Digital Investigative Measures – Towards Empirical Legal Assessment? - FDEF

Final conference of the project Making Transparent the Invisible Surveillance (MATIS), jointly carried out by the Uni.Lu and the VUB.

Programme

(please click here to view the programme in detail)

Day One – The State of Art

Keynote speech

Prof. Dr. Wojciech Wiewiorowski, European Data Protection Supervisor

Panel I: Data retention

This panel will discuss the latest developments in the European quest for defining the allowed parameters of retention of traffic and location data for law enforcement purposes.

Chair: Prof. Dr. Eleni Kosta, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society

Prof. Dr. Nora Ni Loideain, University of London
Prof. Dr. TJ McIntyre, Digital Rights Ireland/University College Dublin
Prof. Dr. Herke Kranenborg, European Commission/Maastricht University

Panel II: Passenger Name Record

This panel will discuss the recent CJEU PNR judgment and the alleged lack of statistical evidence for the PNR system’s usefulness.

Chair: Christian Thönnes, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law

Catherine Forget, Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles
Bijan Moini, Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V.
Prof. Dr. Vagelis Papakonstantinou, VUB (TBC)

Panel III: Personal data sharing for the purposes of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism

This panel will discuss the personal data flows between financial institutions and specialised public services fighting money laundering, such as Financial Intelligence Units.

Chair: Prof. Dr. Maxime Lassalle, Université de Bourgogne

Prof. Dr. Winston Maxwell, Law and Digital Technology Studies at Télécom Paris
Lora von Ploetz, Head of Global Financial Crime Unit Commerzbank (former)
Max Braun, Head of the Luxembourgish Financial Intelligence Unit

Panel IV: Production orders

This panel will discuss the increasingly important role and powers of the internet service providers in the fight against crime.

Chair: Prof. Dr. Stanislaw Tosza, University of Luxembourg, FDEF

Chloe Berthelemy, EDRi
Prof. Dr. Catherine Van De Heyning, University of Antwerpen/public prosecutor
Dr. Carsten Ullrich, Vinted
Claude Eischen, European Delegated Prosecutor for Luxembourg

Day Two – Challenges Ahead

Keynote speech

Steven Jerome Ryder, Data Protection Officer of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office

Panel V: Proposal for the Regulation fighting child sexual exploitation online

This panel will discuss the recent Commission proposal for a CSAM Regulation and its implications on improving the fight against child sexual exploitation, as well as on the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection.

Chair: Prof. Dr. Teresa Quintel, Maastricht University

Angelica Fernandez, University of Luxembourg, FDEF
Thomas Van der Valk, Meta
Alexander Hanff, privacy consultant

Closing roundtable: Measuring legality of digital investigative measures in the AI era

Introductory remarks and moderation: Juraj Sajfert, VUB/University of Luxembourg

Prof. Dr. Paul De Hert, VUB
Prof. Dr. Katalin Ligeti, University of Luxembourg, Dean of FDEF
Fanny Coudert, Supervision and Enforcement Unit, EDPS
Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Kilchling, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law
Prof. Dr. Maša Galič, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

About the project

The MATIS (Making Transparent the Invisible Surveillance) research project is jointly funded by the FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders) and FNR (Luxembourg National Research Fund) and carried out by the research group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Department of Law at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF) of the University of Luxembourg (Uni.Lu). It runs from 2019 until 2024.

The principal investigators of MATIS are Professors Paul De Hert (VUB/Tilburg University) and Mark Cole (Uni.Lu). The doctoral researcher employed on the project is Juraj Sajfert (VUB/Uni.Lu).

The main goal of MATIS is to carry out structured academic research identifying the intrusiveness and outreach of digital investigative measures and evaluating their possible justification in light of this. MATIS is measuring the use and frequency of digital investigative measures in a comparative approach observing several EU Member States, and thereby developing new, objective and quantifiable criteria for assessing the necessity and proportionality of such measures and their legality from the data protection law standpoint.