The largest public response against surveillance came already in 2013 after the leaking of classified NSA documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Many surveillance practices, such as the NSA’s collaboration with social media providers, woke the public for the first time to think about their data’s privacy protection in the digital age.

A lot of the critical atmosphere from the leaks and the media frenzy that followed faded away after Charlie Hebdo and January 2015. For instance, the German foreign service BND (Ger. Bundesnachrichtendienst) had been under parliamentary investigation since 2014 due to Snowden’s allegations that it had been spying on German companies and businessmen on behalf of the NSA. However, when the final report of the investigative committee was published in summer 2017, barely anyone noticed it. The atmosphere in the country had shifted, not least due to the islamist-motivated terror attack on a West Berlin Christmas market in December 2016. In a national survey conducted in early 2017, 79 percent of Germans said they wanted more video surveillance to feel safer.

Terrorism paved the way to zero criticism from the public when it comes to surveillance, Diego Naranjo of EDRi says: "Shocking events leave the public in paralysis, and it’s possible to push any policy through. For us it has meant that we have barely been able to mobilise people for better protection of people’s privacy."



Dutch Referendum



One exception in the zero criticism time was however the Netherlands. A bill introduced in November was met by a prominent student-led campaign that asked Dutch people to rethink some of its content, such as bulk interception of communication. In March, a slight majority of the country’s citizens voted against the bill in a national referendum. Authorities have promised to take the referendum into account and modify some parts of the bill.

From a citizens’ protection perspective, the democratic control of surveillance authorities and ongoing practices is key. Most EU countries require their intelligence services or those carrying out surveillance on civilians (meaning, not military targets) to report about it to a parliamentary oversight committees or a national judicial body. With other democratic bodies checking what exact measures are implemented and how suspects for targeted surveillance are chosen guarantees the respect of fundamental rights and liberties, a European Parliament body said in a report.

Some countries that changed their legislation after 2015 have failed to included judicial oversight all together. Austria’s intelligence agency BVT reports only to a closed sub-committee of the parliament, and in Belgium the prime minister can sign off far-reaching surveillance practices with no further consultation. In Poland, foreign nationals can be subjected to targeted surveillance for three months without a need to report it to a judge.

Sometimes democratic oversight has been overruled through the implementation of states of emergency, as is currently the case in France and Hungary. In the latter, a 2016 bill foresees a state of emergency when there is a “terror threat situation”, in which the executives would have to merely “inform the President and any relevant parliamentary committees” about their actions. The same applies for France.

In some countries citizens can also send complaints to a special rapporteur such as the Defender of Rights in France, or a data protection officer. Some surveillance cases have even made it to higher national or international courts. For instance, in December 2016 the European Court of Justice ruled that Britain’s surveillance laws are illegal due to mass and indiscriminate data collection of everyone in Britain.



The changes in European surveillance legislation need to be seen in the overall political context of the continent. As Amnesty International noted in their extensive 2017 report Dangerously Disproportionate:

“Given the febrile state of European politics, electorates should be extremely wary of the range of powers and extent of control over their lives that they are prepared to hand over to their governments. The rise of far right nationalist parties (...) risk that these emergency powers will target certain people for reasons that have nothing at all to do with a genuine threat to national security or from terrorism-related acts.”

Meaning: as governments change, powers that were once trusted to be handled with care can become disastrous with someone else.



Read more about the newest developments in European surveillance.

Graphics by Linnéa Svensson.