Experts on Ministry of Digital Development amendments: law enforcement authorities would have unrestricted access to Russians’ movements

Amendments to the Law on Communications from the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation imply that location data for any person will no longer be confidential, and a court order to obtain such data will not be required, ForkLog explained, according to the experts polled.

Boris Edidin, a member of the Commission on Legal Support for the Digital Economy of the Moscow Branch of the Association of Lawyers of Russia, noted that the proposed changes remove some risks for operators:

“Telecommunications operators, accumulating large volumes of information in providing communications services, are constrained in their use because there is a risk of these data being treated as the secrecy of communications. The bill removes this risk.”

The amendments could also be \”beneficial\” in cases of searching for missing persons, according to a lawyer:

“If previously obtaining information from a telecom operator required a court decision, now law enforcement authorities can request information from base stations or the operators’ billing systems themselves.”

The Ministry of Digital Development said the bill is intended to facilitate locating missing persons.

The provision to provide location data for a mobile phone without a court order drew the most attention.

Mikhail Tretyak, a partner at the Digital Rights Center law firm, said that the amendments \”with a hundred percent probability\” are aimed at locating people \”of interest to the state\” who are not recognised by surveillance systems or \”in relation to whom there is no corresponding court decision permitting tracking their movements.\”

“From the moment these amendments are enacted, the movements of any — emphasis on any — person will become fully accessible to law enforcement agencies simply upon request. And I do not exclude that these agencies will come to someone early in the morning just because a person, so to speak, “was passing by”,” Tretyak said.

Boris Edidin noted that law enforcement already has access to subscriber data; the bill merely simplifies interaction with telecommunications operators.

“The proposed changes will in no way affect the security of databases or stop the illegal trade in data,” he says.

Head of the ANO \”Information Culture\” Ivan Begtin wrote that the removal of the requirement to obtain a court decision \”changes the status of the information access regime and opens the possibility for streaming machine processing of data for an effectively unlimited number of people.\”

Mikhail Tretyak also pointed to possible abuse of the obtained data by criminal groups, given regular data leaks of citizens:

“Therefore the justification for extracting geolocation data from the secrecy of communications for the sake of helping missing persons is merely a cynical fiction and an attempt to justify yet another measure aimed at imposing total control over citizens’ lives by the state.”

Last year, the Russian Interior Ministry proposed creating a biometric data bank of Russians and foreigners for identifying people by facial image and fingerprints.

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