A/HRC/13/37 establish a legal basis for obliging organizations to produce personal information upon request, as it removes their obligation to consider the nature of the case. 42. Third parties are also increasingly being called upon to collect more information than is necessary, and to retain this information for extended periods of time. The United Kingdom, for instance, has proposed that telecommunications companies actively monitor and retain information on individuals’ online activities including social-networking activities – information that these companies have no justified interest in collecting.61 Similarly, the European Union’s data retention directive62 has generated considerable criticism. When, in 2008, the German Federal Constitutional Court temporarily suspended the German law implementing that directive, it noted that “the retention of sensitive data, comprehensive and without occasion, on virtually everyone, for Government purposes that at the time of the storage of the data cannot be foreseen in detail, may have a considerable intimidating effect”.63 Also in Germany, research showed a chilling effect of data retention policies: 52 per cent of persons interviewed said they probably would not use telecommunication for contact with drug counsellors, psychotherapists or marriage counsellors because of data retention laws.64 43. In this context, the Special Rapporteur is concerned that, in many countries, data retention laws have been adopted without any legal safeguards over the access to this information being established or without the fact that new technological developments are blurring the difference between content and communications data being considered. While constitutional provisions tend to require safeguards on access to communications content, the protection of transaction logs is more limited. While this information may be integral to investigations, it may also be just as privacy-sensitive as the content of communications transactions. 44. With the goal of combating terrorism financing and money laundering, States have obliged the financial industry to analyse financial transactions in order to automatically distinguish those “normal” from those “suspicious”. For instance, the European Union established a directive in 2005 on “the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purpose of money laundering and terrorist financing”65 requiring that financial institutions follow due diligence by reporting suspicious and “threshold” activities to financial intelligence units (FIUs). The additional processing of this information by the FIUs remains opaque, but States like Australia66 and Canada67 are processing millions of transactions each year through advanced data-mining tools. 45. Third parties may also be subject to foreign laws requiring disclosure. The United States Government, for instance, issued administrative subpoenas to the Society for 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 16 See British All Party Parliamentary Group on Privacy, Briefing Paper: Inquiry into communications data surveillance proposals and the Interception Modernisation Programme, June 2009. Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC, Official Journal, L 105 (2006), pp. 54–63. Constitutional Court decision No. 256/08, 11 March 2008. German Forsa Institute, Meinungen der Bunderburger zur Vorratsdatanspeicherung, 28 May 2008. See Directive 2005/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 October 2005 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purpose of money laundering and terrorist financing, Official Journal, L 309 (2005), pp. 15–36. See Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, AUSTRAC Annual Report 2008–09, October 2009. See Financial Transaction and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, FINTRAC Annual Report 2008, 11 September 2008. GE.09-17804