New bill on tapping brought into the Parliament of Georgia

The Georgian Parliament is considering amendments to the Law "On Electronic Communications", prepared by the "Georgian Dream" Party faction. The new wording assumes to use the model of "two keys", that is, to provide access to citizens' personal data in parallel to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) and data protection inspectors.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on October 30, the Georgian Parliament postponed the adoption of amendments to the above Law "On Electronic Communications" from November 1 to March 1, 2015. However, the President Giorgi Margvelashvili would not agree; he vetoed the postponement and urged MPs to adopt the law before December 1.

The basic principle of the new draft – the "model of two keys" – assumes that the MIA and inspectors for protection of personal data will not be able to carry out their secret investigatory actions independently from each other, the "Interpressnews" quotes Eka Beseliya as explaining.

In the opinion of the authors of the amendments, the court should be the main institution entitled to issue respective permits.

Respected local NGOs advocate for the provision of "keys" to mobile operators, having no objections against the "two-key system"; however, the MIA believe that mobile operators' direct access to tapping will increase the risk of leakage of confidential information and create barriers to the work of law enforcement bodies, the "News-Georgia" reports.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.