@misc{10481/87800,
year = {2021},
url = {https://hdl.handle.net/10481/87800},
abstract = {In a little more than a decade, through case-law, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has drawn up a doctrine with which to address massive secret surveillance. The first case, Weber and Saravia (2006),1 assessed the German model of “strategic monitoring.” Using this technique, overall communications were intercepted as opposed to the “individual monitoring” of one specific person. A little later, Liberty and others (2008), studied the system in the United Kingdom, which also involved bulk surveillance, albeit only aimed at intercepting the electronic communications entering and leaving said State. Roman Zakharov (2015), judged the Russian regulations. These made electronic communication service providers use a type of software to intercept all communications.
Later that same year, Centrum for Rattvisa (2018) and Big Brother (2018) led to the ECHR consolidating its doctrine, in the former case by assessing the surveillance of external communications, and in the latter, the information exchange between intelligence services. Finally, Breyer (2020) studied compulsory identification in acquiring prepaid (pay-as- you- go) telephones. The ECHR has ruled that the regulations analyzed in Liberty and others (2008), Roman Zakahrov (2015), and partially in Big Brother (2018) are contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights.

It is striking that the ECHR should tackle this new phenomenon of massive surveillance by simply extending the case-law drawn up for targeted surveillance, that is, the kind that, unlike the former, intervenes in communications based upon objective evidence backing a reasonable suspicion about a specific individual. In both massive and targeted surveillance, to prevent abuses of power, States must set the following requirements in law with sufficient precision: the nature of offenses which
may give rise to an interception order; the definition of the categories of  people liable to have their communications intercepted; the limit on the duration of the interception; the procedure to be followed for gathering, examining, using, and storing the data obtained; the precautions to be taken when communicating the data to other parties; and the circumstances in which intercepted data must be erased or destroyed. It is only fair to say, however, that following Roman Zakahrov (2012), the ECHR modified its thesis of the “six minimum requirements” for massive interceptions, adding two conditions: assessing whether the Member State establishes some kind of supervision over implementing the measures; and judging
the effective protection provided by the guarantee of notification and judicial control (§ 238, as underlined by Big Brother (2018), § 307). Within these limits in Roman Zakharov (2012) lies the great difference between massive and targeted interceptions.

In conclusion, the ECHR has embarked on the difficult task of defining a common European constitutional framework with which to assess massive surveillance of communications, a problem that takes shape in the superior category of massive investigations. To understand the ECHR’s path, it is worthwhile to begin by  studying how these kinds of measures have been characterized and justified.},
publisher = {Thomson Reuters},
keywords = {European Court of Human Rights},
keywords = {Secret surveillance},
title = {The ECHR’s doctrine on massive secret surveillance of data and communications: On the need for a constitutional theory on massive secret surveillance},
author = {Azpitarte Sánchez, Miguel},
}