19 January 2000. Thanks to CS-H.
Source:
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/5696/1.html
Telepolis, 19 January 2000
Christiane Schulzki Haddouti
Telepolis has now learned that at a closed meeting of legal advisors on December 2 in Brussels there was a little progress in negotiations for a European legal aid agreement. The goal is for members to agree on the question of notification obligations during telecommunications monitoring.
So far the British government has wanted to keep British intelligence services out of the agreement to a large extent. In Great Britain there is no clear separation between the interception measures which are accomplished in part by the police and customs authorities and in part by the secret services. The background for these procedures are problems encountered in the course of fighting Irish Republican Army terrorism. Great Britain feared that in the context of a legal aid agreement interception material of its secret services would become available to other member states. The British secret services were concerned that information from the Echelon global interception system would be subject to the agreement (see No agreement with European legal aid convention).
Now obligation to provide information about telephone monitoring measures will expressly exist only if the intelligence services become active in the context of criminal investigations. The German Federal Government could also intersperse that a regulation be considered for data security under the agreement. Until now this was not intended.
No agreement was reached on the question of how the silence of a member state is to be evaluated about reporting the continuation of a telecommunications monitoring measure. Germany claims together with most states the view that silence is to be understood as agreement. France and Great Britain rejected this however. The question is to be clarified in the next meeting of the committee of the Permanent Representatives in Brussels.