Digital Rights Ireland

Digital Rights Ireland is a group that lobbies and advocates for the rights and freedoms of citizens in the digital world.

Its areas of focus include data retention, online defamation, Internet filtering and blocking, monitoring and leaking of confidential information.

The organisation rasises concerns over the legality of the procedures used to identify alleged illegal fileshares. Questions of violation of privacy were raised over the use of MediaSentry software used to search the computers of filesharers as the software does not limit itself to searching folders used for filesharing purposes.

The MediaSentry company is based in the United States which does not have the same level of data protection legislation as the European Union.

Legal action has been taken by the group over a data retention provision in the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act, 2005 which it claims has led Irish law enforcement to accessing data without there being specific crimes to investigate.