The Legacy of the Privacy versus Security Narrative in the ECtHR’s Jurisprudence

The past two decades of coun­tert­er­ror­ism strat­e­gy attest to the fact that the security/privacy trade-off approach is not only out­dat­ed, but that it also amounts to a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the com­plex­i­ties involved in the mod­ern cul­ture of sur­veil­lance. Nev­er­the­less, the ECtHR’s accep­tance of bulk inter­cep­tion regimes as mea­sures that in prin­ci­ple fall with­in states‹ dis­cre­tion seems to be pred­i­cat­ed on this out­dat­ed trade-off.