The Justice and the Emergency Responses Ministry wants to recollect information on plane passenger’s information by all Norwegian citizens and save that information for about five years. In the response the Data Inspectorate clarifies that the retention time is too long.
The proposals, which is now under consultation, means that information on passengers are stored for five years and that the police shall ask the identification of people that previously have not a know affiliation with the terrorism or serious crimes.
The Norwegian Data Protection Agency understands the need of the police to understand if people who are coming in the country are suspected or connected to the international terrorism or to serious crimes.
The retention period shall be reduced
The proposal will provide the storage of that information for five years, with the opportunity to carry out research of big data without a independent preventive control. Information will include name, address, phone number, email address, itinerary, names of people who is travelling with, seat number, history of bookings, information of payments, information on luggage, passport number and nationality.
The proposal means that all the Norwegian resident will be object of investigation by the police simply because they have travelled abroad. In a society in which private actors trust on a great amount of information, it is important being aware of how many walls there should be for the recollection and the usage of that information by the government.
Secret surveillance
We need to see the proposal compared to other law draft, which prevent the control of Norwegian citizens, among the other things the facilitate recollecting in a new legislation on the intelligence and the IP address obtaining.
These proposals permit to have a secret surveillance without an independent preventive control.
The ability of the State to control citizens is not based, today, on which is technically possible, but on political and legal choices on which information it is better to recollect.
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) thinks that the general and undifferentiated recollection of information on passengers in not in compliance with the European right, also because the amount of information is not proportional to their usefulness. In a relation of the Board it is underlines that the recollection of data by a billion of passengers has bring to concrete results in 13 cases.
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