The State Duma at today’s plenary session adopted in the second reading a draft law that allows law enforcement agencies to obtain data on the location of mobile phones of missing citizens in order to find them. This is reported by TASS.
For the second reading, the document was supplemented with provisions on the need to receive a court decision within 48 hours from the start of the search, while the court must be notified within 24 hours after receiving information about the location of the missing person. Within 48 hours from the start of the search, law enforcement officers will have to obtain permission from the judicial authority or stop searching by geolocation.
According to the head of the Duma Committee on information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, this will give “the opportunity to quickly and immediately search for people”. Also, according to the deputy, the revised bill will remove the contradiction between its provisions and the constitutional guarantees of communication secrecy and privacy.
The authors of the document were members of a group of State Duma deputies and senators led by the Chairman of the Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko. The bill was submitted to the lower house of Parliament in the fall of 2018. A year later, it was approved in the first reading. The initiative was prepared in accordance with the instructions of the President of the Russian Federation.