Court-Appointed Lawyer: Security Police Requested All Emails from Telia Without Court Warrant

Parliament debated a court case in which the security police sent a standard written request to telecom company Telia to obtain all email correspondence of a suspect from 2015-2018. Court-appointed lawyer Norman Aas said he could not believe his eyes when he saw in the case file how this information had been collected. According to defence counsel, a court warrant would have been required to access such data.

Parliament debated a court case that raises a serious question about the legality of the security police's (KAPO) data-gathering methods. At the centre of the case is the fact that a KAPO investigator sent a standard written request to telecom company Telia, on the basis of which the full email correspondence of suspect Toomas Tamm from the period 2015 to 2018 was obtained.

Court-appointed lawyer Norman Aas, commenting on the case, said he could not believe his eyes when he saw in the case file how this information had been collected. According to him, this is a fundamental question of rule of law: whether a security agency can access a person's private correspondence without court authorisation simply by sending a letter.

Dispute over email status

The defence counsel in the case argues that the emails in question were in transit at the time of acquisition, and therefore access to them should have been permitted only with a court warrant. This is an important distinction, because the protection of messages in transit is stronger under law than that of emails that have already been delivered.

The case raises a broader question about which methods are permissible in investigative activity and where the line lies that requires court authorisation to cross. Legal experts have drawn attention to the fact that if security agencies can obtain the same data with simple written requests that would otherwise require a court warrant to acquire, the court's oversight effectively becomes meaningless.