Live, Die, Repeat (39c3)

Both within the EU as well as nationally in Germany, there exists a renewed drive to implement data retention, a practice struck down by the ECJ and discontinued in many national legislations. In parallel, cross-border access to stored data has been mandated within the EU as “e-evidence”, and will soon be extended to 90+ countries under the umbrella of the EU cybercrime convention. In principle, all data stored by service providers will be available to law enforcement as part of a criminal investigation. The timing of both initiatives is not coincidental, as access to data naturally relies on the availability of data. The talk will address the state of play on data retention in various legislations, and introduce the practice of cross border access to stored data by law enforcement as well as its shortcomings and threats to privacy and confidentiality. The Specter of Data Retention is back in the political arena, both as a harmonized, EU-wide approach as well as being part of the coalition agreement of the new German national government. Other countries have already recently implemented new data retention laws, i.e. Belgium or Denmark. In parallel, access to all types of stored data – and not only data stored under a data retention regime – by law enforcement has been radically reformed by groundbreaking new legislation, undermining both exiting national safeguards as well as protections implemented by businesses aiming for a higher standard in cyber security and data protection. The talk will give an overview on recent developments for a harmonized “minimum” approach to data retention under the Polish and Danish EU presidency as well as the new German legislation currently under consideration. It will introduce the upcoming international release mechanisms for stored data under the e-evidence legislation, the 2nd protocol to the EU cybercrime convention as well as future threats from the UN cybercrime convention. It will address how a cross-border request for information works in practice, which types of data can be requested by whom, and who will be responsible for the few remaining safeguards – including an analysis of the threat model and potential “side channel” attacks by cybercrime to gain access to basically all data stored by and with service providers. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/live-die-repeat-the-fight-against-data-retention-and-boundless-access-to-data