Lawmakers in the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee (LIBE) want to introduce an obligation for EU governments to inform journalists that are being spied on by security services and other people whose communications were accessed, according to new draft amendments to the EU’s media freedom law obtained by POLITICO.
The members of the committee want to make sure EU capitals inform targets of spyware of ways to legally challenge security services’ decisions and to subject the surveillance measures to “ex-post scrutiny” by a judge or an independent body. They want subjects of surveillance to be informed “of the fact, duration, scope and manner of processing the data obtained,” the document said.
The LIBE committee is solely responsible for the provisions related to interference and surveillance of reporters in the EU’s draft Media Freedom Act,
The amendments were agreed at a meeting of a group of leading lawmakers on Thursday and are set to be voted in committee next week. Another technical meeting will take place on Friday to finetune the compromise.
Lawmakers want spyware to be used by security services only as “a last resort,” if any of the other options like “access to encrypted content” and more traditional “surveillance technologies” prove “inadequate and insufficient to obtain the information sought,” lawmakers suggested. Surveillance also cannot lead to uncovering journalistic sources, they added.
Surveilling on journalists also has to be unrelated to the journalistic activity of the target and to serve, on a case-by-case basis, investigations into serious crimes laid out in the regulation (like terrorism, trafficking and murder), the lawmakers said. It also has to be ordered by a judicial authority, they added.
The civil liberties committee will ifluence the position of the lead culture committee in the European Parliament, which is in the process of drafting the full report on the draft media freedom law.
