Here’s where police can now spy on cellphones without a warrant

LIMA, Peru — Peru’s President Ollanta Humala is giving police wide-ranging new powers to snoop on cellphone users without a court order.

Cops will now be able to trace a mobile phone caller’s movements in real time without any judicial oversight for three days.

The new law, aimed at tackling rampant organized crime, is among the most draconian in any democracy anywhere, says Katitza Rodriguez, the international director of US advocacy group the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

“It is ridiculous,” Rodriguez, a Peruvian, told GlobalPost. “It is just waiting for a civil society group to challenge it in court.”

To make matters worse, the law was passed by presidential decree, without any public debate, on Monday — the first day of a three-day national holiday to mark Peru’s independence anniversary.

“Any policy like that is controversial in itself, but the fact that it was directly approved by the executive branch without prior debate and in the middle of national holiday season is especially undemocratic,” wrote digital rights lawyer Miguel Morachimo on his blog. 

Rodriguez added: “They clearly were afraid of a public debate.”

One of the world’s top-two producers of cocaine, Peru is beset by organized crime, including drug trafficking, extortion rackets, hit men and money counterfeiting.

More from GlobalPost: Peru: Counterfeit currency king 

Humala, a former army officer, has promised a crackdown and previously pushed for tougher surveillance laws — only to give up after a public backlash.

But this week he used special decree powers, which congress recently granted him to tackle the crime wave, to issue the new law. 

It forces cellphone companies to hand metadata to the police whenever they ask for it, including the location of a user and who they’re calling. The cops must retroactively obtain a warrant, but only after three days of tracking a user’s whereabouts.

The decree also requires the companies to store metadata for three years.

Deputy Interior Minister Mauro Medina justified the measures by saying that Peruvian courts move too slowly to give the police surveillance warrants in time for them to be effective.

“After a long process, the authorization would finally come when the extortionist had already changed telephone or SIM card, hindering the chances of capturing him,” he said.

But Erick Iriarte, another Peruvian digital rights attorney, says the law goes against Peru’s constitution, which expressly protects metadata as part of citizens’ privacy rights.

He says grabbing those details without a judge’s prior approval also flies in the face of a recent inter-American human rights court judgment and United Nations recommendations.

According to the UN human rights high commissioner: “Even the mere possibility of communications information being captured creates an interference with privacy, with a potential chilling effect on rights, including those to free expression and association.”

Iriarte acknowledges that Peruvian courts are slow to respond to police requests to track the phone numbers of serious crime suspects.

“The police are right. They need to be able to get a warrant in minutes, or at worst hours, and the judicial system just doesn’t react that quickly,” he says. “There needs to be a fast-track response for these kinds of requests from the police.”

“But if we are saying that the only way to tackle this problem is to violate our basic rights, we might as well just switch out the lights on democracy.”