.  This means that any member states have a statutory duty to notify the supervisory authority, as referred to under article 28, before they are eligible to carry out operations.  Article 10 provides legal constraints to the US investigator when conducting US forensic examinations.  The controller must provide the identity of the representative used behind the processing of any forensic data in a specific case. This needs to be stated to the EU authorities who receive such data.  (Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, 2011).

Data retention law

The data retention law in the EU has an impact on both the US and EU in that ISP providers needs to retain all of the data that is transmitted by e-mail traffic.  It is considered that this contains important information for forensic investigations and the important point of establishing guilt or innocence in a criminal investigation. There are specific directives in place that describe how such data may be accessed.  This storage imposition on the ISP provider creates a huge storage issue requiring thousands of terabytes of storage. (Warner, J. 2005)

The EU data retention law provides the US the right legal authorities in order to gain access to such data and these being defined within the context of international agreements.  There have been complications in gaining access to data and the EU is investigating ways to eliminate these. The law has been criticised saying that it infringes individual privacy rights. (Baker, J 2011). A study that has been carried out indicated that it will cost ISP providers in excess of half a million dollars per annum in additional storage and operating costs to retain this data.

References

Baker, J. (2011, 11 21). EU data retention law blasted on privacy issues. Retrieved from Networld: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/041811-eu-data-retention-law-blasted.html

Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. (2011, 11 21). EU Directive 95/46/EC – The Data Protection Directive . Retrieved from Office of the Data Protection Commissioner: http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewdoc.asp?m=&fn=/documents/legal/6aii-2.htm#18

Warner, J. (2005). The Right to Oblivion: Data Retention from. University of Ottawa law and technology journal, 76-103.