<i>Surveillance Law, Data Retention and Human Rights: A Risk to Democracy</i> By MatthewWhite, London: Routledge, 2024, 392 pp., £150.00

Few issues in contemporary law garner as much public attention as the discussion on the limits on public authorities' use of electronic surveillance measures.On the one hand, the progressive digitization of successive areas of life is turning the idea of creating a new modern society based on information into reality.On the other hand, however, it is heightening concerns about the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms, as the processes of digitization are accompanied by the collection of ever-larger data banks by public authorities.The timeliness of this problem is evidenced by the discussion, which has been going on for more than a decade, on the permissibility and limits of applying a particular measure: the general data retention obligation. 1 In fact, this term is used to describe two legal mechanisms.The first is the retention of data accompanying the electronic communications of all subscribers of telecommunications services (so-called 'metadata', particularly traffic and location data), and the second is the sharing of such data with authorized public authorities -usually law enforcement authorities and security services.When the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) substantively addressed the permissibility of this mechanism and its compatibility with the European Union (EU) legal model for the first time in 2014 in the Digital Rights Ireland case, 2 it held that respect for the principles of necessity and proportionality precluded preventive eavesdropping on the entire population in the hope of fishing out information -in a sea of redundant data -that might prove helpful in future in the fight against serious crime. 3In doing so, the CJEU pointed out that in a democratic state 1 For more on the genesis of European data retention laws, see P. Breyer, 'Telecommunications Data Retention and Human