There are criminals who will go free if the judicial police (PJ) do not have access to the metadata. This was the main idea advocated by João Melo, Deputy National Director of PJ, this Thursday morning at the Digital Wellbeing Conference in Lisbon. “Access to metadata is what allows you to identify the perpetrators of crimes in the digital environment, without it we will have crimes without any answer or even in the archive,” he explained worriedly. The prosecutor added: “There is no right to impunity, but since it is impossible to identify the perpetrators, we are creating this right.” The problem arises at a time when cybercrime is on the rise.
“In Europe, the number of reports of sexual harassment of minors online has grown from 23,000 in 2010 to more than 725,000 in 2019,” said Carla Costa, Chief Inspector of the National Cybercrime and Technology Crime Unit.