From Preventive Operations to Criminal Investigations

This chapter examines how communications metadata collected in preventive operations can be fairly reused in criminal proceedings from the perspectives of privacy, data protection, and criminal procedure. It explores law enforcement’s use of such data at the boundary between pre-investigation and formal proceedings, showing that while these practices may interfere with privacy or data protection, they are not always recognised as such under procedural rules. Using the fairness framework introduced in Chapter 2 , the analysis distinguishes between harmless reliance on metadata as investigative hunches and problematic uses once data enter the case file.