Joint Industry Letter - Improving criminal justice in cyberspace; cooperation with online service providers

Dear Ministers,

We, the undersigned associations, are writing to you ahead of your discussion on improving law enforcement access to data and the role of communications service providers in criminal investigations during the next Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting, on December 9.

We endorse greater cooperation between service providers and Member States’ law enforcement authorities. Our member companies are responsible providers of hardware, software and services that work with law enforcement every day on legitimate investigations. This cooperation can only occur through an appropriate legal basis that takes into account the specificities of each case including the data subject’s country of residence and the owner and location of the data (when applicable).

More modern and streamlined mutual legal assistance (“MLA”) processes represent an important tool to obtain digital evidence without creating jurisdictional and privacy conflicts between different states. We also encourage devoting additional resources to process the ever-increasing number of MLA requests between the EU and third countries.