Abstract

This article addresses the use of security and surveillance technologies through police forces. It looks at the growing importance of mass-surveillance technologies for policing and with that, how general information gathering by police forces increasingly blur the borders between targeted and non-targeted surveillance. As a consequence, modern surveillance interferes with established national and international rights frameworks. The questions discussed relate to the legal basis of employing such technologies and in how far such technologies per se create legal problems. This article argues that information on the nature of technologies in the hand of police forces cannot be secret by default and that surveillance and control capabilities need to be transparent and information on the deployment possibilities must be publicly available. Due to the unprecedented capabilities of modern surveillance technologies, lawyers and police officers alike need to rethink the frameworks for employing surveillance technologies and even more: there needs to be the option of a public debate based on publicly available information as part of the creation of adequate legal basis. To illustrate this, this article will employ fundamental rights standards to assess the requirements for police use of surveillance systems in public places with special focus on Europe and the European fundamental rights frameworks.