Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)

To my mind, the memorandum of understanding referred to by the Minister of State on Committee Stage is not on a statutory footing. Section 7 states that service providers shall comply with a disclosure request made to them. It is important the views of the telcos and the ISPs, Internet service providers, are acknowledged. One of the parties to the memorandum of understanding is the ISPAI, Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland. It made a submission on the Bill and stated section 7 was far too wide and unwieldy and takes no account of what is reasonable, technically possible and not very expensive. Its recommendation is that a service provider shall comply with a disclosure request made to it only where it is technically possible. I take on board the views expounded by the Minister of State but the reality is that we do not know for sure how many requests will be made by a designated officer. We do not know for what purposes such requests will be made, against whom they will be made or the reasons why they may be made. If we accept in good faith what the Minister of State is saying, then we deduce requests will only be made in respect of taxation or an investigation by the Revenue Commissioners, a chief superintendent or an officer of the law.

I refer to the Bills' digest, a very good document published by the Oireachtas Library service. It states that under the Bill an individual can only find out that data relating to him or her is accessed on foot of a disclosure request by first making a request on the basis that they believe the data has been accessed. This veers somewhat from the point of the amendment but I seek to nail down the idea that there is a clear focus in respect of how the legislation is used. We may agree that one must retain data and that such data can be pertinent to solving a crime but we have no wish for anyone to flout the purpose of the legislation for their own ends. We have no wish for anyone to make nefarious requests for disclosure and trawl with the net so wide such that it would put a cost on the ISPs and such that a service provider is spending resources for something that may not be for the detection of a crime or for which the legislation is designed. I wish to put down a marker in this respect and I intend to press the amendment.

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