Karlin Lillington reports:
The Garda made more requests for phone-call traffic data in 2008 than police in Germany, which has 20 times the population of the Republic.
According to a leaked draft of a European Commission report, gardaí made more than 14,000 access requests for call data in 2008, a rate about 40 per cent higher than had been previously assumed by data privacy advocates, who had based an estimate of 10,000 on figures provided in the past by gardaí to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
The information, supplied by the Government, is revealed in a draft report for the European Commission that will be issued later this year, but which was leaked to a German privacy advocacy organisation.
Read more in Irish Times, where they give figures for different countries within the EU and talk about the implications for data retention length.