PRESS: Russia may oblige operators to share missing people location

MOSCOW, Sep 12 (PRIME) -- Russian senators and a deputy will submit to the State Duma, the parliament’s lower house, on Wednesday a bill empowering the police to get information from mobile operators on location of a phone of a missing person without court decisions, business daily Kommersant reported.

The initiative belongs to a group of parliamentarians with Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council, the upper house, at the head.

Connection operators and experts said the amendments will help to save missing people faster, but did not rule out cases of abuse of power from the part of law enforcement entities.

The amendments seek to allow entities of the Interior Ministry to ask about a location of a mobile device belonging to a missing person without going to court.

The authors referred to the ministry’s statistics according to which about 120,000 people are not accounted for in the country every year, including 45,000 children. About 90% of the missing have a mobile phone on them at the moment of disappearing, and the device stays switched on during the first two to three days of search.

A spokesperson for major mobile operator MTS said that the issue of search of people in hard-to-reach places is urgent. “If in search of the people who got into a difficult situation, connection operators will be obliged by the law to hand over information on their location upon motivated requests from law enforcement entities, we’ll do so,” the spokesperson said.

Mobile operator VimpelCom supported the idea, but said that it is important to exclude a possibility of fraud and abuse of such information. Mobile operator MegaFon also welcomed the suggestion.

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