On Tuesday, the Riigikogu's Constitutional Committee and Legal Affairs Committee held a joint session to analyses the legal regulations regarding the PPA's license plate recognition cameras.

Marju Agarmaa, head of the legal order protection department of the Chancellor of Justice's Office, who was invited to the session, said the office's assessment was that the use of license plate recognition cameras was not legal.

"Recording the license plates of all cars with license plate recognition cameras is undeniably a collection of personal data. They are identifiable to the person using the car. And the collection of this data must surely be decided by the Riigikogu," Agarmaa said.

"The norms regarding the basis of which it is collected must be clear. It has to be clear what data is being collected, for what purpose it is being collected and used, who can use it, and for how long the data will be stored. All this should be written in law," she added.

"But in fact, there is currently no law that says data on all road users is being stored on such a huge scale in Estonia," Agarmaa said.

Comparing the data to that obtained via regular surveillance, Agarmaa pointed out that a time-limited authorization from the Prosecutor's Office has to be requested and there are also procedures regarding how to inform people about the surveillance afterwards. "I don't see a fundamental difference if the state collects data on all cars," Agarmaa explained.

The Chancellor of Justice's office considers that as things stand, the PPA does not have the legal right to collect data in this way. "Section 34 of the Law Enforcement Act cannot be the legal basis for this form of data collection," Agarmaa added.

According to Agarmaa, the PPA should also tell the public where their cameras are so surveillance is not being carried out covertly. "People should have the possibility to avoid these places. If they know that they are being filmed, they might choose a different route, they might not go to a place," Agarmaa said.

"It can't be the case that Big Brother is tracking and collecting data and then a very large amount of information about a person is put together within the various national databases," Agarmaa added.

Asked whether the PPA should stop using a system without the legal basis to do so, Agarmaa agreed that no illegal system should be used.

Data Protection Inspectorate agrees

The issue of the PPA's license plate recognition cameras has also led the Data Protection Inspectorate to initiate supervision of the PPA's Polis database. At the joint hearing, the inspectorate's head of procedural affairs Virve Lans, said the PPA still have time to respond.

At the same time, Lans pointed out that the inspectorate also considers that not everything is in legal order when it comes to the use of the PPA's license plate recognition cameras.

"In general, we have not come to the conclusion that there is absolutely no mandate norm. But it is incomplete. In the case of the authorization norms, we think that the purpose, the storage and the composition of the personal data still has to be defined at the level of the law," said Lans.

"In the current case, the Police and Border Guard Act provides absolutely no information on the composition of personal data in practice," he added.

"The law refers to preventive data files and offence data files, but what personal data is processed in the process, is not specified. It doesn't actually say in general terms that it necessarily has to be at the level of the law, but that's where our Constitution, which does say that, comes into play, ," Lans said.

Interior ministry and PPA disagree

Henry Timberg, head of the department of law enforcement and Arrest procedures at the Ministry of the Interior, and Kristi Mäe, deputy director general for development at the PPA, disagreed over whether there was a legal basis for recording license plate numbers. In their view, a ministerial decree is sufficient.

However, they agreed that the law could be amended with the points regarding the cameras written in. "After all, we are always of the opinion that more legal clarity is needed," said Mäe.

Timberg added that it is necessary to wait for the results of the supervision by the Data Protection Inspectorate, before making any required changes to the Police and Border Guard Act. "On this basis, we are certainly ready to make the necessary amendments as a matter of urgency in order to bring everything into line," Timberg said.

Ginter: Law not enough to use a camera system like this

According to legal expert Carri Ginter, the current laws are not sufficient to construct and operate this type of camera system to record and monitor the location and activities of all Estonia's citizens. The law needs to be much more specific and precise.

Ginter pointed out that the case law of the European Court of Justice does not support the creation of a database in which the data of all legally active citizens is collected together, just because a very small proportion of them could be criminals.

"The rule of law does not lend itself to a system whereby the data is collected, used and monitored for lawfulness by the collector, the user and the lawfulness checker. There are fundamental problems with the current regulation and so it should be discontinued. The Republic of Estonia has no legitimate basis whatsoever for having pictures or an overview of the whereabouts of my vehicles. The fact that a license plate is not directly associated with any individual is no argument. The case law of the European Court of Justice has said for years that data collection also has to consider how several databases might work together. In other words, the police's claim that no personalized data will be generated from it is outright wrong," Ginter said.

The legal expert added that the Ministry of the Interior should not be the guarantor of access and justification for the use or misuse of data. "This is not smoothed over by the sad stories of crimes detected by the system. So we cannot introduce a commander's hour in Estonia, even though it could be of great help in preventing crime," he said.

"Instead of 'the regulation could be more detailed' and 'debate in society is welcome,' it would be honest to say that we have still been tracking people illegally and not telling them where we photographed them," Ginter added.

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