Judgment of the Irish High Court in the case of Schrems dated June 18, 2014, including the following statement:
52. In this regard, it is very difficult to see how the mass and undifferentiated accessing by State authorities of personal data generated perhaps especially within the home – such as e‑mails, text messages, internet usage and telephone calls – would pass any proportionality test or could survive constitutional scrutiny on this ground alone. The potential for abuse in such cases would be enormous and might even give rise to the possibility that no facet of private or domestic life within the home would be immune from potential state scrutiny and observation.
53. Such a state of affairs – with its gloomy echoes of the mass state surveillance programs conducted in totalitarian states such as the German Democratic Republic of Ulbricht and Honecker – would be totally at odds with the basic premises and fundamental values of the Constitution: respect for human dignity and freedom of the individual (as per the Preamble); personal autonomy (Article 40.3.1 and Article 40.3.2); the inviolability of the dwelling (Article 40.5) and protection of family life (Article 41). As Hardiman J. observed in The People v. O’Brien [2012] IECCA 68, Article 40.5.